Up All Night

by Lisa Napoli

  Never mind that the instructors teaching the newbies how to edit videotape hadn’t ever edited videotape themselves. The technology was still so new, few people had. Similarly, hardly anyone in the business knew a thing about the new creations of uplinking and flyaways and live shots, but those subjects were covered, too. The eager, attentive pupils together learned the ropes about rundowns and B-roll and dubbing and the difference between master control and B control, and the crucial role of a tape supervisor. Together, the veejays braved the stressful task of tape playback, learning to queue up four three-quarter-inch tape cassettes that teased the first four stories of each newscast—a bit like that episode of I Love Lucy at the chocolate factory where the conveyor belt speeds up and she can’t keep pace. Even more vexing was commercial playback, which involved unwieldy one-inch open-reel tape machines.

  As soon as someone got good enough on a particular piece of equipment, they’d become tribal elders, expected to pass down their wisdom to the latest crop of hires—because every week, even someone who’d been so sure they could hack the chaos and the pressure inevitably fled screaming from the premises, and a steady stream of new recruits would be necessary. Desperate for bodies, John Baker proposed recruiting from the unemployment line. Fortitude could not be taught, but television skills could.

  Everyone at any level of experience was handed a binder containing a fifty-one-page manual called Inside CNN that explained the ultimate, lofty hope: “Make our newscasts so good that people across the country will think of us when they think of television news.”

  It seemed an impossible dream.

  In addition to detailing human resources nuts and bolts about health insurance and stock options, not that most people would have extra cash for such frivolity, the guide explained the mysterious ins and outs of the technological heart of CNN, the revolutionary Basys Newsfury computer system specially developed for the network. In an age when computers were gigantic, room-sized beasts touched only by skilled experts, this user-friendly innovation was as revolutionary as the satellite and video porta-paks—but designed to be as simple to use as a typewriter. Into a desktop terminal, the wire machines would endlessly flow—no more changing paper or ribbons. Producers would lay out the elements of their show in digital rundowns created on this multifaceted system, which could time out the show factoring in the individual read rates of the anchors, eliminating the need for back-timing. Writers could immediately see their assignments and craft their scripts on a split-screen feature. In turn, the editor would copy edit and, with the press of a button, feed scripts into a digital teleprompter so the anchor could read unfettered by paper. Everyone could “top-line” messages to one another—an incredible innovation in communications, long before text messaging, that eliminated the hassle of calling on the phone or shouting across the newsroom. Hardly anyone of any experience level had ever touched a computer before, but this system, connected to a custom-designed microprocessor propelled by an Onyx C8000 with an incredible ten megabytes of memory, was, while revolutionary, perfectly user-friendly.

  There was only one problem: It didn’t work.

  That the essential information backbone of CNN was stalled when the troops moved into the old Progressive Club on May 1 wasn’t the only looming matter. Other key ingredients remained incomplete: Floors were still mud, and porta-potties stood in for the unfinished bathrooms. Nonetheless, rehearsals, inelegantly referred to as the “dry runs,” had to commence. As the crew practiced the theoretical they’d been tweaking for months now, jackhammers reverberated and carpet was unfurled. Every so often, everyone fell to the ground to help the workmen lay cable. Just as it had been on Courageous, the energizing anthem from Rocky was played in an attempt to pump up the crew, electrifying the converted country club.

  But that electric current of discovery that had propelled them for weeks was being replaced by pulsing currents of fear.

  Out of nowhere, from time to time, the Wizard himself would appear.

  “I don’t know a thing about journalism,” Ted Turner squawked in the face of this action he’d unleashed. “But I’m betting $100 million that you all do.”

  Some of them had thought they knew what they were doing. But with each passing hour of error-filled practice newscasts, it was hard to remain positive. Alec Nagle did his best to cheerlead a room full of glum personnel.

  “Are we gonna do this network or not, yes or no?” he asked them.

  “Yes!”

  “We’ve got a twenty-four-hour news network to run. Let’s kick ass, and screw everybody that can’t take a joke.”

  After a month of “CNN College,” veejays and other staff were finally able to move into the still-incomplete building and begin a grueling rehearsal schedule in the final weeks before launch. (Jeff Jeffares)

  A week elapsed, ten hours of rehearsals each day. Not one single, error-free hour had occurred. A gallows joke made the rounds: “What’s the difference between CNN and the Hindenburg? At least the Hindenburg got off the ground.” The act of throwing one’s hands up in the air in utter frustration became known as the “CNN Salute.”

  Fraught with exhaustion and fear, some of the troops became physically ill. Others were racked by intense nightmares, like producer Paul Amos, who woke up in a sweat, screaming, seeing the time clock clicking in his head, his show timing out short. In operations executive John Baker’s nightmare, an hourlong newscast would run out of news ten minutes in, and the anchor would say, “That’s all we have.” Alec Nagle’s nightmare: The anchor would keep reading the same story over and over again, and he couldn’t stop them.

  All the dazzled Reese would confess to being worried about was that this network he was creating would be so terrific, he’d be responsible for a new crop of television addicts: “I think many of our viewers will be people who don’t watch television now,” he said to a reporter. “I don’t know if making more people watch television—when they should, say, be reading books—is terribly good.”

  It was the panic of the most intense of this fiercely intense bunch, Mad Dog Kavanau, that registered code red. The dry runs had led him to a painful conclusion, intensified by the crippling inability of the News-fury to work consistently: There simply wasn’t enough news to fill each hour, nor was there enough new news, from one hour to the next, to update. The entire vision for CNN failed for him with this recognition. It had worked in theory, but the reality proved a disaster.

  Deflated, Kavanau made his way on foot back to Sleazy Jim’s and formulated a plan: When he woke up in the morning, he’d just disappear, run off to Hawaii. He packed his bags so it would be easy to escape and collapsed into the sorry excuse for a bed. That night his sleep was fitful, punctuated by feverish dreams, and when dawn arrived and the morning light streamed into his window, he found himself refreshed by a revelation.

  He dressed and rushed back over to Techwood, finding Burt Reinhardt and insisting he order relics of the past most of his team could navigate: good, old reliable typewriters, as well as reams of six-book carbonless script paper. Crew up a pool of typists, he commanded. The next day, a dozen administrative women showed up, out of thin air, ready to go. Producers would now be permitted to reuse copy stories from one hour to the next, despite his previous insistence that there should be no repetition. The retyping pool pecked away, freeing up time for writers to churn out fresh new scripts.

  Certain that he’d conquered the system’s kinks, Kavanau stood on a crate to address the other CNN originals who’d been toiling away in the service of this television news revolution.

  “I’ve been hearing that some of you have been saying among yourselves that this thing is not gonna work! That we’re not gonna get on the air! That we’re not gonna be a success!” He paused, himself a convert from doubt. He pointed a finger at the ceiling. “Well that may be true for everybody else, but not for you! I didn’t bring you here to fail! You will not fail! You will not fail because I will not permit you to fail! If any of you cannot work under t
hose terms, leave the room! Right now!”

  The startled eyes of the exhausted production team locked on his every move. Whether they believed him, or were too scared to get up, or just tired, or, perhaps, wary of his excitable nature and the pistol they knew he kept hidden on his shin, didn’t matter. If Kavanau said it would work, by god, then it would. It had to. They had invested everything in CNN. They all wanted nothing more themselves than for the first all-news channel to succeed.

  Everyone stayed put.

  1 Once they got on the air, Reese said, “The letters I got could best be described as mash notes; the letters with things men wanted to do with Kathleen were beyond the imagination.”

  2 After some on-air work at CNN, Cowgill moved to WLKY-TV in Louisville, where he has served as sports director since 1987.

  3 Towriss spent twenty-two years at CNN in a variety of roles and is now a communications consultant based in the D.C. metro area.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Until the End of the World

  By late in the day on June 1, a sprinkling of rain had come and gone, and in the hours just before CNN’s debut, the thermometer in midtown Atlanta sizzled at ninety-two degrees. The freshly mowed lawn scented the air, soft and sweet, and the fountain in front of the entrance to the former Progressive Club sparkled bright blue in the afternoon sun.

  Party tents striped yellow and white had been pitched to shelter a generous spread of beef tenderloin and Italian sausages and shrimp and, befitting any grand party, bars from which flowed beer and bourbon and wine and margaritas.

  At Kavanau’s suggestion, the old swimming pools on the grounds had been packed with dirt and converted into gardens beside which reporter John Holliman, previously the agricultural editor for the Associated Press, would fly in each week from Washington to deliver the farm report.1 Nearby, a more modern farm had sprouted—six massive white satellite dishes, dramatically tilted toward the heavens, the largest non-governmental array of its kind. The backbone of CNN’s very own invisible information superhighway would soon buzz with news. Ted and Reese had marked their territory.

  Few people, even those who worked in television, had seen satellite receive dishes before, much less so many in one place. This shot was taken from the window of Ted’s office on the second floor. (Jeff Jeffares)

  The rats were as much a thing of the past as the peeling paint. But a dead squirrel floating in the fountain out front was a talisman of the chaos still inside. The work was still nowhere near complete. The architect Bunky Helfrich was off with Ted in Newport, Rhode Island, for the preliminary trials of the America’s Cup. Thank god for the porta-potties, and the trees, because there still weren’t enough bathrooms. Glass was still missing from the frames in the windows out back. The turntable set rotated only when propelled by humans. The revolutionary computerized news system still had yet to consistently work.

  Still, the $10 million worth of switchers and edit bays and computer terminals inside this converted locker room gleamed to rival Star Trek’s starship Enterprise. The dozens of panicked people scurrying around this hyperspace needed the force of Star Wars’s Obi-Wan Kenobi to be with them. As the clock ticked closer to six, Kavanau huddled with the day’s crew and told them again not to worry. By now, he was more pragmatic about a possible failure. If it didn’t work out, he said, they’d all disperse to local stations around the country and give one another jobs.

  Ted had flown in that morning. If he hadn’t promised three years ago, after his triumphant, drunken victory, that he’d race again—if he didn’t have baked into him the unquenchable need to win—he’d have sat this one out. He simply hadn’t been able to devote the necessary time to practice—although his victory that past fall at Fastnet had earned him the title “Yachtsman of the Year” for an unprecedented fourth time. The thrill had quickly waned. A headline in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune captured his current obsession: “America, Not America’s Cup on Turner’s Mind.”

  Far weightier matters than twelve-meter boats and silver trophies now preoccupied the brain of the best yachtsman in the world. He believed World War III and a nuclear holocaust loomed. Humanity might soon be extinct, for the Russians possessed more tanks and greater strength, now that the United States had weakened immeasurably. Remember those Charles Atlas muscle-building courses in magazines, where the fabled bodybuilder taught the skinny guy to bulk up in the face of bullies? We needed to fortify, Ted believed, so nobody could kick sand on us.

  And what, in his estimation, was to blame for the dissolution of our collective well-being, our great nation’s standing in the world? The very invention that had empowered him and made him rich: television. Television, he’d decided, packed far more power than politics. That didn’t dampen his glee at the sight of acolytes around Newport sporting hopeful “Ted Turner for President” T-shirts. The thought of running still lingered, but at the very least, he wished to be the nation’s Jiminy Cricket—its conscience.

  Workmen put the finishing touches on the bleachers and a viewing stand. As the armed forces band enlisted for the day arrived to rehearse, Ted made a special request that reflected his angst. Could they play the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee”? This melancholy tune was said to be one of the songs musicians on board the Titanic used to calm the passengers as the legendary ship began to sink. That day’s band, standing tall and neatly attired in their crisp military best, assembled in front of the grand columns at the entrance of this Tara on Techwood and complied. At the boss’s instruction, a camera crew recorded the rendition to be stashed away on the HFR shelf—hold for release.2

  Ted relished the moment. Since he planned for CNN to continue broadcasting until the apocalypse, it would be some time before he’d hear this again.

  * * *

  The guests began to stream onto the front lawn of Tara on Techwood, commanded there by a simple ivory invitation and an intense curiosity. Microphone in hand, camera crew beside him, and a newly minted security badge affixed to his lapel, dutiful newsman Bill Tush ran around interviewing luminaries for a live, prelaunch special on WTBS, CNN: The Birth of a Network. As the clock struck six and CNN began, channel 17 would switch over to the all-important moneymaker, wrestling.

  The days when the hulking performers would prop cardboard in the windows of the station’s lobby to convert it into a dressing room were numbered. When the rest of the new building was finally complete, fans would line up there each weekend for the theatrics. The thuds of Abdullah the Butcher, Killer Khan, and Dusty Rhodes would startle the news crew on the floor below—a perfect reminder that it was channel 17 that had made this grand facility possible.

  In between asking the military bands to play “Nearer My God to Thee” and officially dedicating CNN, Ted basked in the glory as man of the hour at the gala launch party on the lawn. (Jeff Jeffares)

  From the bureaucratic badge to this stately columned building and the parade of newcomers who sniffed at Ted’s rerun station, June 1 was the consummate reminder that life would never be the same for anyone on its staff. The free-wheeling fun was history. As a nose-thumb to this formality, one employee taped a photo of Humphrey Bogart over his own on his company-issued ID.

  “It’s not every day of the week that a twenty-four-hour network is dedicated,” Tush said to the camera as he approached Ted’s longsuffering blond belle of a wife, Janie, neatly attired in a black dress and smiling cheerfully. Sensing that she needed something to distract her from her ever-absent husband, who’d recently been named one of the sexiest men of the year by Playgirl, Reese had gone so far as to offer her a job as one of the video journalists. (Immediately, he’d thought better of inviting the boss’s wife to work for him and was relieved she never responded.)

  This was, Janie said in her lilting southern drawl, all very exciting: “All these people working here together. We feel like this is Ted’s dream, something he’s looked forward to for so long. He says it’s one of the biggest things that ever happened to him in his entire life.”

  N
ow, roving reporter Tush happened upon another smiling blonde essential to the Turnerverse, introducing her to the camera as “probably the most proud mother in the world.” What kind of day was it for her?

  Florence Turner smiled broadly. “The most thrilling day of my life.” Unsure what to ask next of this vivacious lady, whose contribution to this monumental occasion was having given birth to the mastermind behind it, Tush posed a question he immediately realized was the kind of vapid softball for which he’d mock a local news reporter.

  “What is it like being Ted Turner’s mom?”

  The proud Florence didn’t find the query dumb at all. She beamed with pride.

  “It’s wonderful. I’m really speechless. I’m so thrilled,” she said, pausing to add a confidence. “The only thing I worry about is Ted’s undertakings are so great and I always worry about him.”

  “When he took over the billboard business, did you ever think he’d go this far?” Tush asked.

  “Never. This is past any dreams I could have had for Ted.”

  “Well, we wish you continued success being Ted’s mom,” Tush said, wincing again at his happy talk.

  Besides family, present that day, too, were media revolutionaries who shared Ted’s and Reese’s frustrations with the established order. Onetime trade reporter and D.C. denizen Brian Lamb had himself recognized the immense power of new technology to upend the “hammerlock” of control long wielded over communications by the networks and the phone company. Imagine, he had said, if when the printing press had been invented only three companies could use it. This was the world they had lived in up till cable had arrived.