Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [68]
When we went out on the book tour, however, the painful reality hit even harder, as reporters and talk-show hosts asked probing questions. In some ways it forced Joan to sort out her feelings and to verbalize how she felt. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Joan admitted that when she learned about my unfaithfulness, her first reaction was to go off and have an affair herself. “But I didn’t know how,” she said. “Even when confronted with the opportunity I didn’t know what to do.”
Joan almost made my infidelity sound as though it was her fault— which of course it wasn’t. “As for his casual affairs, I had played ostrich. He was gone a lot and I was always involved in amateur theater and I didn’t think about it. I just didn’t know. I may have suspected, and I guess maybe my philosophy was, ‘Is he any different from any other man who travels and received adulation?’ I had married an engineer and here he was a hero.”10
Joan mustered great courage in facing those interviews; she was convinced our marriage could still be saved. “My big immediate goal is cementing the relationship between Buzz and me…. We now have a far more open and honest relationship than ever before. In a way, when things blew up, it was a tremendous relief. I think we’re going to make it. I really do. And I couldn’t say that for a long time. I didn’t know if I could overcome the bitterness, but I think now that we have a good chance.”11
But reality poked holes in the bubble of Joan’s idealism. Our relationship was being compromised by alcohol, compounded by my blue funks, and neither of us was yet aware of it.
After the book tour, I still didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had to find some way to make a living.
Many Americans assumed that all of the astronauts received huge sums of money for their services, or came out of the program as rich men and women. Not so. While a few astronauts parlayed their fame into wonderfully lucrative careers, most of us walked away with little more money than we had at the beginning. In addition to my regular Air Force salary, which was my source of income while an astronaut, I received $16,000 during the first year as part of a prearranged NASA contract with Life magazine, to publish exclusively all of the astronauts’ stories. The royalties were split evenly with all the astronauts, so, the more people in the program, the less money each of us received. The second year I got a check for $6,000, the following year, $3,060, and less than that the year I walked on the moon. Now, retired from the Air Force, I wondered, How am I going to earn a living? I didn’t know. The Volkswagen commercial had provided the money we needed to get into our home, but those kinds of deals don’t come along every day. I served on the board of a small firm dealing with supervisory electronics, but that income was not sufficient to take care of my family, either. More than money, what I needed was a cause, a calling, a new challenge.
What I really wanted was a new role in space exploration, but nothing significant arose, at least as far as I could see. When I was working with Wayne Warga on my first book, I had plenty of time to realize just how integrally my life was interconnected with space, since so little activity was going on in space exploration during that time. We launched Skylab in 1973; we sent people to it in ′73 and ′74. Then, in 1975, we cooperated with the Russians in Apollo Soyuz. Much to my chagrin, space exploration