The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story (27 page)

Her plans for cleaning the house during the flight were never realized. She couldn’t even bear to sit on her new armchair. Instead, she sat cross-legged on the floor, curling into a ball, and gleefully kicked her legs before her television set after a risky maneuver had been accomplished.

It took the crew three days to fly to the Moon, which meant a lot of time to endure for the wives. To avoid the press, they had to lie down in the backseats of neighbors’ cars under blankets while being driven to the grocery store or the mall to go shopping. When one of them braved the beauty parlor undisguised, a female reporter was on her tail. With thick green shag carpet, gilt mirrors, and chandeliers, Parisienne Coiffures at the local shopping center was owned by a very “au courant” bearded French hairdresser who wore colorful suits without lapels. He had chosen Houston because he wanted to be where the action and glamour were. So had the two mod English girls who worked for him. The Astrowife sat under a hair dryer listening to a handheld radio account of the flight as the reporter watched her every movement from a nearby chair with her notepad on her lap. “Comb me out slowly,” the reporter told her hairdresser.

Annie Glenn had sent the Apollo 11 wives each a yellow orchid, potted in a champagne glass with a note:
May God watch over you and your family. Fondly…
For the next few days, the living rooms of Togethersville were as tense as NASA’s control room. One day, Joan sat in a blue polka-dot swimsuit chain-smoking in front of the television, while out in her backyard the Apollo 11 wives hosted a pool party. “It’s like a dramatic television show, but it seems unreal. There are just no words. Don’t you agree?” Joan said to one of her visitors. It was still very much uncertain whether Neil and Buzz would be able to land successfully on the Moon. They wouldn’t know for sure until they touched down, and then they wouldn’t know if they’d be stranded there until they lifted back off into lunar orbit.

On Sunday, July 20, the lunar landing module
Eagle
, a silver spider with suction cups for feet, detached from the main spacecraft,
Columbia
, which was being flown by Mike Collins. He would orbit the Moon alone while Neil and Buzz descended through the frozen silence of space.
Eagle
floated slowly over Mount Marilyn and across the Sea of Tranquility, kicking up a cloud of dust.

“Okay, engine stop,” Buzz called out over the squawk box.

It was 3:18 p.m. when Neil Armstrong said, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The
Eagle
has landed.”

Joan experienced an ocean of feelings surge inside her. Her very own Buzz had just landed on the Moon! The entire world would remember just where they were at this very moment for the rest of their lives. Beside her sat Dee O’Hara, the astronauts’ personal nurse, who knew “the boys,” as
Life
said, “better than any woman except their wives.”

“It was probably the only time I’ve experienced a surreal moment,” said Nurse Dee, awestruck. “I don’t know how quite to describe it, but it was truly unreal. I saw the TV flickering and the LM was there, and we were told it was the Moon, and the LM was on the surface of the Moon. Of course, we were so relieved that they had landed. But it just simply wasn’t real. Intellectually you know it is, and, of course, Joan, as was everyone, was terribly relieved that they had landed. I remember sitting there. I kept shaking my head. I thought, this can’t be real, it just can’t be. Here we are, on another planet. It was goose bumps all around.”

Joan’s movements were tentative as she rose from the sofa and then fell to the floor. Of course the
Life
photographer caught the odd moment—Joan in baby blue polyester pants and a white-and-red polka-dot blouse lying still on the tile floor.

They got a much more emotionally readable photo when Joan, who had stood up and leaned against her wood-paneled wall, dramatically fell into the arms of Buzz’s eccentric uncle, the serendipitously named Bob Moon. As everyone laughed and cried and clapped, Joan, who was surrounded by friends, pushed herself out of Uncle Bob’s arms and disappeared into Buzz’s midnight-blue study. Her mind simply couldn’t absorb it. Joan was so overwhelmed with pure relief that they had landed that she swooned and actually blacked out for a few moments.

When she came to, she was lying on the floor and saw a matchbook beside her, and the reality that Buzz was on the Moon hit her again. She had to pick up that matchbook, to grab on to something tangible, but she couldn’t get her brain to coordinate with her limbs.

It took her a while to compose herself, but compose herself she did. “See, all smiles,” Joan would say in a cheerful voice. “No more tears.”

The Conrads’ was definitely the most “happening” house in Togethersville, which to Norman Mailer was textbook Squaresville. The macho writer thought that Jane was “sensationally attractive.” He’d been commissioned by
Life
to write about the Moon landing, and Jane and Pete kindly invited him over for a backyard barbecue. Jane’s friends were excited to see “the monster,” as Jane jokingly called him, in person, wondering what kind of man would stab his wife with a penknife, as Norman notoriously had done in a drunken rage. Leading Norman under the crepe myrtles, two of Jane’s braver, hipper friends danced around him and shook the tree, decorating the writer in bright pink blossoms, soothing the savage beast and showing him a really good time. He’d completely forgotten about his girlfriend from New York City, decked out in black high heels and fishnet stockings, very exotic for the space burbs. The astronauts tried to toss her into the pool, but Pete rescued her.

Norman made a sport of reporting on the Apollo 11 wives, and for the duration of his assignment he referred to himself as “Aquarius.” As if imagining himself on a jungle safari, he spotted, through the suburban vegetation of El Lago, something totally unexpected: a Zen manor, spacious, modern, and Japanese-inspired, featuring a heavy green statue of the Buddha in the living room, as well as a pool table. This was the home of Neil Armstrong. Neil had meticulously placed his rocks in the ivy-covered garden, creating the feel of a true Zen garden.

The neighbors thought Neil a bit taciturn, a bit mysterious. Daresay, cosmic? Neil was not a big breakfast eater—or a big exercise man. As he once told a friend, “I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.” The
Life
photographer Ralph Morse had once snapped the elusive fellow in a chef’s hat. It was said he liked to make pizza and light the occasional cigar in celebration. The NASA public relations man was positioning the hot pink pedestal he’d have to haul from lawn to lawn for each of the Apollo 11 wives’ press conferences. Aquarius would follow. The reporters fired their questions.

“Will you let the children stay up and watch the moonwalk tonight?” one of the journalists asked.

“Is this the greatest moment of your life?” asked another.

Mailer groaned. He found these questions canned.

“Are you pleased with the Sea of Tranquility as a place to land? What are you having for dinner tonight? Space food?”

Mailer moved over to Nassau Bay to meet Pat Collins, who posed outside her house in a white dress. She’d just gotten her hair done and wore it in a high black beehive. Pat was an Irish Catholic girl from Boston. She had met her Mike in France when they were both stationed at an Air Force base in Chambley after World War II. As the recreational director, Pat had hosted events for the enlisted men during their off-duty tours: Ping-Pong and bridge tournaments, theater acting, historical tours of the local area and surrounding countries, the favorite Bingo Night. Because of her background as a social worker, she also did a fair amount of counseling. She was what the French called
gamine
, Virginia Slims skinny. Aquarius found her “conversationally glittery.”

“Mrs. Collins,” asked a reporter, “do you mind that your husband is
not
landing with the others?”

Mike was remaining in the mother ship
Columbia
while the other boys were on the Moon. Like her husband, Pat insisted that she
didn’t
care. But Aquarius didn’t believe her. How could she and Mike not care that he had traveled all the way to the Moon and couldn’t even go down and take a stroll on its beachy surface? Mailer waited for Pat to crack, but it was not to be.

So he was off to Joan Aldrin’s, whose glistening pool surrounded by a fence seemed to be an oasis of tranquility.
What darker things lurked beneath the placid surface?
Aquarius wondered. It started to rain, a summer thunderstorm beating down on the roofs of Nassau Bay, and the reporters had to put on their red and yellow ponchos.

“Mrs. Aldrin,” one of them asked, “what were you doing when they landed?”

“I was holding on to the wall,” said Joan, emotionally exhausted. “I was praying.”

Aquarius could almost smell that something was amiss here at the Aldrins’. A strange bird, this Joan, but what kind of beast was her Buzz? Mailer sensed, even from this brief glimpse, that Joan was trapped in a marriage full of raw agony. (With four marriages already under his belt, three to aspiring actresses, Aquarius knew of what he spoke.)

“Listen,” Joan asked. “Aren’t you all
excited
? They did it! They did it!”

But the crowd of wet reporters seemed bored and ready to go home. They’d grown jaded after a decade of covering the wives. After Joan returned inside, with no more wives to cover that day and the Moon landing that the country had been anticipating for a decade now behind him, Aquarius suddenly regretted that he hadn’t paid Joan, whose husband had just landed on the
Moon
, the attention she deserved.

At just before 10 p.m., on that same day, July 20, 1969, six and a half hours after they’d landed on the Moon, Neil Armstrong stepped off of
Eagle
’s footpad onto the Moon.

“That’s one small step for man,” declared Neil, “one giant leap for mankind.”

Only after Neil had planted his foot on the Moon, which reminded him of the American high desert, was Buzz allowed to join him. “It’s like making an entrance onstage,” said Joan. The second man on the Moon described his view as “magnificent desolation.”

Joan threw kisses toward the TV screen, laughing, her whole body shuddering on the verge of tears as Buzz bounced across the lunar surface, doing what the wives named the Kangaroo Hop.

“How can you be serious about what you’re doing when you’re doing
that
?” asked Joan. “He’s gotten more TV time in the last two days than I ever did in a year of trying!” Still, she couldn’t shake how devastated her husband was that he had to be second. The glory would forever be Neil’s, who would always be first.

After the astronauts completed a two-and-a-half-hour moonwalk and spending twenty-one hours on the Moon, the
Eagle
prepared to lift off to rendezvous with Mike in orbit. As Buzz got closer and closer to Earth, Joan felt sweeter than ever toward her big cosmic baby, coming home to Mama. “Bless him. Bless the baby! They’re on their way back to Mother. That’s a good boy. Just think, tonight we’ll have that beautiful big burn and then—look out, world, here we come! I don’t have any more tears. I think I’ve just cried for the past two weeks.”

“I called three of, in my view,” said President Nixon, “three of the greatest ladies and most courageous ladies in the whole world today—your wives.”

The man who had once schooled Khrushchev on the virtues of America’s greatest cold warriors—the true-blue housewives of the U.S. of A.—was now speaking in person to the Apollo 11 astronauts upon their safe return to Earth, and brought a message from their wives.

“I bring their love and their congratulations. And also, I’ve got to let you in on a little secret. I made a date with them.”

The astronauts couldn’t do much about that one, seeing as they were speaking to the president from behind glass, quarantined in the MQF, the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a tricked-out silver Airstream parked aboard the USS
Hornet
. Scientists thought there was a possibility, no matter how remote, that the astronauts might have picked up some alien Moon germs that could produce a lethal global epidemic. Flying off shelves in bookstores, Michael Crichton’s bestselling novel
The Andromeda Strain
dramatized such a consequence of an extraterrestrial plague.

“I invited them to dinner on the thirteenth of August,” continued Nixon, “right
after
you come out of quarantine. It will be a state dinner held in Los Angeles. The governors of all the fifty states will be there, the ambassadors, others from around the world and in America. And all I want to know—will you come? We want to honor you then.”

Neil Armstrong smiled. “We’ll do anything you say, Mr. President.”

“This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation, because as a result of what happened, in this week, the world is bigger, infinitely, and also, as I’m going to find on this trip around the world…as a result of what you’ve done, the world’s never been closer together before,” said the beaming president. “Incidentally, the speeches that you have to make at this dinner can be very short. And if you want to say
fantastic
or
beautiful
, that’s all right with us. Don’t try to think of any new adjectives. They’ve all been said.”

The headlines were thrilling:

MEN
WALK
ON
MOON
.
ASTRONAUTS
LAND
ON
PLAIN
.
COLLECT
ROCKS
,
PLANT
FLAG

A
POWDERY
SURFACE
IS
CLOSELY
EXPLORED

ANCIENT
DREAM
FULFILLED