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

by Todd Wilkinson

  “Because Ted has committed to make a documentary about me, and I’m sure he would love to meet you and your dad. He’s a bit of a character, I should warn you, his behavior is kind of unusual, and they call him ‘Captain Outrageous,’ but he’s got a good heart.”

  Turner was flattered that Cousteau wanted an audience with him. Not long before, he had begun a friendship with cosmologist Carl Sagan and conducted a memorable interview of him on CNN. There was already precedent on Turner’s stations for a serious treatment of science.

  But Jean-Michel and Jacques knew that they would only have seconds to make their case.

  Sitting down with Turner, the Cousteaus expressed their concern about troubling problems taking hold in the world’s oceans, the stories that needed to be told, and how the only lever to force change was educating the masses so that citizens might lean on elected officials to take action.

  “How much would it cost to put a new series on the air?” Turner asked.

  “Ted has always been direct,” Jean-Michel says. “He doesn’t beat around the bush. If he has a thought in his head, more than likely he will share it with you. At least in those days, he didn’t do much self-editing.”

  The Cousteaus asked for $5 million spread over five years—a sum that in the early 1980s could have paid for a significant part of Turner’s Atlanta Braves professional baseball roster.

  Turner rocked back in his chair, arms butterflied behind his head. He studied Cousteau, and then Jean-Michel. Thinking of what happened in his own family, he was touched that a son was beside his father for support. And here was the real Jacques Cousteau in the flesh. Turner had an opportunity to collaborate with a living legend.

  Cousteau, he reasoned, could help elevate the credibility of his cable channels. Turner quickly calculated how the costs of creating original content could be amortized through subsequent syndication and be a boon for generating advertising. If the right deal was struck, he might also gain access to Cousteau’s earlier work, which would be an improvement over twenty-year-old reruns of the Andy Griffith Show and Leave It to Beaver.

  “He apparently liked what we proposed because, on the spot, without any lawyers present, he said he would support us and we were to work out the arrangements with Bob Wussler. No contracts, nothing,” Jean-Michel says. “Just a handshake. His commitment was based solely on the authority of his word.”

  Wussler was, in fact, shocked at the deal Turner had struck, but Turner was insistent.

  Cousteau didn’t let on, Jean-Michel says, but his father felt an affinity for Turner the instant they met. The mutual fondness was solidified in subsequent years as they learned of each other’s painful pasts. They had each had tempestuous and distant relationships with their fathers, both sent to the equivalents of military school, and both endured lonely, uncertain childhoods. A short while before their meeting, Cousteau had lost his younger son, Philippe, to a seaplane accident. Turner had experienced the loss of both sister and father. They each had learned to persevere, to count only on oneself, seeking out nature as a refuge.

  “I know that Ted saw my dad as a second father and that my dad viewed him like he would a son,” Jean-Michel says. “Sometimes it’s easier when you are not connected by blood line because there isn’t so much personal history and baggage.”

  “He took me seriously,” Turner says. “He believed in me. He didn’t have to, but he did. I needed that. Every man does.”

  The collaboration with Cousteau occurred even as Turner was entering into a separate agreement with filmmaker Chris Palmer and the National Audubon Society and other entities to turn out wildlife documentaries featuring narration by Redford and Newman.

  Jean-Michel Cousteau says the pitch they made to Turner did not involve full disclosure. In June 1979, when Cousteau’s son and Jean-Michel’s younger brother, Philippe, died in a plane crash on the Tagus River near Lisbon, Portugal, the Cousteau brand almost died with him.

  Philippe had gone to film school in Paris and served as his father’s right-hand man with the nonprofit Cousteau Society. Jean-Michel, who had pursued other interests, was with Jacques-Yves when they buried Philippe at sea. “My father was completely devastated with grief, and I mean completely. He turned to me and said, ‘I need your help, son, to keep the Cousteau Society running. If you don’t do it, then I will probably stop.’”

  “What can you do when your father says he needs you?” Jean-Michel asks. “It was simple. I dropped my plans and went to work for him.”

  Soon after he began putting the Cousteau Society’s books in order, Jean-Michel discovered that the organization was $5.1 million in debt and nearly bankrupt. Costs of keeping Calypso shipshape were expensive, the inability to land another series hampered their cash flow, and while his father and brother were charismatic people, they weren’t accountants.

  “I thought, ‘Oh shit, what am I going to do now?’” Jean-Michel explained.

  The society was told that it might be forced to liquidate assets, including Calypso. Jean-Michel said his father had been largely unaware of the magnitude of the financial challenges, and selling the boat would have brought him shame and embarrassment in the twilight of his life.

  John Denver had been briefed by Jean-Michel, and his eponymous song about the research vessel was written so that royalties would keep the boat afloat. The meeting with Turner was essentially a desperate Hail Mary pass. “Ted didn’t know at the time that he was really our last hope,” Jean-Michel says.

  Fortunately, based on their proposal, the $5 million deal that Turner and Wussler negotiated called for the Cousteaus to shoot and produce new shows. It also gave TBS rights for twenty-five years to air twelve hours of a series called Cousteau Odyssey that had originally premiered on PBS. The money enabled the Cousteau Society to clear debt from its books without double-mortgaging Calypso.

  “You want to know the truth? Ted Turner bailed us out,” Jean-Michel said. “Without a clue of what he was doing, he helped save my dad’s reputation and breathed new life and excitement into him. My dad lived to make more documentaries, and Ted gave him the chance.”

  And for his part, Turner was proud that he could now add the title “nature expedition underwriter” to his resume. Like Thomas Jefferson meeting with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1803, he and the Cousteaus charted a route through their storyboards. Their upcoming collaboration would probe the watery conduits of the Amazon River, recording the links between the heart of the South American rainforest and the Atlantic Ocean, a connection that scientists have come to recognize as a hotbed for biodiversity and an important thermostat in regulating Earth’s climate.

  Nothing like it had ever been done. In recent years, copies of the series used in college and high school classrooms for environmental studies have been used to illustrate the vital role of that rainforest and what has been lost to logging, pollution, and climate change. Much of its function as a pump for freshwater and a sink for carbon is now being threatened as desert expands across the basin.

  At first, Turner agreed to produce four hours, edited down from hundreds of hours of proposed filming. Then the series was expanded to six hours. Based on his blind faith in the Cousteaus, Turner opened up his checkbook to augment the original deal. Then he saw them off.

  “I know it doesn’t seem like that along ago, but when we started up the river in 1981, there was no cell phone contact, no sophisticated SAT phones and certainly no Internet—just shortwave radio. We kind of felt like we were characters in a South American version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Jean-Michel says.

  Turner and Wussler had many discussions about projects Turner wanted to underwrite, some of which Wussler believed were wastes of money. “What I didn’t fully appreciate until recently was that Ted was hustling to pay the bills for TBS and CNN. He had mortgaged his house and everything he owned to meet payroll for his employe
es in Atlanta. He was under a lot of stress. It would have been a reasonable, perfectly understandable thing for him to say no to us. But he doesn’t back out of commitments he makes,” Jean-Michel explains.

  “He always follows through. To be honest, though, I think his involvement was also giving him a vicarious thrill.”

  A few years later, Turner, Pyle, and colleagues put Captain Planet and the Planeteers on television, the first-ever Saturday morning children’s cartoon series with an environmental theme. Its purpose was entertaining and educating the next generation about the importance of saving things in nature crucial to human quality of life. Turner figured that in order to make his green programming work, he would just have to toil harder and log more hours. And that’s what he did, staying late at the office and rising early. Finally he had a pullout bed installed at work. He would sometimes say goodnight to his staff with his pajamas on and a nightcap in hand, then greet them with the same attire on in the morning clutching a cup of coffee.

  The making of the Amazon documentaries is its own saga. Far up the narrowing channels of the Amazon, Calypso searched to find the innermost reaches of the river’s main stem and its tributaries, extending into Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. The crew met not just native river people in dugout canoes, but cocaine runners in speedboats, toting machine guns. “We were approached by people who said we could make a lot of money if we ‘volunteered’ to use Calypso for transporting coca paste and carrying it out to boats at sea,” Jean-Michel says. “They made it sound like we didn’t have much of a choice and we declined at our own peril.”

  Rainforests were being toppled to create clandestine coca plantations even as massive open pit mines and oil development were stabbing into the isolated wilderness. The more Jean-Michel and his father thought about it, the more they realized a connection between environmental conditions and the desperate things people do to survive.

  “The viewers of our shows in North America and Europe had no sense of the consequences of drug consumption in the North or the way that multinational companies were exploiting resources in Third World countries. The drugs and minerals and oil that we use connect us to the most sensitive places on Earth,” Jean-Michel says. “It was a dangerous time for outsiders to be there poking around, especially film crews. The drug cartels are ruthless. This was bigger than an ecology story. I told my dad that we needed to make another call to Atlanta.”

  They docked at the edge of a remote outpost and patched in a telephone call via shortwave radio. But they weren’t radioing Turner to say they wanted to pack up and leave. They wanted to push further. “I said to Ted that I thought we really needed to produce a seventh hour of the series that focused on the drug trade because its impact on humans was as important as the effects of deforestation and mining and all three are linked to destruction of the environment,” Jean-Michel says.

  For whatever reason, Turner thought he needed to shout over the phone, Jean-Michel remembers. “Drugs?” he asked Jean-Michel loudly. “You want to make a show about drugs? I thought we are making films about the environment.”

  Cousteau laughs recounting the conversation. “We actually didn’t have a very good radio hook-up and you could tell that Ted was multitasking. I held the radio up away from my ear and you could hear him yelling questions to us and talking to other people wherever he was. He was in downtown Atlanta and I was in the middle of the equatorial jungle trying to impress upon him what was happening.”

  Turner cut to the chase: “Awww, Jean-Michel, are you telling me you need more money?”

  Cousteau, who said he felt meek in hearing Turner’s formidable voice, answered, “Yes, Ted, that’s what I’m asking. To do this right we need more.”

  “Well, how much more do you want?” Turner inquired.

  “Maybe half a million dollars” [equal to at least $3 million today].

  “Do you know how many good pitchers I can sign for the Braves with half a million dollars?” he asked.

  There was silence.

  “Ted?” Jean-Michel queried.

  “Ted, are you still there. Over?”

  Silence.

  Cousteau thought maybe the line had gone dead or Turner had hung up.

  Hearing no answer, he began to regret making the request.

  But Turner was toying with him. “You don’t need to apologize. You got it, pal. I’ll find a way to get you the money. Just make sure that you and your father stay out of trouble and give us something we will be proud of.”

  Turner says the project made vivid for him the truth that most humanitarian challenges have an environmental element. They have multiple dimensions and tentacles. It was a realization that would ultimately influence his thoughts about the United Nations.

  He told his reporters at CNN that the environment wasn’t a fringe topic that should be treated like the weather report, Hollywood gossip, or reading sports scores. During the 1980s, Pyle, Pat Mitchell (today head of the Paley Center), the late former Delaware governor Russ Peterson (who was head of the National Audubon Society), and Turner recognized the power that documentaries could have not only in serving as entertainment but in helping to educate the masses as well. They evolved the art form to a level that went beyond Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and the specials produced by PBS, BBC, and National Geographic.

  Palmer, recently the author of Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom, cites the source of the breakthrough in thinking. “It was our deteriorating environment that led me to believe, like Ted, that we needed to use every means at our disposal to persuade the country, and the whole globe, to change course to be more sustainable. Population growth, toxics, acid rain, loss of biological diversity, overfishing, clear-cutting, loss of topsoil, and many other problems led me to view the body politic as heading for disaster, unless something dramatic and major was done. I saw powerful, popular, and dramatic documentaries on prime-time TV as one action that desperately needed to be taken.”

  Pyle and Pat Mitchell, who spearheaded TBS and CNN’s environmental projects, said that Turner caught flack from advertisers because some of the documentaries specifically pinpointed the perpetrators of pollution and wildlife habitat destruction. What set Turner apart is that he, unlike network executives, personally owned the channels where the programs were running, and he refused to kowtow to their threats of pulling advertising.

  Palmer says that Turner stood up for the integrity of the narratives. “There was a clear conflict that would have been resolved in favor of the bottom line if Ted had not been in charge. You see in the way some decisions are made by the major networks today—a fear of alienating advertisers, which should cause us to ask, ‘Who has the power in our society?’ Ted was crucial in the fight to stand up and resist the two boycotts we faced—one over a film with Paul Newman on clear-cutting, and the other on overgrazing rangelands by cattle.”

  “When you lose a baseball game, the team can get it back tomorrow,” Turner says. “You wreck a river or a place like the Amazon or Gulf of Mexico and the damage can last decades to centuries.”

  He was convinced that environmental stories needed to be aired over and over again until people got the message. He said those conclusions didn’t need to be confirmed by market research. Today, Turner asserts that if he were still owner of CNN and TBS he would have investigative reports about the impacts of coal and fossil fuels airing around the clock until Congress became so inundated with letters and phone calls from constituents that it passed legislation to apply a tax on carbon and incentivize private investment in wind, solar, natural gas, carefully controlled nuclear facilities, and ultra-efficient energy grids.

  “Ted gambles on people as much as he backs causes,” Pyle says. “His faith isn’t placed in an unseen deity. It’s in the potential that he believes exists in all of us to act on good information if we have access to it.
. . .”

  For a week in the early 1980s, when the atmosphere around CNN was still chaotic, Turner and his youngest sons, Rhett and Beau, visited Cousteau in the Amazon. The Cousteaus had offered Turner an invitation to see, firsthand, what they were doing over the course of their eighteen months in the field. Turner decided to treat his youngest sons to a weeklong adventure. Today, both recount their foray to the Amazon as jarring but formative.

  Jean-Michel was in the States during the time of their visit, doing production work and attending meetings, but he heard plenty about it from Jacques-Yves. “My dad was a quiet man in private who was gregarious when he had to be, and he told me about the Turner visit. Again, how many network executives would do that, check out what they are investing in, and take their sons along? Ted is a very physical, very active person and I think that being stuck on a boat kind of left him impatient. Film work can be mundane and boring. Ted was there to be stimulated. In those days, he couldn’t settle down. And he had a short fuse because he was under a lot of pressure. At the time, he was chewing tobacco and had a can that he carried around in his hand, spitting into it, which left the film crew wondering, “Who is this redneck American?”

  Jacques-Yves pulled his team aside and whispered, “Zat iz Ted Turner. Be kind and don’t judge him. He’s one of the few businessmen who are trying to save the planet.”

  “To be honest, my father was, at first, more amused by Ted because he’s such a character,” Jean-Michel says. “He saw him as this outwardly boisterous figure who was a different person inside. He defended Ted. And he told me, “Give him time, Jean-Michel. You will see. He is still young, just as you are. He has the capacity of learning and doing great things. I see it in him. I feel it.”