Second Man

Watching the entertaining and profoundly moving film First Man, which documents the career of Neil Armstrong, complete with a certain lunar landing you may have heard of, I was struck, as a lot of people have been over the years, by the second guy. Dr Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr, or just plain old ‘Buzz’ to his friends, has in his own way, become even more well-known than his famous colleague. There are a number of reasons for this which seem worth exploring, particularly in a blog about alcoholism.

If you know anything about the subject of the Gemini and Apollo space missions – or if you’ve just watched First Man, for instance – you’ll know that Neil Armstrong, for all his undoubted aeronautical greatness, was a bit of a cold fish. In his dauntingly brilliant book The Right Stuff, which covers the exploits of the prototypical X-1 and Mercury flight programmes, the journalist Tom Wolfe paints ‘Neil’, as an almost other-worldly figure, somewhat at odds, to put it politely, with his colleagues. These other All-American types enjoyed a few beers with the guys, laddish banter, football and driving fast cars. None of that for Armstrong, whose measured manner, sense of calm distance and computer-like brain earned him the social, if not professional, disdain of the other guys. The kind of man who would listen carefully to your joke, analyse it unsmilingly and then enquire politely if you were attempting humour.

Armstrong’s famous lunar co-buddy (although I’m not sure you could really call them friends), Aldrin is cut from a different kind of cloth altogether. There’s a telling scene in First Man, where a visibly awkward Armstrong (played by Ryan Gosling) is shown at a pre-flight press conference, coldly answering friendly questions from the press, only to have Buzz (Corey Stoll) intervene cheerfully, his folksy charm breaking the ice and saving the day.

Whereas Armstrong closely guarded his somewhat tragic private life from public view, as much as was possible for one of the most famous men in the world, Aldrin has lived more in the public gaze. For both men, it could fairly be said that post-Moon life, proved to be one hell of an anti-climax. I mean, whatcha gonna do next right? But for Aldrin, the agony or disappointment call it what you will, seemed more public, perhaps because he needed it to be.

After the meteoric super-fame that followed the Moon landing, followed by a seemingly endless global PR tour on behalf of NASA, Aldrin slumped into intense depression and alcoholism of such severity that it nearly killed him, at one stage even ending up making a living as a car salesman (he has a doctorate in astronautics). He’s on record as saying that he would spend weeks in bed, leaving the house only to buy more liquor and fast food.

But in a 2017 interview, he points towards his recovery from his demons as something he could give to this children as, ‘an example of dedication and achievement. Perhaps just not in the same way as serving my country.’

Today, the Second Man continues to make his convivial and ebullient presence felt. He remains an outspoken advocate of the colonisation of Mars, a fabulous but now probably do-able thing. In 2011 he quite rightly punched a conspiracy theorist in the face, who’d publicly accused him of lying about the Moon landings. Now this great American hero, is a regular at lunar shindigs, hanging out with Presidents and Hollywood’s finest. He also hasn’t had a drink in over thirty years.

But for all Buzz Aldrin’s folksy charm, there’s an underlying sadness. Asked if he’d have done anything differently on his great adventure, Buzz once reflected wistfully, ‘I wish I’d looked out of the window more’. And whilst Armstrong’s immortal ‘One Small Step…’, will rightfully resound down the ages, it’s Buzz Aldrin’s less rehearsed and more human lunar comment that speaks perhaps more hauntingly of life’s trials. Gazing in wonder at the alien landscape he saw before him, Aldrin murmured, ‘Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation’.

Nick Jordan

First Man is currently showing on Netflix.