Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [78]
In early October I was in New York, where I had lunch with movie producers Rupert Hitzig and Alan King. I realized that Rupert was the creative force behind the company producing Return to Earth, and Alan was the businessman. We ate in the Rainbow Room, at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, sixty-five stories over Manhattan. “We thought you’d feel more at home eating one thousand feet above sea level,” Alan quipped.
I was still flying high back in California when I received a letter from Universal Studios, rejecting the movie treatment for my new science fiction story, “Encounter with Tiber.” The rejection brought me back to earth with a resounding thud. When I told Beverly about it, she may have sensed I was close to the edge. She encouraged me to come home with her.
Four months after we met, I moved in with Beverly at her Barry Avenue apartment. Whether moving in with her was a knee-jerk response to my divorce from Joan or to the disappointment over the “Tiber” rejection, I can’t say for sure. But it was definitely a rebound relationship. She was a strong woman, with a controlling nature, and she quickly took possession of a lot of the details of my life that I no longer cared to deal with, or had chosen to ignore. And she liked to drink.
Beverly and I were married on New Year’s Eve 1975, at a Mexican resort in Cabo San Lucas. It was a tumultuous marriage from the start, although we had some good times, too. We traveled quite a bit, especially throughout 1976.
I was still working periodically with the National Association of Mental Health, and production had started on the TV movie of Return to Earth. The tie-in was a natural. I had visited the set only once, as had my former wife, Joan, but I had read the script and was looking forward to seeing the debut of director Jud Taylor’s movie rendition of my story. In addition to Cliff Robertson, the movie starred Shirley Knight as Joan, and Stefanie Powers as Marianne.
On March 25, 1976, I spoke in Long Beach at a meeting of the Mental Health Association of Los Angeles County aboard the docked ocean liner Queen Mary. As in most of my talks for NAMH, I encouraged the audience to change their image of people seeking help for depression and other forms of mental illness.
“Superb accomplishments don’t make people superhuman,” I told them, “and America’s placement of astronauts on a pedestal was probably to be expected, but was unrealistic. We’re not all that superhuman.” I also admitted to the audience that I had been hospitalized for alcoholism. “I’ve decided not to cover things up this time,” I said, noting that for too long I had tried to keep matters quiet when I first suffered depression.
People shun help for mental illness for three reasons, I told the crowd. First, they may be afraid they’ll get locked up. Second, they think it will cost them every penny they have for treatment. Third, they think job opportunities will be denied them and that their neighbors will laugh at them. Unfortunately, all of those things still happen today, but they were more likely to happen if a person admitted to depression and alcoholism in the mid-seventies. This was one of my first public admissions regarding my problems with alcohol. The relatively small crowd was not surprised; most of the people attending the meeting were well aware of the link between alcohol and depression. About six weeks later, however, the response would be quite different.
ON MAY 8, 1976, I attended the “Operation Understanding” banquet at the Shoreham Americana Hotel in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Council on Alcoholism (NCA). I had achieved less than a year of sobriety at this point, and several people cautioned me against going public about my alcoholism. No doubt they were not only worried about the repercussions such public exposure might have in my life; they were also concerned that I had not been living sober long enough. They were right.
But this was the first time that a large group of celebrities planned to declare themselves publicly as “controlled alcoholics