Turner had earned stature in the news business the hard way. He already had been proclaimed “the newsman of the future,” had been Time magazine’s “Man of the Year,” had been given an award named in honor of Edward R. Murrow, and commanded the respect of, among others, CBS News veterans Walter Cronkite and Charlie Rose and his close friend at NBC, Tom Brokaw.
And on the morning of 9/11, within minutes of CNN breaking in with views of a burning World Trade Center, Turner hustled downstairs from his apartment to be part of the action. He had instincts as to how to cover the biggest breaking news story since Pearl Harbor. He suggested that Headline News keep its cameras trained on the trade center’s twin towers, and his shrewd advice was heeded. For a moment, Turner said it seemed like the old days.
But he felt a downcast vibe, he says, and it emanated from the attitude of his former subordinates. After the AOL Time Warner deal happened, Turner’s direct influence over CNN had shifted in a reorganization of job titles that he didn’t expect. No one had to tell him that the heads of the new company, Gerald Levin and Steve Case, had rendered him persona non grata. It was written in the body language of veteran reporters he had had a hand in hiring. “Getting the cold shoulder hurt,” he says.
In 1995, the collection of cable channels, movie studios, entertainment content, and sports teams Turner had assiduously assembled under Turner Broadcasting System was consolidated as part of a strategic merger with media company Time Warner. The creation of Time Warner Turner proved fruitful for his brands and for shareholders, of which Turner was the largest.
Five years later, Time Warner Turner was targeted and then subsumed. The $147 billion reverse-leverage takeover by AOL became the biggest deal of its kind. Turner’s agreement was critical. On the advice of Gerald Levin, a trusted friend and Time Warner Turner colleague, Turner consented, albeit with suspicions.
Levin had risen to prominence most notably for his leadership at HBO and in putting the merger with Time Warner together. “We’ve known each other a long time, Ted,” Turner says Levin told him. “You got to trust me.”
Levin had publicly referred to Turner as “one of his best friends” and Turner, who does not take such compliments lightly, returned it in manifold ways. The AOL Time Warner merger resulted in Turner being given the title of executive vice president by Levin and Case, but with it came no power or responsibility, Turner says.
As part of his cajoling, Turner says Levin had promised that his valuable insight, experience, and leadership charisma would be called upon, after reorganization, to bring news and entertainment into a bold new era. Turner admits that the wooing worked. Sitting alone in Montana in autumn 2001, he was ashamed that he’d allowed himself to be hoodwinked. He could only imagine the berating disapproval it would have attracted from his father. “They paid me a $1 million salary basically to do nothing,” Turner says. “For that amount of money, I think they believed that, I would be grateful and attend board meetings and politely keep my mouth shut—and not ask questions. But I’ve never been a lapdog to anyone.”
In fact, Turner was insulted by the callousness of their attempt to buy him off. Behind the scenes, he heard that some executives of the new company fed the perception that he was a relic, too controversial of a figure because he refused to speak in choreographed sound bites. He always said what was on his mind.
When Turner sat in board meetings, he did keep quiet—in the beginning. But he began to become increasingly bothered by what he was hearing. Even as AOL Time Warner’s stock price plummeted, he incredulously listened as the executive team spoke of bonuses and perks.
“When revenue targets weren’t being met, they were talking raises even as the so-called peons of the company were being fired,” Turner says. Some of the companies in Atlanta that he had bootstrapped into profitability and respect were having their staff rolls gutted. Turner found the attitude of his peers, seemingly focused on personal enrichment and not the values of running quality companies, to be surreal. At one point, he piped in: “So, let’s get this straight, while we’re laying off $30,000-a-year employees in Atlanta, we have million-dollar oil paintings hanging on the walls of our offices in New York?”
Eventually, the paintings were taken down and sold, but his dissent didn’t sit well. His colleagues wanted to hear nothing of his criticism. But Turner had been through a convergence before. This was a man, after all, who, when Turner merged TBS with Time Warner in 1995, had allowed his own son, Teddy, to lose his job as a cost-saving measure. He did it to demonstrate fairness.
Turner sensed trouble was brewing for a long while. The suspicion was confirmed by his dear friend, the cable TV magnate and fellow major shareholder in Time Warner Turner, John Malone. Malone told me he had warned Turner to be wary.
“I told Ted that if he wasn’t careful he was gonna get screwed,” Malone says. “The financial parts of a deal are one thing. Machinations that steal your identity are another.”
Turner had become a titan without any say in his eponymous company.
That night in Montana, Turner says he felt like a fool. “How could I have been so stupid. Jerry [Levin] said that I should trust him, and I did. How could I put any faith in a friendship when he never even had me over for dinner the whole time I had known him?”
This slight proved only to be the tip of the iceberg. For Turner, it would become a reminder of how cutthroat a few of his associates were, and how Machiavellian those on Wall Street orchestrating megamergers had become.
On paper, the merger made Turner an astoundingly wealthy man. His worth, in the first few months of the deal, elevated him to twenty-fifth richest in the world. What he didn’t have, however, was a decision-making role at the top of the new company. Levin told him he needed to be patient, to focus on the stock value as a monster consolation prize.
If Turner couldn’t have his companies, he rationalized, he could at least adhere to the admonishment he made in 1997 when he gave $1 billion to the United Nations, and challenged fellow billionaires to do more for society.
Counting on the value of his AOL Time Warner shares holding up, he summoned the heads of his major foundations and started crafting an action plan to dispense the windfall. “I knew the impact that $1 billion could have in aiding the mission of the UN. I had started thinking about what you could do with $4 billion or $6 billion or $8 billion. You could literally change the world and fix some real problems. I figured that I’d kick in my share and then lean on my wealthy friends. We wouldn’t have to wait for governments to take action. We could show that the private sector is capable of doing things faster, better, cheaper.”
Among Turner’s priorities, adopted over two decades of involvement with global media and a number of international organizations, including the United Nations, and friendships with people ranging from Jimmy Carter to Mikhail Gorbachev: getting malaria nets into the homes of every family in Africa, assisting Rotary Club International in its noble attempt to eradicate polio from the world, and working with governments to reduce nuclear dangers around the world. On the environmental front, he would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into getting imperiled species out of biological triage, including the critically endangered California condor that he hoped to reintroduce to a ranch he owned in the desert Southwest.
He also wanted to help launch clean water projects, eradicate poverty by supporting micro-businesses in the developing world, and support women’s rights. Out West, he was growing the largest bison herd in existence, and wanted to show how the animals could be used to restore the environment and help people eat healthier. There was talk that Nelson Mandela had him in mind for a special assignment to try and bring reconciliation of the two Koreas.
Yet always in the back of Turner’s mind, there was the possibility of making another attempt to buy one of the big three American television networks that had evaded him. Were he ever to prevail with that dream,
he had aspirations of expanding the influence of television to dimensions that surpassed CNN. As he did when assembling an ace pitching rotation for the Atlanta Braves, Turner would have marshaled the resources to recruit the best talent money could buy.
Imagine, he mused, if he could bring the following talent pool to one channel: Cronkite, Rose and Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Bill Moyers, Jim Lehrer, Diane Sawyer, Judy Woodruff and Al Hunt, Oprah Winfrey, Catherine Crier, the entire team at 60 Minutes, and, of course, former colleagues from CNN and retired objective statesmen such as politicians and judges. As moderators, they could deliver insightful, intelligent examination of presidential candidates, discuss the risks posed by nuclear weapons, the important role of the UN, solutions for addressing climate change, solving the Social Security and health care crises, having real conversations about population, and approaching alternative energy as both an environmental and national defense issue.
“It would have been the antithesis of FOX News,” he says. “Imagine applying that kind of human capital and the might of television to uniting America in the spirit of cooperation and sacrifice that existed during World War II rather than dividing the country for ratings’ sake or using TV as a propaganda arm of a political party? I would deploy TV as a tool for bringing the world together and leveraging peace.”
Things did not go according to plan.
Financial pundits have since wondered why Turner didn’t diversify his holdings of AOL Time Warner and, after the merger, immediately stagger out substantial withdrawals of his stake in the company.
To this there is an answer. As he reassessed the moves he did and didn’t make, Turner confesses that Levin did a masterful job of captivating his ego. Confidants at AOL Time Warner had convinced Turner to hold onto his securities in the company—even as some of those same people, it later turned out, divested themselves of the stock. Turner remained a loyal shareholder because that’s what he’d done as he’d put together the Turner Broadcasting System. If he didn’t demonstrate his faith in the new company, he figured, why should shareholders be expected to have confidence? But he discovered, keenly, that such idealism was naïve.
Implicit in the conceit dangled before him by Levin was the possibility, implied, that if things did not pan out with new management, and if Turner had maintained his stake as largest shareholder, that he might be summoned to mount a heroic rescue of the company.
Turner was ready to receive that solicitation from Levin and Case. It never came.
In the autumn of 2001, $8 billion of his personal fortune was swiftly evaporating, endangering the environmental and humanitarian projects that had given him more personal meaning than anything he had done in media. To keep his bison ranches, newly launched restaurant chain, and other investments solvent, he had to prepare himself for a possible liquidation of assets.
On the deck of his house, under the clear autumn night sky in the Rockies, Turner felt as though he could touch the desolation that had swallowed up his father. More accomplished than Ed Turner could ever have dreamed, and now flirting with a reversal of fortune equally unimaginable, he struggled to resist an impulse that he knew was in his bloodline.
Were detractors here to judge Turner with schadenfreude, one might be tempted to draw an analogy between him and the fictional media tycoon Charles Foster Kane, portrayed by Orson Welles in the movie Citizen Kane. (Besides being one of Turner’s favorites, it was a film that he came to own when he shrewdly acquired the MGM film library.) Kane, of course, was the unhappy, despondent magnate who discovered, in the end, that money and power couldn’t buy contentment.
“You know,” Turner said, “I’ve always prayed that my own end wouldn’t resemble Charles Foster Kane’s. I’ve never forgotten the last scenes in the movie.”
Kane dies in self-imposed exile from other people. He dwells in a mansion, Xanadu, erected behind a gated mass estate in Florida named after the ancient mythical Mongolian city. The narrator says:
One hundred thousand trees, twenty thousand tons of marble are the ingredients of Xanadu’s mountain. Contents of Xanadu’s palace: paintings, pictures, statues, the very stones of many other palaces—a collection of everything so big it can never be catalogued or appraised; enough for ten museums; the loot of the world. Xanadu’s livestock: the fowl of the air, the fish of the sea, the beast of the field and jungle. Two of each; the biggest private zoo since Noah. Like the Pharaohs, Xanadu’s landlord leaves many stones to mark his grave. Since the pyramids, Xanadu is the costliest monument a man has built to himself.
In the film’s final moments, administrators of Kane’s estate attempt to decipher the secret meaning of the last word the tycoon muttered before he died: “Rosebud.” It was, of course, the name that Kane, as a boy, had bestowed on his trusty snow sled before he was sent away to boarding schools. The sled has two symbolic meanings: the forsaken love of Kane’s parents who gave up their son so that he would have money over a relationship with them, and secondly, a broken connection to pure innocent bliss that he had known in the outdoors as a child.
“Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it,” the narrator says as an epitaph. “Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained anything. I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life. I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle—a missing piece.”
The message of the film was never lost on Turner. “The movie gave me chills. Seeing the emotion drained out of Kane when he dies an old man with an empty heart and surrounded only by stuff, nothing really of substance. That was it. The end. No big speech. Lights out.”
A man of wealth and means, one moment here, the next gone. “No one cared. Nothing to show for all the potential he had to try and do good,” Turner says. “It was as if he had never existed. He had no one close to him at his side. Those who claimed they cared for him but only wanted a piece of his money, were gone. He left the world feeling completely alone.”
Out of silence, he adds, “I can’t think of anything being more sad.”
In Ed Turner’s final months, Ted and his father had a fateful telephone conversation. It was the first time that Ted Turner ever forcefully stood up to him, and it would be the last time they ever spoke to each other.
Turner explains that his father had made a move to expand the family’s outdoor advertising business, but had then panicked with second thoughts and lack of pluck. Turner, who was being groomed to take over the company, was twenty-four when he heard, secondhand, that his father was planning to sell the company. “Dad, all my life you’ve taught me to work hard and not be a quitter and now you’re the one who’s quitting!” he said. “What’s happened to you? How could you do this?”
His father refused to give his son a sound explanation.
“We had a falling out. I stood my ground,” Turner says.
Not long after the exchange, Ed Turner, suffering from smoking-related emphysema and bad health caused by alcoholism, ate breakfast at his southern plantation, calmly read the newspaper, had a cigarette, then went upstairs to the bathroom. He put a handgun to his head, and pulled the trigger.
Ted Turner, who once blamed himself for being sent away from home as a four-year-old, shouldered new guilt.
Decades after the suicide and doubting his ability to mount a comeback from the AOL Time Warner debacle, Turner thought of how taking his life would be done, and what rational justification would be used as an explanation to his children and grandchildren.
He thought of Jane Fonda. The truth is that among their intimate conversations as a married couple, Turner and Fonda had had heartfelt discussions about suicide and its lingering effects. Fonda’s mother had taken her own life. He and his wife related to one another in a way that could not be explained to others. It’s well known that surviving children of parental suicides keep track of the days
and years until they reach the chronological age when a mother or father died at their own hands. Once they surpass it, they are supposed to feel liberated.
But that’s not how it happens, both Turner and Fonda say.
“You never stop thinking about it,” Fonda says. “Never.”
Ed Turner was fifty-one at the time of his death. Ted Turner in 2001 was nearing his sixty-third birthday.
Before his final act, Turner’s father confessed that the goals he had set, those that represented to him the epitome of success, were all material. Having $1 million in the bank, owning both a plantation and a yacht. . . . “Son,” he said, “you be sure to set your goals so high that you can’t possibly accomplish them in one lifetime. That way you’ll always have something ahead of you. I made the mistake of setting my goals too low and now I’m having a hard time coming up with new ones.”
“My dad had achieved those things and he wasn’t happy,” Turner says. “He didn’t know why. Basing his contentment on material possessions, he could not find a reason to live.”
The surviving son had indeed accumulated a notable collection of high honors. “I realized those are the kinds of things that start people’s obituaries, but they are backward looking, not forward,” he says. “But what do they matter?”
Occasionally, though he tried to forget, Turner would think about the handgun his father had used to take his own life, and it left him feeling dulled inside. He never knew what happened to the weapon.
But he reflected on it again in 2001. In Montana, he had shotguns and rifles in cases at the Flying D Ranch. If he had to, he could, he figured, go out like Ernest Hemingway.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 9