Cindy Adams, a still-working attraction in New York’s gossip museum, doesn’t remember whether she already knew this story, but here it is: Buzz Aldrin, a moonwalker as of almost exactly 50 years ago, joked about bringing back a moon rock and using it to propose to his third wife, Lois Driggs Cannon, in the late ’80s. Adams is tickled by this tale. And she is on the subject, which is quoted at length to preserve her arcane poetry:
This story was told to reporter Jesse Nash about 25 years ago, and he
just told it to me. We’re back to 1995. The setting? A celebrity
junket at Ocho Rios on the Caribbean grounds of Jamaica.Evangelist Marjoe Gortner’s money-raising Save the Oceans event. The
freebie faces included Dennis Hopper, Pete Sampras, Wolfgang Puck,
James Woods, Mickey Rooney, Patty Hearst, Henry Mancini, plus Buzz.
Some of those names are now gone—this saga remains forever.
Boy, does it! People reported on the saga, as it were, for the moon landing’s emerald anniversary in 1989. “And that leaves only Buzz Aldrin out there, sometimes taking the heat. In 1988 he joked about making an engagement ring from a chip off a moon rock. Government officials took umbrage, and the mythical ring turned into a two-carat diamond set in a diamond-studded eternity ring, which now rests on Lois’s finger.”
Lois Aldrin, however, wasn’t giving up on the myth. “When people ask about the ring, she has a ready response. ‘I tell them the moon is really made of diamonds,’ the astronaut’s wife says. ‘And we like to look up at the stars.’”
It’s probably for the best. All the moon rocks these days are stolen or fake. Lois and Buzz divorced in 2012, and, per Adams, she “left Earth last year.”
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— It has already been a summer full of hell in the Hamptons
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