When I arrived, Turner’s longtime aide-de-camp, a friendly and fit-looking woman named Karen Averitt, answered the door. Averitt, a yoga instructor and gourmet chef, is someone I’ve come to know fairly well over the years. She plays a role in Turner’s life that cannot be exaggerated. Along with the invaluable Debbie Masterson, Turner’s executive assistant in Atlanta who succeeded Dee Woods, these three women, over a span of thirty years, have enabled Turner to be Ted Turner.
Besides managing his schedule in Montana, Averitt coordinates his outdoor activities, choreographs the arrivals and departures of a constant parade of guests, and, on top of it all, delivers savory sustenance for the events that form the highlights of every Turner day—lunches and dinners with friends. But more than that, Averitt and Masterson (and Woods before her) provide emotional coddling and support and stability for Turner, which are vital to his well-being. (Averitt’s husband, Jim Averitt, is a nationally known musician and songwriter who, in Montana, helps make sure that the main house is shipshape and handles all of Turner’s sizeable travel logistics on the ground.)
I had driven though a spring snowstorm and was running late, waylaid by a bull bison standing in the middle of the dirt road leading to the Turner-Fonda place. Miller had earlier warned me that tardiness could upset Turner and cause him to cancel the interview.
Despite the gossip in southwest Montana, Turner and Fonda had not erected a southern-style mansion equipped with a vanity pool in the backyard. Turner had, in fact, custom engineered a pond out back, which he presented to Fonda as a wedding present. He wanted it to serve as a sanctuary for marsh birds and a waterhole to attract wildlife they could watch from the porch. He worked with engineers so that its surface would perfectly reflect the summits of the Spanish Peaks mountains.
Their home—in contrast to the predominant style of Great Lodge trophy megamansions that have inundated Montana—was surprisingly cozy at 7,288 square feet. Built into the side of a slope, the discreet, unpretentious home site did not lord over its setting. “Before I selected this location, I considered more than half a dozen others and walked them,” Turner would explain later. “I wanted the home to sit in deference to the natural beauty of the ranch, not for it to be a monument to me.”
Past the doorway splayed across a wooden floor in the living room was a huge tanned bison rug. It was positioned in front of a fireplace column forged of rough native stone. The hearth crackled with flame. On the wall nearby was a stuffed moose head and next to it a massive, original painting by Thomas Moran. Down the hall were aquatints by Karl Bodmer and some 150-year-old high plains scenes by George Catlin.
Over by the south-facing windows, in front of sliding glass doors, a spotting scope was mounted on a tripod for surveying the countryside. Under a glass case nearby were arrowheads, pieces of wildlife bone, and skulls Turner and Fonda had found during hikes.
Meanwhile, across a ceiling beam hovered stuffed animal heads—a bighorn sheep, mountain goat, elk, mule deer, and flying mounts of pheasant and duck—all hunted by the sportsman and his wife. In remembrance next to those trophies was the cougar that had actually been part of Turner’s menagerie at a plantation in South Carolina. (It was one of the cougars he attempted to release at Avalon Plantation.) After the cat succumbed to old age, it was preserved by a taxidermist. For Turner it’s a reminder of what he’s trying to achieve.
In the twenty years that have passed, some of those animals have been removed, symbolizing perhaps the profound, massive leap in thinking that has transformed Turner. Speaking to the couple’s insatiable appetite for learning about the natural world, his bookshelves were lined with natural history classics, field guides, and videos of nature documentaries Turner financed for broadcast on TBS and CNN. Finally, on a coffee table, sat rows of photographs, Turner with family members and influential friends whom any student of world events at the time would instantly recognize: former US president Jimmy Carter and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, baseball legend Henry Aaron, and others.
In the adjoining dining room with a long rustic banquet table in the middle, chandeliers made of wapiti tines, not crystal, hung from the ceiling, and everywhere windows offered a panoramic view.
Living up to his billing, Turner strolled into the room with frenetic energy. He had guests visiting that he planned to take downhill skiing, then possibly a Turner-led hike into the outback or horseback riding in a lower pasture. They would perhaps finish off the day with a wade in a trout stream.
It was a big interview for me. This was Ted Turner. A larger than life figure. He wore jeans, slippers, and a blue Oxford button-down shirt, he said simply, “Hi” with a loud throaty drawl, then reflexively extended a hand. “My name’s Ted. What’s yours?”
His signature mustache, inspired by actor Clark Gable, star of his favorite movie of all time, Gone with the Wind, balanced over his upper lip. His hair still had brown flashes. He looked me over, sizing me up. Although the day was still young in the interior of the outback, Turner was roaring ahead. You could describe his body language as swaggering. At sunrise without hat or gloves, he ventured into the storm on a brisk walk, part of his routine, ready for a sixteen-hour day mixing business, outdoor recreation, and entertaining. There was no delineation between career and avocation, fun and the office. Boundaries were abstractions. He fit the mold of a workaholic, and he was paying whatever price was necessary.
Another thing: Turner has always been a creature of habit. “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise,” is a rhyme that defined his work ethic, a mantra taught to him by his father. Confirming his insistence on familiarity, at every one of his residences the same items of rustic wardrobe can be found in the closet. He sees virtue in packing light. Behind it all is a fear of being stranded too long in one place. This was the man who came charging into the living room.
“You can ask me anything you want and we’ll see if I want to answer it. You got twenty minutes,” he said. “So shooot.”
Twenty minutes? I had three pages of questions that I had assembled with editors on the other side of the country. I had been told I would have a full hour with Turner.
Fazed, I rifled through pre-prepared questions, scrambling to pare them down.
Five seconds elapsed.
Turner does not like lulls. Two additional seconds expired.
He loudly cleared his throat. ”Okay, you got anything for me?”
Fumbling, I dropped my notepad.
Turner’s forehead wrinkled, and he sighed.
Ten seconds had passed. Eleven. Twelve.
Turner now was clearly agitated. He cast a lion’s glare. One fourth of a minute—fifteen seconds of his time—had expired.
The phone began ringing in the other room. No one was picking it up.
“Karen, could you get that?” Turner called. “It’s probably Atlanta.”
Averitt was temporarily beyond earshot.
“Karen?” he inquired again. No response. “Kay-ren?!” he repeated. Still nothing.
“KAR-EN!!” he shouted.
Silence.
Averitt, calmly, suddenly appeared. “Yes, Ted?”
“Would you get that?”
“Yes.”
“It’s probably Atlanta,” he said to himself.
Turner listened to Averitt informing the caller that he was in the middle of an interview and would have to call back.
Turner looked at me again. “Come on,” he said. “What do you have for me? I don’t have all day.”
With his notorious mercurial temperament, he was primed for a little rhetorical jousting. He had perfected techniques for deliberately putting journalists on edge. If he believed an interview was not going the way he wanted, he would make wisecracks or say something provocative to watch the journalis
t squirm. Or he might just walk out of the interview. I once saw him respond to a question from another journalist about his wife, Jane Fonda: What did he think about some people calling her a traitor for going to North Vietnam decades earlier? “You know what,” he’d said then. “That’s a dumb-ass question. I’m not going to dignify it with an answer. I love my wife. You can quote me on that. Too bad for you, you are done. That’s my answer. Anybody else got something smarter to ask?”
In Turner’s living room, I meekly floated my first question. An easy one, it angled before him like a clay pigeon at the skeet range. “Mr. Turner. You’ve removed all of the cattle from your ranch, taken down fences, shipped in truckloads of buffalo. You’ve ruffled the feathers of your neighbors by saying these animals—buffalo—are better for the land than beef cows. You’ve said they’re more hygienic and cause less of an environmental impact. What are you hoping to accomplish?”
In control of the clock, Turner created his own pause. A squint crossed his face. He was aware that he was inflicting maximum discomfort.
His head started to move. He nodded. “Well, for starters,” he began. “Call me Ted. Mr. Turner was my father. Another thing. God knows I don’t like having to correct reporters. Being as smart and full of knowledge as y’all are. I know that most people call the animals ‘buffalo’ but the official scientific name, in case you didn’t know it, is bison. I like to be accurate, don’t you?”
He walked over to the picture window and bent to peer through the spotting scope. A half hour earlier, the Spanish Peaks had been cloaked behind a curtain of clouds. They now rose clear. Turner was proud of the scene; he owned it, after all.
The vision of what he explained gave him obvious internal joy, for he seemed to lighten up within and started, overtly, to relax. The intensity of his voice and demeanor turned noticeably softer.
Motioning toward his bison herd miles in the distance, which then numbered around twelve hundred, he said it wouldn’t be long before the first crop of new calves arrived. They were out there surviving without hay brought in to artificially feed them, and they didn’t even blink when a coyote passed by.
“Have you ever eaten bison?” he asked. “Pretty tasty. You ought to try it some time.”
Drawing his thoughts back into the room, he gestured toward the Moran, Bodmer, and Catlin paintings. They had been rendered in the throes of the Wild West’s last gasp. “Someday, I want my ranch to look something like those.”
As the years would reveal, it wasn’t physical exactness he was referring to, but the mood of the paintings. During his teenage years, Turner had been an amateur artist. He was a romantic, and visually oriented. He said he had compiled a list in his mind of the different wildlife species he’d already seen on the Flying D, and he named many of them—elk, moose, black bears, pronghorn, two kinds of deer, bald and golden eagles, osprey, coyotes. And added that he would eventually like to harbor grizzly bears and a pack of wolves. The chances of that happening seemed laughably remote.
He lamented how the American frontier had been transformed and tamed in less than 150 years. He walked to a table and held up a bison skull, perhaps a few centuries old, that he had found in the mud. He started to riff about the first three bison he ever owned. He grew animated, his posture looser. He espoused the time-tested virtues of bison, that they were hardier and better adapted to handle the harsh winters and hot summers on the prairie. They have less fat and lower cholesterol than most breeds of beef. They are delicious to eat and tender. Bison are better able to ward off predators. “And they are native to North America,” he added, “which means they evolved in landscapes like this.”
He didn’t know it, but he was roughly a decade away from launching a restaurant chain bearing his name, and it would serve bison from his ranches, the first attempt to fully vertically integrate the flow of a native animal from its original habitat to the human plate.
Turner delivered on his promise for a twenty-minute interview, then said, “I’ve got a few more minutes, what do you say?”
That chat was the genesis of this book. I would come to write five more stories over the years, and with each one Turner would become more trusting, open up a bit more. We never talked about those topics that occupied the tabloids. His relationship with Jane wasn’t of much interest to me. And while new biographies about Turner “the media mogul” came and went, nothing was being penned about those endeavors that were consuming far more of his time and resources. What about Ted the environmentalist?
Finally, after years of brushing off overtures from other writers, he consented to the idea of this book, though it took some time before he allowed me to probe his relationship with his father—a topic that those around Turner had warned me to avoid. In fact, that complicated, traumatic chapter could be considered both the lock and key in explaining why Turner was shifting his priorities away from media, even prior to the debacle at AOL Time Warner.
Almost twenty years after that hour-long visit in his living room, Turner’s private property holdings in the United States have grown ten times in volume, hovering near two million acres, including three estancias in Argentina.
Turner is not the same person he was then, nor are his lands in the same condition as he found them. And whenever he’s in the West, his friends say, he’s also not the same person as he is in Atlanta.
“Instead of having his foot pressing the gas pedal to the floor and racing 160 miles per hour all the time as he did during the early 1990s, Ted is now going half that fast, which is still way over the speed limit for most human beings,” says Turner’s longtime friend, financial advisor, and confidant Taylor Glover. “Ted has switched into a different gear, down a different road.”
During his halcyon days, Turner took hold of media assets and added value to them, using dynamic tension and an underdog’s gatecrasher mentality as a motivating force. There was always an adversary to confront, always a competition going on within himself and against other entities, Glover says. In sailing, it was against other boats and crews. In television, the other networks. He once challenged his media rival Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. to enter the boxing ring to scrap on TV.
“He doesn’t see the world that way anymore,” Glover says. “He is much more self-reflective and focused on trying to bring people together. He’s thinking hard about how he can contribute to resolving human challenges that involve issues far bigger than himself. These passions were always the most important things, but he didn’t have the time to act on them.”
When Turner reached the half-century mark in 1988, he owned CNN and TBS, professional baseball and basketball teams, the MGM film library, a handful of properties in the Southeast, and an island. Nevertheless, he felt hemmed in. In his travels between Atlanta and Los Angeles, the inner West was regarded as a “fly-over” region. That perspective changed in 1987. He bought his first ranch, the Bar None, at Toston, near the birthplace of the Missouri River in Montana. At the recommendation of his son, Beau, he had started fly fishing as a way to relax. With a stream running through it, Bar None gave him a great stretch of casting water.
Turner’s arrival in Montana coincided with a cultural shift occurring in Big Sky Country. Robert Redford was about to make his movie adaptation of Norman Maclean’s novella, A River Runs Through It, transforming fly fishing into a national sensation. The film also accelerated a phenomenon that was quietly under way, the changeover of historic working cattle ranches into recreational investment holdings for millionaires and billionaires.
The Bar None whetted Turner’s appetite for more land in Montana. He had heard stories of the Flying D from Rob Arnaud, who was working for him as caretaker at the Bar None. A fourth-generation Montanan, Arnaud was also an outfitter conducting commercial hunts on the public land next to the Flying D, and was familiar with its size and beauty.
A handsome, broad-shouldered spread, the Flying D rivals the K
ing Ranch of Texas in mystique. It covers 170 square miles and straddles two counties, girded on one side by the Gallatin River and on the other by the Madison River, both famous blue-ribbon trout meccas. Despite being stocked heavily with cattle and conducting an intensive agricultural operation, the ranch was rumored to have sketchy profit margins. Turner asked the real estate brokers who had found him the Bar None, Joel Leadbetter and Jim Taylor of Hall and Hall, to determine if the Flying D might be available for purchase.
The owners, the Shelton family of Texas, granted a one-person exclusive listing for Leadbetter and Taylor to show Turner the ranch, even though it was “not for sale.” However, they indicated a price for the ranch plus all cattle and machinery, a sum that seemed outrageous: twenty-two million dollars. Perhaps they never believed another rancher able to afford it would come forward. They were both right, and much to their dismay, wrong.
Turner was not another would-be rancher. Upon getting the opportunity, he drove through the “D” once, and was instantly smitten. He told Leadbetter, Taylor, and his attorney to do “whatever it took” to close the deal. There would be no dithering around. He correctly ascertained that the Flying D represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
After intense negotiations over contract details, not the least of which was the value of cattle and machinery, and overcoming sellers’ remorse that constantly threatened to torpedo the purchase, the deal was closed. Turner paid $21 million cash and acquired all 107,000 acres, plus the cattle and machinery to operate a legendary ranch. The acquisition made headlines across the West and caused a ruckus. People in Montana only knew Turner for his “Captain Outrageous” reputation in the media. A pervasive fear, for some, was that he would turn the ranch into a massive real estate play, dividing it up and selling the pieces.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 4