Few history professors ever see one of their books made into a movie—much less one that stars Ryan Gosling and challenges comic-book-franchise offerings at the box office. But James Hansen, recently retired from Auburn University in Alabama after 31 years of teaching history, has now seen his 700-page biography of Neil Armstrong turn into one of the year’s most praised films (see the Physics Today review).
Hansen’s 2005 book, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, explored not only Armstrong’s years with the space program but also his childhood in Ohio, his life with his first wife, Janet, and his three children, and the uncomfortable celebrity that awaited him after Apollo 11’s historic flight. The book was also one of the first to discuss the 1962 death of Armstrong’s daughter, Karen, who passed away from cancer as a toddler.
Physics Today recently spoke with Hansen about writing a biography of a famously private man.
PT: Tell us a little bit about yourself. What led you to write a biography of Armstrong?
HANSEN: I was trained as a historian of science and technology. About 20 years into my career, I was teaching a graduate seminar at Auburn on the history of space travel. On the first day, I had the students express an interest in a research topic. When they were finished, one of them asked me, “Well, what are you going to do next, Dr. Hansen?” And I said, “I’d be interested in doing a biography of an astronaut. But the only astronaut that really interests me is Armstrong.”
At the time, what I knew was that he was very private and hard to even reach. I had a friend at NASA who had a post office box number for him—Armstrong had a secretary who went through the large amount of mail and decided what he needed to see and what he didn’t need to see.
Armstrong wrote me a very polite letter saying that he wasn’t really interested at that point in time—he was busy with a number of corporate boards that he was serving on. But I sent him a couple of my books for one of his birthdays and that opened the conversation back up again. He invited me to his home in Cincinnati, and we eventually signed an agreement—a simple one saying, “Neil Armstrong agrees to do this, James Hansen agrees to do that.” It took me two years to get that agreement, and then two years to write the book.
PT: What about the other members of the Armstrong family? How did you make contact with them as you worked on the project?
HANSEN: It was one of the points of agreement between Neil and me that he would write a letter making it clear that he approved of my research, and then requesting that people assist me in whatever way they thought appropriate. That was a really important thing to have because people that knew Neil well knew how private he was.
In the end, word got out that I was working on this project, and I didn’t have to use the letter that much. The fact that he’d agreed to have a biographer write his life story actually made some news on the national level.
PT: Yes, I understand that you sold the film rights even before the book was finished.
HANSEN: Yeah. When the approval from Neil made the news, Hollywood came to talk to us. I had to have an agent for the first time in my literary career. The film rights were sold to Warner Brothers and Clint Eastwood a year or so before I finished the book. Clint wanted to direct, and he actually invited Neil and me and our wives to his private golf club to play a round of golf and talk about the possibilities. After my book came out in 2005, the option ran out with Eastwood—for whatever reason Clint decided he wasn’t going to make the movie. Then Universal came in and got the rights.
PT: What involvement did you have in the writing and shooting of the film?
HANSEN: [Director] Damien [Chazelle] wanted the screenwriter Josh Singer, who won the Academy Award for Spotlight, to write First Man. Josh wanted to do deep research, not just into my book but into other books and sources. As soon as Josh got started, I was getting regular phone calls. He wanted to talk to as many people as he could, so I made arrangements for him to talk to other people who had talked to me for the book, including Neil’s sister, his sons, and some of the astronauts. When Josh wrote a preliminary outline, I had lots of comments on that. Every time a new version of the script came out, he sent it to me and I commented extensively on every draft. We ended up having probably a total of 75 drafts.
My contract with Universal also made me a coproducer on the film. And so as soon as it started to shoot, I was on set most every day. There weren’t many days that they didn’t have some questions for me. Gosling was reading my book, and he had lots of questions. The production designer, Nathan Crowley, had a lot of questions. Just to show you how detailed they were about the story and the technology, many of the questions they had I could not answer immediately—and I’d written a 700-page book and been teaching the subject for 25 years. I had to do some research or talk to some other people to get the answer.
PT: What do you think might surprise readers about Armstrong’s life?
HANSEN: I think that the audience will be surprised to see how problematic the Armstrong marriage was. I know some of the astronauts were surprised when they were consulting on the script. They were unaware that Neil and Janet had as much trouble as they really did. I trace a lot of things about his personality back to his childhood and family life growing up. He kept so much stuff locked up. He just wasn’t an easy person or an easy husband to engage with.
One of the major revelations in my book was about Neil’s daughter, Karen. There were lots of people who didn’t even know his daughter had existed because Neil was so private about it. He wouldn’t even talk about her with Janet, which was obviously problematic.
The death of a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent, obviously, and whether you admit it to yourself or not, you know there’s going to be an effect. I looked carefully at Neil’s flying [he was a test pilot in California] in the aftermath of Karen’s death. He had a series of incidents in his flying, one of which was depicted in the movie.
It was at this time that he decided to put his name in for astronaut selection. My book suggested that his decision came out of the agony of the loss of a child. The moviemakers picked up on that theme and made it a crucial part of the story.
PT: You mentioned that Neil’s childhood had a big influence on his personality. What was his childhood like?
HANSEN: He was the oldest in his family, and neither one of his parents was college educated. His mother, Viola, was a very religious woman, an evangelical Christian, whereas the father, Stephen, was not very religious. He was an auditor for the state of Ohio, and he had to move the family around a lot because he would do the books for one county, and then they’d have to move to another county for his next year’s work.
I know from letters that Viola expressed a lot of dissatisfaction with her husband. She would make comments like “He’s not the man I thought he was.” And when Neil wrote letters back home from college, he always addressed them “Dear Mother and family.” The father wasn’t mentioned. I think there was probably some emotional abuse in the home. I talked to a child psychologist about how a child’s development is affected by observing emotional abuse toward the mother, and the personality that was described was very similar to Armstrong’s. Neil had the ability to block out what was going on around him and focus on his own world. And I think that can only be explained by what was going on in his house as a boy.
PT: What was Armstrong’s life like after returning from the Moon?
HANSEN: Well, that’s when he really becomes “first man.” The reason I used that title was that it was not just going to be a biography but an iconography. People start making him into a global icon, a celebrity, something he never, ever wanted to be. For a period of time after Apollo 11, he was receiving 10 000 letters a day.
Because he was so private, he was a perfect vessel for society and culture to project meanings onto. Lots of stories were told over the years that were highly exaggerated, some just downright false and fabricated. For me, the whole story of what happens to him after Apollo 11 is as interesting as going to the Moon. The film doesn’t really suggest much about that, but the book does a great deal to follow what happens to him and his iconography all the way to his death.
