Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [131]
For years, although I did not realize it at the time, the Omega watch company used photos of me on the moon in their advertisements. They paid nothing for the use of those photos, neither to NASA nor to me. But they were certainly getting a lot of bang for their buck on that donated watch.
Later, at Omega’s invitation, Lois and I accompanied some of their company representatives to Riyadh. On the plane, I talked with one of the Omega executives about my recent discovery that Omega was using my picture in a print ad promoting Omega watches as the first watch on the moon. I suggested to the Omega representative that we should strike some sort of agreement under which we could promote their watches, and I could receive some compensation for their using my image. I had no intention of suing; I was hoping to strike up a business deal. The Omega representative surprised me. “You’ll probably have to sue us,” he said bluntly.
Upon my return, I realized that he was probably right. I hired a lawyer to send some letters, still hoping to work out a deal, but Omega wasn’t willing to budge. After a long season of lawyer runarounds, I dismissed the lawsuit, deciding it wasn’t worth pursuing any longer. At the same time, I would think that Omega had to pay something to other celebrity spokespersons for wearing Omega watches in far less conspicuous places than the moon.
Not one to harbor ill feelings, I can see two positive results that came from the Omega situation. First, thanks to my efforts to negotiate with Omega, new standards were put in place as to how commercial companies should compensate astronauts for their photos when used in advertisements. Astronauts now benefit more fully from the “right of publicity” to control their image as shown in photos taken of them during spacewalks and moonwalks, even though their faces may not be visible behind the helmets of their spacesuits. More personally, I later struck up a venture with Bulova to create two outstanding Accutron watches—the Eagle Pilot and the limited edition Astronaut—which include features I found helpful in space, and which both have my signature engraved on their casebacks. In fact, Bulova Accutron provided the original timepiece in the Columbia command module for our trip to the moon, so the relationship has been a natural one.
Forty years after I stood on the moon’s surface with my Omega Speedmaster watch on my wrist, Omega made a great effort to overcome any problems we had in the past. They invited me to Basel, Switzerland, to attend a celebration of our moon landing along with some of the other Apollo astronauts at the BaselWorld watch fair. They were very gracious hosts and presented me with a beautiful new limited edition Speedmaster watch that commemorates Apollo 11. This was a welcomed gesture since my original Omega Speedmaster was stolen on the way to the Smithsonian.
A much more sticky situation arose, however, when I discovered that the Bermuda-based liquor company Bacardi-Martini was using the “visor shot” in its advertising campaign to promote Bacardi rum. In the print ad, a bottle of rum was shown splashing its contents onto the image of me standing on the moon, and as if to suggest that rum transforms everything to a party atmosphere, the lower half of my spacesuit had turned into a pair of swimmer’s legs in swim trunks and fins. It made a mockery of this iconic image. What’s more, I was just about to celebrate twenty years of sobriety at the time.
I had a new legal team in place thanks to Lois’s daughter, Lisa Cannon, who brought in entertainment litigation attorney Robert (Rob) C. O’Brien to help her handle my business affairs. It turned out that this was Bacardi’s second attempt to use the visor shot in its campaigns. The first time, a few years earlier, Bacardi’s ad agency had claimed that since the photograph was in the public domain, they thought they could use it freely. When informed of my right of publicity in the photo, they agreed not to use it. Apparently