He sighed slightly, and turned away, facing instead toward the small city of Bozeman. In one direction, the vast wilderness that he revived, rolling toward Yellowstone. And, in the distance, civilization. Out of sight, but present in his thoughts. An upwelling of big box stores, nondescript grids of bricks and mortar, a swooning reminder of what he had given up. And, at their juncture, at the intersection of encroaching humanity and adamant wilderness, stood a “media mogul” headed toward decline, but an environmentalist in his ascent.
CHAPTER TWO
Survival
“My dear son,
I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today . . . I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me. You go ahead and go with the world, and I’ll go it alone.”
—ED TURNER, IN A LETTER TO HIS SON, TED TURNER, SHORTLY BEFORE HE MADE HIM WITHDRAW FROM BROWN UNIVERSITY
“I don’t like to admit it, but I’m getting old . . . Though not ‘old’ in the way we remember old people being when we were young.”
The year is 2005. Ted Turner sits at a breakfast table in Patagonia, in the middle of one of the three ranches he owns in southern Argentina. I am across from him. Estancia Collon Cura was named after a river revered for its trout fishing. Outside the window, he watches a flock of ravenous parrots squabble in the fruit trees, boisterously consuming pears. The colorful birds are fueling up for an autumn journey northward into the tropical jungles of the Amazon.
He says he needs to get a few things off his chest. He’s been pondering his own mortality—the snatches of time he has left—and he starts in by speaking cathartically of a night when he was alone in Montana. “I thought about it. I had reached the loneliest point in my life and I wondered what I had to live for.”
I had been told that it was highly unlikely Turner would broach the subject and when he did I was startled and then surprised. He had given me an opening to go far deeper in our conversations than ever before. I took it.
He does not like to mention the word “suicide.” But in autumn 2001, Turner did not have a plan for probably the first time in his life. The twentieth century had come to a crescendo while he consented to the biggest blockbuster business deal ever hatched. The largest presiding shareholder, he gave his blessing to the megamerger between the Internet company AOL and Time Warner, the latter a parent to companies he founded and were synonymous with his name. Turner’s net worth had swelled from $2 billion to upwards of $11 billion.
One might assume, therefore, that he had reason to be running a fin de siècle victory lap, taking a bow as one of the richest men in America. Unfortunately, the high of the previous year had not lasted.
In the autumn of 2001, the stock price of AOL Time Warner tumbled, and Turner suffered one of the most precipitous declines of personal net worth in history, equating to losing $10 million a day, every day, for two years running. But the worst, he said, wasn’t losing a colossal amount of money. “I had money. A lot of money. I made it. I lost it,” he says wistfully. “But I can tell you, there’s more to life than having money. You can always make more. That part’s been relatively easy for me.”
On the night he considered killing himself, Turner wasn’t thinking about his financial decline. He was thinking about his father, Robert Edward Turner II, better known as Ed. A, who had committed suicide.
Their fractured relationship has been the topic of much speculation. One of Turner’s closest friends says, “If you want to unlock Ted Turner, get him to open up about his father . . . Ted had the kind of traumatic childhood that would destroy many of us.”
In 2001, Turner the son had already surpassed his father’s terminal age. And, as he does in autumn, he had repaired to the Flying D to fly fish, ride horses, and inspect his bison herd. But as opposed to other autumns on The D, he felt little pleasure in the trip.
It was no secret that during Turner’s career, he had found himself in deep mood troughs, swings in which he would retreat into himself and escape to his properties for long walks. Personal physicians attributed those low periods to stress overload, not, as some observers have speculated, to clinical depression. Despite what some unauthorized biographies about him have alleged, he does not take lithium and is not bipolar. He does see a therapist.
During the summer of 2001, the sleeping pills prescribed to help him wrestle with insomnia caused by stress and sleep apnea proved ineffective. And hovering over him, at night, was self-doubt, persuading him that, after decades of staying busy and not confronting his past, he was venturing close to understanding the feelings of imminent doom that had destroyed his father.
On September 11, 2001, he was in Atlanta when he received a telephone call informing him to turn on the television. On the only news channel he watched, CNN, he saw smoke rising from one of the World Trade Center buildings, then he watched, dumbstruck, as a plane flew into the second building. Not long thereafter, he watched both towers fall, killing more than twenty-six hundred people. He was left speechless and helpless and horrified. That quickly, surreal had become the new normal.
The AOL–Time Warner merger had been approved by the Federal Communications Commission on January 11, 2001. The value of Turner’s one hundred million shares in the new conglomerate had skyrocketed. By early September 2001, Turner had made huge commitments to charities, not the least of which was a $1 billion gift to the UN, honored through an annual $100 million in the sale of stock. He also had pledged a quarter of a billion in stock to slow nuclear proliferation while funding the Turner Foundation at $50 million annually. And he was in the midst of launching a new restaurant chain, Ted’s Montana Grill, that featured bison on the menu. And he had two million acres of land and hundreds of employees on his payroll to look after. Then the stock plunged.
The tanking of AOL Time Warner caused a panic, and the sadness he felt for the victims of 9/11 was a devastating blow. To confront his own gathering financial crisis, Turner and his advisors hastily drafted a contingency plan in the event that liquid assets had to be sold. No one outside his circle knew how dire it was.
Turner and his inner circle gathered in Montana weeks after 9/11. What some of his friends who were there with him remember is how unusually taciturn he became over dinner at the Flying D. They looked into his face for evidence of his usual feistiness to ease their own worries.
Turner had always been a rhetorical gunslinger known for showing confidence when the odds were stacked against him. He’s legendary for being a competitor who does not enjoy losing. He once jokingly opined from the swaggering perspective of middle age: “If I only had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”
That indomitable Turner was not present in the room. There were dark circles under his eyes and his skin was ashen. Turner says he was burned out, and all that he could focus on was the thought that he was a personal failure. He did not know if the collapse of AOL Time Warner would extend to his prized possessions, the $500 million worth of ranches.
His duress, amplified by 9/11, was making those at his side anxious about leaving him alone.
“Was I thinking about my dad that night? Sure I was. I think about him every single day. What son doesn’t think about his father?”
Yet why did his domineering patriarch, the man he revered, forsake him twice? Few archetypal relationships are more potent than father and impressionable son. In some families, rules of behavior are handed down to men as dictations from one generation to the next. The Turner clan had its rules. Ted was Ed’s only son. And before the boy had even reached kindergarten, he had a lesson imparted to him.
At age four in 1943, Turner commenced a long, protracted exile from normal family life. His father entered military service just after World War II broke out. He sent word that he wanted family members
to join him on the base where he was stationed, except for Ted.
Turner remembers the morning he was sent away to what would become a succession of boarding schools. His dad informed him that showing fear or, worse, relying upon other people for emotional comfort, were flaws that must not infect the character of a self-made man. Ed Turner told his adoring son that he needed to wipe away tears and buck up if he ever expected to get ahead in life. Turner tried to cling to the legs of his mother, Florence, who could not look him in the eye. He looked up and pleaded for an explanation. She nudged him away. The boy would hypothesize for many decades afterward that he had done something wrong, something he couldn’t remember, something that maybe he needed to apologize for, to warrant banishment.
At the boarding school dormitory, he had nightmares about being abandoned. His room was made of white cinderblocks, devoid of color. A chain-link fence wrapped the premises of the school like a cordon. Turner remembers an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia and a need to flee. His earliest memory is of a kindly marm who occasionally would respond to his nocturnal whimpering, though most of the time no one answered his panicked desire for companionship.
Even today, he’s nauseated by the smell of oatmeal, the only food that was served for breakfast. And he still has two primal fears that persist from his early childhood: being left alone and a disdain for fences. “I woke up every morning hoping that my mother would show up and rescue me, take me home,” he said. “But she never arrived.”
Years later, after Turner’s father had taken his own life, his mother told an interviewer something that she had never expressed openly to her son. She said she had been intimidated by and stood powerless before Turner’s father. She was ashamed for not marshaling the courage to intervene on the boy’s behalf when Ed Turner insisted that Ted be enrolled in boarding and military schools “to toughen him up.”
“I cried. It did no good,” Florence said. “Ed told me he had the purse strings. I had to do what he said. Ed always insisted on sending Ted away to school because he was jealous of my love for the boy.”
When, much later in his life, Turner learned of what his mother had said, he sobbed, not out of sorrow but relief. It wasn’t anything he did, after all, he realized. It was about them. But it still didn’t fill up the hole of insecurity. He says, “I don’t think that with age you ever outgrow those feelings that go back to your childhood.”
During the Roaring Twenties, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
Hard work and luck had enabled him to assemble an incredible portfolio of land, Turner says, but he’s never claimed that material wealth immunizes or insulates a person from suffering. Yes, there’s irony in the Fitzgerald quote and Turner would seem to contradict it. Despite decades of soaring forward at warp speed and never allowing himself to slow down, his greatest epiphany is this: “No matter what you do, you cannot outrun your past, or forget the effect it has on you, nor should you because, for better or worse, it is who you are.”
Of all expressions of human emotion, the one Turner regards as most pathetic is self-pity. It was Ed Turner, in fact, who first taught him that feeling sorry for oneself is a cardinal sin. But that day in September saw a convergence of calamities that made self-pity almost impossible to avoid.
In addition to his financial dissolution, his ten-year marriage to Jane Fonda had formally ended in the spring of 2001, following a separation that started on January 1, 2000. After the divorce became final, Turner lay on the floor of their bedroom, crawled into the fetal position, and cried.
Turner’s friends did not wish to offend him by voicing a suspicion about his emotional fragility. His associates were not the only ones who worried about him. His youngest son, Beau, the child with whom he has the strongest rapport, was bothered by his father’s melancholy. Beau pulled him aside.
“I told him, ‘Dad, don’t be like your dad. Don’t take your own life.’ He smiled at me and said, ‘You don’t have to worry about me doing something that extreme, son,’” Beau says. Of course, Ed Turner had said the same thing to Ted.
Beau Turner wasn’t comforted. He watched his father in subsequent weeks withdraw steadily into himself. On that night in autumn 2001, Turner excused himself early from the long rectangular supper table just as the sun was dipping behind the mountains. He bid his friends good evening and disappeared in his bedroom.
Hours later, he was awake and alone. He had not brought along one of his female friends on this trip to Montana. He had become the owner of more private property than any individual citizen in America, but he was isolated. He had suicide on the mind—his father’s and the prospect of his own. The easiest means would be a gun—a hunting rifle or a .12-gauge; it would fit with Turner’s identification as a man’s man. If he had an intricate plan, he doesn’t share it now as he thinks about the intense feelings he had that night.
Rubbing his eyes, he swung open a bedroom door to stand on the outside deck. Black silhouettes of the Spanish Peaks reminded him how insignificant he was. Turner shivered in the cold air.
He began practicing an old ritual from his sailing days on the open ocean. He looked into the sky and started connecting the dots of stars—a game taught to him when he was a Boy Scout.
Ed Turner had stoically drilled into his son a mantra that only fools allow themselves to be afraid. Sixty years after the advice was imparted, the son felt petrified.
In the immediate foreground, there was a pond that he had designed from scratch to share with Fonda as a wedding gift. Fonda had ventured nearest to the point of understanding and forgiving his complicated personality, he says. From the picture window designed for grand views of the property to the fieldstone in the fireplace hearth she had chosen, down to the trees planted in the yard that formed a sheltering grove where Turner’s visiting grandchildren climbed and played, he was surrounded by reminders of their life together. The marriage had become strained, and ended, by his own admission, without him putting up a heroic fight to save it.
All his life he had difficulty in totally embracing intimate relationships with women, beginning with his mother and including his daughters and wives. He had heard the observations made of what a contradiction it was, that a man who had helped revolutionize modern mass media could flounder at bonding with those from whom he seeks the tightest connections.
During the summer of 2001, Turner’s young granddaughter, the child of his daughter, Jennie Turner Garlington, and son-in-law, Peak, died. After he attended the funeral in Kentucky, he reflected on the girl’s grief-stricken parents. He wanted his daughter to know that he could understand her hurt. As a teenage boy, his kid sister, Mary Jane, had died after a drawn-out illness. On his rare visits home from boarding school, Turner says, she had beamed in his presence. As a big brother, he was protective of her, and she sought out his companionship, ruing that their father had sent him away to military schools. At night during those interludes at his parents’ house, he would listen to Mary Jane shriek from pain associated with advanced stage terminal lupus. When it became unbearable, he says, she lost her will to survive. She pleaded from her room, behind the walls, believing no one else could hear. “She said, ‘Please, make the pain go away. Please, God, let me die.’”
If he could have, he says in reflection, he would have switched places with Mary Jane and allowed her to have his life. When Turner tried to seek consoling from his parents, he was told to pray.
Being a Christian, he asked God to stop his sister’s suffering. But three more years passed before Mary Jane succumbed. His parents, after her death, pulled further away from each other until they divorced. Ed Turner had always had several girlfriends and made no attempt to hide them. Adrift, Turner lost confidence in the ability of organized religion to offer an explanation or a purpose for his familial disintegration.
God, he figured, shou
ld not be elusive to the people who need him most—especially those in the world who most deserve human compassion.
As Turner assessed his mistakes in 2001, he realized that his last refuge—work, where he could always escape as a workaholic and find a mission—had also vanished. September 11 had given him a stinging reminder that he could not go back to his old professional origin ever again. His companies had given him a sense of purpose and a means to heal his wounded self-esteem after his father died. But just as abruptly as Ed Turner departed leaving him cold, he had a similar feeling being stripped of control over the Turner Broadcasting System. He never imagined it could happen.
From his penthouse suite atop the CNN Building in Atlanta, Turner followed a routine. Rise well before 6:00, duck down to the street for a brisk stroll around Centennial Park with his Labrador, Blackie. Eat a light breakfast set out by a maid. He’d peruse the morning papers—the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the hometown Atlanta Journal-Constitution, though mostly his attention would be pegged to CNN and Headline News. Turner doesn’t own a computer, never has; he doesn’t know how to log on. He doesn’t carry a cell phone, or any other kind of electronic gadget, save the clicker lock for his hybrid vehicle. For years, he’d walk down the stairs from his apartment to the nerve center of TBS and excitedly he’d visit with the editors and newsreaders congealing the line-up for its best-known asset, CNN. Famously, he had barred the word “foreign” from the newsroom lexicon and ordered that everyone use “international” instead. He found “foreign” to be derogatory.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 8