The Fax That Came to New Mexico
In the spring of 2000, on a five-hundred-and-eighty-thousand-acre ranch in New Mexico — a property so vast it could swallow a midsize European principality — Ted Turner received a five-page fax. He had invited friends out to the high desert, among them
John Malone, the chairman of Liberty Media, a man who understood power and its withdrawal as well as anyone in American business. The fax was a press release from AOL Time Warner announcing a new management structure. It awarded Turner one of two vice-chairmanships and "the additional title of Senior Advisor." What the fax did not say, in the bloodless bureaucratic prose of corporate reorganization, was that his five-year contract to manage Turner Broadcasting had been abrogated a year early, that the cable networks he had willed into existence — CNN, TNT, Turner Classic Movies, TBS Superstation, the Cartoon Network — would no longer report to him, and that the company bearing his name had been handed to Robert Pittman, the chief operating officer of AOL. Malone watched Turner read the document. "Ted went white," Malone recalled. "He was very upset. He thought it was extremely bad behavior for them to do it that way." Malone offered the only honest counsel available: "You can sue, but you won't get your job back. You'll just get money."
The man who went white that afternoon had, over the preceding quarter-century, assembled a portfolio of achievements that bordered on the preposterous. He had transformed a money-losing UHF station in Atlanta into the first national cable "Superstation." He had invented twenty-four-hour television news. He had skippered Courageous to victory in the 1977 America's Cup, swigging aquavit until his shirt came off. He had bought the Atlanta Braves for $10 million, run onto the field to lead fans in "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," and used the team as programming fodder for an empire worth billions. He had acquired the MGM film library — more than thirty-five hundred motion pictures — and spun it into new cable networks that multiplied under his competitors' noses. He had pledged a billion dollars to the United Nations before it was fashionable for billionaires to make such gifts. He was America's largest individual landowner, with nearly two million acres across nine states and Argentina — the rough equivalent of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. He had been Time's Man of the Year.
And now a fax machine in the desert was telling him it was over.
"'Vice-chairman' is usually a title you give to somebody you can't figure out what else to do with," Turner said afterward. He likened himself to a monarch. He was sixty-two years old, and the kingdom had been dissolved by memorandum.
By the Numbers
The Turner Empire
~2MAcres owned across 22 properties in 9 states and Argentina
$1BPledged to the United Nations in 1997
$300MCNN annual profit at its peak under Turner's influence
$5.4BJunk-bond-financed offer for CBS in 1985
$1.5BPurchase price of MGM studio and film library
$10MPrice paid for the Atlanta Braves in 1976
55,000Bison on Turner ranches by 2013
The Wire Coat Hanger and the Forty-Nine Dollars
The first word Robert Edward Turner III uttered was not "mama" or "dada" but "pretty." The detail persists because Turner himself repeats it, and because it sits so oddly against everything that followed — the bellowing, the aquavit, the profane charm, the coat-hanger beatings.
He was born in 1938 in Cincinnati, the first child of Robert Edward (Ed) Turner Jr. and his dutiful wife. Ed Turner ran a successful outdoor-advertising company and was propelled by the memory of his own father, a Mississippi cotton farmer who lost his farm in the Depression and, refusing to declare bankruptcy, became a sharecropper instead. The downward trajectory haunted Ed. Often he would warn his son that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman were Communists and that the Communists would take over America and execute anyone with more than fifty dollars in his pocket. For years, Ted never carried around more than forty-nine dollars.
Ed Turner was a charming, gifted salesman who was on the road or at work far more than he was at home. He was also frequently drunk and given to sudden rages. When Ted disobeyed, his father would untwist a wire coat hanger until it was straight, like a whip, and beat his son, exclaiming, "This hurts me more than it does you." When this failed to break the boy, Ed reversed the punishment — pulling down his own pants, lying down, and ordering Ted to administer the lashings. With tears streaming down his cheeks, the boy obeyed. "It was the most painful thing I ever did in my entire life," Turner recalled, crediting his father with understanding that "that would be a more effective punishment than him beating me."
When Ed joined the Navy during the Second World War, the family relocated to the Gulf Coast — except for Ted, who was left with his grandmother and eventually sent to boarding school in Cincinnati at an age when other boys were being tucked in. He was miserable, impossible to control, suspended. The family moved to Savannah, Georgia, around the time Ted was ten. Ed Turner, intent on obedience, became more formal, replacing hugs with handshakes. He dispatched his son to the Georgia Military Academy, outside Atlanta, and then to the McCallie School's military program in Chattanooga. "I was hurt," Turner said. "I didn't want to go off so young. It was like a prison. You couldn't leave the campus. There was a bell when you got out of bed in the morning and a bell to go to meals, and a bell to go to bed at night. And there were no parents there — no mom, no dad."
Yet Turner defends and even romanticizes his father's cruelty. "He thought that people who were insecure worked harder, and I think that's probably true," he said. "I don't think I ever met a superachiever who wasn't insecure to some degree. A superachiever is somebody that's never satisfied."
The insight is too clean, too neatly resolved. But Turner delivered it often enough that it functioned as operating code — a way to transmute abandonment into fuel without having to call it what it was.
The God That Failed
By his mid-teens, Ted Turner had decided to become a missionary. He was religious, earnest in the way that children of punishing fathers sometimes are — seeking a divine parent to replace the earthly one. Then his sister Mary Jane, three years younger, contracted systemic lupus erythematosus at twelve. The disease attacked her body's own tissue. She was racked with pain and constantly vomiting; her screams filled the house. Ted came home regularly to hold her hand. He prayed for her recovery. She prayed to die. After years of misery, she succumbed at seventeen.
"I was taught that God was love and God was powerful," Turner said, "and I couldn't understand how someone so innocent should be made or allowed to suffer so."
The loss destroyed his faith and, in the vacuum, planted something else. "I decided I wanted to be a success." He took up boxing — not because he was gifted at it, but because "I could take punishment." He won the state high-school debating championship. He became an accomplished sailor. These were, in a sense, the same skill: the capacity to absorb blows and keep talking.
Ed Turner was constantly giving instructions — where Ted should work during summers, whom he should date, how he should save for college tuition. When Ted was home, his father charged him room and board. Expecting his son to attend Harvard, Ed was displeased by the rejection letter. Ted was accepted at Brown, which mollified his father only briefly. According to Robert and Gerald Jay Goldberg's
Citizen Turner, he was not much of a student. He gambled. He kept a rifle in his dormitory room and occasionally poked it out the window and fired off a round. He argued loudly in defense of the South, of war as a mechanism for ridding the planet of the weak, of nationalism generally. He delighted in irritating liberal sensibilities. He was named best freshman sailor in New England. He was eventually expelled for smuggling a coed into his room — which was really just the last straw.
When Ted chose to major in classics, his father wrote a letter so extraordinary that Ted brought it to the Brown student newspaper, which published it anonymously:
I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a Major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today. ... I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me.
The letter is remarkable not only for its venom but for its odd literary quality — the image of Aristotle as an "old bastard," the billboard baron from Podunk bellying up to the bar. Ed Turner was a better writer than he knew. His son, expelled and chastened, went home and entered the billboard business. "I liked the advertising business," Ted said. Father and son were alike in more ways than either could have comfortably acknowledged. Both were persuasive and headstrong. Both viewed seduction as conquest. Both were self-centered. Both were political conservatives. Both liked whiskey. Both battled depression. And both had unsuccessful marriages.
The Pistol and the Spreadsheet
In 1962, Ed Turner made the boldest business decision of his career, paying $4 million for the Atlanta, Richmond, and Roanoke divisions of General Outdoor Advertising. Instantly, Turner Advertising became the foremost outdoor-advertising company in the South. Ted was elated. But Ed was strangely morose, terrified that he lacked the resources to absorb the acquisition. He checked himself into Silver Hill, a psychiatric hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, and from there placed a panicky call to a friend in the outdoor-advertising business, pressing him to buy back the divisions for the amount they had cost him. The friend, not wanting to take advantage, threw in a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus.
Ed Turner could not shake his depression. "I don't want to hurt anybody," he wrote to his wife. "I just feel like I've lost my guts."
On March 5, 1963, Ed Turner had breakfast with his wife, went upstairs, placed a .38-caliber silver pistol in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. He was fifty-three.
Ted was twenty-four. He later told the biographer Christian Williams that they "had terrible, terrible fights. It was after one of those fights — we disagreed about how the business should be run — that he blew his brains out." The message was lacerating on two frequencies: Ed Turner had abandoned his dream of business glory because he felt inadequate, and his son — somehow, obscurely — might have been the reason. For all that, Ted Turner says he lost his "best friend."
In the weeks after the suicide, Turner was distraught yet astonishingly focused. He told his father's advisers and bankers that Ed had not known what he was doing when he resold the divisions; that he, Ted, would sue if necessary to reclaim them; and that he was prepared to run the entire enterprise. His ferocity and his mastery of the numbers were impressive. The bankers came through with loans. The friend sold back the divisions. The twenty-four-year-old who never carried more than forty-nine dollars in his pocket had inherited the biggest billboard company in the South and was already dreaming beyond it.
As Turner wrote in
Call Me Ted: "Turner Advertising Company was already one of the largest billboard companies in the south when my father put together a deal that would make it the biggest." The deal nearly destroyed Ed Turner. It became the foundation on which his son built everything else.
The Rabbit and the Wolves
Turner's metaphor for himself was a rabbit — "a rabbit that's small and fast. All my big competitors were like a pack of wolves, and they were all chasing me, but I was fast enough to be out in front of them." The image is revealing for what it leaves out: rabbits, of course, are prey animals. The speed comes from terror.
Five years after Ed's suicide, in 1968, Ted bought a Chattanooga radio station, WAPO. Within a year he had acquired stations in Jacksonville and Charleston. In 1970 he made the move that bewildered everyone in the industry — purchasing Channel 17 in Atlanta, a money-losing UHF station whose staff of about thirty employees earned, for many, thirty dollars a week and all they could eat. He changed its call letters from WJRJ to WTCG. "Working in UHF television at that time was like being in the French Foreign Legion," recalled Terry McGuirk, a Middlebury College student hired by Turner the summer after his junior year. McGuirk — who would become Turner's most faithful lieutenant, eventually rising to chairman of Turner Broadcasting — started by selling ads for a station hemorrhaging $50,000 a month.
Turner charmed and wheedled to get advertisers. He programmed "The Mickey Mouse Club," Three Stooges movies, and every sports event he could find. News was alien to the man who would become identified with CNN — too negative, he complained — and was initially aired only in early-morning hours. Profits were slim. He borrowed heavily. The consensus was that he had been outsmarted.
But he wanted a national network. In 1975, Gerald Levin of Home Box Office — then a regional cable service owned by Time Inc. that offered movies to subscribers — demonstrated that HBO could become a national pay-TV network by distributing its signal over the newly launched RCA satellite. All cable operators needed was a thirty-foot dish costing about $100,000. Turner saw the same opportunity from the other side. Channel 17 already had a transmission tower twice the height of most competitors, reaching five states. With satellites, that weak UHF signal could become a national cable channel. He renamed it TBS — Turner Broadcasting System — and petitioned the FCC for clearance.
The broadcast networks, the Hollywood studios, and the professional sports teams united against him. They were, in Turner's telling, a cartel. Cable conventions in those days were like revival meetings, with Turner as the firebrand preacher. He assured congressional leaders that he was trying to help the nascent cable industry provide consumers with more choices — and better ones, since he vowed not to air violent, sexually explicit movies like Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. What viewers would actually receive was "Lassie," "The Munsters," and "The Flintstones." No matter. The FCC allowed Channel 17 to become the Superstation.
Ralph Roberts, the founder of Comcast Communications — which would grow into the nation's third-largest cable company — said of TBS: "We thought it was the greatest thing in the world." Roberts was charmed. Others were less so. Turner would drop to the floor, theatrically, to beg for business. Once, addressing a roomful of Southern ladies on how to woo advertisers, he explained: "My daddy said, 'If advertisers want a blow job, you get down on your knees.'"
Captain Outrageous and the Invention of Live News
To insure continuous baseball for his Superstation, Turner bought the Atlanta Braves in 1976 for $10 million. He ran onto the field, led crowds in singing, spit Red Man tobacco juice into a cup behind the dugout, played cards with his players, and insisted they call him Ted. In his second year as owner, the baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, suspended him for the season for tampering — trying to sign a player under contract to another team.
He celebrated his 1977 America's Cup victory by swigging nearly a whole bottle of aquavit given to him by the Swedish team, then drinking champagne, pulling his shirt up to his neck, and yelling at nearby women, "Show me your tits!" At a Newport sailing race in 1978, he coaxed Frédérique D'arragon — a French-born girlfriend who would remain in and out of his life for more than thirty years — to jump naked into the water as their boat passed the reviewing stand. Jimmy Carter, who invited his fellow Georgian to state dinners at the White House, recalled: "He was very raucous. He was loud, and he interrupted sedate proceedings." Dick Cavett was less amused. During a taping, Cavett pressed Turner on his image as "a colorful, boisterous, sometimes inebriated playboy type." Turner's reply: "I have heard that you are a little twinkle-toed TV announcer. Would you deny that?"
Captain Outrageous. But by the late seventies, Turner's politics were softening under the influence of Carter and others. He began to liken himself to "an ambassador for good will." And from this strange amalgam of showmanship and earnestness, CNN was born.
Reese Schonfeld — a creative, prickly executive who had discussed the cable-news concept with Turner in 1978 — served as CNN's first president. Schonfeld, who understood the mechanics of news production in ways Turner did not, traveled the country signing up cable operators. Turner, who was generous with money but cheap in sharing credit, told those same operators that CNN would do for cable what Edward R. Murrow had done for network news. It would make news the star, not overpaid anchors.
On June 1, 1980, at CNN's base in Atlanta, three military bands struck up music. A nervous Turner stood at a lectern in a blue blazer, sporting Elvis sideburns. He recited what he called "a little poem" reflecting CNN's mission: "To act upon one's convictions while others wait, to create a positive force in a world where cynics abound, to provide information to people when it wasn't available before." A band played "The Star-Spangled Banner." When it ended, Turner whooped "Awww-riiight!" and CNN went live.
Production values were initially amateurish — "video wallpaper," network executives sneered. Ratings were poor. Employees relied on portable toilets outside. Staff would arrive in the morning to find Turner wandering out of his office, where he slept on a Murphy bed, wearing a robe or wrapped in a towel, retrieving coffee from the newsroom. Once, Steve Heyer walked in and found Turner sitting at his desk stark naked. "Don't get up!" someone exclaimed.
He was much more than a cheerleader. He was the kind of guy you'd want to run through a wall for.
Lou Dobbs, the CNN pioneer who anchored business news, initially thought Turner was "a drunken sailor" and possibly the wrong person to lead the effort — "an eccentric" rather than "a visionary." Then he got to know him. "He is a natural-born leader," Dobbs said. "I once asked him his definition of a leader. He said, 'A leader has the ability to create infectious enthusiasm.'"
The broadcast networks refused to include CNN in their pooled White House coverage. Turner filed a federal lawsuit in Atlanta against the "cartel" and the Reagan Administration, claiming antitrust and First Amendment violations. To build congressional support, he spent $13,000 installing a satellite dish for the House and cabled every member's office — because CNN had twenty-four hours to fill, and a congressman had a much better chance of being seen. In 1982, the Atlanta court declared in CNN's favor. By the mid-eighties, CNN's triumph was apparent.
Bob Wright, the president and CEO of NBC, identified the essence of Turner's gift: "He sees the obvious before most people do. We all look at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don't see. And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everyone."
Junk Bonds, Alexander the Great, and the Film Library
Turner Broadcasting had a mere $282 million in revenue in 1984. The New York banks spurned his request for credit. But in 1985, Turner secured junk-bond financing from Drexel Burnham's Michael Milken — the wizard of leveraged paper who was, at that moment, rewriting the rules of American capitalism — and made a $5.4 billion hostile offer for CBS.
Milken, who had grown up in Encino, California, the son of an accountant, and who would later be convicted of securities fraud, was representing both Turner and the seller of MGM,
Kirk Kerkorian. The CBS bid failed — Thomas Wyman, the network's CEO, questioned Turner's "moral fitness" and welcomed the "white knight" financing of Laurence Tisch, who stealthily gained control. But the MGM gambit worked, after a fashion. In August 1985, Turner bought MGM's film studio, its Culver City lot, and its library of more than thirty-five hundred motion pictures for $1.5 billion, without fully consulting his board. The financing, arranged by Milken, involved Kerkorian accepting Turner Broadcasting stock in lieu of some cash. The difficulty: Turner found himself with $2 billion in debt. Within three months, he was forced to sell the studio back to Kerkorian for $300 million.
He kept the film library. And with that library, Turner created new cable networks — TNT (Turner Network Television) in 1988, TCM (Turner Classic Movies) in 1994 — that would become enormous profit engines. "I did it right under the networks' noses," he said, with the satisfaction of a man who knew exactly what he had gotten away with. "They laughed at me when I started CNN. They laughed at me when I bought the Braves. They laughed at me when I bought M-G-M."
Then, in the unmistakable cadence of a man who had spent his boarding-school years memorizing the classics: "When
Alexander the Great took control when his dad died, he was twenty years old. He took the Macedonian Army, which was the best army in the world at the time, and conquered Greece, got the Greeks to all join with him, and then marched across the Hellespont and invaded Asia. They didn't even know where the world ended at that time. And he was dead at thirty-three, thirteen years later. He kept marching. He hardly ever stopped. And he never lost a battle."
But to avoid losing everything — Kerkorian held a stipulation that could have given him control, and Rupert Murdoch's companies were circling — Turner had to seek a bailout from a consortium of thirty-one cable companies in 1987, led by T.C.I. and Time Inc.'s cable subsidiary. In exchange for more than $500 million in cash, he ceded more than one-third ownership and granted the cable executives seven of fifteen board seats and a veto over any expenditure exceeding $2 million. "In hindsight, you could say that Ted lost his company," McGuirk admitted. "But, at the time, it was in many ways Nirvana, because Ted partnered with his best customers."
The rabbit had survived by letting the wolves into the den.
The War Room in Baghdad
CNN's most visible triumph came ten years after launch, with its coverage of the Gulf War. Unlike other networks, CNN committed to covering any potential war from ground zero — Baghdad itself. Eason Jordan, who oversaw international coverage, figured the Iraqi communications system would be destroyed in any allied air raid. He recommended investing in a suitcase version of a satellite phone: $52,000. Tom Johnson, who had taken over as CNN president on August 1, 1990 — the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait came on his second day — went to Turner with various spending plans.
"What am I authorized to spend?" Johnson asked.
"You spend whatever you think it takes, pal," Turner replied. Johnson was amazed, "especially because I'm not even sure he remembered my name."
CNN spent $22 million covering the war. It got permission from the Iraqi government to circumvent the Al Rashid Hotel switchboard and set up a direct telephone transmission from Baghdad to Amman to Atlanta. When the United States destroyed Baghdad's telephone system, only CNN had a phone line. When the Bush Administration urged broadcast networks to pull their crews out of Iraq, they complied. Tom Johnson received calls from President Bush and other government officials urging him to leave Baghdad. When Johnson told Turner about these calls, and about two bureau chiefs killed when he was at the Los Angeles Times, Turner was unmoved: "I will take on myself the responsibility for anybody who is killed. I'll take it off of you if it's on your conscience."
No one was killed. And the entire world watched the first live war on a network that had been dismissed as "video wallpaper" a decade earlier. Turner understood, in a way that many corporate leaders do not, that building a brand can be expensive — and that the expenditure is justified by moments that become definitional.
Rockefeller, Bison, and the Logic of Total Control
"You need to control everything," Turner said one day in his nearly bare New York office, his foot propped against an empty coffee table. "You need to be like Rockefeller with Standard Oil. He had the oil fields, and he had the filling stations, and he had the pipelines and the trucks and everything to get the gas to the stations. And they broke him up as a monopoly. You want to control everything. You want to have a hospital and a funeral home, so when the people die in the hospital you move them right over to the funeral home next door. When they're born, you got 'em. When they're sick, you got 'em. When they die, you got 'em." He smiled. "The game's over when they break you up. But in the meantime you play to win. And you know you've won when the government stops you."
This was the philosophy — vertical integration as an existential imperative — that drove his attempts to buy NBC, CBS, Paramount, ABC, and various Hollywood studios throughout the late eighties and early nineties. Every time, someone stopped him. The cable owners on his board vetoed the NBC purchase. Viacom outbid him for Paramount. Gerald Levin, who controlled nineteen per cent of Turner's company through Time Warner, blocked the five-billion-dollar NBC deal because Levin wanted a network for himself. "Everyone wanted to merge with Ted," John Malone told the New Yorker's Ken Auletta. "No one wanted to turn control over to Ted."
The frustration was compounded by what Turner saw happening around him. In 1985 and 1986, Murdoch formed the Fox network, and CBS, NBC, and ABC all got new owners. Turner watched from Atlanta, handcuffed by his own board. One of the few acquisitions they approved — and only after Turner wore board members down — was Hanna-Barbera in 1991, whose animation library included more than a third of all animated cartoons ever produced in the United States. With it, Turner created the Cartoon Network. Even this modest triumph required an exhaustion campaign against his own directors.
Meanwhile, Turner's landholdings grew in the opposite direction from his corporate constraints. He accumulated nearly two million acres, becoming America's largest individual landowner. In Montana, he got rid of his cattle and sheep and returned the land to bison, the animals that grazed there two centuries ago. By 2013, he had 55,000 bison across his properties. Fences loom large in Turner's psyche — he hates them, which is one reason the landholdings are so vast. "I'm happiest when I'm on a horse on my ranch," he said. He drove a Toyota Prius. He sold his Cadillac during the 1973 oil embargo and never looked back. A man who wanted to control everything chose, in his private life, to be surrounded by nothing but open space.
If you can get yourself where you're not afraid of dying, then you can move forward a lot faster.
The Clitorectomy Speech and the Sale of the Kingdom
By 1995, after thirty-two years in business, Turner no longer felt like a nimble rabbit. He needed a studio. He needed scale. Terry McGuirk spent six months negotiating an exit from Time Warner and a potential deal with Malone. But Turner feared placing CNN in the hands of so committed a conservative as Malone and worried about Malone's partnerships with Murdoch.
Gerald Levin — the intensely private, mustached executive who ran Time Warner, a man who weighed his words with the care of a jeweler handling small stones — concluded that his own company needed CNN. He saw it as "the jewel" that could link with Time Warner's magazines. After consulting only two members of his team, Levin phoned Turner and asked if he could fly to Montana to discuss an "important" matter.
"I knew I was selling the company," Turner said later. "And there was another reason I did it, too. I was a little bit tired." He was tired of his cable partners, tired of vetoes, tired of playing Horatius on a bridge defended by people who kept trying to tear it down behind him. Levin's plane landed one morning in Montana. Jane Fonda picked him up. Turner had house guests, including Tom Brokaw, but he and Levin went out on the porch alone. Levin consulted ten or so points he'd jotted on a piece of paper. When they walked back inside and Turner saw Brokaw, he shouted: "Hey, buddy. We just made a deal. We're going to merge." Levin looked startled.
There was, before the sale was finalized, the National Press Club luncheon in Washington that nearly derailed everything. Fonda knew the relationship between Turner and Time Warner was fragile. "One false move and it would fall apart," she said. "I didn't sleep that night. Ted slept like a baby." When Turner rose to speak, he startled the audience by discussing a CNN story on clitorectomies, then pivoted — suddenly, inexplicably — to compare the mutilation of women to what Gerald Levin was doing to him. "You talk about barbaric mutilation," Turner cried. "Well, I'm in an angry mood. I'm being clitorized by Time Warner!"
"I slid under my seat," Fonda recalled. Levin, more diplomatically: "Ted is Ted."
Turner Broadcasting merged with Time Warner in 1996. Turner still owned almost eleven per cent of the merged company. He pressed Levin to sell company airplanes, curb Hollywood studio costs, and prioritize cross-divisional synergies. He even fired his own son, Teddy, a promotions manager for Turner Home Entertainment, bluntly warning him over a family dinner: "You're toast." The edict from Levin was "Let Ted be Ted." At employee meetings, Turner would stand and announce: "I've got one suit. I don't spend my money on suits. I own ten per cent of the company and each dollar you waste, ten cents comes from me."
But Turner had traded a silent board for a real boss. And when AOL acquired Time Warner in January 2000 — a deal pegged at $165 billion, the largest corporate marriage in history — Turner was not invited by Levin to participate in the negotiations. "Ted was not a strategic partner," a senior Time Warner executive explained. "Gerry is a sole practitioner." Turner's future role was not even a minor part of the discussions. What was talked about much more, an AOL strategist recalled, was what a great fit CNN and AOL would be. "You can AOL-ize CNN and do cross-promotions."
Then came the fax in New Mexico.
Scarlett O'Hara in a Corduroy Jacket
Jane Fonda — the actress, the activist, the daughter of Henry Fonda, who had endured her own mother's suicide (Frances Ford Seymour slashed her throat at forty-two while institutionalized) — said of her ex-husband: "He loves 'Gone with the Wind' for lots of reasons, and one of them is that he identifies with Scarlett O'Hara."
Not Rhett Butler. Scarlett.
Fonda and Turner married in December 1991 at his Florida estate, bride and groom in white, surrounded by their collective children, dining on quail that Fonda had shot herself, candied yams, collard greens, and corn bread. She moved to Atlanta. She got him to drink less, diet more, spruce up his wardrobe, buy art for his houses. His mood swings became less pronounced. He stopped taking lithium, which he said a "quack" psychiatrist had prescribed after misdiagnosing him as manic-depressive. Fonda organized family reunions twice a year, Christmas celebrations, church christenings. Turner's daughter Laura said simply: "Her influence was profound."
Then Fonda's daughter Vanessa moved to Atlanta. Fonda started spending more time there and less time on Turner's peripatetic circuit. She launched the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention. She began attending services at the Providence Missionary Baptist Church. Turner learned of her conversion to Christianity without advance notice. "She just came home and said, 'I've become a Christian,'" Turner recalled. "That's a pretty big change for your wife of many years to tell you. That's a shock."
"My becoming a Christian upset him very much — for good reason," Fonda said. "He's my husband and I chose not to discuss it with him — because he would have talked me out of it. He's a debating champion." Laura Turner didn't think religion was the real issue: "It was another male — Jesus. It took time away from him."
On January 4, 2000, they announced their separation. Before the announcement, Frédérique D'arragon — the woman he'd once coaxed to jump naked from a sailboat in Newport — came back into Turner's life. Fonda, remarkably, had lunch with D'arragon and offered her blessing: "He needs to be taken care of. She has no children. And she's loved him a long time."
Turner told the New Yorker's Ken Auletta that the year 2000 was one of the most miserable of his life. His marriage ended. He smashed his foot skiing. His black Labrador, Chief, contracted coonhound disease. His back hurt. Two grandchildren were diagnosed with Hurler's syndrome, a rare enzyme deficiency. He had no spouse, no intimate friends, and no longer ran his own company. "I felt like Job," he said. He had felt "suicidal."
A close friend identified three burdens: "An insecurity that can be traced back to his abusive father; a manic, restless nature; and lust. Each one of these is a great huge bear. Turner must wrestle with three bears, and they sometimes overwhelm him." Fonda's version was more devastating: "Why this guy didn't go under psychologically at age five, I don't know. It scarred him for life. It colors everything — his relationships, his anxieties."
The Billion-Dollar Cricket
"I want to be Jiminy Cricket for America," Turner once said, and the image — the tiny insect conscience perched on a giant's shoulder — is more apt than he may have intended.
In September 1997, Turner and Fonda were flying to New York for a United Nations Association dinner honoring Turner. On the plane, he told her he planned to give a billion dollars — then a third of his net worth — to the United Nations. "I was extremely moved," Fonda recalled. She also asked: "Don't you think you should talk to your lawyers first?"
He did. He learned he couldn't make the gift directly to the U.N. The next day, he walked into Secretary-General Kofi Annan's office and blurted: "Hi, Kofi. I'm going to give you a billion dollars."
"I thought it was a joke," Annan said, shaking his head in wonderment.
That night, Turner announced the pledge — $100 million a year for ten years to support U.N. programs eliminating land mines, providing medicine for children, easing the plight of refugees. He hired former Senator Tim Wirth to oversee the effort. "All of you billionaires out there, watch out," Turner declared. "I'm coming after you." By 2013, Turner had paid $973 million of the billion pledged. The Turner Foundation awarded $50 million in a single year to environmental causes. He created the Nuclear Threat Initiative, recruited former Senator Sam Nunn to lead it, and pledged $250 million over five years. In December 2000, he personally contributed $34 million to resolve a long-running dispute between what the United States owed the U.N. and what Congress was willing to pay.
He carried typed cards in his wallet with his own version of the Ten Commandments: "I promise to care for planet earth and all living things thereon." "I promise to treat all persons everywhere with dignity, respect, and friendliness." "I promise to have no more than one or two children." "I reject the use of force." "I support the United Nations."
Asked whether he thought about winning a Nobel Prize, Turner did not pretend: "I've thought about it a little bit. Of course I've thought of it."
The philanthropy was genuine. The egotism was genuine. These were not contradictions in Turner; they were the same current running in two directions. He had five children but told audiences that "if I was doing it over again, I wouldn't have had that many, but I can't shoot them now that they're here." He called himself "a socialist at heart" and a fiscal "conservative." He compared Rupert Murdoch to Hitler but hesitated to call Saddam Hussein evil. He opposed unionization at his own company while railing against elites. On Ash Wednesday, seeing smudges on CNN staffers' foreheads, he asked if they were "Jesus freaks." He apologized, blithely assuming the furor would pass. It did. A week later, he observed: "That's the downside of speaking spontaneously."
Horatius at the Breakfast Table
Over breakfast at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts — where Turner had come for appearances at the Kennedy School of Government — Ken Auletta asked him why he felt so burdened.
"It's the position you're in," Turner said. "Because I was at CNN, because I had commitments, because I did the Goodwill Games, because I was concerned, because I did all those documentaries, I developed a self-imposed sense of responsibility. If Gandhi and Martin Luther King could make the kind of sacrifices with their lives that they did, and that our parents did fighting in World War I and World War II, why couldn't I make sacrifices, too?"
Then, in the middle of a hotel dining room, as people at nearby tables leaned forward, Turner performed from memory Thomas Macaulay's "Horatius":
And how can man die better / Than facing fearful odds, / For the ashes of his fathers, / And the temples of his gods. . . . Haul down the bridge, Sir Consul / With all the speed ye may; / I, with two more to help me, / Will hold the foe in play.
"Pretty cool, huh," he said, grinning. He had gotten almost every word right. "If Horatius could do it, I can do it. He saved Rome. He stopped the Etruscans."
Then he leaned over and whispered, as if to a co-conspirator: "I know a lot. My knowledge is my burden. If I didn't know so much, I could just go through life as a dilettante."
He stood up and, watched by everyone in the room, walked briskly to the door.
When Fortune visited him at seventy-five, Turner was frail and forgetful, with a pacemaker — two, actually. His net worth had stabilized at $2.1 billion, including the two million acres, the 55,000 bison, and a restaurant chain. He no longer held any Time Warner shares. "How are you feeling about life at 75?" the interviewer asked. "It's better than being dead," Turner replied.
He had not changed his operating philosophy, he insisted. "We need to make a lot of changes in order to survive another 50 years. We're in a lot of trouble." The nuclear threat. Climate change. Overpopulation. He still gave it fifty-fifty odds that humanity would be extinct in fifty years. He was calmer than he once was, also more self-aware. "I had more energy at 50," he said. "On the other hand, at 75, I've probably got a little more wisdom and good judgment than I had at 50 because I've got more experience."
Jane Fonda had told Auletta years earlier: "He went much further than his father thought he would. So what's left? To be a good guy. He knows he will go down in history. He won't go down as a greedy corporate mogul. Although he claims to be an atheist, at the end of every speech he says, 'God bless you.' He wants to get into Heaven."
She told one more story. In 1992, on the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, the Turners went to a matinée of a film about Columbus. In the darkened theater, someone screamed out a litany of Columbus's supposed sins. There was a silence. Then Turner blurted: "I never did that!"
Fonda reached over and patted his knee. "It's O.K., honey. I know you didn't."
"I did that a lot," she said afterward.
In Turner's Atlanta office — the vast one, crammed with trophies and artifacts — busts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi occupied the positions of honor. In his nearly bare New York office, there was only a bust of Alexander the Great, peering from a shelf. Two offices, two identities: the conqueror and the conscience. The rabbit, still running. The boy in the darkened theater, protesting his innocence to no one in particular, while the woman who knew him best placed her hand on his knee and told him it was all right.
