An upside down world: Astronaut Deke Slayton and cosmonaut Alexei Leonov enjoy a zero-gravity moment of détente during the Apollo-Soyuz link up
By The Landlord
“Opposition is true friendship.” – William Blake
“There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.” – WB Yeats
“The language of friendship is not words but meanings.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.” – Socrates
“When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.” – W. Somerset Maugham
“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Friendship involves many things but, above all the power of going outside oneself and appreciating what is noble and loving in another.” – Thomas Huxley
“I'm a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn't have the heart to let him down.” – Abraham Lincoln
“Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it’ll always get you the right ones.” – John Lennon
“We'll be friends until forever, just you wait and see.” – A. A. Milne, Winnie The Pooh
Exactly 50 years ago today, on 17th July 1975, many people around the world, turning on our TVs, may have been very much surprised by news of monumental collaborative event between two mortal enemies. With the Cold War still very much ongoing, an international space mission, carried out jointly by the United States and the Soviet Union was broadcast globally – viewers’ attention caught particularly with the docking of an American Apollo spacecraft with a Soviet Soyuz capsule to become one vessel. As well as a scientific project, it represented a huge “handshake” in space, a symbolic away-day détente between the two nuclear superpowers.
I was really too young to properly remember the moon landings, but as a youngster, this was a vivid moment for me on television, and perhaps my first as a true-life space event. I was very familiar with sci-fi space stories, such as Star Trek, the original Flash Gordon, or the quirky, jerky puppetry movement of Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, or Joe 90. But this was real-life, real-time drama of the two space vessels meeting in the cosmos. It was as if some giant intergalactic robs insects were moving in for a weird slow-motion, snog in the massive vacuum of space. How was that possible over such vast distances? How did they get so close so precisely, and just not collide at huge speeds and smash up into tiny bits?
Even now footage of the moment they first touch brings a tangible tingle of excitement. But what seemed even more amazing at the time was when we then saw two sets of spacemen opening the respective air-tight doors, then sliding across for a historic hug and handshake, tumbling into each others’ tight spaces a chaotic zero gravity. It felt like magic - like getting out of one car on the motorway and climbing in the other. It seemed sort of impossible and dangerous, but wonderful.
It was the most exciting thing for me since earlier that same summer our big male cat suddenly one afternoon met the new dog next door, who had somehow got in under the fence. I watched through the kitchen window with grip of worry. Oh no! What might happen? They slowly approached one another, both bristled a bit, then sniffed each other, and then just sat down in the sunshine.
There's a lot of technical and political history behind the bigger space event, with several years' secret planning between the US governments of Richard Nixon, then later Gerald Ford, and the USSR’s Leonid Brezhnev. The mission consisted of three American astronauts (Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Deke Slayton) and two Soviet cosmonauts (Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space in 1964, and Valery Kubasov). They visited each others' ships through the round hatches daily, shared meals, and performed both joint and separate scientific experiments, including an arranged eclipse of the Sun by the Apollo module to allow instruments on the Soyuz to take photographs of the solar corona.
It was a landmark event in many ways. The pre-flight work provided useful experience for later joint American–Russian space flights, such as the Shuttle–Mir program and the International Space Station, which without Apollo-Soyez would not have been possible. Here's a documentary:
But of all the memories and records around the event, now in many ways forgotten in the public consciousness, eclipsed by movies about the preceding moon landings, and years of Space Shuttles and the new era of billionaires' satellites and ego trips in our stratosphere, was the fact that the American and Soviet commanders, Stafford and Leonov, became lasting friends. This is very much in evidence at the end of the above film. Leonov became the godfather of Stafford's younger children, and Stafford gave a eulogy at Leonov's funeral in October 2019. As Leonov said during their live broadcast press conference from space when asked what he thought of American food when the teams exchanged gifts: “As an old philosopher once said, the best part of a good dinner is not what you eat but with whom you eat.”
US astronauts try some Russian space snacks
Perhaps, retrospectively, it's not surprising that the two men, so dedicated to their projects, sharing a fascination with the boundaries of their science, having gone through rigorous training and skills, should find common ground, or indeed space together. But it's certainly an unusual place, and circumstance to start a big friendship and surmounting many outside pressures that could have made it impossible.
All of this then launches our topic, one about unlikely, unusual or surprising friendships. The general topic of friendship was circumnavigated, and only in a surface way, a long time ago, and here at the Bar we we’ve also looked at surprising encounters and meetings, as well as hand gestures, but friendship is a deep and complex subject. So songs about this could refer to real or fictional friendships, but the angle is that rather than being about friendship in broad terms, they should highlight something surprising about it, ideally with details.
Do opposites attract? Perhaps unlikely friendships operate on one party giving something the other might feel they very lack - an exchange of gifts and abilities. It's not uncommon, for example to see very tall and short people as friends, but there's always a lot more going on than that. Perhaps it’s about mutual fascination, or realisation that despite many apparent surface difference, that humans share so much more than they realise.
There have been many surprising and unusual famous friendships in history, sometimes between what appear to be quite contrasting characters. The studious and serious poet TS Eliot apparently had a strong, amusing friendship of letter correspondence with the mischievously moustachioed film star Groucho Marx.
Despite their contrasting backgrounds, Marilyn Monroe was also great mates with Ella Fitzgerald, perhaps united by being very famous women of talent in the 1950s in a male-dominated industry. Monroe actually really helped Fitzgerald's career by insisting the owner of the Mocambo nightclub in Hollywood to allow the great singer to perform in what was very much a culture and environment of racial prejudice.
Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe at Tiffany Club, 1954
Helen Keller, despite her enormous disability, had a close friendship, not only with Mark Twain, but also the telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell, whose dedication to the science of communication, stretched long before that famous apparatus, and spent years teaching deaf people, and helped Keller get a home teacher too.
But perhaps the most surprising of famous friendships mixes intellectual and physical vigour. Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, in unlikely circumstances, became good pals with the French professional wrestler André the Giant. The two met because when Beckett moved to France in 1953, a builder named Boris Rousimoff helped him build his new home. In break time, Beckett and Rousimoff became friends over card games. Rousimoff meanwhile confessed, amid the building job, that he was having trouble getting his heftily difficult son, André, to school. At 12 years old, André was already 6 feet tall and weighed 250 pounds. Beckett thought he could help. He had a truck that was big enough to fit André, and offered to drive the big lad to school to repay Rousimoff for helping construct his house. And in an even stranger twist, while in the truck together, the two men's conversations were mostly about cricket. As well as the ring, the eventually 7-foot André also appeared in several films, including The Princess Pride.
Intellectual giant Samuel Beckett and his friend the wrestler André The Giant
There's much more that can be said about friendship of course, but it's high time for my introductory mission to end, and hopefully to return back down to Earth with less of a death-defying risk than those American astronauts, who almost died in the process.
So let’s turn this over to the context of song and hear from you, learned readers, with your part in extending our ongoing global Song Bar friendships. But before that, and lastly, for your further entertainment, with a nod to my old childhood cat and his dog neighbour friend, who were both very much alive during the Apollo-Soyez mission, let's enjoy a brief and shameless clickbait-parody gallery of unlikely, but real animal friendships, then ending with a famous fictional one:
So then, who will extend their virtual musical handshake across the internet divide to help guide this topic? Give a big global hand and applause for Loud Atlas! Deadline for nominations is the usual 11pm UK time on Monday, for playlists published next week. OK then, pals from near and far, it’s playtime…
Bonus fact: In 1975 they even invented a special Link-Up vodka cocktail (with Southern Comfort and lime juice) to toast those involved in the Apollo-Soyez mission, so that same drink is now going to be added to our Bar - watch out for it the usual top right. Cheers to unusual friendships everywhere!
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