Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [115]
The bank managers called Lois and said, “You don’t have anything left.” She was devastated, and could see no recovery after the S&L mess. Overnight, everything about our financial picture changed, as Lois’s fortune and the wealth of her children were quite literally wiped out.
Certainly it upset me that Lois had lost her financial resources, but that sort of change didn’t really have an impact on my attitude toward our relationship. Lois was so self-effacing; she said, “Buzz, if you need or want a wealthy woman, I understand if you want to leave.”
I thought that was absurd. “Is my course of action going to be any different,” I asked, “just because you no longer have your stock?” No. I still had my modest Air Force pension coming in each month, and intermittent consulting fees to supplement it. On my own, that was all I needed. But from Lois’s standpoint, she had nothing to fall back on.
For the next few years we had to scramble back from the bottom to build a business of some sort, something that we hoped would allow us to live in a lifestyle at least somewhat similar to the one we had enjoyed during the first part of our marriage. Lois began taking the calls, wheeling and dealing with people or groups that wanted me to come to speak for them or to participate in some special event. Prior to being married to Lois, I had had a secretary come in every so often and simply write a bunch of “thanks, but no thanks” notes, turning down almost every invitation that came to me. I had not wanted to be a public person again.
But when Lois’s fortune was wiped out, we had to find some way to survive, and it seemed ridiculous to turn down offers from people who were willing to pay me to speak about what I loved talking about anyhow! So we started accepting a few speaking engagements. Lois and her daughter, Lisa Cannon, a Stanford graduate who had left the music business as a performer to work as an entertainment attorney, took care of the business side, negotiating the contracts, and helped me on the performance side to hone my presentations. Before long, I was busy on the speaker’s circuit. That year, with the book advance and a couple of extra endorsement deals that came along, we earned about $250,000. It was a good start, and we felt our lives were rich and full. We didn’t see ourselves as older or slowing down; we were healthy and excited about life.
My petite little platinum blonde beauty of a wife suddenly turned into a public-relations dynamo. “The business is Buzz!” she proclaimed, and indeed so it became. Lois encouraged me to do interviews and attend more social functions. She protected my reputation in every way, and just had a knack for helping me to be seen in the right places, at the right times. For my part, I loved it. I was the star performer, who just needed to show up on stage as the curtains parted, and did not need to concern myself with any of the logistics. Admittedly, there were a few occasions when I balked, but every time we attended another event, it gave me more of a platform on which to talk about my ideas regarding space exploration. We rarely traveled simply for the sake of travel anymore. Now it was mainly for business. Lois’s father was delighted to see Lois in the business world—finally making that Stanford education pay off!
ON JANUARY 20, 1989, my fifty-ninth birthday, Lois and I went to Washington, D.C., to attend the inauguration of President George H. W. Bush. While we were there, Lois’s mother passed away, which was a blow to Lois; her mother was like a best friend. Fortunately, we were able to return to Phoenix immediately after the inauguration with the help of our friends Julia and Ambassador George Argyros, who flew us in