by Lisa Napoli
And on the way back home on the fancy coaches hired for the trip, the boys of summer were treated to a present from Ted: porno films.
* * *
Presidents. Satellites. Suspensions. Basketball teams. As if that wasn’t enough drama, late one night, the FBI trailed Ted’s French lady-friend, now a suspect in a matter of international espionage, all the way to a Holiday Inn in St. Petersburg, Florida. Much to their surprise, they discovered Ted in the room she was headed for—waiting in bed with a bottle of Champagne, cheerfully wondering what took her so long. He was there for a yacht race the next day. The alibi she gave the embarrassed agents exonerated her on the spot.
Ted began to wonder if the FBI had tapped his phones or the lines in the commissioner’s office. Speaking before the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association in Salisbury, North Carolina, he speculated about both in a breakfast speech that was pure Mouth of the South. First, he lamented that no book existed with the title How to Be an Owner. Next, he advised never taking more than five drinks at a baseball cocktail party. Then he swore off the parties themselves: “I want to keep a low profile, keep my mouth shut and be a good boy. I’ll do whatever the commissioner says. If he says, ‘Step ’n fetch it,’ I’ll step ’n fetch it.”
The only person he disliked more than Commissioner Kuhn and Adolf Hitler, he said, was sports agent Jerry Kapstein. He promised to explain why he didn’t like the man, for, after all, “You should have some reason to dislike a guy besides the fact that he wears a full-length fur coat and is a Jew.” Frustrated by the piles of money he extracted from owners like Ted on behalf of his clients, he’d written Kapstein a letter decrying his tactics and signed it “Yours in Christ.”
After his remarks were published, the Anti-Defamation League expressed outrage, and some members of the New York Yacht Club pushed to have him ousted, Ted issued an apology. In a letter to the local Jewish paper, several Jewish employees of channel 17, including Pike, loyally rose to Ted’s defense. Really, they explained, Ted was not an anti-Semite. Fallible, but not anti-Semitic. He was, they knew, equal-opportunity offensive.
Keeping his mouth shut—and keeping a low profile—was simply not in Ted’s DNA. Frustrated by a sixteen-game losing streak, he thumbed his nose at baseball’s establishment yet again by sending his manager, Dave Bristol, off on vacation and announcing that he’d manage the team himself. If he had “enough brains” to buy the club, surely, he believed, he had enough brains to run it. “I could make them winners. Hypnotize them—you are winners,” he said. Whatever tactics he might deploy to improve the team, his knowledge of the basics was sorely lacking. Observers looked on with amusement as Ted clumsily suited up in his uniform with the stirrups on backward.
His self-appointed managerial role lasted exactly one game—after he added another loss to the Braves’ dismal streak, dropping their record to 8–22. Finally, mercifully, his suspension kicked in, and he was free to go sailing.
How hard could it be to manage a baseball team? Harder than it looked, Ted discovered, when he took the helm for one game—and added to the loss column. (AP Photo/R. C. Greenawalt)
But he didn’t leave baseball behind. Trailing behind him as he pulled into Newport was a “portable” ten-meter satellite dish that got planted behind the twenty-two-room English Tudor lodge he’d inhabit with the crew for the summer. By day, he’d walk the two miles to the docks to sail. By night, after the endless parties that were part and parcel of racing season, the dish would allow him to tune in to the Braves and channel 17. Onlookers attracted by the space-age curiosity gathered around and wondered in amazement if the dish radiated light. They’d never seen such a thing. The biggest marvel—and the main attraction—was not this hulking piece of newfangled technology but this strange, larger-than-life specimen of a human.
The flap about his suspension had put yachting, and specifically the America’s Cup, on the populist map. Most of the nation couldn’t tell a luff from a tack, nor did they care to, but that didn’t stop the crowds from swarming to the quaint town of Newport in support of Ted. Fans mobbed him, rock-star style, rushing out of restaurants and chasing him down the street to snap a photo or beg an autograph. Street vendors peddled buttons that proclaimed Ted Turner for President.
A faction of haters sported competing buttons featuring a cartoon of a mustache and wagging tongue with the caption Beat the Mouth, a riff on the nickname he despised. Spotting one on a lapel, Ted grabbed it and threw it on the floor, inviting its owner outside: “If you want to beat the Mouth, I’ll give you a chance to do it right now if you want to follow me to the parking lot.”
The motto he chose for his crew, “Acta Non Verba,” belied his garrulous nature. The theme song of the newly released movie Rocky became their anthem. Just the first rousing bars of the tune gave them all goosebumps, they said.
Though Ted told his tactician, Gary Jobson, that he’d never felt as prepared for anything as he was for that year’s competition, this now three-time yachtsman of the year was still considered the underdog. No one imagined or expected he could win. And that made his desire to win all the more ferocious.
How do you spell fun? W-I-N, he said, but he and the crew were having plenty of F-U-N, too. Frat boy style, they’d raise their shirts and scream off the side of the boat to pretty passersby, “Show me your titties,” and some women, dazzled by the intoxicating allure of dashing seafarers, happily complied. At one of the seemingly endless society dinners, Ted caused a fracas when he asked an attractive young woman if she got enough loving from her companion, who looked to be twice her age. It made no sense to him that a beauty would be wasted on an old guy. When she admitted, “I’m horny as hell,” Ted said he thought he could help take care of that—later backpedaling by saying he was offering up his young, single crew members.
“There are times you’d like to bash his head in with a baseball bat,” said crew member Dick Sadler. “But there are more times you want to hug him. You know he’s conning you, but you can’t help but love it.”
No matter how crude or bombastic, his performance on the water couldn’t be denied. One fateful day in August, the venerable selection committee, the old guard of yachting, arrived on board Courageous, neatly attired in their traditional blue blazers and straw hats, to pass along good news.
“Captain Turner, we appreciate your hard work. You’ve come a long way. We’d like to inform you that you have been selected to defend the America’s Cup.” Ted’s eyes welled up at the news of his victory, and his men erupted in jubilation. Now they needed equal parts luck and skill to win the best-of-seven competition against Australia. At the press conference later, cocky Ted nonchalantly toked on his cigar, blowing smoke rings, declaring that he felt like the luckiest guy in the world.
“This has to be a dream,” he said. “I’ve been dreaming of this so long, I had to figure I was still sleeping when I got the news. Then I heard the guys yelling and celebrating, so I had to think it was real.” There would never be a time in life as good as this.
With the Rocky theme serenading on an endless loop, and a masterful performance by the entire crew, over the next six days Courageous easily took the four victories in a row in a pitch-perfect performance, clinching the Cup. And all of Newport erupted, a “floating Times Square on New Year’s Eve,” as one observer described it, an explosion of horns and screams.
As was tradition, his men threw Ted into Newport Harbor, and everyone jumped in next—everyone except for Janie, who didn’t want to ruin her hairdo. Back on the boat, before he peeled off his wet clothing, the victorious captain posed in front of a mirror and announced, “You are the fucking greatest,” flanked by two young groupies who’d appeared from God knew where, as women always seemed to when Ted was around. “Captain Courageous!” the mobs shouted as he staggered past hundreds of spectators over to the victory press conference, fortified by champagne and beer and Aquavit and bottles of rum that had passed his way. He’d had so much, he kept tripping out of
his shoes.
The Aussies sang Dixie, and as he entered the room he was greeted with thunderous applause. He and his tactician lit up cigars and belted back more booze. Two more bottles of rum suddenly appeared on the folding table in front of them.
Hovering in wait: Two creatures from his other life in Atlanta, channel 17’s Sid Pike and R. T. Williams. Hyperaware of appearances and the fact that the international press was present and cameras rolling, Pike slipped up to grab the booze and hide it under the table—attempting to keep Ted from getting even drunker. Ted, chomping on his cigar, melted down to the floor in search of them, shouting as he slithered, “Pike, give me that, you dumb fuck!” Despite his inebriation, he managed to hoist himself back up, bottles in hand, and burble out words of thanks:
“I’m happy to be alive and be in the US and able and healthy enough to compete with my good friends on the Australia and to be in the US and be fortunate enough to be competing in this competition with my good friends and it’s bit overwhelming to see all the nice people who’ve been so kind and everything,” he slurred. And his crew spirited him off the stage, back to the lodge, and tossed him into bed. “Captain Courageous” had cinched his place in yachting history.
Later, the earnest Pike wondered out loud to Williams whether he’d done anything wrong by moving the liquor. All he’d been trying to do, he explained, was protect Ted in front.
“Shoot, Pike,” Williams said, “you can’t protect Turner from himself. Everyone knows that.”
1 They didn’t win the World Series until 1995.
2 Hundreds of ham operators participated, and fifty thousand people sat hushed in the darkened stadium as a small circle of lights formed a landing pad on the field. The crowd booed.
3 For a look at average salaries before free agency, please see https://www3.nd.edu/~lawlib/baseball_salary_arbitration/minavgsalaries/Minimum-AverageSalaries.pdf.
4 To take the satellite facility tour yourself, please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV8YRqBUnMI.
CHAPTER SIX
“No News Is Good News”
To enter the majestic art deco building at 220 East Forty-Second Street in New York City was to instantly become imbued with a sense of urgency and importance. There in the center of one of city’s finest lobbies spun a gleaming, twelve-foot facsimile of the earth, rotating faster than the actual one, symbolizing the expansive action that transpired thirty-six floors above. Dramatically lit like a Hollywood movie star, the globe was framed overhead by a golden sun. News was collected here and pumped out to the world, in a variety of formats. Here on these premises, the New York Daily News, the paper for which the building had been erected in the 1930s, was created and printed each day. Radio and television and wire reporters worked frenetically in their respective media. So dramatic was the structure that Hollywood had chosen it as the backdrop for one of the world’s most famous fictional broadsheets, The Daily Planet. This dazzling building was worthy of Clark Kent and Superman.
What Reese Schonfeld was himself trying to accomplish in these hallowed halls required a superpower. Each day, he arrived and rode the elevator up to a modest office that housed an organization known only to a few—the Independent Television News Association, his tiny bid to upend the news establishment.
Nine independent television stations around the country had signed on to the service, including WPIX, housed here in this building. Reese had launched it just two days after Coors’s TVN had shut its doors in the fall of 1975. His grand plan to pump out news on the satellite had never reached fruition. Stations simply didn’t want those massive dishes eating up spots in their parking lots and saw no reason for the nuisance simply to receive a daily news feed. And then Joseph Coors had decided to ditch the news business.
Just as a wire service spat out text and photos to subscribing news entities, this collective Reese had cobbled together would provide filmed stories and footage from around the nation to its member stations. Late each afternoon, the ITNA fed out a half hour’s worth of material for subscribers to use in their newscasts as they wished. In those first weeks, KTVU in San Francisco contributed coverage of the latest in the saga of kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, while KTXL in Sacramento sent updates on the trial of accused presidential assassin Squeaky Fromme.
“The invisible newscast,” Reese called this offering—not a show but, rather, elements for producers around the country to use in building their newscasts.
This was his best salvo in combatting what he called “the golden age of network arrogance.” In order to bolster their ratings and preserve their domain, networks didn’t want to share their abundant footage with their affiliates before they had the chance to air it. What Reese had created might not have been much, but it was a start—and it was a paycheck. For the service to work long-term, he’d need twice as many stations to subscribe.
The holdout independent that drove him craziest continued to be channel 17. At the annual convention of the Association of Independent Television Stations, Reese would grab Ted and state his case about news. Invariably, Ted, flanked by a couple of convention babes, pontificated for the amusement of all who could hear. Ted had not budged on his declaration that “No news is good news.” News was depressing, an endless parade of gloom and doom, depicting the worst of humanity, dragging down anyone who tuned in.
“I hate the news,” he’d say. “I’ll never do news. I don’t believe in news. I’ve got entertainment programs stacked up in my basement that I could run until 2000.” Those programs he ran—I Love Lucy, Georgia Championship Wrestling, endless hours of old movies—were the ultimate in escapist fun. Benign as a pussycat! Invariably, he’d sum up his rebuff of Reese’s advances by railing against the networks and their unfair domination of the American mind.
While they disagreed on news, the two men did agree on that.
He longed for the day when news was front and center, when technology allowed it to flow freely around the giant, spinning globe, educating the audience and inspiring change. For now, he toiled away in these hallowed halls of journalism, a pipsqueak among giants, the overlord of a tiny service he’d concocted out of need and despair, dreaming of the news revolution.
Eventually, Reese was able to hire a few young staff people to help him on his mission. During long days, they’d sit with telephone receivers stuck to each ear, brokering and bartering for stories, all in the service of preparing their invisible newscast. He also attracted a small crew of other news veterans, exiles from greener pastures who’d left indelible marks on the industry of broadcast journalism.
One of them was a television producer from the Bronx, a legendary New York newsman named Ted Kavanau. Some believed Kavanau to be a genius, others a madman. Then there were those who thought him a combination of both. “Mad Dog,” they called him. He possessed, in the eyes of at least one old boss, the perfect blend of showmanship and journalistic judgment. This approach had shaken up news in his hometown.
With the handsome looks and impeccable attire of a New York City police detective—replete with a pistol strapped to his shin—Kavanau buzzed with the frenetic energy of a bookie. It had taken him a while to find his way to the profession. Though he felt himself to be a poor student at DeWitt Clinton, the prestigious, public all-boys high school he’d attended, he’d managed to pass the challenging entrance exam for City College, a tuition-free oasis of higher learning considered to be New York’s “Jewish Harvard.” Kavanau’s contrarian attitude was already evident. Asked to explain logarithms on a crucial math test, he sketched out a cartoon of a dancing log.
Unsure at graduation what to do with his future, he settled on the practical idea of becoming a teacher in the New York City schools—until he discovered what it would take to obtain the credential. His fates tilted in a completely different direction when he learned about a master’s at Syracuse University that seemed a far easier course of study—in the relatively new medium of television. Once he graduated, he became an instructor at Ithaca College, wher
e he produced public service shows for one of the nation’s earliest cable television providers. When a local professor named Martin Abend agreed to appear on a panel discussion program there, the two men struck up what would turn out to be a lifelong friendship.
After producing documentaries and public affairs programs in Boston, Kavanau made his way back to the city he loved and where he belonged. As the producer of New York’s first ten p.m. newscast—for independent station WNEW Channel 5—he was well aware how challenging it would be to convince viewers to switch over from prime-time network entertainment. And yet, he also believed the degrading spectacle of the New York streets could be as exciting and outlandish as any drama—and certainly more relevant.
Each night, a menacing announcer opened the show in the same foreboding tone—“It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”—leaving even those who’d just tucked their kids in with a grave sense of unease. In the moments leading up to airtime, Kavanau would announce to his startled staff that he was tossing out the show’s rundown. He’d rush into the field with the night crew, scrounging around for the freshest morsel of news. Inevitably, they discovered something—a fire likely had just flickered to life or a dead body was sure to be lingering somewhere. After filming the scene, they’d spirit back to the station, rush the footage into the on-site lab for processing, and interrupt the newscast with a this-just-in breaking missive.
While WNEW was financially better off than most independents around the nation, it was still a scrappy operation compared to the local network owned-and-operated stations, propelled by buckets of money and four times the number of crews. Kavanau’s intrepid news teams (who proudly described themselves as “The Jew Crew,” “The Fascist Crew,” “The Hippie Crew”) scrambled each day from story to story, with help in the field from a motorcycle courier who’d meet them to replenish their film stock and other supplies, then ferry the film they’d shot back to headquarters. The urgency they felt as they navigated the streets, rancid with decay, was what he wished to convey to the audience at home. He reveled in conveying to New Yorkers images of their beloved city in all its raw ingloriousness, as if it were not just his job but his moral obligation.