Jacques Cousteau (2 page)

THE SOUL OF Jacques Cousteau’s code for living was his belief that reflecting on the past is useless. Once, when one of his sons came to him for help making a biographical film to celebrate his birthday, Cousteau said, “You’re wasting your time talking about my past. Don’t count me in. I can’t help you.”

In the autumn of his sixty-seventh year, therefore, Cousteau would not have agreed—or cared—that what can now be understood to be the enchanted opening movements in the symphony of his life were ending and a final dissonant movement was about to begin. He had just finished a two-month fund-raising tour of the United States, where sellout sports arena crowds in six cities had welcomed him like a visiting monarch and opened their checkbooks for the television celebrity.

Despite Cousteau’s insistence in a recent interview that he did not feel responsible for anything, he was awash in responsibilities. He was the president of the world’s largest manufacturer of scuba diving equipment, the director of the Musée Océanographique de Monaco (Oceanographic Museum of Monaco), the director of the French Office of Undersea Technology, the founder and president of the fastest-growing environmental organization in history, and the president of a television production company that between 1966 and 1976 had made him one of the most recognizable people on earth as the star of
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau
.

His days were as heavily scheduled as those of a head of state, leaving little time for anxiety, but that fall Cousteau was very worried
about his future in television. The American Broadcasting Company had canceled
The Undersea World
after a ten-year run, even though it was among the most successful television ventures of all time. ABC and the other two commercial networks, NBC and CBS, had simultaneously decided that science and nature documentaries, variety revues, and quiz shows weren’t drawing big enough audiences. They were turning instead to an addictive new formula built around weekly serial dramas called situation comedies.

Cousteau monument, St.-André-de-Cubzac, France
(courtesy of the author)

Within weeks of the cancellation, Cousteau had proposed a new series to the fourth American television network, the Public Broadcasting System, a loose new conglomerate of viewer-supported stations across the United States. After endless presentations to corporate boards of directors, he had finally found a sponsor, the Atlantic Richfield Petroleum Company (ARCO). PBS audiences were minuscule compared with those of the major networks, but he knew he had no place else to go on television. Everything for which he had worked as a filmmaker and explorer for a half century was lost without it.

Radio and television had fundamentally altered exploration, allowing listeners and viewers to share moments of discovery instantaneously
with heroic men and women in faraway places. The live broadcast of exploration had begun in August 1932, when oceanographers Otis Barton and William Beebe had themselves sealed in a 4.5-foot steel ball and lowered three-quarters of a mile into the Atlantic to peer through 6-inch portholes into the inky darkness. They reported a full hour of their dangerous journey as it was happening on the new National Broadcasting Company radio network. More than fourteen million people had been riveted to their radios in England and the United States. Vicarious exploration had reached its zenith on July 20, 1969, when one-eighth of the three and a half billion human beings on earth witnessed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon.

Like them, Cousteau had been catapulted to stardom by the astonishing new medium that sent information around the world on invisible electromagnetic waves. Now, for the first time, he was faced with adapting to its vicissitudes. Incredibly, lunar astronauts had also experienced the fickleness of television networks and audiences. Every person on earth with access to a television set had watched Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon. Very few of them could name the astronauts who made the last moon landing just three and a half years later (Gene Cernan, Ron Evans, and Harrison Schmitt).

His new television series,
The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey
, consisted of a dozen episodes built around underwater archaeology, shipwrecks, and environmental disaster airing over three broadcasting seasons. The first show, on the discovery of the sunken ocean liner
Britannic
, drew favorable reviews and a solid audience, but the costs for filming the series were outrunning ARCO’s money. Cousteau needed more than $2 million a year to keep his two hundred employees, companies, expeditions, and institutes afloat. He didn’t particularly care about money as long as he had enough, and his chief financial tactic was simply going out and getting more cash when he ran out.

The six-week fund-raising tour in the United States organized by the Cousteau Society, a nonprofit corporation he had launched four years earlier, would pay only some of the bills. In six cities, he and his son Philippe gave speeches to sellout crowds in sports arenas. At the finale in Seattle, more people packed a basketball coliseum than had come to the same place to see the Rolling Stones a few weeks earlier. Before his lecture, as he had in each city, Cousteau set aside time to
listen and talk to schoolchildren. They gave him flowers and drawings of seals, dolphins, whales, and one in which
Calypso
was depicted with wings hovering over the sea surrounded by a silver aura. After the gifts, Cousteau told the children they could ask him anything they wanted to about his life.

How old are you? Sixty-seven. How deep is the deepest you ever dived? Three hundred and seventy-two feet. Have you ever swum with a blue whale? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’ve never swum with a blue whale, because there are very few of them left anymore. What is it like underwater? It’s fantastic underwater because it is like floating in space. Are whales smarter than humans? Some whales have bigger brains than humans, but that doesn’t mean they are smarter. A girl raised her hand. Cousteau nodded to her. Without the slightest hint of humor, she said, “When I grow up, I want to marry a whale.” Another child told him that his school was changing its name to Orca Elementary to honor Cousteau and his work saving the whales. Cousteau beamed. “Wonderful,” he said. “That’s beautiful.”

After the children, Cousteau sat down with two reporters from Seattle’s antiestablishment newspaper.

“What does your work—the books, films, and the Cousteau Society—mean to you personally, as Jacques Cousteau?” one of them asked.

“This is an introvert question and I am not introverted,” Cousteau replied. “I am extroverted. I do not find my pleasure in asking questions about myself. I find my satisfaction in dealing with questions that concern the community and the outside world. We are more and more induced by publicity and the media to turn toward our neighbor. I hate my neighbor.” (He laughed.) “I like to look to the outside world.”

“You must have a sense of responsibility,” the other reporter said.

“I hate responsibility,” Cousteau snapped. “I feel in gear with the life of the world and that is not the same thing. The sense of responsibility is introverted, it gives you an importance. None of us has any importance, but rather we are in a symphony. The man who plays the violin in the symphony, he does not have a sense of responsibility. He is cooperating …Life is a symphony and we are playing a tune in the symphony; there is no responsibility there.”

“Do you believe in destiny?”

“No.”

“What about God?”

“If there is anything like God, it is so complex that we have no idea of what it is like. The concept of God is separate from ourselves. We have no importance to a God if there is one.”

“What do you rely on?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t you have some sense of faith?”

“No. I believe in the
instant
. I am going to give you a quote that has guided my life. I don’t like quotes, but this one enlightens me. It’s a Spanish proverb: ‘The road to paradise is paradise.’”

Cousteau savored his celebrity and the freedom to roam the planet, but remaining on television was crucial because it was the most powerful medium on earth for sounding an alarm. While he was in the United States,
Calypso
and her crew were at sea, sampling the water and bottom sediment for pollution by heavy metals and other toxins that might account for the dramatic collapse of life in the shallows near shore. Not long ago, the Mediterranean basin had been the entire world to the civilizations that bloomed on its shores, a gift that had nourished the Samarians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians, Gauls, Romans, and the countless other tribes and bands that had been fed and cleansed by its waters. Now, even the most casual observer could see that the nearly landlocked ocean known to the Romans as Mare Nostrum was headed for disaster. The lush habitat for plants and animals was becoming a polluted soup spoiled by the refuse of tens of millions of people crowding its shores. Cousteau had become obsessed with sounding the alarm about the Mediterranean and the rest of the world’s oceans, which, thanks to him, had been revealed as fragile beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. As exploring and filming the underwater world had dominated the first half of his life, saving what he had seen would command his passion for the rest of it.

“The Mediterranean will be the first to die,” he told a French magazine reporter, “and become a warning for the world.”

Cousteau was the secretary general of the International Commission for Scientific Exploration of the Mediterranean, chairman of Eurocean, a joint venture of twenty-four European companies to
explore and preserve the oceans, and director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. He had easily convinced all three to support the survey expedition, accomplishing several goals at once. The voyage to measure pollution would become an episode for the PBS series in which film footage of gorgeous coral and swarms of fish that he shot forty years earlier were contrasted with images of his divers descending into today’s bleak underwater wasteland. It would help make the recovery of the Mediterranean Sea a cause célèbre, and promote the work of the Cousteau Society. Because of television and Jacques Cousteau, millions of people would know the results of the Mediterranean pollution survey that just a decade earlier would have been shared only by a handful of scientists. Cousteau was outraged by the dismal state of the ocean of his youth. He had a dark sense of foreboding about the overall health of a planet that was supporting five times as many people as it had when he had been born in 1910. Increasingly, he was desperate to transmit that message to the world.

Cousteau’s own children and grandchildren would inherit the misery of unimaginable privation and sadness if his dire predictions about the earth came true. Both of his sons and their families were living in Los Angeles, where, for a decade, the day-to-day work of producing and editing his television show made it as much a home as any of them ever had. His younger son and coproducer of the
Odyssey
series, Philippe, was at that time recovering from a broken leg suffered in the crash of his gyrocopter while filming on Easter Island. His other son, Jean-Michel, was an architect working on aquarium exhibits and lecturing. Both his sons were married, with children of their own, and Cousteau believed that their prospects for the future were grim unless humanity ceased to be the plague on the earth that it had become.

In the autumn of 1977, while Cousteau was absorbed in the passions of his sacred present, events in the unknowable future were about to change his life forever. He could not have known, for instance, that he was about to become the patriarch of a second family. His affair with an Air France stewardess named Francine Triplet seemed to be more than just another of his endless liaisons with women. Within a year, they would have a child together, then another, beginning a secret life that would remain hidden for almost fifteen years. Cousteau
also could not have known that soon he and his wife, Simone, would suffer their ultimate agony together, the death of a child. Afterward, Cousteau carried on while Simone retreated alone to
Calypso
, where she was known as
La Bergère
, The Shepherdess. Later, someone asked Cousteau if it had been difficult for him to be the commander of
Calypso
during her halcyon days.

“Not if Simone was on board. She was the cook, the mother of thirty sailors, the one that advised, the one that ended the fights, the one that told us when to shave, the one that challenged us to do our best, the one that we counted on, our best critic, our first admirer, the one who saved the ship in a storm. She was the smile each morning and the warm good night.
Calypso
could have lived without me, but not without Simone.”

Marriage is absolutely archaic. It is a device people use to avoid facing the fact that we are all solitary and perishable.

Jacques Cousteau