Moondust (36 page)

“It seemed like all he wanted from me was to cook his meals, take care of the children, and stay out of his way until called upon. My life was to revolve around his needs, but my needs weren't being met.”

What fascinates me most is that her decision to seek resolution in Jesus was just that – a
decision
. There was no Mitchell/ Bean/Irwin-style epiphany. There was no emotion at all. She'd always been to church, but in the routine way of the conservative South. Her religion had been about the laudable aims of being good and helping other people. In essence, the Golden Rule. Now she said:

“God, I don't know if You are real; Jesus, I don't know if You are the Son of God. But I have made a mess of my life, and if You are real, You can have my life. If You are not real, I want to die.”

So she handed over her skepticism, her will, her
life,
just like that. She says that she kept it to herself to begin with, but over the coming months a kind of peace descended and she found herself able for the first time to forgive Charlie his drunken rages and rejections and insensitivity – because as any overworked marriage counsellor will tell you, this is the biggest challenge to repairing any relationship. Yet it was so simple once the decision was made. She says God told her not to try to change or save or chastise Charlie, just to be bold enough to love him with no conditions attached. So she did, then felt better, and the love now flowing through her faith seemed to lift some of the burden on her husband's love. He saw the transformation in Dotty and eventually asked God to give him the strength to love his wife, and he duly found it. The beer was still an issue, but Dotty dealt with that in her own inimitable way, praying, “God, if you want Charlie in the beer business, give him peace … but if you don't, make him so miserable that he sells out!” And so it came to pass that one night, Charlie poured a drink and it might as well have emanated direct from Gordon Cooper, it tasted so bad. He sold his share of the business for a tidy sum and gave up the booze. He started a commercial-real-estate development company and set about repairing his relationship with the sons he'd terrorized. His disappointment at being Earthbound forever after Apollo vanished. Things were on their way to getting better.

I have no religion and probably never will, so I don't know why I enjoy hearing all this so much, but I do. Perhaps it's the idea that you can make a smart decision to suspend the faculties that we most associate with intelligence: skepticism and independence … the idea that under certain circumstances, dispensing with intelligence might be the most intelligent thing a person could ever do. Charlie smiles when I ask if he still thinks of the Moon trip as “the dust of my life”?

“Well, that was probably a little bit exaggerated,” he says, “but I tried to use the analogy of the Moondust, you know, and kicking around in the dust. No, the Moon flight was a
big
experience for me, a great adventure – and I'd do it again, Andrew. So it wasn't inconsequential for me – I didn't mean it that way – it's more from an internal sense.”

But he'd choose his faith over it?

“Oh, yeah, definitely.”

The singsong voice of Mission Control. I remark that it's hard to reconcile this Charlie with the despot he describes after the flight. It's as though he's talking about a completely different person.

Charlie and Dotty both laugh knowingly.

“Oh, totally,” Charlie explains. “Oh, yeah, God changes us on the inside. I mean, I have an explosive temper and I was a very stern father and I was a big flirt, you know, and that frustrated Dotty.”

“He was critical,” says Dotty.

“Yeah, I had a critical spirit, you know.”

They're funny together like this, trading lines from the same story, the Lord's Sonny and Cher. Was he really that bad as a father?

“Well, I mean I wanted to be a good father, because I did love my children. So my motives were good, but my method was madness.”

In what way?

“I was trying to spur them on. In the military, a lot of times you spur people on with criticism. I learned that in the Naval Academy. My father was very critical. My parents fought a lot in their marriage. They stayed together, but had a very contentious relationship.”

Charlie talks of coaching his two boys at soccer and Little League baseball when Apollo was done and he had more time on his hands; of how he was absurdly demanding, “not only with my kids, but with the whole team – 'cos I wanted victory.” I suggest that this isn't surprising, because he had just come from the most competitive environment on Earth; then Dotty nods her head vigorously and goes “uh-huh, mm-hmm” as I relate what Alan Bean said about some of the guys still engaging in one-upmanship when he bumps into them. Charlie breezes past this, saying that it was all “just good, healthy competition,” but Dotty sticks up for Bean, saying:

“I can see how someone would think the way Alan thinks. Charlie was not introspective. He did not think about feelings
and try to figure people out or anything like that. He was just positive – gonna be great, let's do it. Alan's not like that, he's more sensitive and he would look at people's feelings and think about those things a lot more. There's a different personality there.”

Charlie nods doubtfully.

“Fortunately, our kids don't remember much of the hard times,” he says. “And I thank God for that; I think it's a miracle. As for forgiveness, the boys said, ‘Well, that's okay, Dad.' And then I found that it's a fine line between discipline and discouragement as a father. I prayed a lot about that, asking, ‘How do I do that?' ”

We talk about that idea of “finding the strength to love my wife,” which seems a radical notion to me and most of my Fifties/Sixties/Seventies-born friends. We've come to assume that love just
is
or
isn't,
is true or not. That it's irreducible.

“Well, yes,” says Charlie. “You have to have that strength, but first it was a decision, ‘Lord, I want to love my wife, I want to make this marriage work … please give me the strength and the guidance and the wisdom to do that.' As Dotty says, love is a decision. You decide to love somebody.”

The very opposite of what the songs say.

The doorbell rings and Charlie announces that the “gutter guy” is here. He goes off to meet him, leaving Dotty and me alone. She hands me a copy of a pamphlet she wrote telling the story of her conversion, and flashes her eyes.

“Of course, I was thinking of your book in terms of trying to help people. That was why I was talking about women going into marriage, 'cos I thought that people could relate to that.”

I tell her that I'm sure they will, one way or another, then ask whether she thinks her trials were common to the other wives? She sighs and shakes her head. Her face combines smile and grimace in a way that few could manage.

“We didn't talk about it,” she says.

Was it as difficult for the women as people tend to assume?

“Well, look at the divorces. I know that one woman divorced her husband and she's sorry now that she did, but I think she was, ‘Well, he's done his thing, I want to go do my
thing now.' So she reacted that way. I'm sure there was this feeling of being abandoned. So a good number have divorced in that situation.”

We move on to the “Original Wives Club,” Dotty explaining that the ones who generally come are the ones who are single now, because it's their only remaining contact with the programme.

“So they really love to come. It's a neat thing. They can get that support and that encouragement. Not very many of them have remarried, not very many at all.”

She names a couple of the women who've remarried then broken up again, and some more who never wanted to try again. The high divorce rate is much commented on, I note, wondering whether it was to do with dissatisfaction on the men's part when they got back to real life, or the “rock star syndrome,” or just the pressure of an absurdly demanding job?

“I think it was just the typical thing. The lack of attention that the women were given. The men were held up as heroes, while the women were doing the hard work at home. But I guess that, really, most of them were because of the affairs that were going on.”

Gutter guy seen to, Charlie's returned now.

“Well,” he says, “you have to look at what causes the affairs, too. Most of the time, the affairs were the symptom. The cause of that was – ”

Dotty interjects with some urgency.

“But there was a lot of temptation. Every wife had to deal with the knowledge that her husband was a hero and considered prize game by good-looking women wherever they went. And it was accepted, I think, that the idea among the men was, ‘Sure.' At least that's how it seemed to me: ‘We got this availability …' It didn't seem to be frowned on.”

In 1977, the
Life
interviewer Dora Jane Hamblin wrote: “I think
Life
treated the men and their families with kid gloves. So did most of the rest of the press. These guys were heroes … I knew, of course, about some very shaky marriages, some womanizing, some drinking, and never reported it. The guys wouldn't have let me, and neither would NASA.”

It wasn't so much that these things happened, because they happen everywhere, in every occupation, in every part of the world. What made them uncomfortable was the Boy Scout image that NASA sought to project. And I know that at this point I should ask whether Charlie succumbed, but I can't bring myself to pick over such old wounds, should they exist.

I ask Charlie if he enjoyed the reunion at the Reno Air Races and he says yes, it was nice to see the guys and they were treated well and there “weren't too many people bugging you.” Which isn't how it looked to me at all. He's still interested in space, but doesn't campaign the way Buzz does.

“I mean, Buzz has some real far-out ideas,” he says, quickly adding, “some
good ideas
.”

The settlement of Earth-crossing asteroids being my current favourite.

We talk about Jim Irwin and Ed Mitchell, others who had big experiences up there, both of whom were Lunar Module pilots like Charlie. In fact, Ed acted as his backup on
Apollo 16,
so the two got to know each other well.

“Ed's more of a New Ager, I call it,” explains Dotty, keen to distance herself from that version of spirituality. “It's spiritual, but it's not really the
Holy
Spirit, so much as ESP and cognitive stuff.”

It turns out that Charlie was aboard the noetics bus for a while.

“Yeah, after Ed left the space programme, he convinced me that this was all real and maybe I oughtta try it on my flight, so I was planning on doing that, but I was so tired that I could never concentrate, so never did anything with it. Ed then started this Institute of Noetics out in San Francisco, and it was basically to scientifically prove the existence of God.”

Dotty's not going to let this one lie.

“But it's not the same God,” she says firmly.

“Well, I mean …” Charlie starts.

“We've tried to talk to him about what we believe is the Truth, but he's really going a different way.”

“But we're still good friends,” Charlie returns.

I comment on the way that, the further we get from Apollo,
the more avant-garde it's coming to seem and Charlie agrees.

“Well, to me, I think the wind was taken out of the sails of manned Deep Space missions because we didn't discover any life out there. If we'd turned the camera on Mars and there'd been little green men looking back at us, we'd have been there by now.”

We so badly want to believe that we're not alone, don't we? With a pang of envy, the thought occurs to me that the Dukes are lucky, because they don't think they are. I tell Charlie that a few weeks ago there was a huge gold harvest moon and I spent ages trying to imagine standing on it. He listens, then scrunches up his eyes.

“Yeah, I still do that, too,” he says. “Yeah.
Wow
.”

Then he has to dash back to the gutter guy, while Dotty and I talk about her boys. I ask whether she thinks the relationship between them and their father healed completely? She says that she thinks it did, that the three of them just got back from a golf trip together and that they're very close. One son is now an airline pilot, the other in business, so both followed in their father's footsteps to a degree, but I wonder whether the unhappiness surrounding their early years had any long-term effects?

“Well,” she says, “I know they made decisions, both of them, to be a more present father than their father was. And they've followed through with that, really wanting to be there, so that affected them some. And I think that they … neither one of them do I see raising voices or getting angry with their children like Charlie did, so that was probably a decision, too. So even though these were negative things, the boys took some positive things from them. And I don't see any effect on them with their relationship with their daddy at all.”

We talk about the time toward the end of the Seventies when she hit rock bottom and tried so many different ways to pick herself up, including drugs. Only with great difficulty can I picture Dotty toking on a spliff, I tease. Is that part of the story true? “Oh, yeah, it's true. I say that to help some people identify. It was more a part of the party life, which most people realize is not really going to bring you deep fulfillment either. Then came the money. I think that's really why women went into work, because
your worth was judged by how much money you made and so women keep fighting that and getting more money so they can be worth more. I feel sorry for the women who are where I was, so pulled in different directions, always striving, striving.”

I know she's talking about a struggle which hasn't gone away for most women, the competing pull of children and work. Dotty and her contemporaries were in the front line of that one. With Charlie gone, I now ask for her feelings about the Moon.