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By Root 1448 0

twelve-thirty in the afternoon. We talked and drank, talked and drank. Rupert loved drinking as much as I did, and we downed one gin and tonic after another. Rupert and I talked much about our fathers—his was a doctor in New York, who sounded almost as opinionated and overbearing as my father. We both chuckled over my dad’s outrage when the U.S. Post Office issued the stamp with Neil Armstrong’s image and the caption “First Man on the Moon,” though of course I had been taken aback as well. Rupert laughed uproariously when I told him that besides lobbying the post office incessantly, my father went so far as to picket in front of the White House, with a huge placard bearing the message, “My Son Was First, Too.” By the time Rupert and I actually got around to signing the contracts, we were sloshed.

We arranged a follow-up meeting a few weeks later, at the Beverly Hills Polo Lounge at five o’clock. I arrived at the Lounge before 1:00 p.m. By the time Rupert showed up shortly before five, along with his friend John Roach, I was thoroughly intoxicated. Rupert tried to talk business with me, but my interest wavered, as did my conversation. At one point Rupert leaned toward me and spoke quietly but firmly, “Buzz, don’t you understand what a hero you are? Don’t you realize that every person in this room knows who you are and what you did on July 20, 1969?”

“Nobody remembers where they were on July 20, 1969,” I groused.

“I’ll prove it to you,” Rupert said. A young man who looked as though he could have been in a heavy-metal rock band was passing by our table, and Rupert reached out and grabbed his arm. “Excuse me,” Rupert said. “Where were you on July 20, 1969?”

The rocker looked at me, then back at Rupert as though he’d lost his marbles. “How should I know?” he answered, shaking off Rupert’s grip and continuing on his way. That was the last thing I needed to hear. I ordered another drink.

Despite my attitude, Rupert was determined to see Return to Earth made as a movie, and we agreed to press on to build the production team and sell the project to a television network as a made-for-TV feature-length movie. At least I think that’s what we agreed to, because that’s what Rupert did. He said that he had high hopes of getting a first-rate actor, Cliff Robertson, involved in the project, as well as an attractive female to play Marianne. Rupert had my attention.

“What do I need to do?” I asked.

“Nothing right now. I’ll be back in touch as soon as we have all the pieces of the puzzle put together.” Rupert went his way while I had one more drink for the road, or maybe it was two or three.

FOR REASONS INEXPLICABLE to me at the time, life just kept tumbling down around me. I would talk with aerospace companies about future projects, and they seemed quite enthusiastic, but when nothing materialized, my spirits would sink again. I had formed my own company a few years earlier, Research and Engineering Consultants, but that was going nowhere, too. At about the time my book came out, I was consulting with North American Rockwell on the development of the space shuttle, and they liked my ideas, but that door had closed as well. It seemed that everywhere I turned—my marriage, my career, my expectations as an American hero—life was unraveling all around me. With no mission or goal on which to focus, those words I’d uttered on the moon—“magnificent desolation”—mocked me as a poignant description of my life on Earth.

Increasingly, I saw divorce as an escape to a new life. My roller-coaster ride wasn’t doing Joan and the kids any good, and divorce seemed a viable option. When I discussed it with my father, at first he was opposed to my divorcing Joan, but not because he felt we had such a happy home. The book had been bad enough, but at least we had pulled our marriage back together by the last page. To divorce now, after that ugly blot on my name, could be the death knell. He was more concerned about appearances, worried that an all-American astronaut should not be seen as anything but a successful, happily married family man. Of course,