Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [112]
During this year of our engagement, I felt inspired to resurrect my idea to create a science fiction story about travel between the stars for a book and movie, based on some of my original concepts from the mid-seventies. Lois and I drove to Los Angeles and met with several major talent agents, including IMG and the William Morris Agency, to choose an agent for the project. Coincidentally, I reached out to Tom Clancy in hopes that we could work together on penning the story. With his plate full at the time, he graciously declined, but put in a good word for me with his literary agent, Robert Gottlieb, at the New York office of the William Morris Agency. I soon signed on with Gottlieb, who suggested that I put the science fiction story on hold in favor of a nonfiction insider’s account of the dramatic space race to the moon. In view of the approaching twentieth anniversary of Apollo 11, the story was ripe with even more drama as we uncovered recently declassified documents that showed a much closer U.S.-Soviet moon race than had ever before been realized. Gottlieb brought Malcolm McConnell in as a co-writer to work with me, and we were off to a good start.
The more activity, the more Lois liked it. I liked it, too, and felt myself slowly but surely becoming more outgoing in my personality. I began to notice that I was smiling more, feeling more.
In May 1987, Lois and I traveled to our first Cannes Film Festival to attend the premiere of a new French documentary about the Apollo 11 lunar landing. This was an entirely new world for me, a different crowd. Although I had been around kings and queens, and had met presidents, and I lived around the Hollywood and Beverly Hills crowd, Cannes was something else. I had many friends in high places, but for the most part I didn’t socialize with them. Give me a good engineer, a good rocket scientist, and I can talk for hours. But Lois introduced me to a social set that I had only seen on magazine covers as I passed through airports. We met movie stars and producers, pop music artists—every kind of celebrity.
While we were in Cannes, we met the acclaimed Austrian photographer Helmut Newton. “Oh, you are so beautiful together,” he said to Lois. “I vould love to take a picture of you; both of you.” We told him we would be in Paris in a few days before heading back to the States. Helmut set up a date to shoot a formal photo at the Georges V hotel along the famous Avenue George V just off the Champs–Elysées. As Helmut prepared for the shoot, he didn’t think Lois was wearing a sexy enough dress; he would have preferred her in a low-cut dress, but Lois’s modesty prevailed. “Vell, at least show me more leg,” Helmut pleaded. Lois complied. The result was a formal—and quite leggy—shot of Lois, and me in my dress whites.
In November, as a surprise for her birthday, and perhaps to make up for the dismal outcome of our first Hawaiian escapade, I took Lois on a trip to the big island of Hawaii where we stayed again at my friend’s hotel in Kona. But this time I took Lois to the Keck Observatory, at the nearly 14,000-foot summit of the extinct volcano Mauna Kea, to gaze through the giant telescope. I had called ahead and made special arrangements, so when Lois and I arrived, the astronomers were prepared for us, with the telescopes already sighted on the moon. Enhanced by a perfectly clear night sky, I showed Lois the precise area where Neil and I had landed on the Sea of Tranquillity. This was the closest Lois had ever been to the moon. As she observed the detailed markings of hundreds of rugged craters covering the surface, she could imagine even more intensely what I had experienced when I was there.
LOIS AND I were married on Valentine’s Day in 1988, at the Western Savings corporate headquarters in Phoenix, a cavernous, glass building that more closely