“He thought it was funny and in hindsight, it was,” Hansen says. “Ted respects the Sandhillers because they are a tough, tough lot. They had cattle. Ted’s brought back bison, but he admires the people who pursued their dream there. To stay on the land you have to find a way to make your tenure economically and ecologically sustainable. There’s no fooling around. That’s reality.”
For her part, Fonda enjoyed reading Willa Cather, a Nebraska novelist who, in O Pioneers!, wrote, “She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”
“Through Jane, I became much more knowledgeable about the plight of women, especially in the developing world. So many issues of poverty relate directly to how women are treated by men,” Turner says. “You can’t have a healthy society unless men embrace women as equal partners.”
In turn, Fonda says she gained an appreciation for the impulses of sportsmen. Turner and his son, Beau, and all of the ranch crews, took her under their collective wings. With Turner, she learned how to fly fish, and was gently introduced to firearms safety and how to shoot and clean a gun. She went afield and honed her aim on clay pigeons and shooting rifles at targets.
Turner joined his wife on her first hunt at the Flying D. She shot a white-tailed deer, assisted in field dressing it, and brought it back to the ranch house where she joined chef Karen Averitt in fixing venison steaks for dinner.
“I have infinitely more respect for hunters today than I ever had before I met Ted,” she says. “I had been intimidated being around guns, but I’m not afraid of them anymore. And I understand why sportsmen and sportswomen are so dedicated to defending the Second Amendment.”
“Jane is far more fearless than her critics give her credit for,” Turner says. On a corner of the Flying D, there is a rock effigy hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. Archaeologists say it served as a marker for native peoples stalking bison and wandering up and down the Rockies between the Far North and the southwestern deserts.
During one gathering there with Native American tribal elders, a bison was offered by Turner and Fonda for harvest. After it was killed, one of the traditionalists cut out its liver and dipped it in the bile sac of the beast—a ritual practiced over generations by Indians in celebration of the animal’s bounty. Turner and Fonda were invited to partake. Without hesitation, Fonda stepped forward. She never winced, Turner said. The men around her were impressed. He beamed.
“Jane is a warrior in a lot of respects,” Turner says. “She did things that could leave you surprised.”
Fonda says she came to realize why her husband could become so stir crazy in cities and had to get his regular fix of the outdoors. “It was the one thing that didn’t change. Because his childhood was so crazy and dysfunctional, the way he found solace was by going out in the woods and being alone and paying attention to whatever was around him, I think even having a conversation with it. Mostly, he went to find and watch animals. I learned from him that some of the most ardent environmentalists are hunters.”
Another first that Turner encountered in Fonda is that she called him out on things that other women in his life might have allowed to pass or would have been afraid to confront, including his occasional bouts of yelling, or speaking brashly. His own mother had been meek and submissive.
“There is a side of Ted that is totally unconscious—the projection of his father,” she says. “It rises out of him and he isn’t aware of why it exists or how it comes across.”
“I had known Jane Fonda from earlier years, so we were happy to see each other again after she had gotten together with Ted,” says former US senator Timothy Wirth, who oversees the UN Foundation. “I asked her how it was going, and she responded with her characteristic big smile and humorous comment: ‘You know, he’s the only person who has apologized more than I have.’”
Fonda caught her first flash of Turner’s combustible personality in 1991 when the Goodwill Games were being held in Seattle. Turner’s longtime executive assistant Dee Woods had made a rare faux pas in Turner’s ordinarily precise calendar.
“Ted doesn’t like being caught off guard with multiple surprises,” Fonda says. “He panicked when he discovered he was supposed to be in a couple of different venues at the same time. For a man known for speaking off the cuff, he is actually very rigid in his demand for organization.”
Stressed, Turner charged into a trailer at the Goodwill Games and snapped. He berated Woods in a way that Fonda hadn’t witnessed in him before. The rigid scheduling that he used to maintain stability in his fast-paced life had failed. He didn’t cope well in the absence of structure. And he blamed Woods, who had otherwise done an admirable job of arranging his nonstop life for years. “She was a sweet woman who looked out for him, and didn’t deserve to be treated that way,” Fonda says.
Other women in Turner’s life had observed similar outbursts. His forceful personality and his ability to deliver insulting put-downs to antagonists has intimidated many. Fonda found it to be juvenile and she wouldn’t let it pass. She pulled Turner aside and said sternly, “If this is who you are, then I don’t want to be around that person.”
No man is so high and mighty that he can justify such behavior. Turner told her that sometimes he just loses it, that it dates to frustration he coped with early in his life. Fonda informed Turner it was no excuse. “I said, ‘Ted, you don’t have to be this way,’” she explained to me. “‘You can control it if you want. No one is making you behave like a jerk.’”
Turner looks back on the incident and says Fonda was right to give him a dose of tough love. He knows that she did it because she genuinely cared for him. And he realizes she wasn’t trying to control him; she wanted to help him find solace. Like the Fastnet race when his son, Teddy, was placed in peril by his judgment, Turner is abashed.
“Jane toned Dad down,” notes Laura Turner Seydel, Turner’s eldest daughter. “He can be kind of high strung, but she made it clear that the way he behaved was a choice he made. He needed to think, in advance, about how the words that came out his mouth would be interpreted by others.”
Turner Seydel said nature was a balm for her father and Fonda. “Dad started to become a different person, a guy more fun to be around and less intense. We kids saw it happen. That’s why we all love Jane so much. She had a powerful effect on him.”
About Turner’s childhood, and how it shaped the man she married, Fonda has this to say: “Ed Turner believed that withholding love and affection was a way to induce hunger for achievement, a way to toughen Ted up, to make sure he never depended on other people. Tragically . . . Ed Turner was right.”
In retrospect, Fonda admits she made a tactical miscalculation. She believed during the middle of the marriage that she could change Turner or at least, through discussions and therapy, have Turner explore the cause of his inner pain, convince him that he could prevail over it, and move on.
“People say you can make peace with your past, but with Ted it’s not true. It is so hardwired into him that it’s part of his psyche. His ability to be heroically generous is an expression of his own need to feel loved.”
Fonda kept pushing Turner to accept that he was not responsible for the things his father had done to him. He needed to reject the curse of self-loathing that was imprinted upon him. He was not bound by any code of honor or faithfulness that required him to make excuses for Ed Turner’s behavior. The flaws in his father did not have to be his own.
“Given everything that happened to Ted when he was a child—the beatings, the psychological manipulations—like his father asking him to beat him, his mother screaming outside the door, the trauma
of his sister’s slow painful death, his father coming home drunk at night and telling Ted stories about women he had slept with who were not Ted’s mother, and Ed Turner’s suicide, which was a violent act committed against Ted—there was complete toxicity,” Fonda says. “Ted views it as a betrayal of his father to talk unkindly about him. He can’t bring himself to do it. He couldn’t in his own memoir. What he must acknowledge is that his father betrayed him—and it wasn’t his fault. He’s stuffed that psychic energy all these years. He needs to let it go.”
When Turner and Fonda became acquainted, she knew of his reputation for carousing. She told him that if they were going to continue dating, he needed to reveal himself, open himself up emotionally, and refrain from repelling any questions she had.
Turner admits that the more that Fonda pressed him, he may not have liked it, but he realized it was necessary. One of the few regrets he has is that he didn’t understand the importance of their exchange while the couple was still married.
Fonda knew from the sometimes-detached behavior of her own father and the suicide of her mother how cruel treatment from a patriarch or matriarch—a person one loves, idolizes, and craves affirmation from—can be devastating. One evening in Montana, everything about Turner’s grief spilled out.
Turner shared the story of his childhood in ways he hadn’t with other women. How he was sent away to boarding school, never developed a bond with his mother while his dad was cold and emotionally abusive, watching his sister die, and enduring years of demeaning commentary from his father, a man who told Turner he would never amount to anything. Fonda says she began to weep, yet she vividly remembers Turner not allowing himself to grieve for the absence of a loving, nurturing environment as a boy.
“Ted has a profound external capacity, a sense of compassion, for the pain and suffering of others, but he has no empathy for himself,” Fonda says. “His father drilled it into him that he should never feel sorry for himself—that he should feel ashamed to even think about doing it. He has not made peace with what happened between him and his father because he will not allow himself to go to that internal place. It’s not that he’s stubborn. He is afraid to go there for fear he will be branded weak.”
Men of his generation were told to be stoic, to reject the psychological probing that goes with therapy as a sign of weakness. The negative consequences for sons and daughters still reverberate. Turner does not deny that analysis and he discusses it today with his therapist.
On the morning when research for this book began at Turner’s Collon Cura Estancia in Argentina, Turner went into detail with me about how devastated he was on the day when he received the telephone call from Jimmy Brown, the black man hired by Ed Turner to help raise him as a boy, that his father had killed himself.
Biographers have speculated that Turner is “haunted by the ghost of his father.” Fonda believes it. Turner has a different explanation.
“Do I wonder what he would make of me now?” he asks. “Or how he might have enjoyed being out on a ranch with me, the two of us, surrounded by friends? Or having sat in the stands together at Braves games? Or seeing what happened with the SuperStation and CNN, or the issues that I am working on with some of the most brilliant minds on Earth?”
How much confidence would Ed Turner have had in his son to succeed? “That,” Fonda says, “is the open-ended question that haunts Ted.”
Turner acknowledges that his father’s lack of support drove him to be consumed by his work. Always, he has been apprehensive about the notion of “resting” because for him it means that if he slows down and looks over his shoulder, failure might be gaining on him.
“That’s what drives him to try and stay ahead,” Fonda says. “People who come from tough childhoods, who have big egos and distinguish themselves by their genius can go in two different directions. They can cause enormous harm or they can devote themselves, driven by something within, to being forces for good.”
Recently, a group of three dozen billionaires pledged to give away half of their wealth. It didn’t surprise Fonda. Turner, who was among them, personally had fulfilled the promise more than a decade earlier.
On a night in 1997, Turner announced that he was gifting $1 billion to support the mission of the United Nations. Fonda was on the other side of the country attending a different social engagement. But she had been the first person that Turner informed after he made the decision, even before he had consulted his chief financial advisor Taylor Glover on how to give away what was approaching half of his net worth. Glover was stunned but not surprised.
Fonda says, “Giving away money and getting involved in human survival issues doesn’t leave him feeling depleted of time or money. It may make him exhausted, but this is how his conscience operates. Nothing he does gives him greater satisfaction. When he told me what he planned with the UN, I cried. Why? Because I knew how selfless it was. Ted had no idea of its significance, or the impact it would have.”
Fonda and Turner were never happier together than when they spent time in the West. While each has differing versions of certain episodes in their marriage, their memories about one important event of natural history coincide exactly: the day when cranes set up a home in the pond behind their home at the Flying D and the morning when they gave lift to the first generation of native, Flying-D-hatched offspring.
They were still in their honeymoon phase, carrying on a travel schedule that seldom allowed them to be in the same place for more than a week. They had made a stopover at the Flying D and they were dozing before dawn. The yaks of magpies and the warbles of mountain bluebirds drifted in over them. Then the dim peace of dawn was interrupted by a loud squawk from the marsh just outside their window.
The sandhill pair had arrived weeks earlier, Turner says, in a wobbly glide, more like massive transport planes than fighter jets. They flew in tandem, necks extended forward, legs pointed behind. And they hung around, making it clear they were not moving on, engaging in a courtship dance and gravitating toward an island mound. The water around them served as protection. Then they made a nest.
Turner and Fonda pored over birding and natural history books, reading information to one another out loud. They delighted in knowing that these summering birds were likely spending their winters at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge along the Rio Grande River in New Mexico. The refuge happens to be at the northern end of a ranch Turner would soon acquire, the massive Armendaris. The information gave the couple and the birds a connection at both ends of the flyway, and to the crane stopovers in Nebraska.
Turner and Fonda pondered the dimensions of the journey, becoming acutely aware of the remarkable spectacle of the great north to south migrations involving billions of avians across the continent.
The cranes built a nest bed from dried wild grass, pieces of plumage, twigs, and mud. The couple was riveted by the process. Dinner guests were regaled with details of avian minutiae, and would take turns peering into the spotting scope as Turner and Fonda offered naturalist descriptions of what they were observing. Some jokingly referred to it as another episode of “Ted and Jane’s wild adventure.”
One evening recently in his living room at the Flying D surrounded by guests, Turner waxed for an extended period on the life cycle of cranes, describing the patterns of migration involving lesser and greater sandhills.
“I know enough that I could write a book about cranes,” he says of visits he’s made to Bosque del Apache and to the Platte River where the largest migratory concentration of cranes occurs. “I’ve studied them. I understand their behavior. They’re one of my favorite birds.”
When the first crane chick hatched, Turner was ecstatic because it proved to him that if he protected or enhanced habitat through a manufactured waterhole, wildlife would somehow find it.
Cranes are famously attentive parents. The mother or father is always there to kee
p the eggs warmed and covered against the elements while the other goes foraging and stands at the ready to engage intruders. From a distance, the human onlookers had a front row seat, concerned about predators and aerial scavengers, threats that included ravens, golden eagles, black birds, and prowling the shore, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, weasels, and skunks. The mother and father cranes, aware of the menaces, stood vigilant guard for weeks.
Then on that day in June, Turner and Fonda were awakened. After the single crack of motherly astonishment, they remember the primordial cooing, the “unison calling.”
With the sun climbing over hills, the first beams hit the wings of the birds and cast them in a bright pearlescent glow. Fonda says she looked at her husband and he had tears in his eyes. Seeing that, she cried, too. They held each other for a long moment, saying nothing.
“That’s the soft, sweet spot of Ted Turner,” she explains.
“I never felt like I had to hold it in,” Turner says of sharing the moment with Fonda.
Not long after the first sandhill hatched, the other egg was pushed out of the nest unhatched. Not uncommon behavior for adult cranes, given the challenges of raising young. The chick fledged the nest and grew under the watch of its guardians before it was forced to fend for itself. In the fall, all three birds departed.
Except for a few seasons, cranes have continued to nest at the pond. Yet in the late 1990s, and before they separated as a couple, Turner and Fonda remember a lone crane returning. It appeared to be searching.
Turner isn’t trying to be melodramatic or sappy. He’s not trying to make too much out of it. But when he thinks about his marriage, the cranes sometime come to mind. “Only half of the pair came back in the spring,” he says. “Somehow one crane had gotten separated from its mate and came back to the pond to rendezvous. But the other sandhill never showed up.”
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 15