ATLANTA, 19 June — The walls of Ted Turner’s international headquarters, 14 floors above downtown Atlanta, are lined with Oscar statuettes. If you try to pick one up — to brandish aloft, for example, the actual best-production award for Casablanca — you will discover that they are all firmly bolted to their glass display shelves, and Turner’s aides, who pace the floors crackling with nervous energy, will break their frowns for just long enough to laugh at you.
Turner isn’t frowning, though. “Great Britain, huh?” barks the 63-year-old multibillionaire founder of CNN, former champion sailor, Rhett Butler lookalike and record-breaking philanthropist, bolting out from behind his desk with such force that he almost dislodges the best-picture Oscar for Gone With the Wind, which he seems to use as a paperweight. His famous pencil moustache is silver now, impeccably kept, and it twitches and leaps every time he smiles, which he does a lot — in amusement, but also in exasperation at conflict in the Middle East, impending environmental catastrophe, everything. “We’ve met, haven’t we? No? Huh. Great Britain. Let me tell you something.
I’ve got some great paintings of the Battle of Trafalgar... “
The smiles seem particularly out of place because Turner has just emerged from the worst two years of his life - years that he has said left him feeling “suicidal”. In spring 2000, he was suddenly sidelined from the broadcasting company he had built from scratch, kicked from the driver’s seat into a meaningless advisory position by means of a fax message. Then his wife of eight years, the actress Jane Fonda, came home one night — the way he tells it — and informed him that she was now a born-again Christian; they divorced last year.
Two of his grandchildren developed a rare genetic disorder, and one died. Turner’s friends said he was inconsolable.
Then, just when he felt it could get no worse, he brought the wrath of America upon himself by telling students in a speech in Rhode Island that the Sept. 11 hijackers had been “brave”. He was stung into silence. “Where’s the upside in opening your mouth?” he says now, scissoring himself into an armchair overlooking the city, the shelves behind him crammed with more than 140 plaques and trophies.
“It’s kinda nice to keep quiet at a time when everybody else is telling everybody what to do.”
Instead, he threw himself into his charity work, which is dizzying stuff in itself: he pledged $1 billion to the United Nations in 1997 and helped pay off the $34 million it was owed by the US in 2000. Turner’s UN Foundation, the biggest of his three charities, recently spent $22.2 million in one month combating intestinal parasites in Vietnamese children, reducing China’s greenhouse-gas emissions and helping women from Burkina Faso start businesses selling nut butter. “But I’m trying to force myself to relax,” he says.
He has just got in from Argentina, he explains, where he owns “a couple of ranches” — rather an understatement, since he has 128,000 acres there and 1.8 million in the US, making him America’s largest individual landowner. “When I was young and ocean-racing competitively, and working the rest of the time, I was going 24 hours. I was on the verge of collapsing. But you’ve got to slow down a bit. That’s what I’m finding from my... “ - and here he punctuates his sentence with the weirdly drawn-out “awwww” sound he uses instead of “um” or “er” — “from my personal experiment with life.”
Nigel Pritchard, CNN’s head of international public relations, who is sitting beside me, has prepared a memo outlining some things his boss might like to consider not saying. Craning my neck, I see that it politely suggests that he might steer clear of talking about AOL Time Warner, the company resulting from the merger of the internet firm AOL with the company that Turner Broadcasting was already part of. And, specifically, he might like to avoid reference to that Rhode Island speech. Nigel is only doing his job, but I suspect that he knows this part of it was never going to be very effective: Turner is notorious for doing as he pleases. Early in his career, he made a pitch wearing no clothes to advertising executives; later, he caused controversy by travelling to Cuba to get Fidel Castro to tape a promotional slot for CNN. “I made an unfortunate choice of words!” he cries when the subject of the Rhode Island speech is raised. “I chose, accidentally, to say that they were brave. That was a mistake. Because brave — it’s the home of the brave here. And the home of the Braves!” (Turner owns the Atlanta Braves baseball team.) “All right! I use that word so often, it just pops out. It’s on the top of my mind because I’ve owned the team for 25 years. I sing the song every time.”
He leans forward as if sharing a secret, except that his voice, amplified by encroaching deafness, never quietens. “Look, I’m a very good thinker, but I sometimes grab the wrong word. I say something I didn’t think through adequately. I mean, I don’t type my speeches, then sit up there and read them off the teleprompter, you know. I wing it.”
Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, is reported to have thought that Turner was playing a prank when he offered to spend $1 billion on the beleaguered organization. Nothing could have been further from the truth: in his various world-saving projects — everything from preventing the extinction of the Chiricahua leopard frog in the wilds of New Mexico to founding an influential nuclear non-proliferation institute — Turner really does seem to see himself as locked in a personal, elemental battle against apocalypse. “I’m doing everything I can to try and avert disaster while we kind of give us a little time to get our act together, because in time we’ll have to do it,” he says. “Either that, or, you know... it’s goodbye.”
He doesn’t just give money: his staff are sometimes taken aback to see him skulking in the streets nearby, picking up litter.
Turner has always lacked a statesman-like gravitas in his philanthropy, and in his universe, it turns out, environmental apocalypse is basically like sport. “It’s like baseball,” he says, but he is too polite not to cater to his audience. “Or we could use soccer. We’re down by one goal, with 10 minutes left to play. Well, the game’s not over. But we’re gonna have to not let the opposition score any more, and we’re gonna have to get at least one more goal, and preferably two, to win the game. That’s where we are right now,” he says, careening recklessly into a pool analogy. “We’re right behind the eight ball.”
He is baffled, enraged, driven to louder and louder pronouncements and bigger smiles of confusion by the fact that nobody else seems to be thinking about these matters at the moment, embroiled as we are in the war on terrorism. “But right now, aren’t the Israelis and the Palestinians both terrorizing each other?” he says, as Pritchard starts scribbling furiously on his notepad. “It looks to me like they’re both doing it. When the Brits retaliated for the Germans, for the, awwww, Krauts... for the Nazis bombing London by bombing Berlin, weren’t you both terrorizing each other? The rich and the powerful, they don’t need to resort to terrorism... The Palestinians are fighting with human bombers; that’s all they have. The Israelis... they’ve got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism.”
But Pritchard is writing at warp speed now, and there has always been a part of Turner that wants to please everyone, including his worried public-relations staff. “The United States, I think,” he says, pulling himself together, “would probably not be considered a terrorist example at the current time.”
It must get depressing, I say, to dedicate so much time to issues that seem to have faded from the agenda. And so much money: when Turner gave his first billion to the UN, he dropped 67 places on the Forbes 500 rich list, out of the top 10 for ever. (His fortune now stands at $3.8 billion.) Even with his resources, he must feel powerless now compared with when he sat astride the world”s biggest media conglomerate. Does he ever feel hopeless? “I remember, many years ago, at the height of the cold war, I was down the Amazon with (the explorer) Jacques Cousteau, and I had a hopeless thought, and I said, “Jacques, I don’t think we’re gonna make it.” And he said, “What difference does it make? What else can we do?”
Then he is suddenly quiet. “It is depressing,” he says softly. “The Middle East, the environment, all these things - it is depressing.” He turns his head away and his lips start pursing and unpursing, mashing his moustache. The skin around his eyes turns red, and he blinks, and it becomes apparent that Ted Turner is crying. “It is depressing,” he says again.
But it lasts only moments, and he is soon arching forward again, outlining his solutions. One of these has always been a spirited internationalism that can seem a little goofy these days — the simple benefits of getting to know your enemies instead of raising the barricades against them. CNN gained a reputation in parts of Europe as a sinister force of American imperialism, but in fact it has always dripped with this let’s-all-get-along ethic, and Turner says his greatest pleasure, back when he had full control of the channel, was in “ordering them to cover this or that UN conference from gavel to gavel”.
It is the same with his theory of diplomacy. “The worst thing you can do if you want to start a fight is to use derogatory terminology,” he says. “You go into a bar in Britain and say, ‘I don’t like you blokes’ — you’re gonna get punched in the nose, right? Whammo! You know — ‘Britain stinks. Does anybody wanna defend it?’
Whammo! Right? I mean, it’s easy to start a war if you want to.”
It isn’t hard to see how Turner’s childhood might have instilled this sense of permanent crisis, of desperate insecurity, behind the frenzied activity that is his trademark. His father, from whom he inherited an advertising business that he turned into CNN, was prone to fits of rage, and beat him with a coathanger; he committed suicide when Turner was 24. Even before that, his younger sister had died from an immune disease when she was 12, and Ted was sent to a boarding school he hated.
His father, he has said, not without admiration, believed that in stilling insecurity in his son would help him to achieve. All in all, Turner seems to have been a well-qualified candidate for total psychic collapse. “But when everything goes wrong,” he says today, “you can either give up or you can try to fight. I tried to fight.”
Initially, he really did want to fight: “When I was a little kid there was this book called A Yank in the RAF (Britain”s Royal Air Force). That’s what I wanted to be. A Yank in the RAF. The Battle of Britain! Biggin Hill! A Spitfire — I was gonna take off and shoot the Krauts out of the sky... but I was born in 38. By the time I was seven, the war was already over. And I saw what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima and London, I saw the little kids shaking and being put on the trains and sent to the countryside. I thought families ought to be able to live in their houses and not have to worry about bombs falling from the sky.”
He says he didn’t seem to think he could live with Fonda once she converted.
“But I don’t really want to talk about all that,” he says. “It’s personal.” He’s now seeing an old flame, a Frenchwoman called Frederique d’Arragon. “She’s been, awwww, a part of my life for a long time,” he says sheepishly. After a brief spell in the armed forces, he plowed his energies into his father’s billboard business, purchasing a radio station and using empty billboards to advertise it. His radio empire grew, and expanded to local television.
By 1980, he was launching CNN, although it was not until the Gulf war that the often-derided channel came into its own. (The Guardian)
