Moondust (35 page)

Strangely, that hadn't occurred to me.

“Oh, absolutely. All our friends were there. And I felt that it was an exciting adventure that humanity had embarked on – for whatever reason, whether it was about beating the Russians or not. At least this was something that stretched us, instead of miring us in the mud of Vietnam. At least there was a fifty-fifty chance he'd come back from this one.”

Jan Evans, de facto coordinator of biannual Original Wives gatherings, describes the hate mail and calls she received when her late husband Ron, CM pilot on
Apollo 17,
was flying in Vietnam prior to NASA. After that, the Apollo years seemed wonderful to her. She laughs with the revelation that she volunteered her husband for the Astronaut Corps while he was away, but not as she recalls the time word came of another marriage breaking up and Ron, genuinely upset, slammed his fist on the table and said, “Damn it, don't any of these couples ever talk to each other?!”

Val Anders had particular reason to linger on the danger of
Apollo 8,
which carried the first human beings around the Moon, because there was a feeling that it had been rushed following intelligence reports that the Soviets were preparing their own circumlunar flight. NASA administrator James Webb's response to the suggestion that the first crewed Saturn V flight should leave Earth orbit is reported to have been “Are you out of your mind?!” Even the flight directors seemed anxious.

“And I'd never seen them nervous before, which made me nervous. But on the other hand, it was such an exciting step. When you started to think about the possible consequences and what it could mean for the rest of your life, you simply turned off that thought. You couldn't move beyond what was happening at the moment.”

She stops and sighs. She reminds me that death was a part of
the women's everyday world. When Bill was training in San Francisco, their sister squadron went through a bad patch, where they were losing about one pilot a week, “and you'd see the little black car coming to the housing area, wondering where it would stop. We all went through that.” So while they might not have talked about the fear, they felt it. A week after the
Apollo 11
crew was announced, Joan Aldrin wrote in her diary: “Broke out in blotches last night, which still persist today. I'm covered in pancake makeup and jumpy. Nerves. If I'm like this now, what will I be like when it really happens?”

I ask about the children and Valerie Anders says that her eldest son, who was eleven when Bill flew, was notably excited by what was happening. He was protected from any negative consequences by the fact that most of his friends had parents in the programme. Like everyone else, she didn't understand what a blessing this was until afterwards.

“When we moved to Washington, D.C., I think it was very hard on our second son, who wanted to be part of the crowd in sixth grade, but then stood out because his father had done this. Only then did he begin to realize that it was quite extraordinary, and he didn't deal with that well. I don't think the girls had as hard a time as the boys. My personal feeling is that the sons were trying to live up to what their dads did, whereas the daughters could go a different direction and feel no need to compare themselves.”

Valerie sighs again, more deeply this time. It is an awesome thing to feel a need to live up to. Another of the women told me:

“There have been quite a few cases of problems with the sons, 'cos they just couldn't compete with the legend. Michael Collins lost his only son. That was just …”

Then she trailed off. Rene Carpenter told me that her eldest son developed schizophrenia in his late teens. I remember Collins writing about his six-year-old boy, the youngest of his three children, being interviewed on TV.

“‘What do you think,' Michael is asked, ‘about your father going down in history?' ‘Fine,' says Michael; and after a considerable pause, ‘What
is
history, anyway?' ”

In retrospect, that question might be read many different
ways. Apollo was an awe-inspiring enterprise, but it came with a high price tag in more ways than one.

The living room of the Duke residence is plush, but not ostentatious, with a central well approached by stone steps and containing a modern, beige sofa suite and glass-topped coffee table, and with beautiful views over the park through sliding glass doors at the back. It's a cool, deceptively masculine room, decorated with ethnic souvenirs and photos of grandchildren and their two sons in stripy Seventies flares, but afterwards I can't recall seeing any evidence of Charlie's astronaut career. He emerged from the fug of the 1970s calling his Moonshot “the dust of my life,” and I'm wondering whether he still feels that way as he waits for me to settle in an armchair before draping himself over the end of the sofa opposite. Dotty brings coffee, then perches next to him, leaning forward with her arms on her knees. She's in a neat black skirt and white blouse. He's chiselled Clint Eastwood handsome in jeans and unbuttoned blue cardigan over a casual white-striped shirt. They both look slim and fit and healthy and Charlie would probably beat me in a race to the mailbox and back. NASA knew how to pick 'em.

Born in October 1935, Duke is the youngest of the Moonwalkers and was recruited in 1966 as part of the nineteen-strong fifth group of astronauts. For all his modesty, he must have impressed the power brokers to get anywhere near a flight, and in fact wouldn't have flown but for Gene Cernan's astonishing decision to turn down the
Apollo 16
LM pilot's job in favour of commanding
17
– an act of will made possible only by his throttle jockey rapport with Deke Slayton. Duke's parents were South Carolinians who met in New York, where they'd gone looking for work during the Great Depression. When a child loomed, they returned south, and in October 1935 took delivery of identical twins, Charles and Bill, but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor drew America into World War II on December 7, 1941, Duke Senior volunteered for the Navy and was sent to the South Pacific. This was classic Greatest Generation stuff and Charlie did everything in his boyish power to help the effort, collecting
aluminum foil and raising money in his spare time. His heroes were the cowboys and pilots he saw at the Saturday matinees. By the time the war ended, he knew he wanted to go into the military.

One of J. G. Ballard's stories contains the striking line: “The best astronauts, Franklin had noticed during his work for NASA, never dreamed …” But before his flight, Charlie had a dream that he and John Young were driving the rover across the lunar surface, when they found another set of tracks. They asked Houston if they could follow them and wound up confronted by another rover, in which sat two people who looked exactly like them, but had been there for thousands of years. The dream was so pure and so vivid that Charlie is apt to call it “one of the most real experiences of my life.” In the event, however, the reality was exciting for Duke but not mystical or spiritual as it was for some. On the flight before (
Apollo 15
), Jim Irwin had found the crystalline “Genesis Rock,” a 4.15-billion-year-old relic of primordial crust formed in the Moon's infancy – in geologic terms, mere
moments
after the solar system itself was born. It just sat there on a rocky pulpit at the edge of a crater, as if it had been waiting for him all that time and he said he felt the presence of God then, heard
His
voice, and upon returning, he quit NASA to found the High Flight ministry. A year later, he embarked on the first of several expeditions to search for Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey, which the novelist Julian Barnes used as a template for one of the short stories in his book
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
. He almost died after a bad fall on Ararat's slopes in 1982, but lived on until 1991, when a second massive heart attack finally took him. The thing was, everyone had known this was coming, because NASA medics discovered alarming irregularities in his heartbeat while he was on the lunar surface. Despite all the monitoring and all the tests, these had never shown up before. It seemed that the Moon, with her bardic sense of mischief, was playing the equivocator again, revealing Irwin's calling while simultaneously foretelling his death.

Duke had none of that. He felt so at home up there that he
had to resist an urge to take his helmet off, because if he did the vacuum was ready to seize his insolent body and turn it inside out. It was when he got back that the strange stuff started to happen. There were the parades, the White House meetings, congressional addresses and appointment to the backup crew for
Apollo 17
. He was only thirty-six and for a while, “was sort of floating like I was back in orbit again,” until he began to hear that same whisper as everybody else: What do I do now? A highly compromised shuttle had been approved, but was way down the line. And he felt bored. The light had gone out. So he took his excess energy and decided to make some money – just decided to – and
did
. The thing was, the astronauts, though poor, found themselves sitting at the peak of the manhood steeple and were to powerful businessmen what the Spice Girls would be to eight-year-old girls one day. They were always being courted by the moneymen and now Charlie used one of the connections he'd made to set up a beer distribution business in San Antonio. It was hard work, but soon the cash was rolling in. Charlie was a success all over again.

Meanwhile, as Dotty tells it, she was slowly falling apart. The pair had met in August 1962, in Boston, where Charlie was taking a masters in engineering. Like so many aspects of these stories, the facilitator was chance, even if Charlie purports to have known instantly that she was the one.

“I was coming up twenty-seven and I'd had a lot of experiences, I'd dated a lot of girls in Germany. But she just captivated me. When I went home the next day to South Carolina, I told my mom I'd met the girl I was going to marry.”

He stops and laughs.

“Even though I think she was not looking for an Air Force officer–slash–engi
neer
to settle down with.”

Dotty was five years younger, from a comfortable family in Atlanta, Georgia. She'd just completed an art degree and spent the summer touring Europe, so Charlie must have been different for her.

“Yes, in a way I probably worried that he might be square. Not square in the sense of being a
nerd
type of square, but in the
sense of not being free, 'cos I was a kind of free spirit. And I put him to a test on that, to see if he could accept that in me. And he did fine.”

I ask what the test was and Dotty smiles.

“It was rolling down a hill. It was in the fall and I wanted to see what his reaction was.”

What did he do?

“He just rolled down with me. It was very good. So he passed that test.”

Charlie courted her assiduously and they were engaged in November, then married in June but married life disappointed Dotty straightaway. Her new husband's studies were being funded by the Air Force, who insisted on a B grade-average. The problem was that MIT was a tough school and with all this dedicated courting, his grades had slipped to the point where he found himself on probation and forced to focus on his studies. Dotty suddenly found that even when he was home, his head was in books. She hoped that when the master's was won, they'd move and things would get better, but they wound up in the desert at Edwards and he was studying just as hard – and now she was also competing with airplanes for attention. Looking back, Dotty thinks that her expectations of marriage were based on the fairy stories she'd been told as a girl, and therefore doomed from the start, but she sees a generality in them, too.

“I think our marriage was typical of so many women of my generation who entered a marriage thinking that this was the beginning of a wonderful closeness and romance and fulfilling each other's needs and this sort of thing. And I've probably come to see that most men enter marriage with more of this hunter instinct, which I think is ingrained, which is ‘You've caught her and you're married and so now you can get on with the rest of your life.' So where the woman sees the marriage as a beginning, he sees it as something which is done. And that certainly happened – as soon as we got married, the courtship, the romance, the beautiful close relationship that we had with each other kind of – ha! – stopped.”

They struggled through, but it was rocky. Like everyone else around the Astronaut Corps, they'd somehow understood that
breaking up would mean the end of an astronaut's career and were surprised when the first divorce occurred in the home of Donn Eisele in 1971, and nothing happened. Still the Dukes made it through, but by the end of the 1970s, Dotty says that she felt directionless and suicidal, while Charlie had turned into what he himself characterizes as a remote partner and a brutal, alcoholic father. His brother, Bill, who'd grown up to be a doctor, disapproved of Charlie peddling beer, feeling that it was a betrayal of his responsibilities as an American hero and role model to the young. But Charlie didn't care. He was making good money. He liked beer and if he didn't sell it, someone else would. Only in quieter moments would he admit to himself that he was bored, as he had been at NASA after Apollo.

Dotty tells me that during this time, she tried everything to reinvigorate, then sedate herself. There was an exciting career with a travel agency, some rewarding charity work, self-help books, alcohol, flirtation with other men, even –
get this
– drugs, in the form of marijuana. The list is so exhaustive, so
neat,
that at one point a little lion tamer in my head is forced to grab a chair and fend off that song of the Seventies, “I've Never Been to Me” by Charlene. But clearly, Dotty was very unhappy. She thought about divorce, but couldn't face it. Charlie didn't know what to do with her depression and pulled away, which made her feel lonelier.