Christmas Moon: America in Winter

In December 1972, on the day when Apollo 17, the final Moon mission, left lunar orbit to return to Earth, their wake-up call was an evocative, soaring, and strangely somber love song, a major hit that year, “The First Time Ever I saw Your Face”, sung by Roberta Flack. “I thought the sun rose in your eyes…”

It was a proud but bittersweet moment for NASA and for the country. JFK’s challenge had been met, and then some. Only four years earlier, Apollo 8’s reading of a Bible verse while orbiting the Moon on Christmas Eve was a beloved worldwide television spectacular. Now we were leaving.

“And I knew our joy would fill the Earth.

And it would last 'til the end of time…”

“The First Time Ever I saw Your Face” was recorded in 1969 and went almost unnoticed when it was first released. The producer warned Flack that the song’s rhythm was too slow, but she stuck to the tempo she preferred. In 1970, she got a phone call from Clint Eastwood, the TV actor who’d become famous doing westerns in Italy and Spain. He wasn’t yet a megastar. He was directing his first film, Play Misty for Me, and wanted to buy the rights to use “First Time”. Misty, a dark, timely thriller about a casual hookup and an obsessed stalker, was the Fatal Attraction of its day. Eastwood and Flack agreed on a price--$2000—and then Flack asked if she could re-record it. “It’s too slow”, she said, finally conceding the point. “No, it’s not”, insisted Clint. They used it as is, his judgment was perfect, the film brought the song back, and it became a major hit.

People were intrigued by the combination of Roberta Flack’s yearning voice with a melancholy, contemplative reserve. Maybe it fit the times. The country was wracked by rising rates of crime, street violence, and anger. The endless fountain of postwar prosperity was fading. Racial protests, and student protests against the Vietnam war had been going on forever by then. Blacks didn’t feel much attachment to the space program, which most considered irrelevant to solving more important problems on Earth, problems that concerned them. We were no longer willing, in JFK’s words, “to bear any burden”, whether it be for Saigon or the Moon.

A tiny, poignant reminder of those times can sometimes be glimpsed in photos and films of the period, even Scorsese’s Mean Streets: a car window decal of the American flag, about three by four inches, with a photo of the full Moon in place of the star field. Distributed in the millions by the New York Daily News, then a conservative, blue collar tabloid, it was proudly titled “Good Old U.S.A.—First on the Moon”. It was a nationalist sentiment, less popular on Central Park West than in outer borough New York, where for a couple of years you saw the flag decal everywhere, on aircraft carrier-sized Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs, and Dodges. The bridge and tunnel crowd. My people. Perhaps, even if only metaphorically, your people too.

The tumult of 1968-‘71 was deeply, lastingly counterproductive for the American Left. They expected 1972 to be a pushover, yet they could see the country was slipping away. Everything they did boosted the poll numbers of the loathed, despised Nixon, who they felt had won 1968 on a fluke, backed by the country’s haters. The angry reaction of middle class and blue-collar whites to pretty much everything since riots and crime started spiking in the Sixties was now too visible to ignore.

It was a time when audiences had grown impatient with Dragnet-style cops who politely followed the rules. We told the box office that we were ready for badasses who’d throw away the rulebook if that’s what it took to clean up the streets. Two months after Play Misty for Me opened, Clint Eastwood found the role that, more than any other, would define him with the public, “Dirty Harry” Callahan.

Another fall 1971 film captured the feeling of the era, America’s shock at how badly and how quickly things fell apart in the cities. The French Connection was the story of a pair of NYPD detectives who unravel a heroin delivery. The movie begins with a Christmastime drug raid on a local bar in a bleak, rundown Black neighborhood. But the injustices you see in the film aren’t all one-dimensional. It never stops comparing the posh hotels where the drug lords hang out with the freezing, dirty alleys where stakeouts keep the plainclothes detectives up all night. Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman’s memorably obsessed, flawed cop, became the bitter hero the filmmakers didn’t glamorize.

The French Connection was more than a big hit. It would influence the look and feel of police dramas for a generation. Like Play Misty for Me, French Connection would also create a memorable scene with the help of an overlooked 1969 tune that would become a belated hit recording two years later, when the movie came out.

“Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon” was a tribute to the Apollo program written by Jimmy Webb, one of the most successful songsmiths of the time. On the surface, it’s a bold, bouncy affirmation of the jazzed-up national spirit and the bright optimism that the success of the space program brought out in most of the nation. In the film, it’s an onstage musical number at a Mafia-ridden New York nightclub, sung by a charismatic trio of Black women, The Three Degrees.

“Has to make you glad to be alive!

Has to make you glad to be ali-i-ive! Yea-ah! Yeahhh!”

But the effect is cooler, more ironic and detached, darker than the song itself. For a few riveting moments of dramatic contrast, while this joyous, soaring uplift is going on in the background, the image in the foreground is Popeye Doyle at the bar, his expression frozen with the realization that across the restaurant, he’s spotted known mafiosi breaking bread with rich, crooked, politically connected lawyers. The song is all excitement and hope for the future, but the cynical ‘70s reality was, the cities were going to hell. That was also a major theme of the next megahit crime film, The Godfather, which opened in the spring of 1972.

That December, Bob Hope was in Vietnam in what was billed as his final overseas Christmas tour. We were leaving Vietnam, step by step. The boundless confidence of the foreign policy of the early ‘60s seemed like a long, long way back. The media weren’t paying much attention to Hope anymore, but his Vietnam shows had changed over the years, recognizing that there was a slightly different mix of young American soldiers now. The 1972 Christmas show featured the racy humor of Redd Foxx and the racy curves of Lola Falana. Black country singer Charley Pride was aboard, as was stunning model Jayne Kennedy.

G.I. audiences grew more cynical over the nine years of Hope’s Vietnam tours, but they rose to their feet to cheer a most special guest, astronaut Alan Shepard, American’s first man in space, and commander of the Apollo 14 landing mission. He carried personal greetings from President Nixon. In less than two years, Nixon would be gone. In less than three, South Vietnam fell. But that was in the future while a man who’d walked on the Moon walked among our men in uniform.

238,000 miles away, Roberta Flack’s voice woke the Apollo 17 astronauts. They pressed the button to fire the rockets, and begin America’s final ride home from the Moon. It seemed hard to believe, then and now, after all we’d done, so recently and so passionately, to get there.

“And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave

To the dark and the endless skies, my love/ To the dark and the endless skies…”

We knew it would be a long time before we went back. Nobody had any idea just how long. Half a century later, we still don’t.

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When John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the Moon”, he was reaffirming a program he inherited from the Eisenhower administration. Even the name—Project Apollo—had already been picked out. But Kennedy, who could easily have dumped the program, as his science advisors recommended, instead chose to give the ‘60s one of its final defining moments, and a too-rare positive one.

WTC under construction.

 

So many other of the country’s big projects of the early Sixties hadn’t worked out as hoped: optimism over civil rights, urban renewal, construction of new college campuses, overseas wars.

The young white actor, yet to be known as a jazz expert, still to prove himself as a major artist in his own right.