by Jane Fonda
By the way, if you eat at one of Ted’s Montana Grills around the country (which I strongly recommend), you’ll see items like Karen’s “Flyin’ D” Bison Chili on the menu.
Some of the most precious memories I have of my time with Ted are those of the predawn hours, rowing with our dogs out to a duck blind in the ACE Basin of South Carolina, past the falling-down old rice mill and cabins from the days of rice plantations and slavery; waiting in the blind for the sun to come up; listening to the dogs’ teeth chatter, partly from cold and partly from excitement; the sounds of the forest coming to life behind us; the gray mists lingering in the tall pines; and the pale pinks and mauves of dawn reflected in the shallow marsh waters. I remember during morning quail hunts in the woods at Avalon how the sun shone through the beads of dew that hung on spiderwebs, turning them into glimmering tiaras and the sulphur butterflies fanning the velvet air and alighting briefly on spires of lespedeza; Ted rowing me slowly through the Tai Tai canal through the swamps at Hope Plantation in South Carolina’s ACE Basin, where the swampy, brackish water was so dark and still that in my photographs I couldn’t tell which was real and which was the reflection of reality; Ted knowing that the orange streak that had just gone by was a summer tanager; Ted knowing where the pair of bald eagles was nesting (he had a pair on every property, it seemed).
It was as though all the critters knew that the land was in the hands of someone who cared about them, so they came. A pair of sandhill cranes made their nest on an island Ted had created in the lake in front of our house on the Flying D Ranch. One morning we woke to a shrill cry and immediately Ted sat up in bed and said, “It’s the crane! Her egg has hatched.” He was right, and I loved him for his knowing. He knew his animals, especially his birds. No matter which part of the country we were in, Ted could always recognize every bird on the wing—and he knew their mating and nesting habits. He wasn’t as conversant in wildflowers, so I decided I would become the expert in that field. I spent our first years together with eyes focused earthward or with my nose in one of my many flower books, picking, pressing, and identifying every new one I found. Within three years I had hundreds of them mounted, some very rare, and as we rode our horses through the ever changing landscapes I relished being able to identify them for him. I had found a wonderful way to do “my thing” within the context of Ted’s life.
Another creative project I took up was photographing his properties. I wanted to become deeply familiar with all of them, so I decided I would try to capture the essence of each one and then create albums called Homes Sweet Homes for Ted and each of his children. Within a few years, as the properties began to expand in number, what I thought would be a one-album-per-person job became a five-album-per-person travail.
Every one of my projects caused friction with Ted. He felt abandoned, said it was a way for me to avoid intimacy (he was partly right), and called me a workaholic—while I thought of myself as needing a creative outlet and felt, as Mark Twain once said, that “really a man’s own work is play and not work at all.” I tried hard to understand Ted’s neediness, so I’d reluctantly cut back. But I refused to give up my pastimes entirely, especially since (unbeknownst to him, or to me at the time), I had given up things far more important. Like my voice.
Ted is the only person I know who has had to apologize more than I have. He has apologized to Christians, Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, the antichoice people, and the pope. He’s an equal opportunity offender. He can’t help himself; like a child, he often seems at the mercy of his impulses. It’s a rare occurrence when something enters his head that doesn’t come out of his mouth.
Like the time he was making a very important appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Time Warner was represented on the Turner board of directors and was preventing Ted from buying a major broadcast network to add to his cable empire, and he felt this would keep him from competing with other media conglomerates like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Disney, and Viacom. At the same time he was in major negotiations on a TBS merger with Time Warner: One false move and everything could fall apart. I was too nervous to sleep the night before. Not Ted. As usual, he hadn’t prepared and had made no notes; but like his hero Alexander the Great, he always slept well on the eve of battle.
On the day of the speech all the journalists who packed the hall were aware that it was a precarious time. So imagine their shock (and mine) when in the midst of the speech he said, “Millions of women have their clitorises cut off before they are ten or twelve years old, so they can’t have fun in sex. . . . Between fifty percent and eighty percent of Egyptian girls have their clits cut off. . . . Talk about barbaric mutilation . . . I’m being clitorized by Time Warner.” Some people laughed; others were too stunned. Many looked over at me. I simply slid down in my seat. Hey, it wasn’t my idea.
Several years later Ted would give an unprecedented $1 billion to establish the United Nations Foundation. Over the years many large grants from the foundation have gone to stop FGM (female genital mutilation). You can’t say he doesn’t put his money where his mouth is.
Certainly the most public part of my new life with Ted was our attendance at the Braves games. In the fall of 1991, right before we got married, the Atlanta Braves played in their first World Series. I can’t remember ever being on such a protracted adrenaline high or so superstitious: If I had a Band-Aid on my index finger during a winning game, I’d make sure it was there for the next one. Same with underwear, earrings, and caps. I began a personal collection of winning Braves caps that people gave me, and for the Braves’ victorious 1995 World Series, I was wearing my all-time good-luck black-and-white coat made from bison hair. Plenty of things he’d done in his life justified his celebrity, but none guaranteed Ted’s standing as folk hero to Atlantans like his having stuck with the Braves and brought home a winner.
During the first year of our going steady, besides traveling with the team during baseball season, we crisscrossed the globe constantly, visiting the Soviet Union, Europe, Asia, and Greece as Ted’s various undertakings demanded his presence. I had been in many of the places before and had had my own experiences there, but being on the arm of Ted Turner made it different. With a few noticeable exceptions the spotlight was always on him. He was the one who did the speaking and was feted and celebrated, and although people at CNN used to say that I was the first woman in Ted’s life who had a talking role, it was definitely a supporting one. Sometimes I would feel invisible and frustrated, as when he would give a speech about something that was important to both of us without having prepared and would, in my opinion, end up rambling.
Occasionally, though, the tables were turned, like the time we met with President Mikhail Gorbachev in his office in the Kremlin. During the half hour the three of us spent together, the president spent a good chunk of our time talking to me. As we left Ted whispered, “You know, that was a very unusual situation for me.”
Ted getting carried away during “Auld Lang Syne” at the start of a Braves game. Left to right: Nancy McGuirk, Ted, me, President Carter, Jennie Turner, over the president’s shoulder, and Rosalynn Carter with her back turned.
(AP/Wide World Photos)
1995 in San Francisco at the State of the World Forum with President Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev.
(AP/Wide World Photos)
“It’s not easy, is it?” I replied. “I know. I feel like a tagalong all the time these days and I’m not used to it, either. I’m willing to settle into this new role, but it must be hard when it happens to you, too.”
Fortunately we were getting better at talking about our feelings, so instead of pouting or pretending it hadn’t happened, Ted was able to regale listeners with the story of how he had spent twenty-eight minutes staring at Gorbachev’s back.
I was learning a valuable lesson: When you confront problems and work them through, what might have been a rupture becomes stronger at the broken place. It is analogous to bodybuilding: When you lift weights to build muscle,
you cause microscopic tears to occur in the muscle tissue, and when the tears heal (it takes forty-eight hours) the torn places become stronger. Still, much of me remained a handmaiden to my insecurities. My long-standing fear of not being good enough kept me feeling that if he knew me fully, he couldn’t possibly love me. What this meant was that I was willing to forfeit my authenticity to be in a relationship with him.
Often at business receptions I would stand silently by Ted’s side, listening to men in the highest echelons of power discuss how much better things were in, say, Brazil or some other less-developed country I had visited, and I would think, Haven’t they seen the favelas? The slums? People see what they need and want to see. I realized that these men, these makers of policy, designers of structural adjustments, and rationalizers for conflict, cannot allow themselves to see any consequences of their policies that might shake their certainty that they are doing the right thing. The bar girls, the boys and girls who prostitute themselves to feed their families, the women who earn $1 a day in U.S. maquiladoras in Mexico, the desperate gangs of youth, the garbage pickers, the displaced farmers—these brutal realities pass under the radar of liberal academe, of the economists and social scientists who sip their champagne and praise themselves about the great job they’ve done in Central and South America, or wherever.
Were it not for Ted, I wouldn’t have been at such gatherings. They gave me indigestion. But because they involved Ted’s businesses I never felt I could say, “But people have been really harmed by those policies you are praising. Don’t you see that?” Afterward I would often tell Ted about my discomfort, but he would never fully engage. There’s a Horatio Alger side to Ted: Anyone can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (making those who don’t feel that it’s their own fault). I think it pains him too deeply to countenance the possibility that while there are Horatio Alger–type successes in the United States, they aren’t frequent enough to matter. Structural inequities are too ingrained and too invisible.
While traveling the world with Ted, I realized the historic importance of what he had done, how his revolutionary vision for twenty-four-hour news had transformed the planet into Marshall McLuhan’s global village and changed news reporting forever—rather remarkable for a man who hadn’t liked watching the news because he found it depressing. I learned that all the big news companies had researched whether or not a twenty-four-hour news channel would work. Their research said it wouldn’t. As usual, Ted plunged ahead, sans polls or research, relying only on instinct.
It amazed me how in America people bemoaned television as a passive medium for so long, yet when a swashbuckler from Atlanta—a romantic renegade with a global vision—turned the passive medium into a more democratic and empowering one, people had difficulty with it. We forget how it was at the beginning with CNN. Maybe it was easier for audiences when news was predigested and all the seeds and stems were disposed of; maybe having news as raw material made them work too hard.
It’s strangely analogous to what I had seen happening in Eastern Europe in 1990 when I visited there right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and after the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Under the Communist system, people had had everything decided for them by the government- and by state-run institutions, and when the possibility of democracy came along, forcing them to participate and make choices, they didn’t have such an easy time adjusting. I remember meeting a lyricist in Prague who said to me, “I’ve spent my life writing words for people who have grown adept at reading between the lines. Now we can write clearly and I’m not sure I know how.”
When Desert Storm, the first Gulf War, began in 1991, Ted’s dreams for world peace received a blow. He got physically sick. Like so many Americans, both of us had hoped that the winding down of the cold war would see a commensurate cutting of the military budget, freeing up funds for domestic and peacetime needs. It was a sad time, yet it was exciting to watch Ted’s responses to crises.
Tom Johnson, former publisher of the Los Angeles Times, had just become president of CNN. The second day he was on the job, we were at the Flying D when Tom phoned from Atlanta to say that he had just gotten three calls—from President George H. W. Bush, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell, and press secretary Marlin Fitzwater—asking him to order the CNN reporters out of Baghdad “immediately.” It was clear, Tom went on, that Operation Desert Storm was about to begin. From what he had been told, Tom was convinced that Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett were in imminent danger, and he wanted them out. He explained what he knew to Ted, who replied, “Tom, those who want to stay [in Baghdad] will stay. Those who want to come out can come out.” Then, shouting into the phone, he said, “Tom, you will not overturn me on this, pal. You understand me? I will take complete responsibility for this decision. If they die, it will be on my conscience, not yours.” Ted and Tom had to resist very strong pressure from Washington, but if Peter Arnett had not stayed in Baghdad, the alternate (and real) view of the war—which represented a total revolution in TV war coverage and was certainly the defining moment for CNN—would never have occurred.
This gave me a bird’s-eye view of how good Ted is in tough times. He has an easy, confident feel for when and how much to risk. It’s not that he’s unafraid. The bravest soldiers aren’t unafraid, but they’re the ones who are able to harness their fear on behalf of courage. In the years that I was with him, I saw numerous circumstances when Ted was able to mobilize courage, weigh priorities, and then make the winning decision. He’s often played it close to the edge. I guess it’s similar to sailing close to the wind. I wasn’t with Ted when he sailed competitively, but I’m told that whenever he’d take the helm he’d find a way to go just a little faster, cut it a little closer, although his competitors were hours (or even days) behind him.
“Hope for the best and prepare for the worst” is a homily very much at the center of how Ted lives his life. It’s why he would have made a great general. His troops would have followed him into any battle, as his sailing crews did, because they would know that no foolish risks would be taken; everything would have been thought through, every option weighed, and he would never ask his men to do something that he himself wasn’t willing to do. I think that it was his studies of the classics, which teach clear, strategic thinking; his familiarity with the major battles of history; and his competitive sailing that honed these skills so finely. Ted was a sailor of large boats. This is important. Smaller boats require brawn. Big boats require brains: knowing how to build a winning team and how to empower them; how to envision all the things that could happen and to be prepared for any eventuality.
When his company merged with Time Warner in 1995, I watched Ted begin to create an alternate life for himself. He had already started down that path, but now he was far more intentional about building his bison herd, increasing his landholdings and his philanthropy, and not wanting his future to be totally circumscribed by Turner Broadcasting in the event that his new boss, Gerald Levin, decided to drive him out of his own company. When his worst fears materialized, everything was already in place for him to be a full-time rancher, philanthropist, and restaurateur. Ted’s Montana Grill, where his bison meat is the star attraction, is providing this entrepreneur with a whole new arena in which to work his magic.
What I didn’t anticipate was how Ted’s “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” dictum could apply to our marriage. That would come later. Seven years later, to be exact.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A CALLING
Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL,
Hero with a Thousand Faces
Any single path truly taken leads to all the others. Even then, you will find that outward and inward become the same direction. The center of the wheel is everywhere.
—ROBIN MORGAN,
The Burning Time
&n
bsp; IT STARTED BECAUSE I wanted to be a responsible trustee of Ted’s family foundation. It resulted in my discovering my calling.
I had been with Ted only a short time when he decided to create the Turner Foundation and focus its grant making on protecting the environment and reducing population growth: Growing numbers of people on a small planet with finite resources spells trouble, not just for the environment but for the human species as well, since a healthy environment is our life support system.
While I understood environmental issues, the population part was a little fuzzy—not the reason it is a problem, but what to do about it. Whenever he spoke publicly (and privately), Ted hammered away relentlessly about how population growth was the central problem of our time. He would recite statistics: 840 million people go hungry every night and 2 billion are chronically malnourished; 1 billion people try to live on less than $1 a day and another billion on less than $2; more than 2 billion people lack basic sanitation; 1 billion do not have access to clean water, adequate housing, or rudimentary health care. This was his mantra.
Often, when I had pounded away about an issue, the press would label me strident and shrill. “Nag, Nag, Nag” was the title of one Life magazine article about me. Ted, it seemed, was simply considered “passionate.” He was, and is, and his passion led me to study the issue of population in earnest to try to figure out a strategy. As I delved deeper I saw that population growth was a more complicated and divisive issue than I had realized: On the one extreme were those who thought the problem was not the number of human beings but inequitable distribution of resources; there were those who believed that technological breakthroughs would mitigate against growth in population; there were those who were concerned because they foresaw a world where people of color would dominate white people; and there were those who approached the issue solely from an environmental standpoint and favored setting quotas. I was confused by the argument from feminist groups that the population problem was, at its core, a gender issue. To be honest, in my heart of hearts I still saw gender issues as a distraction. All this was about to change.