Shaking Up the Networks
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III
COVER STORY
Outrageous as ever, Ted Turner is changing the face of TV news
He is a Southerner's Southerner, a good ole boy on a howl whose favorite movie is Gone With the Wind. Yet he lived in Cincinnati until he was nine, headed at 17 to Brown University in the Ivy League to study ancient Greek culture, and has since sailed and socialized with the privileged around the world.
He is a celebrated woman chaser who bragged to a Playboy interviewer that he photographs nude women. Yet he laments the decline of family values and deplores displays of anatomy and hints of extramarital sex in movies or on TV.
He is sometimes cunning and guarded, then unnervingly straightforward. He can be vulgar and abusive to his closest associates, yet passionately loyal. He cherishes honor and courage, but is a far better loser than winner, gallant in defeat, gloating in victory. He is perhaps the most openly ambitious man in America, yet he admits, "My desire to excel borders on the unhealthy." He urges world peace, yet many of his heroes are conquerors.
A brawler in military school, thrown out of college twice for carousing, he was even dropped from his fraternity for burning down its homecoming display. His father called him heir to a family business, then made an agreement to sell it instead, days before committing suicide. Nonetheless, from boyhood Robert Edward Turner III has likened himself to heroes he studied in the classics, prominent among them Alexander the Great.
Ted Turner, 43, is a prototypical modern celebrity, famous above all for being famous. He is not so much renowned for his achievements as his achievements are renowned for being his. He became "an American folk hero," a characterization he embraces, as a once successful, twice beaten and now retired yachtsman in the America's Cup, scarcely a sporting event to figure in barroom betting. He has also been a regional billboard magnate, the owner of a newly thriving but previously cellar-dwelling baseball team and a somewhat more reliable basketball team, and the licensee of a non-network-aflfiliated UHF television station in Atlanta, TV's 17th largest market.
Turner has vaulted past those pursuits to what he calls, with characteristic bombast, "the most significant achievement in the annals of journalism." Although considerably less than that, his Cable News Network (CNN) is nevertheless a catalyst for a burgeoning revolution in television. Turner has shown that there is a substantial and eager audience for news all the time, not just in the confined hours at the beginning and end of the workday. In two years his 24-hour-a-day service has grown to be sent into 13.9 million households via cable TV. According to the A.C. Nielsen TV ratings company, CNN attracts viewers in more than 5.8 million of those homes in an average week. Editorially, it scoops the Big Three networks on a fair share of stories. By any measure, CNN is in the big leagues of news.
What makes this enterprise even more remarkable is that it arose under the once impassive gaze of the three major networks. For three decades they ruled television news without serious threat and smugly claimed that no one else could put together the resources to compete. Ted Turner has challenged them at their own game, and made them flinch. Suddenly ABC, CBS and NBC are providing or planning hours each day of added news in the late night and early morning, time periods they long disdained. "The networks,"
Turner says, "are in stark terror of us."
Years before he conceived CNN, Turner became a major force in cable TV through a move of similar ingenuity and daring. It began in 1970, when to the horror of his financial advisers he traded $2.5 million worth of stock in his company for title to Atlanta's Channel 17, a sorry UHF television station that was losing $600,000 a year. Many viewers around the country did not pick up UHF signals then; indeed, two years after Turner made his buy, Atlanta's other UHF station went bankrupt.
Turner fared only slightly better using standard UHF programming: cheaply acquired reruns, repackaged old movies, sports. Then he had a moment of inspiration: Why not expand his station's audience many fold, and thus make it far more appealing to advertisers, by beaming its signal via satellite to cable-TV systems around the country, in effect creating another network? The start-up would be costly and risky; cable operators might take the programming, but they would probably not pay for it, and advertisers were at best dubious that Turner could actually deliver a measurable increase in viewership. Moreover, the legalities of the proposal were murky.
The idea worked. When Turner's Channel 17 went onto the satellite in December 1976, the concept of the "Superstation" was born. Imitators followed (notable among them: Chicago's WGN-TV and New York City's WOR-TV). Turner is thus commonly cited as the first cable programmer to distribute via satellite. He corrects the record: "The first to go up there was Home Box Office. I just read about it. Give me the credit for going up to New York the next week to talk to the people who had satellites." Today Turner's WTBS-TV, airing primarily reruns and sports, is piped into 20.4 million of the 31 million homes with cable, far more than any other cable service; in those homes it commands about a tenth of the audience through the day. Most important to Turner, WTBS reaped $18 million last year in profits, and this year, he projects, it will garner $40 million. That is a significant fraction of the earnings of any of the Big Three networks, and probably sufficient for now to sustain CNN.
During the formative years of the Superstation, Turner voiced both mistrust of journalists and utter lack of interest in providing TV news. He blamed network coverage for sapping national morale by harping on the "bad news" of deaths and deficits rather than the good works of, for example, the Boy Scouts. He accused "the media" of undermining the credibility of the U.S. Army through "anti-American" coverage in Viet Nam. His own station, lacking the resources to compete for serious news viewers, aired its newscast at 3 a.m. The show took itself so lightly that Anchor Bill Tush once read an entire script with his face hidden behind a photograph of Walter Cronkite.
Since creating Cable News Network in 1980, however, the ever unpredictable
Turner has taken to championing the value of television news. "I'm here to serve as the communicator who gets people together," he proclaims. "I want to start dealing with issues like disarmament, pollution, soil erosion, population control, alternative energy sources." Turner happily pays the bills for CNN's seven domestic bureaus and five foreign bureaus (Rome, London, Tel Aviv, Cairo and Tokyo). Total cost of running CNN: a substantial $51 million a year. But then, TV news is always an expensive business. ABC, NBC and CBS decline to reveal their news budgets, but industry sources say each spends about $150 million a year. A single installment of the weekday evening news costs at minimum about $200,000 and can range far higher; one report from Lebanon consumes about $4,000, not counting travel, editing and courier costs.
So far, Turner has concentrated on the business side of CNN, leaving news decisions largely to professional journalists. But some reporters' hackles were raised in mid-May when, after a power struggle,
Turner accepted the resignation of CNN'S first president, Reese Schonfeld, who has spent an estimable career developing alternatives to network news. One cause of the dispute was Schonfeld's decison to fire Interviewer Sandi Freeman, CNN'S most popular performer, who, Schonfeld said, was not a journalist. As soon as Schonfeld resigned, Turner started negotiating to get Freeman back. Turner kept Schonfeld on as a consultant and corporate board member, however, and as replacements he named a committee of key Schonfeld aides: Ed Turner (no relation), Burt Reinhardt and Robert Wussler, a tough-minded former president of CBS-TV. Wussler contends that Ted Turner will continue to stand apart from CNN's day-to-day journalistic operations. Explains Wussler: "He does not have time for it, and he knows that is where he would be most vulnerable to his detractors."
Turner appeared to contradict that hands-off policy in late May when he recorded his first CNN editorial, opposing violence in movies, and had it shown eleven times (plus ten airings on the Superstation). He attacked The Deer Hunter, a Viet Nam War drama, The Warriors, a fictional portrayal of New York City youth gangs, and especially Taxi Driver, the film that allegedly inspired John Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Reagan. Said Turner: "The people responsible for this movie should be just as much on trial as John Hinckley himself ... Write your Congressman and your Senator right away, and tell him that you want something done." Despite the fervor of that Citizen Kane outburst, which renewed speculation that Turner aspires to political office, Turner did not prevent CNN Commentator Daniel Schorr from contradicting him in an on-air reply. Schorr echoed Turner's concerns but opposed congressional action that might conflict with First Amendment guarantees against censorship. There has been no similar on-air performance by Turner since.
The heart of CNN'S day is from 7 p.m. to 10p.m. E.T.: half an hour of business and economic news, followed by half an hour of sports, and then two hours of world and national reports. "A newspaper you can watch" is the way Turner describes it. The format for the rest of the day is much like an extended version of NBC's Today or ABC's Good Morning America: sober and almost impersonal in the hourly news summaries, folksy in such soft segments as Arden Zinn's exercise class and Dr. Steve Kritsick's advice on pet care, downright gossipy in the late-night hour of Hollywood chitchat by longtime Syndicated Talk Host Mike Douglas.
CNN is news without stars, news without end, and virtually news without editing. With the notable exception of a few Big Three network emigres, including Washington Reporters Schorr and Bernard Shaw, most of CNN'S regular on-air personnel are unfamiliar and even unimposing. They tend to be former local station anchors and reporters. Odd for a service founded by a master of self-publicity, CNN is almost entirely devoid of show-business pizazz. That sometimes makes it dull. But at the same time it diminishes the worrisome phenomenon of the reporter's on-air personality overshadowing the news. Says Schorr: "We spend our time getting out of the way of the news. We have demystified what an anchor does because we have so many."
CNN is there for the viewer whenever it is convenient for him. The late Communications Theorist Marshall McLuhan envisaged television as creating a sort of global village into which everyone could plug merely by turning on his set. Indeed, much of the psychic appeal of television, as opposed to film or print, is its immediacy: you can be there at the moment something happens. But until CNN, every TV news show had a closed narrative structure of beginning, middle and end. The world was tied up into neat packages and presented at fixed hours, after the fact, except for coverage of the most extraordinary events. Turner's news, by contrast, stretches on, sometimes haphazardly, like life.
The absence of pressure to make choices, to pare down and winnow out, means that CNN can explore the day's issues at enough length to avoid the pitfalls of oversimplicity and superficiality. But it can also waste viewers' time. Moreover, the heavily scheduled rookie reporters sometimes bring scant backgrounds to the stories they cover. Says one senior insider: "They do not always understand that length is not depth." That problem has been compounded by a lack of decisive leadership since Schonfeld left. And it could worsen: several of the overworked and underpaid producers are being romanced by the Big Three networks. There are other significant failings. Visual quality is often shabby, with footage lopsided or out of focus, and some employees suggest that equipment is in short supply and inadequately maintained. Commentators sometimes read from notes so that they display less of their faces than the tops of their heads. Even CNN'S all-inclusive approach to Government events draws some in-house criticism. The former policy of gavel-to-gavel coverage of often tedious congressional hearings, says one insider, was "lazy journalism." Although CNN airs some specials, it has no documentary unit comparable to the 60 Minutes team at CBS or the Close-Up producers at ABC.
Yet CNN has plainly made its established competitors wary. Until recently the offices of news executives at the Big Three networks each contained three monitors, tuned to ABC, NBC and CBS. Now in many there is a fourth, tuned to CNN. On a few occasions, CNN'S lean operation has outpointed the far more heavily staffed networks. CNN was the first to report that President Reagan had in fact been hit during John Hinckley's assassination attempt in March 1981, in part because it stayed on the air while ABC and CBS resumed regular programming after telling viewers, as was first believed, that the President was unhurt. In El Salvador, where CNN was outstaffed four or five to one by each of the Big Three networks, it was CNN Correspondent James Allen Miklaszewski who caused worldwide furor by photographing an American military "adviser" carrying an M-16 rifle in violation of U.S. Government policy. Satisfying as those coups were, perhaps most significant was a victory CNN won by taking the networks and the White House to court: it now has a full share in providing and receiving pool coverage of day-to-day Administration events.
CNN has won the grudging respect of senior news executives at all three major networks. Says Van Gordon Sauter, president of CBS News: "We see CNN as a very good service . . . but not of network quality." Adds Richard Wald, senior vice president for news at ABC: "CNN does a nice, straightforward, basic rendition of the news very competently." Outside analysts are more generous. Anthony Hoffmann, a cable analyst for Warburg Paribas Becker Securities, observes, "People talking to a CNN reporter do not seem to think they are talking to the whole world and so they say things they will not say to the networks. You hear more of the words of the people and less prepackaged editorializing. I think the American public is getting suspicious of prepackaged news."
Turner has benefited in part from the general advance of cable. ABC, NBC and CBS combined still draw 80% of total TV viewing. But CBS Broadcast Group President Gene Jankowski predicted to TIME Correspondent Janice C. Simpson that by 1990 the three networks' share in households with cable will drop to 57%. Turner claims CBS sought to counter that slippage by once trying to buy CNN; Jankowski sidesteps making any answer to that suggestion. But industry sources say there may be a continuing interest at CBS in breaking into cable news.
Eager to solidify his position against a host of potential competitors, including the networks, Turner revved up his competitive pace in January with CNN2. The programs use the same raw material as CNN but reshape it into a 24-hr, hard-news "headline service," similar to network news shows or all-news radio. In contrast to CNN, which is structured for extended viewing, CNN2 is meant to provide a quick catch-up on the news whenever the audience tunes in. The service is supplied via satellite to cable systems that are wired into 1.5 million homes, and to some 78 broadcast TV stations. Sixty-six of them are affiliates of the Big Three networks. Cable operators who buy CNN can get the second channel free. Broadcasters use CNN2 as part of their normal over-the-air programming; they pay a cash fee and share the commercial time with Turner.
When affiliates started buying CNN2, the networks were galvanized into action. CBS, which had been considering an overnight news offering for years, decided to hurtle ahead: in October it will launch weeknight news shows from 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. E.T. Also in October, ABC will follow Nightline with a midnight-to-1-a.m. show featuring Interviewer Phil Donahue. NBC last month premiered a featurish hour of news from 1:30 to 2:30 a.m. four nights a week, and from 2 to 3 a.m. on Friday, and a morning program preceding Today, from 6:30 to 7 a.m., and using Today's personnel. ABC countered with a 6-to-7-a.m. headline news show in repeating 15-min. cycles. Says NBC News President Reuven Frank: "The late-night and early broadcasts are partly a result of competitive pressure from Turner, and partly a reflection of the fact that CNN has established that there is an audience."
Financially, CNN is a lot less steady.
Although Turner acknowledges he lost an estimated $2 million a month in the early stages, he contends that CNN was nearly in the black within 18 months of startup. But the costs of CNN2 and a big new promotional campaign, everyone agrees, have pushed the project back into the red: losses for CNN averaged $1.1 million a month despite monthly revenues of $3.4 million during the first six months of 1982, and CNN2's monthly losses were about $800,000 more. With the lagging U.S. economy damping down advertising revenues, Turner has abandoned his projection that CNN can make a profit this year. Turner's troubles have led many industry observers to predict that within the next year or two he will have to sell or take in a partner, or else see CNN go bankrupt (the total value of his holdings: $250 million to $300 million, says a top-rank video executive). Turner's financing includes $50 million in loans at steep interest from Citicorp and Manufacturers Hanover Trust. In borrowing from them, he estimated losses of $32 million from CNN's start through the first half of this year; he is $6 million over that total.
Even more worrisome, after two years of savoring competitive victories, Turner faces some hard-driving rivals on his own turf.
Units of ABC and Westinghouse Group W, the country's largest non-network station group, have joined to offer their own 24-hour cable news headline service, Satellite News Channels, which started airing June 21. To date, however, SNC is less varied and ambitious than CNN. It offers three 18-min. newscasts an hour, plus 'quick regional news bulletins. SNC, like CNN2, is intended for brief sampling rather than the extended viewing sought by CNN; the new service is explicitly patterned after similarly repetitive all-news radio stations. SNC's ABC footage is limited to stories that do not feature network correspondents; the network thus provides only 15% to 20% of the total film and tape. Even so, foreign coverage has been generally solid. But for its first six weeks, SNC had on board only ten of the 24 regional TV stations that are supposed to supply U.S. news. That reporting system will not be complete until late December.
SNC's real threat to CNN, however, is financial, not editorial. While Turner charges cable systems at least 150 a subscriber each month for CNN, SNC is offered free. In fact, cable operators who had signed on by the debut date were granted a start-up bonus of 500 a household. The financial incentives helped: SNC has already signed up systems with 3 million subscribers, including 620,000 from Westinghouse Group W's own cable systems. Only about a dozen cable systems, though, have dropped CNN to take SNC.
To substitute SNC for CNN may be risky. Admits George Livergood, who until the end of May was regional vice president of Group W systems in the Southwest: "Once you give something to a subscriber, you never take it away." When Livergood operated Theta Cable in West Los Angeles (now Group W Cable), an engineering snafu deprived 9,000 customers of CNN during coverage of the first space shuttle flight. Says Livergood: "We got 2,000 phone calls an hour. The shuttle was on seven other channels, but they chose to call rather than switch."
In fact, Turner is banking on the loyalty of cable operators as well as viewers, although such allegiance is by no means assured. Says Marc Nathanson, who represents 40 cable systems in California: "I'm wondering if our pocketbooks are going to outweigh our feelings toward the pioneers who took the risks. As for me, I'm supporting old Ted and sticking by his service." Playing on the traditional suspicion between broadcasters and cable people, Turner has launched a direct-mail campaign aimed at arousing cable operators; he enclosed copies of ABC memos counseling local affiliate stations to use every resource, including the stations' news and public affairs departments, to campaign for "free TV." At the National Cable Television Association convention in Las Vegas in May, Turner reminded cable-system owners of the Johnny-come-lately quality of his opposition with placards, buttons and a giant 3-D billboard of himself playing the guitar, all inscribed with a slogan paraphrased from a country music song title: I WAS CABLE WHEN CABLE WASN'T COOL.
Cable-system owners seem to warm to the message, and to Turner's style as a personal entrepreneur in a gray, corporate age.
Most of them talk freely of a hugely lucrative "communications revolution" in the decade to come, and they honor Turner as the most important supplier of basic cable service to advance that future. They thronged to his kickoff party at the NCTA gathering and were plainly pleased as the whippet-like (6 ft. 1 in., 175 lb.) Turner windmilled through the crowd greeting many by name, his raspy drawl audible from yards away despite the background music.
Turner is said to be congenitally unable to keep a secret. At Las Vegas he was supposed to announce at a press conference that he had signed a deal to distribute CNN in Japan. But a day before, he was blurting out the details to anyone close enough to listen. As a businessman he shows little suspicion and less patience. He sometimes makes deals to distribute CNN on the basis of 30 seconds of chat and a handshake, even with strangers.
Turner's whirlwind pace leaves most aides looking a little shellshocked. He is a kaleidoscope of ever shifting moods, interests, personalities: now the apoplectic boss, now the courtly charmer, now the scholar and Renaissance man, now the buccaneer business baron. If Turner were a character from Shakespeare, and he has that kind of incandescence, he would be in equal parts the nobly ambitious Prince Hal, the impulsively belligerent Hotspur and the comically self-indulgent Falstaff. Says Schonfeld: "If Ted Turner were a color, it would be red--the red of the surface of the sun." Adds another Turner aide, insisting that he not be named: "Do I like Ted? Do you like a volcano?" Turner's wife Jane says she is sure he must have been a hyperactive child: "He's hyperactive now."
He has a genuine love of risk and an abiding faith in the value of competition, win or lose. He trusts his own vision and scorns prudent measures like market research. He loves to cast himself as a hapless crusader or starry-eyed underdog, and revels in emerging as the triumphant idiot savant.
Some of his grandiose behavior stems from a boyish love of audacity and outrage, some from an outsize appetite for experience. He once told George Breece, his Washington lobbyist, "I want to live five lives. I have to hurry to get them all in."
But there is a haunted side to Turner.
He is as acutely aware of childhood traumas as of childhood dreams of conquest. His memories are shot through with a ceaseless struggle to prove himself worthy, with a sense of rejection as a Yankee in the South and a Southerner in the North, and with the agonizing depressions and deaths of his father and his only sibling Mary Jane. Coupled with an inborn restlessness, those memories have left him all but incapable of repose.
His father Ed Turner came off a hardscrabble farm in Sumner, Miss., and entered the billboard business. In pursuit of ambition he moved the family from Cincinnati to Savannah when Ted was nine. Almost immediately Ted was shipped off to Georgia Military Academy, just outside Atlanta. He arrived six weeks after the school year started, the last entrant to his class, with an alien accent; he knew trouble was ahead, and came out fighting. Thus began a pugilistic attitude that lasted into adulthood. Turner was all the more motivated to establish his virility with his fists because he found no glory on the playing field: he tried football, basketball and baseball and was lackluster at each. He finally turned to a sport that required no special physical talent, just brains, determination and nerve. Ted Turner soon became known as the Capsize Kid, a fanatic sailor. He took crazy chances and rarely won, but he loved the competitive frenzy.
Life was strict, punishment swift and reward restrained at home as at military school, though father and son were close. Ed occasionally used a wire coathanger "to get my attention," Ted recalls. He was assigned onerous chores to earn his pocket money, and by his late teens his father charged him rent during summer vacations. For Ted's graduation from his second military academy, the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tenn., Ed Turner offered an enticing but booby-trapped present: a share of the cost of a Lightning-class sailboat. The rest was to come from Ted's savings, and would, his father knew, take virtually every cent the boy had.
For college Ted wanted to go to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. His father insisted on the Ivy League. Rejected by Harvard, Ted went off to Brown to study the Greek classics whose mythical and historic heroes had inspirited him as a teenager. His father again disapproved and sent a long, literate but contemptuous letter. It said, "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 am a practical man, and for the life of me I cannot possibly understand why you should wish to speak Greek ... I have read, in recent years, the deliberations of Plato and Aristotle, and was interested to learn that the old bastards had minds which worked very similarly to the way our minds work today. I was amazed that they had so much time for deliberating and thinking, and was interested in the kind of civilization that would permit such useless deliberation ... 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 angry son did the only thing he could to upstage his father: he published the letter in the Brown University newspaper. But Ed Turner apparently won his battle. Soon afterward, Ted switched his major to economics. And he did indeed leave Brown; after having been suspended twice for infractions involving women, he headed down to Florida and lived like a bum, then returned to Georgia to join his father in the billboard business.
Through much of his teens, a turbulent time for anyone, Ted shared a special family grief; when he was T 15 and she was three years younger, his sister Mary Jane was stricken with a severe form of lupus erythematosus, a disease that causes the body to make antibodies against its own tissues. Even now Turner looks away when he speaks of her suffering, and his express-train speech slows to a flat few words. "She was sweet as a little button, she worshiped the ground I walked on, and I loved her. A horrible illness." To inti mates he has described nightmarish scenes that took place as pain and deterioration tormented her nervous system. Carpenters were brought in to pad her room. She screamed, "God, let me die, let me die!"
Her death after five years of suffering increased the pressure on Ted as the only surviving child. When he went to work for his father, the lessons in business were intense. Says Turner: "Driving in to work, he told me about the tax laws, amortization, depreciation, sales, management, construction. He told me how he got started, what happened in competitive situations, how he lost business and how he got it." Always Ed Turner instilled ambition, and the self-doubt that keeps driven men going. Says his son of that training: "All my life I have had this gnawing pain that I might not succeed. It is only in the past four or five years that I have put that ghost to rest."
By the time Ted was in his 20s, Ed Turner was long since a millionaire. He went on buying companies, ran up debts, prospered yet worried. Eventually he grew despondent: he decided his expansion had been a great mistake. He signed an agreement to sell his billboard firm's big, newly acquired Atlanta division. Then Ed Turner retreated to his plantation in South Carolina and on March 5, 1963, at age 53, shot himself.
Turner discussed the psychic impact of that suicide in a speech at Georgetown University this spring. Said he: "My father died when I was 24. That left me alone, because I had counted on him to make the judgment of whether or not I was a success." His father's erratic business behavior and sudden death put young Ted to what old friends still consider his toughest test as a businessman: he had to find a way to nullify the sale contract and win back the Atlanta billboard business.
Ted used all his father's lessons, all his own natural guile. While the deal was pending, he lured away employees (a key but unsalable asset) from the Atlanta unit to the Macon, Ga., division that he retained. He shifted lucrative contracts between companies. He threatened to destroy financial records, "to build billboards in front of theirs." And when at last he persuaded the buyers to rescind the deal in exchange for $200,000, money he did not have, he gambled that they would wait to be paid to avoid an income tax of 90% on a short-term gain. Thus was born the financing rule that has since governed many a Turner acquisition: never make a down payment unless it is with the other fellow's money.
While Turner the businessman recovered quickly from his father's death, the inner man has been deeply, almost obsessively affected. Says a friend: "He talks about death incessantly. Over the years, killing himself was a high-priority topic of conversation. Most of the time he was flippant about it. He would talk in this joking way about how, if things did not work out, he could always sell the business, how all he needed was a roof over his head and some food. Then he would say, 'If things get really bad, I can always kill myself.' He could not go several days without talking about suicide."
Things have not, however, gone badly. Ted Turner proved far more adept than even his father at the billboard business. As the money rolled in, he looked for new pursuits. One was world-class sailing. Eventually he competed as far away as Australia, often for months each year. His long absences were possible only through the boundless patience of his second wife Jane, who raised his two children by a first marriage (which ended in divorce about two decades ago) and three of their own with a stoic emphasis on her role in providing "stability." She recalls ruefully such times as the three consecutive Christmases when the children (the youngest is now 13) were ocean orphans because Turner was away sailing. "He never had to worry about our children," she says. "I did that for both of us."
By the time Turner was 30 he had found his next challenge: broadcasting. He then got into sports when he bought the right to broadcast Atlanta Braves games; the sportscasts proved popular, so to keep the money-losing team in town, and on the air, he acquired the Braves outright. Later he picked up the Atlanta Hawks basketball team and financed the purchase of a now defunct soccer team, carrying their games on the station that he eventually renamed WTBS, for Turner Broadcasting System. Then came the idea for the supremely lucrative Superstation.
As it grew, Turner succeeded in another high-cost, high-risk challenge: the America's Cup, yachting's premier prize, which he lost in 1974 but won in 1977. No money could buy the publicity he enjoyed during the summer when he won. Turner was quotable and accessible; he was a hard-cussin' ordinary guy competing in a tight-lipped rich man's sport. He acted like Captain Bligh with his crew, and they seemed to love him for it. On the day he won, he showed up at a press conference roaring drunk. When someone moved his bottle of aquavit out of view of the cameras, Turner dropped under the table to retrieve it. He was amiably, gloriously outrageous.
But when the Turner family watches a documentary about the months he spent seeking the Cup in Newport, R.I., Jane makes a short, undeniable observation: There is not a glimpse of her or their children anywhere in the film. Ted Turner considers himself a devoted husband and father, but the price of his ambition is paid as much by his family as by himself. He travels on business some part of every week. He schedules every day, whether he is at the family's home in Atlanta or at the 5,000-acre plantation in Jacksonboro, S.C., where the Turners spend about half their time. Still, at the country retreat Jane Turner asks in all seriousness: "Doesn't he seem more relaxed here?" He will go for months without attending a social event, even a meal out, that is not related to work.
And he overreacts to that strain.
Some of his misbehavior is relatively innocent, if unjustified, familiarity. But it can lead to ugliness. When he pinched the wife of former Atlanta Braves Pitcher Dick Ruthven, the player made the incident public and demanded, successfully, to be traded. Jane Turner keeps her opinion of such exploits to herself.
A friend sees Turner's behavior as evidence of anxiety: "Ted does these bold things in business, puts everything he has on the line. The pressure can get almost unbearable. The way he reacts is to get loud and hyper and irritating. The nervousness comes out in this compulsive attraction to women. If a pretty girl walks by, I might peek out of the corner of my eye. When Ted is in one of those pressure-filled moods, he is likely to jump out and follow the pretty girl down the street."
The pressures on Turner must be considerable. Like his father, he has expanded his business, taken on debt and risked all on having judged the market aright. Unlike his father, he refuses to retrench. Much of his personal property is pledged as collateral for loans, and nearly all of his worth is tied up in 87% of the Turner Broadcasting System's stock.
Yet he keeps on spending. He plans to build a $31 million movie and TV production studio in Atlanta next year and start making his own features. Already he is financing Jacques Cousteau's exploration of the Amazon in exchange for television rights, and the Superstation makes original shows, including Nice People, documentary profiles of community benefactors, and Winners, American real-life success stories.
Turner knows he faces an uphill battle. He knows too that there are a lot of corporate buzzards circling overhead, hoping CNN will falter so they can pick its carcass clean. But Turner has built a unique career on being an optimist. And on being right.
Says he: "Sure, I'm worried. But I'm not that worried. As soon as I earn me my billion dollars, I am going to buy a network. I am going to find the new Frank Capra and set him to making movies. I can quit whenever I want to. I am not worried about what people think.
But I am the right man in the right place at the right time, not me alone, but all the people who think the world can be brought together by telecommunications."
The man who has taken on the sports Establishment, the federal regulatory bureaucracy, the old-money yachting elite, the networks and, perhaps most daunting, his own exacting demands of himself, ponders a moment when asked who he really is and dredges up yet another heroic memory.
"Charlemagne," Ted Turner replies, at least half-seriously, "saving Christendom from the infidels." --By William A. Henry III. Reported by B.J. Phillips/Atlanta
With reporting by B.J. Phillips
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