Jacques Cousteau

A few weeks after I decided to write about Jacques Cousteau, I went to St.-André-de-Cubzac, France, where he was born and is buried. It’s a typical market village on the fringe of Bordeaux with a busy highway running through the center and narrow streets off to each side that are deserted during the day because almost everyone works in the city. The second-floor bedroom in which Cousteau first drew breath is now part of an apartment over a pharmacy, across the street from the windowless stone abbey that anchors St.-André to the twelfth century and the Roman Catholic church. Two blocks west, I found a civic monument to Cousteau at the traffic circle on the approach from Bordeaux. Above a splash of carefully tended annuals in summer bloom, a twice-life-size wooden dolphin is mounted 10 feet off the ground on a steel pole. Rendered by the sculptor in the act of leaping from the sea, the dolphin holds in its mouth a red knit watch cap like the ones worn so famously by Cousteau and the crew of
Calypso
. On a separate pole, arrowed signs guide visitors to the local highlights—the Philippe Cousteau Professional Academy, City Hall, and the Forty-fifth Parallel Ecological Observatory, one of several founded in the eighteenth century to study the earth precisely halfway between the equator and the North Pole.

Just past the traffic circle is the cemetery, two acres surrounded by limestone walls beyond which the ancient vineyards roll like ocean swells toward the Gironde Estuary and the Atlantic. On the late August afternoon I was there, the walls were so bright with reflected sun that it was hard to look directly at them. Inside, there were rows of tombs, some of them like blockhouses intended to protect their occupants, some like ornate temples decorated with stone flowers, angels, and portraits of the deceased. A sign at the gate pointed the way to
Sépulture Cdt. Cousteau
.

Calypso,
August 2005, La Rochelle, France
(COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)

Cousteau’s parents, Daniel and Elizabeth, lay together in a knee-high chamber of limestone bricks capped by a simple cross inscribed with a single word: COUSTEAU. A carpet of red flowers covered the center of the tomb, around which were conical, waist-high evergreens spaced like sentries. To the side, facing over the vineyards just then plump with the season’s crop, were three graves marked by wrought iron crosses. Over one of them was a foot-square piece of slate with weathered gold leaf lettering:

J Y Cousteau
Papa du Globe

I was alone at the tomb for only a few minutes before a man and woman I guessed to be in their midthirties arrived. They looked at me but didn’t speak, so I moved away to give them the privacy they seemed to want. While the man stood silently with his hands clasped in front of him, the woman reached out and swept a few dry leaves from the top of the tomb. Then she picked up a handful of pebbles from the path at her feet and arranged them in the shape of a heart on the spot she had cleared. Around her heart were similar commemorations
of pebbles—an anchor, a ship’s hull, another heart, the letters
JYC
, a circle. When the woman turned to face her husband, I saw that her eyes were shiny with the beginnings of tears. She shrugged as though slightly embarrassed by her emotions and took his arm. They nodded at me as they started for the cemetery gate. “Did you know him?” I blurted in English. “No,” the woman said. “But we loved him.”

In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s—the middle decades of my life—Cousteau was the most internationally recognizable television star on earth. His success as a filmmaker had peaked with
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau
, which aired four times a year for a decade before being canceled by ABC in 1976. After that, Cousteau never again reached television audiences of tens of millions, though he produced over a hundred more documentaries. Instead, he became a revered elder of the environmental movement, credited with kindling a new awareness of the need for stewardship of the world’s oceans and rivers. The man and woman in the cemetery were thirty years younger than I, members of the generation after mine. The woman arranging her pebbles on his tomb added a layer of complexity to a man I regarded as a brilliant showman who had coinvented the Aqua-Lung because he wanted to breathe underwater, had made movies to show the world what he found, and had used his celebrity to transform the human relationship with our planet. I had not understood that Cousteau was, simply and timelessly, beloved.

The next day, I took an afternoon train north along the Atlantic coast to the port city of La Rochelle to look for what was left of Cousteau’s
Calypso
, the converted World War II minesweeper that had become the most famous research ship in history. At the dock of the Maritime Museum, I found a wreck that bore only a vague resemblance to the heroic white ship I remembered from many hours sitting in front of the television eating a cooling turkey TV dinner and watching Cousteau and his divers explore the underwater world.

The hulk was weeping rust streaks from corroded fittings on its sooty white flanks. Frayed dock lines seemed to be straining to keep it afloat. The name and hailing port had been covered over with off-shade paint that looked as if it had been applied in a rush to conceal
its identity. The transom planks, darkened by rot, bulged ominously. In four places, flat canvas slings were wrapped tightly around the hull as though to contain its innards. On deck, a clutter of metal tubing, wire, gas canisters, and the remains of a crow’s nest in front of the pilothouse looked dangerously jagged and forlorn. The boarding gate was missing, leaving a hole in the gunwale through which I could see the ship’s docking ladder under a pile of crumpled sheet metal. On the side of the ladder I made out sun-bleached green letters in uneven Greek script with the letter
a
in the word
Calypso
replaced by the symbol of a fish: α.

La Rochelle has been in continual use as a port since the tenth century, when it dealt mainly in red wine and salt. From the sea, ships have to navigate channels through treacherous, shifting sand flats at the confluent mouths of the Dordogne and Garonne rivers, but once inside the harbor, they are safe from all but the worst storms. As I looked at the wreck at the dock, I realized that this perfect harbor was very likely the last port of call for a ship known to more people than Jason’s
Argo
, Jules Verne’s
Nautilus
, Captain Cook’s
Endeavour
, or Ernest Shackleton’s
Endurance
.

Cousteau in his tomb in St.-André had seemed natural to me. We all owe a death. Boats eventually die, too, but the wreck of
Calypso
felt wrong, neglected, and dishonored. I had already picked up faint rumblings about a legal stalemate over possession of the ship and bitter conflict among Cousteau’s survivors. The sight of
Calypso
rotting at the dock raised questions I knew I would have to answer to represent his life accurately. How could a man of such immense power have allowed his former mistress and widow, his surviving son, and their children to descend into bitter conflict over his legacy? Was he a tragic character hidden behind the veil of celebrity? Does he deserve our enduring love?

At dusk, after a long hour absorbing what the wreck of
Calypso
was telling me, I walked over to the Maritime Museum and asked one of the ticket takers what was going to happen to Cousteau’s famous ship. I hoped that its presence at the museum dock meant that there were plans to rebuild it as an exhibit. Shaking her head as though she was angry to speak the words, the ticket taker said, “She will not be repaired. She is destroyed.”

For three years after my visits to St.-André and La Rochelle,
Jacques Cousteau dominated my end of conversations, an indulgence that is familiar to anyone who spends much time with a writer. I talked often about the scene I witnessed at his grave and my sadness and consternation about the wreck of
Calypso
. Without exception, I received in return stories of memorable moments in the lives of friends, colleagues, and strangers in which Cousteau and his adventures played a role. Everyone, of course, could do the accent. Some told me that he had changed their lives forever.

The owner of a wineshop around the corner from my hotel in Bordeaux—a woman who wore her five or six decades on earth like a designer dress—told me that as a teenager she had seen Cousteau on television and decided she would marry him. When she found out he was already married, she picked a man who looked enough like him to be his brother.

I mentioned Cousteau to a docent at the Picasso Museum in Antibes, who told me that the first time Cousteau met Picasso, he gave the artist a piece of polished black coral from the Red Sea. Picasso had it in his hand when he died.

It was like telling people about your operation or a recent death in the family. Everybody had a story. A marine biologist from Olympia, Washington, said he had watched every episode of
The Undersea World
, decided to devote his life to studying the sea and its creatures, and never wavered in his passion. He gave me a program he had saved from a Cousteau Society environmental rally held at a sports arena in Seattle in 1977. An oceanographer told me about going to the same rally in Seattle, where the image of Cousteau walking across the basketball court was indelibly etched in her memory. She said he was like a powerful, kind, and handsome king. Another woman remembered that her father, who was a diver and sea captain, insisted that his wife and children watch Cousteau on television. He wanted them to understand why he was so excited about what he did for a living. A champion swimmer from California told me that after he watched Cousteau specials as a teenager, he majored in biology in college, became a master diver, made more than fifty documentaries about the ocean, and helped found one of the world’s great aquariums in Monterey. A thriving novelist with a Ph.D. in marine science told me that his affection for Cousteau as a boy had sent him to sea to be an oceanographer, but it had proved to be the wrong life for him. One
thing nobody told him, he said, was what hard work research diving really is. Watching Cousteau, he had not been able to imagine it as anything but fun.

Since I began work on this book, I have heard hundreds of these testaments. My own includes seeing Cousteau’s
The Silent World
at an army base movie theater and, a few summers later, buying an Aqua-Lung in partnership with a friend so we could spear black sea bass to sell to neighbors in our Connecticut seaside town. After that, I spent most of the next forty-five years writing about the sea and its creatures. In the 1980s, partly because of Cousteau’s booming insistence that human beings were doing irreparable harm to the oceans by over-fishing, I guided the editorial policy of the country’s most respected commercial fishing magazine in the direction of environmental responsibility. The concept that without fish there could be no fishermen finally started to make sense to fleets that had, until then, fished with little restraint, driving some species into total collapse.

Not everyone I met in the course of my research was kind to the memory of Jacques Cousteau. From his earliest encounters with his collaborators in the invention of the Aqua-Lung, he possessed the power to persuade other people to join him in fulfilling his vision. Engineers, sailors, divers, directors, producers, writers, reporters, friends, family, and lovers willingly helped him realize his visions and were grateful for the chance to share even a sliver of his adventures. Later, many of those people felt slighted as they disappeared in his wake while he became famous and moved on. Most of them were grateful to have been part of Cousteau’s magnificent journey, but few believed that they had ever known the man at all.

As Peter Guralnick, the author of a brilliant biography of Elvis Presley, wrote about trying to understand the life of a celebrity: “No matter how long one peers in from the outside, it is never quite the view from within.” Instead, guided by the hundreds of books, magazine articles, newspaper stories, and films that constitute Cousteau’s oeuvre, I have constructed a timeline for his life and a chronicle of his inventions, adventures, and achievements. In interviews with friends, former
Calypso
crew members, and some of his family, I tried to go beyond that public man to understand his nature and motivations, perhaps even to know him.

This book is a voyage into the life of Jacques Cousteau, necessarily
burdened by the flaws contained in the opinions of dozens of people who knew him or wrote about him. It is a biography of sorts, but not a day-by-day recitation of the events of his life. Nor is it the simplistic account of the life of a man who was far more complex than most of us, whose true character was hidden behind the veil of celebrity. I offer to all those whose lives were changed by Jacques Cousteau a few things they might not know about him. Most of all, I intend this book to be a respectful, honest remembrance of the man who brought the oceans and rivers of the world to life for all of us.

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