CHAPTER FOUR
The Songs of the Cranes
“He lives a lot in his head. Sometimes Ted will disappear into himself. It’s the only safe place he has ever known. But he doesn’t allow others to go in there with him.”
—JANE FONDA
A notoriously light sleeper, Turner sat straight up, causing Jane Fonda to jump.
He caressed her shoulder to calm her. “Honey, did you hear it?”
Fonda had been startled by the noise. They pulled each other closer, listening. After a moment, according to Fonda, Turner chortled. “I think a baby just hatched on the nest.”
Moments later, a melodic cooing floated through the open window of their bedroom. Fonda recognized the “unison calling” described in their Birds Of North America Field Guide. For sandhill cranes, the song is an expression of gladness between mated pairs, commonly emitted when chicks hatch on the nest. Jane Fonda and Ted Turner had become avian godparents.
Turner and Fonda, Ted and Jane. They were called America’s ultimate power couple by the tabloid press. “Of all the relationships I’ve had in the past,” Turner says, “my marriage to Jane was the most intense and fulfilling. Do I have any regrets that we came into each other’s lives? None. Do I still think about her? I would be lying if I didn’t say yes.”
Together for more than a decade, Fonda forced Turner to look inward and try to confront pain that had emotionally hobbled him since childhood. She also inspired him to be a committed feminist, advocating to empower women, half of whom worldwide, around two billion, don’t have the same rights or level of respect as men. For her part, she says, it was Turner who inspired her to better appreciate the role that environment plays in shaping human civilization and quality of life.
Any book about Turner would be remiss if it didn’t include a deeper look at his relationship with Fonda. Several books have mentioned it superficially, but the impact on both of them was not superficial. The magnetism of their bond had little to do with money or fame, they say. It involved instead a willingness to feel the pull of nature and, at their most vulnerable level of insecurity, allow it to be a platform for healing.
America’s fascination with her runs as deep as it does with him. Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda: American actress, fitness queen, liberal activist, spiritual seeker. On her fifty-first birthday, Fonda’s second husband, the California legislator and civil rights activist, Tom Hayden, informed her that he was in love with another woman. The news left Fonda devastated. Around the same time, Turner’s second marriage to Jane Smith, the mother of his three youngest children, Rhett, Beau, and Jennie, was ending after two decades.
In an interview with Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes, which coincided with the 2005 release of her memoir, My Life So Far, Fonda recalled Ted’s wooing. “The phone rings, and it’s this booming southern accent. And the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Is it true?’”
“Is what true?” Fonda said, thinking it was a strange way to start a conversation.
“And he said, ‘Are you and Hayden getting a divorce?’ Now, I mean, I’m in the middle of a nervous breakdown, right? I can’t talk above a whisper.”
Turner told his executive assistant Dee Woods to keep calling Fonda to see if her schedule would allow for a date. Fonda said she needed a year to get over her divorce. Woods called on day 366.
About their first date, in Los Angeles, Turner wrote this in his 2008 memoir, Call Me Ted: “From meeting her before and watching her in the movies I knew she was attractive, but as we talked through our dinner date I was surprised by the strength of our connection. Knowing that a lot of people assumed I was a male chauvinist and a greedy capitalist, I was up front with her. I let her know that my dad had raised me without a lot of respect for women and that this was something I’d been working hard to change. And knowing of Jane’s political leanings, I even bragged to her about how many friends I had who were communists, including Castro and Gorbachev. I always tend to talk a lot when I’m excited or nervous and that night I was really excited.”
The evening ended with a hug. Fonda told Turner she wasn’t ready for a serious relationship. Still, Turner continued the charm offensive and refused to relent. There was something about him, she told me, that was undeniable.
“He pursued me and sometimes would drop to one knee and recite poetry that he composed himself or recite long verse that he’d learned in high school,” Fonda said. “I mean, it was irresistible.” Following months of relentless courting, they became a steady couple. On 60 Minutes, Stahl asked Fonda if she was repeating a pattern of allowing herself to be sculpted by a powerful man.
“In a positive way, yeah. I mean, I know I’m a chameleon in some ways. I mean, you know, I was going to all these receptions. Ted goes from one thing to another. A lot of tuxedos, a lot of gowns, on the arm of a corporate executive . . . What was really going on though was very, very different. What was going on was he gave me confidence. Ted Turner would wake up every morning and say, ‘I love you so much. You are so beautiful.’ And I would think, ‘Well, he’s no dummy. Gee whiz.’”
Very early in their courtship, Turner invited Fonda to join him at the Bar None Ranch, the first property he’d purchased in Montana. The buy had come at his son Beau’s suggestion, and it had been intended as a fishing and hunting getaway. Many say it was bison that brought Turner west. In fact, it was him stepping into a stream at the Bar None and becoming hooked, at his own half century mark, on fly fishing. He quickly mastered the sport, and enthusiastically introduced it to Fonda. It’s a passion she still practices to this day.
Fonda had been to Montana. Her actor brother, Peter, lived in the next dale over, Paradise Valley.
“He was a true southern gentleman,” Fonda says of the first weekend she spent with Turner at the ranch. Arriving late in the day and spending the night, Fonda says that Turner greeted her out front the next morning with the door to his Land Rover open. He had outfitted them with binoculars, fishing rods, and lunches.
“I don’t think the grin left his face the entire day,” she remembers. “He was different from his reputation in the press. He was softer, gentler.”
“I wanted to show Jane around the country,” he says. Turner had always fancied himself a naturalist.
In his four-wheel-drive vehicle, he set out east from the historic homestead along Sixteen Mile Creek, pointing out stream banks he was restoring after decades of overgrazing by cattle. He directed Fonda’s attention toward an osprey carrying a fish back to its nest. They watched red-tailed hawks and mule deer, walked along elk trails in aspen stands, and exchanged stories about their grown kids.
“We were driving along and Ted tilted his head out the window to look into the sky. I asked him what he was doing. He pointed to something. You could hardly see anything with the naked eye. He recognized this speck high above us as a golden eagle based on the way it was flying.”
Turner stopped the car and they tracked the bird with binoculars, his arm around her. They leaned against the vehicle and continued to chat. Fonda, like Turner, doesn’t believe in making small talk. She bluntly asked him honest questions, such as his reputation as a playboy. Turner says he wasn’t put off, but impressed by her directness.
Turner’s sensitivity for nature and fluency in talking about it moved her. “I have met a range of enormously successful, talented, driven men in my life, but never one who could identify a bird in silhouette and find such happiness in doing it. Other people look past such things. It’s so simple, but it’s so wonderful. So many of us take so much for granted. Ted doesn’t where nature is concerned. I said to myself, ‘I think I can love this man,’ and my heart started to open.”
When Fonda looked at him, he felt like she could see his soul. He trusted her. The following year, he purchased the Flying D Ranch. He was making plans to build a home and he walked the home site with her. Sh
e was impressed that his instincts were not tiered toward making a grand architectural statement on the land, but blending in with the surroundings. It was an expression of values different from how the rich live in Hollywood.
A year later, Turner proposed. The couple, because of their diverse interests and demand as public speakers, were constantly in motion, attending environmental conferences and galas in Los Angeles, New York, and back in Atlanta where they maintained a tiny nine-hundred-square-foot penthouse on the top of the CNN office building.
Everywhere they went, their presence electrified the room. She was undaunted by and uninterested in the size of his bank account, and had evaded the curse of getting lost in her own celebrity. In fact, at Turner’s request, she gave up acting, and collaborated with him on philanthropic endeavors and ultimately setting up homes on a dozen ranches he acquired to grow his bison herd.
The mutual unspoken truth was that they didn’t need to explain to each other the importance of staying real in a world full of artifice, sycophants, and deception. One liberating the other, they could simply be themselves, Fonda says, weaknesses and all.
When they sought solace, it was in the West. Whether with guests or alone, Fonda says that she and Turner would cuddle in front of a television at night with a bowl of popcorn. After active days, they would watch nature documentaries underwritten and aired by TBS. She met Cousteau and had conversations with Barbara Pyle about scripts for Captain Planet and the Planeteers that Turner was green-lighting.
“Ted has this emotive attachment to animals. Some of those films, for Ted, were real tearjerkers. And it didn’t matter how many times he watched them, he would cry at the parts when an animal died, or it had its home taken away by habitat loss, or when young were turned out into the world by their parents.”
Some of the films were narrated by actor friends turned environmental activists such as Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Ted Danson. In fact, when Redford was shooting his movie adaptation of Norman Maclean’s novella, A River Runs Through It, in Montana, the couple had him over for dinner. Redford and Turner could relate to one another. For years, Redford had been pouring much of the money he made from movies into expanding the size of his Sundance Ranch in Utah. He operated the site not only as the administrative headquarters for the independent film festival he founded, but he would also routinely invite prominent environmental experts to help inform his thinking about conservation.
“Jane, Bob Redford, and those other actors have a lot of guts,” Turner says. “I have a lot of respect and admiration for them. They don’t speak out for the environment because it’s fashionable or because they think it will increase their celebrity. In fact, probably the opposite is true because anytime you are outspoken on something, people will disagree with you. That’s okay. What matters is standing up. Captain Cousteau told me that. Through Jane, I met a lot of great people—folks who were kind of dismissed by people I knew because of their liberal reputations. What they forget is that conservation is one of the most basic parts of being a conservative. And whether a person wants to call himself an environmentalist or not, people like Bob Redford always do their homework. He knows what he’s talking about.”
Far from being a strange pair, their friends say the combination of Turner and Fonda created a symmetry, with passions that seemed to feed on each other.
“They had a dynamism,” says renowned economist Lester Brown, who has advised Turner on environmental and humanitarian issues over the years.
Brown, who heads the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, DC, and earlier founded the influential Worldwatch Institute, is not the sort of gentleman who regularly ponders the caprices of pop culture. He is a bow tie–wearing, bicycle-to-work, former-tomato-farmer wonk. His yen is assessing how natural resource consumption and environmental challenges threaten the human race. He often joined Turner and Fonda as they attended international environmental conferences, and he served on the board of Turner’s first foundation, the Better World Society.
At his modest office along Connecticut Avenue near Dupont Circle, Brown recalls a black tie party at the British Embassy. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were visiting America. A high-grade mixture of politicians, businesspeople, and entertainment icons had been invited.
Brown and his sister sat next to Turner and Fonda as their guests. As people mixed, a crowd, larger than the one flanking the Queen and Prince, gathered around Ted and Jane. “It was kind of fun just watching the scene unfold. British royalty is fascinating, I admit, but the kind of interaction with them is formal and distancing. With Ted and Jane, it was different. People related to them as real and approachable giants. Democrat and Republican friends of theirs—governors, senators, and ambassadors—came up and wanted to have their pictures taken with them. Ted has testified on Capitol Hill as a TV executive. It’s amazing to see him in action when he’s ‘on.’ He has a public persona that is different from his more quiet and serious side that he shares only with his friends. The fact is that everybody of importance in this country seems to know him, and if they don’t, they still have an urge to want to talk with him or form an opinion about him. I’ve watched it happen with heads of state from other countries, too. He’s sort of a man’s man to men and a curiosity to women.”
Brown thinks for a second and goes on. “Jane has her own way of disarming people and she does it with grace and genuine sincerity. In person, she’s really not anything like the negative stereotype that has been crafted by the political right seeking to demonize her. In fact, I think she is rather self-effacing. If you think about it, because of all the media exposure they’ve received, either of them would be considered a major headliner. And yet when Jane and Ted were together, the sum was greater than the individual parts, which isn’t often the case with charismatic figures. They had, I guess you would call it, gravitas, and it didn’t matter if they were at a red carpet event or a baseball game with fans hollering at them. I was impressed by their poise.”
When they traveled, there was no entourage. Turner dislikes the paparazzi but with his masculine energy he could charm them into staying away. Around Atlanta, Turner likes to drive to some social events in his compact economy car (later they would buy hybrids for themselves and all of their kids). They took walks around Centennial Park with their dogs, carrying a plastic bag to pick up poop left behind by the canines. And always, if he found others’ discarded trash on the sidewalk, Turner would carry it himself to a trash can. Matter-of-factly, he says, “Jane and I just wanted to be responsible citizens.”
In December 1991, the couple married before family at Turner’s Avalon Plantation near Tallahassee.
The Flying D, however, was their main base camp. A focal point in front of the main house is a pond reflecting the Spanish Peaks.
“This was our Golden Pond,” Fonda says, alluding to the title of a film she starred in with her father, Henry Fonda. A movie about healing and redemption between parents and children, it provided an impetus for Fonda to begin forgiving her father for his absence in her life.
Turner kept adding to his real estate portfolio. A few acquisitions lay in the very heart of what had been the historic vortex of the great bison herds. The Sandhills of Nebraska were also home to a namesake staging area for the cranes that appeared in Montana at their back doorstep.
Before he became the assistant general manager of Turner’s ranches in the West, John Hansen and his wife, Jaynee, oversaw Turner’s bison operations in Nebraska. Back then, Hansen was based at the Spike Box Ranch between Valentine and the tiny outpost of Mullen.
“Ted, unlike many businesspeople who buy up ranches, does not believe in being an absentee landowner. He and Jane would come out and visit for stretches of time and they would stay with Jaynee and me. We’d cook dinner together and all ride around the back sections of the ranches in a pickup truck. And it was just like being together with family.”
Hansen said part of the couple’s routine centered on walks. Fonda acquainted herself with the diversity of wildflowers. Turner liked to scavenge for Indian arrowheads because he knew there had been aboriginal encampments there. For both of them, unwinding meant losing track of time, getting lost in the moment, forgetting that they had lived their lives on hamster wheels. For a spell, Fonda says, Turner slowed down.
“You could kind of tell that Ted hadn’t, probably ever, spent down time like this where he could just be himself,” Hansen said. “He didn’t have to rush off and tend to a crisis. His companies were running smoothly. It took him a while to settle in but when he did, he wasn’t thinking about the office in Atlanta.”
Fonda and Turner were surprisingly easygoing, Hansen says, and they took a liking to Nebraska and the people. When they would drive down the road and stop to talk to passersby in their pickups, as is the local cultural custom, Hansen said there would be a startled expression on the faces of neighbors when they saw that the passengers in the other vehicle were Turner and Fonda.
“Neighbors did double takes. I have fond memories of those days,” Hansen says. “Ted and Jane truly loved each other’s company and they were absorbing all they could about the history of the Great Plains and sympathized with the human struggles to stay on the land, from the Indians to the sodbusters into challenges of the twentieth century.”
Turner jokes that when he first dispatched Hansen to Nebraska, he sent him a copy of The Wind, a 1928 black and white film that portrays homesteaders in Texas fighting a perpetual battle against wind and sand.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 14