Up All Night

by Lisa Napoli

Maverick Ted delighted in charges he was a rogue and a thief and a pirate for wishing to air the programs he’d been buying to the widest possible audience: “Who had the devious and cunning mind who figured out how to disrupt the world?3 Me me me me me me.” It wasn’t his fault that his great idea was crushing the establishment.

  While he gloated, though, he was deathly afraid. If the winds blew in a different direction and the mighty lobbyists working on behalf of establishment television and Hollywood prevailed on the FCC, in an instant, rules might be rewritten, and the right to transmit channel 17 around the nation might disappear.

  This harsh reality necessitated a brainstorm. Where should he set his sights next? What kind of channel could he create that was immune to the whims of regulation, one that would be wholly his own?

  He called to order a meeting of his top men. Gathered around the conference room table, they braced themselves for whatever he would hurl their way. Perhaps this was to be another dramatic reading of another story about Ted the Great. Since he’d won the America’s Cup, his already outsize ego had puffed to the size of Antarctica. Recently, he’d subjected the men to a word-for-word reading by regional sales manager John Withers of his thirteen-page Playboy interview. The journalist Peter Ross Range had spent months following Ted from his home to office to stadium, talking with him on boats and planes and in cars, yielding a wide-ranging interview that touched on love, sex, sports, competition, Russia, and Ted’s hobby of photographing nude women. Transcribed, the conversation totaled eight hundred pages. Range pointed out to readers what his sales team and anyone close to him already knew: Ted “the radio” never stopped talking, even while he was in the john.

  Range concluded that the mogul was a “blithe spirit,” a fanatically positive thinker who advocated “lots of sex” as a solution to the world’s problems—because, after all, “only horny people shoot people. I mean, you never feel aggressive just after you’ve gotten laid, right?”

  On this day, though, Ted was not engaging in self-congratulatory behavior, for once. He wished to discuss new channels they might create.

  HBO had staked its claim on a channel dedicated to newer films and entertainment.

  What about all-sports? Ted had hoped to parlay his ownership of teams into a regional cable sports network. But that would mean losing sports on channel 17, decimating their core business. Besides, rights issues for sports were a different sort of complicated and thorny than rights issues for entertainment.

  What about all-music TV? said one man, riffing on the success of the all-music weekend show, The Now Explosion. Boring, someone said. Who would watch music on television?

  After entertainment and sports, what else was left?

  Someone chimed in: All-news radio was the fastest-growing commercial radio format in the nation. Why not all-news TV?

  But, the men wondered, wasn’t that like the six-o’clock news over and over again? That would be really boring! Who would ever possibly watch three hours of news a night? Was there even enough news to fill twenty-four hours every day? Might they have to blow up old motels or something on slow news days?

  The all-news format did offer an advantage, though. There would be no copyright issues, no complex negotiations with the entrenched Hollywood establishment that had been trying to block channel 17 every step of the way. As difficult a proposition as it seemed, producing news suddenly sounded grand and important.

  Other rationales clicked into place: Half of the nation didn’t bother to read a newspaper anymore, opting to get whatever news they did from television. Network television news, by Ted’s estimation, had destroyed the faith of the citizenry. Part of the reason America had so many problems, he believed, was because his fellow Americans were so ill-informed. There was no better place to promote a variety of opinions than on almighty television. With a news channel, he could quite possibly help save the world.

  Running for president still seemed a bit far-fetched—and expensive. But this idea felt right. Suddenly, the man who for years had decreed news evil and boring and depressing had seen the news light—a “born-again journalist,” a friend described him. Wherever he went, whoever he spoke to, he glowed about what he planned to do next. The next great cable service, he had convinced himself, was news.

  * * *

  The call Reese had been hoping for his entire life came without warning in September 1978, and it was initiated by the last person he’d ever imagined. Over the past year, it seemed everyone in broadcasting had been flirting with an exploration of the new wild west, cable-satellite, hoping for a slice of the success HBO and channel 17 had discovered.

  As the only provider of news to independents, Reese himself had fielded inquiries from a variety of organizations attracted to the possibilities of an all-news format. Stations owned by the Post-Newsweek group had studied and tabled the idea as too risky. Tantalized by the unfurling ticker tape of news on the wire machine in his office, Jerry Levin over at HBO had commissioned Reese to produce a pilot for an all-news channel. To Levin’s lament, even after the pilot was completed, an executive at his parent company, Time, ultimately nixed the project.

  When the phone rang, Reese took the call out in the open space of the ITNA newsroom and then rushed to his office for privacy after he realized who was on the line. Ted Turner.

  Ted explained that he’d been asking around for the name of the best “guerilla fighter” out there, a man who understood how to work with a scrappy budget and help him launch his new idea. There were plenty of news executives from the networks, accustomed to fat budgets and generous expense accounts, guys who sent reporters out into the field on chartered Learjets with suitcases of cash, while filling only a half hour of airtime a day. Those guys wouldn’t cut it.

  That had led him to Reese.

  Could an all-news network be done? he asked the newsman.

  Yes, Reese responded.

  Would Reese be interested in doing it? “Of course,” he answered without hesitation. “I’ve been waiting for this for twenty years.” Later, he wondered if he should have played harder to get.

  Ted confessed that he knew “diddley-squat” about the news business. That didn’t bother Reese. He did. He had lived and breathed it for two decades now.

  A flash of concern tempered his excitement. Did this Ted Turner have a political agenda, like Joseph Coors? For years, he’d heard Ted’s homilies against the news. He was accustomed to dealing with unorthodox station owners through the ITNA—one, a former used car dealer, another whose family had been in the produce business, a third with ties to a gambling concern in Vegas. That Ted himself wasn’t a starched-collar traditional broadcaster wasn’t the problem. But he had met his second wife at a Republican party function and was an avowed patriot, nationalist, and conservative, railing against the networks for their family-unfriendly programs that he believed promoted violence and debauchery. Then, there were the remarks Ted had made about the agent Jerry Kapstein—as a Jew himself, Reese wondered if he should be concerned.

  Ted promised that promoting a political point of view was absolutely not a motivating factor. All those times he’d said, “No news is good news”? His aversion to news all these years, he claimed now, had really been about cost. Though Reese didn’t quite buy the back-pedaling, like any starry-eyed person in love with an idea, he was so tantalized by the possibilities that he focused only on the fact that his dream job had just arrived, tied up in a neat little bow. Other people may have been talking about all-news, but here was Ted Turner declaring his intent to invest in it—and he had the power, and the gumption, and, presumably, the money to make it happen.

  Look at how wrong he’d been a few years earlier, Reese told himself, when he’d dismissed Ted as an idiot for thinking anyone outside Atlanta would watch his dinky UHF rerun station. Ted was imbued with something most media executives in New York did not have: a sense of the world outside the island of Manhattan.

  Reese flew to Atlanta to continue the conversation. Ted pi
cked him up at the airport in his beat-up Toyota. They headed back to midtown, to the same ramshackle building where they’d met four years earlier. Though the station’s fortunes had continued to rise, the office seemed worse for the wear.

  Ted explained that this creation would be the first business he started that did not bear his name. He planned to call it the Cable News Network. How could the nation’s cable systems refuse to carry a channel with the word “cable” in the title? He’d been working hard these past years to make friends in the industry and wanted to make sure they all identified with the idea, to feel as if it belonged to them. He’d rise or fall on their decision to carry it.

  What was the minimum budget? Twenty million, said Reese, to get up and running, and $2 million a month after that. A bargain, considering that each network spent $100 million a year to provide a fraction of the coverage, a ridiculous sum given that their flagship newscasts were just a half hour.

  Reese was certain staffing would be no problem. Plenty of people who toiled in local television news would work cheap for the chance to do national news. Jobs at the networks were hard to come by.

  Which star, Ted wondered to his newly enlisted partner in crime, would they sign to make a splash?

  “Dan Rather,” Reese said cockily—optimistically. He was playing in the big time, now.

  “Who’s Dan Rather?” Ted responded. He knew Walter Cronkite largely as a hobbyist sailor and because Cronkite had profiled him on 60 Minutes after the America’s Cup win—but not because he watched him on television.

  “The CBS anchorman-in-waiting,” Reese explained, surprised that Ted honestly didn’t seem to know Rather’s name. He was one of the top stars in the business, and Reese hoped he just might be up for grabs. Recently, Rather’s income had plummeted after the cancellation of the gossipy interview show he helmed, Who’s Who.

  “How much would he cost?” Ted asked.

  “A million dollars a year,” Reese answered.

  “A million dollars a year just to have a guy read the news?” Ted asked.

  “A million dollars a year to get a guy away from CBS network,” Reese said.

  “Well”—Ted shrugged—“I just offered Pete Rose a million dollars to play baseball and he only works half a year.”

  No matter who they hired, Ted was firm that this Cable News Network had to be headquartered in Atlanta. Why did media people think New York City was the center of the universe? News happened all over! And great companies were headquartered all over, too, like Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, for instance, Coca-Cola in Atlanta, and General Motors in Detroit.

  There were upsides and downsides to building a home base outside the northeast, said Reese, who had proposed Arlington, Virginia, as a more palatable alternative to Atlanta. In both places, it would not be necessary to hire union labor—the unions being a costly element of television production. On the other hand, convincing the best talent in the business to live down south was not going to be easy. But with the budgetary concerns a factor, Atlanta it would have to be.

  Reese was firm with his own nonnegotiables: There could be no cumbersome film in his newsroom. State-of-the-art gear that recorded pictures and sound on videotape had begun to transform newsgathering, allowing stories to move more quickly to edit and air.

  “With film you needed a cameraman, a sound man, and a lighting man,” Reese explained. “With tape, all you needed was a cameraman and a tech who did the lighting. And you didn’t need the same skill level to operate a tape camera, so you could hire people at much lower pay. You saved more [in salaries] in one year than you spent on the camera.”

  He’d also need something that was only in the process of being invented: a computerized newsroom. At a trade show, he’d seen a demo of a system in development that promised to allow the wires to tick in silently—as opposed to the belching teletype machines that chomped through reams of paper. These terminals would also allow writers and producers to craft rundowns and scripts on one machine. Finally, to send and receive news feeds, seven satellite dishes would be necessary. Ted swiftly green-lit it all.

  With those loose plans, Ted made his way in December 1978 to the Western Cable Show in Anaheim, where he intended to drum up support among the nation’s five thousand cable operators. As prices and size continued to fall, more and more of them had begun buying and installing the satellite dishes necessary to pull down feeds.

  Standing before the power elite of the industry, Ted felt invincible as he described his idea for a new, revolutionary, twenty-four-hour news channel. Channel 17, along with HBO, were each now available in two million homes. They’d unleashed a frenzied rush of programmers eager to seize their momentum. In this industry, Ted was a hero.

  To get this Cable News Network off the ground, he now told them, he would need their buy-in, as he’d supported them these last years. If he could line up only half the nation’s fourteen million cable customers, CNN would be golden. A representative of Turner Broadcasting worked the room, handing out contracts, asking operators who were present to sign up on the spot. They hesitated. They refused.

  It wasn’t just that they didn’t believe in this far-fetched notion. It was difficult to imagine an audience for round-the-clock news—since news frequently ranked among viewers’ least favorite programming. Of equal concern was the purveyor of the idea. The only news Captain Outrageous had produced was, literally, a joke. How could anyone be sure that the man who collapsed drunk after winning a major sporting event, who had the temerity to believe he could, without a shred of baseball experience, manage his own baseball team, who made rude and crude remarks and deigned to talk about running for president, how could he launch a news network?

  The vice president of planning for the Washington Post, which had been nosing around the idea of an all-news service itself, summed up the skepticism: “The cable industry doubts that Ted Turner knows his ass from a hole in the ground about news.” The TV critic for the Charlotte Observer had long been appalled by Ted’s wanton disregard for public service, especially after he busted WRET for running news headlines recycled from Atlanta’s channel 17. He considered Ted’s foray into broadcast journalism like “Attila the Hun deciding he’s going to do a summer camp for the elderly.”

  Back at the Daily News building in New York, Reese learned the bad news. The plan had thudded. Under pressure to sign a contract with ITNA, he finally relented. He needed the medical insurance the company was offering. So much for his dream.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1979, Ted had been fighting with his Braves general manager, Bill Lucas, about what to do about third baseman Bob Horner, whose agent, Bucky Woy, drove Ted nuts. Free agency had made baseball a bear.

  Lucas was settling into his third season since Ted had elevated him as the first black man in the sport to serve in this prominent position. An easygoing former player who’d worked his way up in the front office, Lucas saw his success in the Turner empire helped by being unafraid to stand up to Ted.

  One day at home, Lucas suddenly grabbed his head and fell over. His wife had him rushed to the hospital. Days later, he was pronounced dead. He was just forty-three.

  The news of this untimely death of a beloved figure shocked and shattered the entire city, including and especially Ted. Lucas was only a few years older than him. “Seeing such a young, vibrant guy taken away,” he said, “made me stop and think about what a short time we all have on this planet.” This bolstered his already fierce determination to achieve something grand.

  Overcome with grief, Ted did what he did so well. First, he ranted and raved to reporters, blaming the sports agent Woy for killing his friend with stress, as if he’d pulled a trigger on a gun.4

  Then, he picked up the phone and called Reese in New York.

  “None of us are going to live forever,” he told him. “Let’s do this fucking thing.”

  Reese arrived in Atlanta hours after the funeral, at which Ted had eulogized Lucas as having been called back by God t
o the “big baseball league in the sky.”

  On that bittersweet day, the madman and the newsman convened at the ballpark.

  Reese asked who was going to run this Cable News Network.

  “You,” Ted told him. “It’ll be all yours.”

  That, Reese explained, meant he must have total control over format and the hiring of personnel. He also, he added, had to make enough money “so that when you fire me, I’ll never have to work again. Because we’re not going to get along.”

  “What’s your astrological sign?” Ted asked.

  “Scorpio,” Reese responded.

  “We’re not gonna have any trouble,” Ted, a Scorpio himself, said.

  CNN, they decided, would start in a year. Wait any longer, and someone else might beat them to it. They signed a letter of agreement.

  “This is gonna make me the most powerful man—” Ted said, before stopping himself. “This is going to make us the two most powerful men in the world.”

  The time was right for Reese to confess a possible wrinkle. That contract he’d signed meant he was obligated to his current job until November. Ted absolutely did not care or understand.

  “You’re gonna let those ITNA guys run your life? You’re afraid . . .”

  Reese’s board was firm: He couldn’t leave until he found a successor. The obvious choice was hanging out in plain sight in the ITNA newsroom: Ted Kavanau. But his reputation preceded him. The board nixed the idea. For the moment, Reese remained locked into his job.

  Ted didn’t give a damn. He expected Reese by his side at the upcoming cable convention in Las Vegas in a few weeks, where he intended to hold a news conference announcing to the industry, for a second time, the launch of the Cable News Network. This time around, he did not plan on asking the industry for their blessings. He would tell them his plans. It was, he felt, a worthy gamble. If he could just get CNN on the air, the concept would sell itself and the money would begin to flow.

  With the help of a talent scout, Reese had begun to enlist time-filling “columnists” against the possibility (probability?) that there wouldn’t always be enough news. Having taped essays on the shelf would be a balm for anxious producers. Among those hired were political commentators Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers, and astrologer Jeane Dixon, who’d predicted great success for CNN.5 Then came other specialty beats—the pet reporter, veterinarian Steve Kritsick; style reporter Elsa Klensch; and chief of the financial desk, veteran business reporter Myron Kandel. Reese intended to build out economic news in a way television had never covered it before. But CNN still needed to announce a full-time marquee staffer with serious journalistic chops.