Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet

by Todd Wilkinson

  There was a complication. When he was an unknown twenty-something and left to grieve largely alone, his father’s death had caused him to promise that, no matter how bad his life ever got, he wouldn’t copy Ed Turner. Suicide had made his father’s life irredeemable. “I honestly think if he had given me a chance, I could have helped him.”

  In the bedroom at the Flying D, Turner closed his eyes. He searched for mental photographs of his offspring. One by one, they surfaced. He says he flashed through them, and then added pictures of his grandchildren. Hours passed until a muted glow of color began seeping in the window. He grew tired and his mind calmed. Slowly, his desperation winnowed. At dawn, he felt ashamed, not triumphant.

  He had never shared the details with his family and closest friends. He didn’t want them to think less of him.

  “Ted didn’t get the love he needed or deserved early in his life, at the time when it is supposed to be hardwired,” Jane Fonda says. “But the miracle is that he felt compassion for living things by submersing himself in nature. It saved him. All his life he’s had to relearn how to love and be loved the hard way and what I’ve noticed is that communing with him in nature is the way that he accelerates the bonds of love and friendship.”

  Often, he meditates on the things he has done and might still do that will outlast him. True power isn’t in the making of money; it’s how that money is channeled, he says.

  In the early 1980s, he was aboard the deck of a ship, a cocky, much younger man. He was so full of pride and had no idea of how little he knew. He was in the company of an influential elder, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, a mentor and father figure. They were anchored up the Amazon River. Turner says he can still hear the inflection in Cousteau’s voice when he suggested that the environmental problems facing the world—nuclear catastrophe, resource depletion and scarcity linked to consumption, and exploding population growth—might be insurmountable.

  “But Ted, we cannot afford to get discouraged,” Cousteau said. “Even if we know the end of our world is coming for certain, which we do not, what can men of good conscience do but keep trying to do the right thing until the very end?”

  Turner had no idea that it would become an admonishment of self-preservation. Had he capitulated decades later in pulling the real and proverbial trigger, any and all of his previous accomplishments would have been tainted by the flaw of a final impetuous act. Anything yet to come afterward, involving ideas that took shape earlier and blossomed only in the ensuing years, would not exist. There certainly would be no reason for a book to document them now. In hindsight, people today would be looking at Turner and wondering: Was he really a shrewd thinker, ahead of his time, albeit crazy as a fox and eccentric, or was he just crazy?

  At some deep level, Turner grasped this reality and he reeled. He did not want to represent the personification of squandered opportunity. As romantic as tragic figures are, in serving as muses for classical rhyme and verse, he did not want to become one. And yet, he thought of Publius Horatius Cocles, immortalized by Thomas Babington Macaulay (Turner’s favorite bit of heroic prose) and he thought of Cousteau and, lastly, he thought of Robert Edward Turner Jr.

  He realized that he could still love his father without having to suffer shame and guilt by refusing to emulate him. Alone, haggard from his all-nighter, but not paralyzed by a fear of loneliness, Turner walked through his ranch house past the room where the guns are kept. The Sirens’ call was gone. For the first time. Continuing onward, he pledged that when he returned to Atlanta, he would reach into his desk drawer for the last time and hold the gun that killed his father in his hand. He would have the weapon destroyed. More than a decade has passed since he made that pledge, a span that in measuring Turner’s life, has become in a way, a personal capstone. His financial fortune would reverse and he would become an emblem for how to give money away. His bison herds would grow; his rally in defense of the United Nations would become ever more voluble, and he’s declared: “I’m still here. Nobody’s going to shut me up until I’m dead and gone.” And, even then, he has the satisfaction of knowing that the initiatives he’s established—a way of thinking about the human relationship toward the land and among people toward each other—will continue.

  At the end of many days, he still wonders what Ed Turner would be thinking of how he sold his boy short. Perhaps the biggest triumph in Ted Turner’s life is that he did not become his father.

  The difference between projecting a mask of blind stoic fearlessness and possessing real courage and wisdom, Turner says, is knowing what you throw away if you choose to give up on the things you love—and those who love you.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My Captain Was Aquaman

  “Ted said that one of the best lines he knows about honour was written by Shakespeare in Richard II, and he went on to quote it word for word: ‘Mine honour is my life; both grow in one: Take honour from me, and my life is done: Then, dear my liege, mine honour let me try; in that I live and for that will I die.’”

  —SUR RICHARD BRANSON, BUSINESSMAN, TURNER FRIEND AND ECO-HUMANITARIAN

  When a father dies by his own hands, who is left to guide the abandoned son forward not to avenge a loss but to help rectify the hole that’s been created? Who becomes the next role model? Who fills the void? In hundreds of speeches and interviews given over the years, Ted Turner has paid homage, without elaborating, to one of the most widely recognized scientists on the planet, a man whose medium covers most of Earth’s surface and sets it apart from the other, lifeless planets in our solar system: a man who was a crucial catalyst for Turner’s budding identity as an environmentalist.

  “I can’t remember when I first heard his name,” Turner says. “It might have been when I arrived at college in my years at Brown, before I had to leave. Those of us who spent time around the ocean liked to talk. Here was this guy, this Frenchman, who seemed to be pulling back a veil on the world beneath the waves.”

  People come into your life at certain moments—people who play the role of guru, Turner says, and you’re either ready to receive their wisdom, or you’re not. They cause course corrections in thinking.

  Enter Jacques-Yves Cousteau. During Turner’s halcyon days as a competitive sailor when he covered sixty thousand miles on the water, and subsequently during his pioneering launch of TBS and CNN, bronze busts of Alexander the Great and British Navy admiral Horatio Nelson adorned his desk in Atlanta. By design, he admits, they were props that journalists often referenced. They were chosen to help illustrate his competitive mettle and desire to someday have a place in history.

  Those men were warriors, and they helped to secure Turner’s mystique as a modern David taking on Goliaths. Yet in fact the paladin he came to rely upon for grounding was an unlikely living man. Cousteau was diminutive, had a big nose, smoked a pipe like a college professor, spoke with a continental accent, and had served as an inventor of the aqualung and scuba diving. And though they were a generation apart, Turner and Cousteau had both experienced similar epiphanies precipitated, ironically, by periods of estrangement.

  “Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course,” Cousteau had famously written in his book, The Silent World. “It happened to me on that summer’s day, when my eyes were opened to the sea.”

  Cousteau also opened Turner’s eyes, baptizing him into a life of environmental activism and, Turner says, he became something of a surrogate father.

  Hindus and Buddhists look upon the selection of calling as Dharma. Turner the agnostic—who is open to being convinced of an all-uniting divinity—does not think of his own stirring of consciousness in religious terms; he does, however, explain it as an act of pure faith.

  Turner has vague recollection of a film, Le Monde du Silence (in English, The Silent World) showing in art house cinemas toward th
e end of his teenage years. Under the instruction of Jimmy Brown, a black Gullah caretaker who had been hired by Ed Turner to help raise Ted, Turner had been racing small sailboats to victory in regattas off the coast of Charleston, Savannah, and other Atlantic port towns. And The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, a documentary that won an Academy Award in 1956, showed him a new world under the rudders of his boats. But it would be a long while before Cousteau had any bearing on Turner’s life.

  Upon graduation from McCallie Prep in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he was a champion in speech and debate, Turner enrolled in Brown. There, he became a leader on the forensics team and was captain of the sailing club. He also got suspended after he became rowdy and threw chairs out of a dormitory. After a year he was reinstated, but in the interim, he enlisted in the US Coast Guard Reserve at Cape May, New Jersey. Just as he had done on the Brown sailing and debate teams, he demonstrated leadership abilities on and off the water.

  During his third year, he was forced to withdraw from the Ivy League institution after Ed Turner pulled financial support for his son’s tuition. Penning perhaps one of the most poignant father-to-son missives ever, the elder Turner chided his son for pursuing an undergraduate degree in classics, studying the works of ancient philosophers, and learning to speak Latin. Why does Turner relate to the stories of the ancients and maintain an interest in quoting Shakespeare? It goes back to those days.

  Ed Turner, however, was irate that Ted wasn’t majoring in something practical, like business. And he had no interest in investing his money into a college education that he believed his son couldn’t use to succeed.

  “My dear son,” Ed’s letter to Ted began. “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 suppose that I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the purpose of an education is to enable one to develop a community of interest with his fellow men, to learn to know them, and to learn how to get along with them . . . These subjects might give you a community of interest with an isolated few impractical dreamers . . . and a select group of college professors. God forbid! . . . There is no question but this type of useless information will distinguish you, set you apart from the doers of the world. If I leave you enough money, you can retire to an ivory tower, and contemplate for the rest of your days the influence that the hieroglyphics of prehistoric man had upon the writings of William Faulkner. Incidentally, he [Faulkner] was a contemporary of mine in Mississippi. We speak the same language—whores, sluts, strong words and strong deeds. . . . I just wish I could feel that the influence of those oddball professors and the ivory towers were developing you into the kind of a man we can both be proud of . . . 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. I hope I am right. You are in the hands of the Philistines, and dammit, I sent you there. I am sorry.”

  Turner the younger was stunned, and then amused, and finally incredulous. He didn’t believe his father would follow through on his implicit threat. He allowed Brown’s student newspaper to publish the letter verbatim. It became the talk of the campus, but left Ed Turner furious, and vowing to teach his son a lesson in one-upmanship. He was paying the tuition, he knew that Ted knew it, and he could take away what his son valued if he didn’t play by Ed’s rules. An alcoholic and chain smoker who developed emphysema, Ed had set a strange example for his son. He told Ted that men are by their nature promiscuous and that “real men run around.”

  He once boasted to Ted of having slept with over three hundred women—in addition to Ted’s mother—by the time he turned thirty. Obviously unhappy and, according to Ted, suffering from chronic depression, he also had a mean streak when he was drinking and had paddled Turner or slapped him if, as a boy, he got crosswise. The razor strop was a favored implement. Once, when he was convinced that his corporal discipline wasn’t having the desired impact, he resorted to reverse psychology. He handed his son a wire hanger and told Ted to beat him, saying, “this is gonna hurt you more than it is hurting me.” When Turner refused, he was verbally browbeaten, derided as a weakling, and taunted until he complied.

  The oft-repeated explanation of why Turner left Brown, publicized in several unauthorized biographies, is that Ted was tossed out for fraternizing with females in his dormitory room. Indeed, that was a contributing factor to his departure; he has always had a fondness for women, following in the footsteps of his father. But the truth is Ted couldn’t stay in Providence, even though he wanted to. His father cut him off and, having no resources, his college career ended. It was a lesson in emasculation and a scarring episode that, ultimately, has made him more sympathetic to issues involving empowerment of the have-nots.

  Heading back to Georgia, Turner went to work in the family outdoor advertising business, subject to his father’s whims. Ed informed him that he needed to prove himself worthy of moving up in the family company. One day, if he worked hard, his father said, he would become a full-fledged partner. He also tried to manipulate many aspects of his life, including telling him where to live, demanding to know whom he was dating, and how he was spending his time away from the office.

  At twenty-one, Turner married for the first time—a woman from Chicago named Judy Nye whom he had met while sailing. The courtship, he said, happened too fast and the wedding should have been called off. Needing to provide for his young family, he took over an outdoor advertising venture for his father in Macon, Georgia. He became the youngest member of the local Rotary Club (and a lifelong devotee to the worldwide organization), served on the board of the Red Cross, and assisted with publicity for The United Way. Handed a junior management position in the billboard company, he recalls a personal on-site inspection made by Ed Turner to assess his progress. Afterward, he received a rare note of commendation. It contained a few complimentary lines that left him beaming.

  “My father was usually very sparing with his praise, and nothing he did before or after that day ever made me feel so good,” Turner noted in his memoir Call Me Ted. “I had no way of knowing at the time just how special and precious our days together then would later prove to be.”

  Nothing, of course, is ever black and white. Ed Turner did show flashes of love. His son pined for them.

  When his father committed suicide just shy of Ted’s twenty-fifth birthday, Turner by then was a young parent of two children—Laura and Teddy Jr.—and newly divorced from Judy Nye. He says they were not compatible. Judy Nye agreed, pointing to his incorrigible infidelity as one reason for their split. Turner met Jane Smith, an airline flight attendant from Alabama, at a young Republican social mixer, married her, and became the father of a third child, Rhett. Turner was scrambling to hold the billboard business together even while gaining a name as a competitive yachtsman. And he repeated the example of his father insofar as he again did not adhere to the strict discipline of monogamy. He does not make excuses; to this day, when interacting with his closest friends who have enjoyed happily married lives to the same person, he expresses admiration of them, and personal regret.

  Just as there was no indication of his converging path toward Cousteau and environmentalism, his political ideology in this period was further to the right than one might think, given his support of progressive causes in recent decades. He was a Goldwater conservative, in emulation of his father. Indeed, Turner’s first bold independent public statement came after Ed Turner’s death.

  To make a statement, he covered several of his billboards across the Southeast with the famous opening line to Ayn Rand’s objectivist Libertarian manifesto Atlas Shrugged: “Who is John Galt?”

  The wounds of his sister’s and father’s deaths, and his fading confidence in organized religion, made Rand’s promotion of hedonistic materialism, small government, and no regulation appealing to Ted. And w
hile eventually he would reject Rand’s cardinal tenet that self-interest takes precedence over one’s duty to others and the common good, he was then, and remains now, a devotee of the notion that the free market can be a positive agent of raising social consciousness and expanding prosperity in the world. Again, his refrain is that capitalism isn’t the problem but how it is being applied.

  During these same years, Cousteau won another Academy Award for a documentary, and was featured in the television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. It ran from 1966 to 1976, and showed in millions of American living rooms on television sets with rabbit ear antennas.

  “By being the first subject of environmental programming on TV,” Turner says, “the Captain was the first champion of science for common people. You didn’t need a degree to understand the message. The beauty of the ocean gave people a reason to take notice, and his narration offered them a reason to care. He led tired, working class people on escapes to places they would not otherwise think about, and he told them why the ocean had a connection to their lives.”

  Until then, American heroes were largely war veterans, astronauts, politicians, sports figures, and movie stars. “Cousteau gave us a new category,” Turner says. “If Rachel Carson is credited with being the mother of the modern environmental movement, then the Captain should rightfully be considered the movement’s father.”

  It was a reference that, upon Cousteau’s death, would tie Turner and Cousteau together. Turner’s assessment was cited in obituaries around the globe. Without television and the feature stories in National Geographic magazine, Turner says, the appeal of Cousteau’s scientific endeavors might never have broken from obscurity, nor might the environment have been a coming-of-age interest for those baby boomers who went on to devote themselves to environmental causes. “In one form or another, we are his offspring,” he says.