Jacques Cousteau (36 page)

“We have lost only the hardware,” he told reporters. “The brains who have conceived the systems are already at work. Give me a little time and we will do it again. This is not dream stuff. This is economic reality.” His next windship, he promised, would be twice as large as
Moulin à Vent
and have two Turbosails.

AS THE ME GENERATION status seekers of the 1980s drowned out the altruism and environmental awareness of the previous decade, Jacques Cousteau somehow remained at the top of all the lists of the most recognizable faces in the world. The waning popularity of his television shows did nothing to reduce the magnitude of his fame, which he used to advocate for population control, nuclear disarmament, and the protection of rivers and oceans. Financially, Cousteau was teetering on the brink of catastrophe yet keeping the throttles on most of his enterprises wide open. The bill for repairing
Calypso
after the ice damage from the St. Lawrence expedition came to more than $100,000. His windship,
Moulin à Vent
, was a derelict on the Norfolk waterfront. At Cousteau Society headquarters at 777 East Third Avenue in Manhattan, the very real possibility of bankruptcy soured the workdays. Cousteau and Jean-Michel had no choice but to call a meeting of the society advisory board to construct a vision of the future that might not include the production of films for television. PBS and the three networks had emphatically slammed their doors. The French government was running as fast as it could from the Turbosail project. Only a relative trickle of memberships, renewals, and donations was keeping the society afloat. Despite their dire financial situation, Cousteau and Jean-Michel enthusiastically introduced their plan for a five-year expedition to the Amazon, the South Pacific, and the rivers of Asia.

After a particularly bitter session during which an accountant pegged the Cousteau Society’s debt at $5.1 million, John Denver, who had been a loyal adviser since the beginning, pulled Jean-Michel away from the dismal group. Denver said he was working on his own music special on the new television network owned by Ted Turner, who had recently emerged as a celebrity in popular culture when he
won the America’s Cup yacht race. Turner is a little bit different, Denver said. Kind of an odd duck, a bit of a rager, but a powerful man with some very interesting and enlightened ideas about the ocean. Denver told Jean-Michel that he’d be happy to arrange an introduction. Jean-Michel led Denver to an empty office and told him to call Turner right now.

John Denver, Jacques Cousteau, an unidentified woman, and Ted Turner on Calypso, celebrating Cousteau’s seventy-fifth birthday in Washington, D.C
. (
COURTESY ROGER NICHOLS
)

Robert Edward Turner III was the son of an advertising man who had specialized in billboards to build a business worth more than $1 million by the time he committed suicide in 1963. Ted inherited Turner Outdoor Advertising after his father’s death. Twenty-five years old, he had been expelled from Brown University three years earlier for having a woman in his dorm room. Afterward, he spent most of his time racing sailboats out of a yacht club in Savannah, Georgia. Five years after Ted took over, Turner Outdoor controlled the billboard market in northern Georgia and southern South Carolina, owned a half-dozen radio stations, and was looking for a television station to buy. He heard that Channel 17 in Atlanta was losing $50,000 a month with less than 5 percent of the city’s television
viewers watching its programs. Turner had plenty of cash and thought it was a bargain compared with the price of a network affiliate. Federal law now required that UHF frequencies be built into new television receivers, along with the thirteen familiar channels broadcasting in VHF. What difference did it make, Turner figured, if a channel’s number was 17 instead of 4, 5, or 7? Why did NBC, CBS, and ABC mean any more than the Turner Broadcasting System if he could transmit a signal into every home with a new television?

Turner bought more television stations around the South, but WTCG-17 was his masterpiece. In 1976, with some more of his cash, he gave the people of Georgia a compelling reason to tune into WTCG-17 when he bought the Atlanta Braves baseball team and the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. After that, if you wanted to watch local baseball or basketball you had to watch it on Turner’s channel. The same year, he got permission from the Federal Communications Commission to bounce his signal off a satellite and down to local companies that sold Channel 17 as part of a package of channels piped into homes through cables instead of over the airwaves. Cable television offered not only more channels but clearer pictures. Ted Turner’s Channel 17, renamed WTBS (W Turner Broadcasting System), became America’s first cable television superstation. His programming consisted of Braves and Hawks games, reruns of other sporting events, old movies, sitcom reruns, and cartoons, all of which he either owned outright or bought for next to nothing.

In a year and a half, WTBS was worth $100 million. Turner was being celebrated in
Fortune, Time
, and the rest of the front rank of American media as the country’s most successful swashbuckling entrepreneur. He became an even more prominent international celebrity in 1977 when he bought a three-year-old aluminum 12-meter yacht that was supposed to be a sparring partner for two new boats competing to defend the America’s Cup. Turner’s boat,
Courageous
, had won under its original owners three years earlier, but the newer
Enterprise
and
Independence
were supposed to be much faster.

With Turner himself at the helm,
Courageous
beat the other American yachts in challenge races and took the best-of-seven series against Australia’s challenger
Australia
in four straight races off Newport, Rhode Island. In a sport awash in egos, Turner bested them all with braggadocio, taunting, cigar smoking, and drinking against the glitzy
background of international yacht racing. The media, delighted as always by a colorful showman who made good on rash promises, dubbed him Captain Outrageous and the Mouth of the South.

After John Denver’s introduction, Turner and Cousteau sat down to talk in the summer of 1981. They liked each other immediately. Jean-Michel, who went to Atlanta with his father, reported to John Denver that their meeting was love at first sight. Both men were cultural icons who radiated confidence as if they had invented it. Instead of clashing, as two such similar men usually do, their pragmatism and mutual respect prevailed. The adventures of Jacques Cousteau, recent gas shortages, and the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island had inspired a quirky environmental awareness in Turner. He was a runaway capitalist and developer, but contributed millions of dollars and free television time to promote population control, solutions to world hunger, and safe, nonnuclear energy sources. He believed that a single man like Cousteau who could deliver important but at the same time entertaining messages to the world was more essential than a thousand scientists who made sense only to one another.

Though Cousteau betrayed nothing, he was slightly uncomfortable approaching Turner. He was a seventy-one-year-old filmmaker who was $5 million in debt, and he was not at all convinced that cable television was the way forward. Turner immediately set Cousteau at ease with a gracious acknowledgment of Cousteau’s contributions to humanity’s relationship to the environment, his skill as a filmmaker, and his value as a guide to the beauty of the natural world. In person, Turner was soft-spoken and thoughtful, nothing like the raucous sailor he appeared to be during the America’s Cup races. He quickly convinced Cousteau that in the same way that broadcast television had been a better means of reaching audiences than theatrical films, cable television, with much clearer pictures paid for by individual subscribers instead of advertisements, was the future.

With the preliminaries out of the way, Turner asked Cousteau what he wanted. Cousteau was brief and to the point. The great rivers of the world upon which the oceans and all life depend for survival were becoming toxic sewers. He wanted to continue what he and Philippe had started on the Nile and make a six-month voyage on the Amazon, from which he would produce four hour-long television specials. How much money do you need? Turner asked. Six million,
Cousteau said. Turner stuck out his hand to shake. You’ve got it, he said.

While Cousteau and Turner worked out the details of the contract, Jean-Michel negotiated with the superstation programming staff. The Amazon shows would not be ready for broadcast for at least three years, but the Cousteau Society had retained ownership rights to all twelve episodes that had aired on PBS from 1978 to 1980. The next day, after consulting with Turner, WTBS bought the exclusive rights to
The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey
series for $5 million, payable over the next five years. In New York and Norfolk, the fog of financial desperation that had settled over the Cousteau Society and the Cousteau family began to lift.

The exploration of the Amazon was Cousteau’s most complex and expensive expedition. For fifteen months, while he negotiated with the governments of Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Guyana, Surinam, and Ecuador for rights of passage, Jean-Michel managed a team of fifty men and women preparing for the voyage. Albert Falco and Raymond Coll, the last of the original
Calypso
divers, organized underwater camera teams, trained new divers, and supervised the building of their equipment inventory in Norfolk. Jean-Michel’s wife, Anne-Marie, was the expedition’s still photographer. Susan Schiefelbein went to work on the telescripts. Cousteau Society staffer Paula DiPerna set up an office in Manaus, Brazil, as the logistical ringmaster in charge of hotel rooms, plane tickets, boat charters, medical contingencies, and equipment shipments.

Because
Calypso
was going to be far from a shipyard for at least two years, she had to be in perfect condition when she left Norfolk. Through the spring and summer of 1981, Falco, Coll, and their crew worked with a handful of professional shipwrights to replank the ice-gouged bow, repaint and recaulk the rest of the hull, and rebuild the rudders, propellers, and shafts to original condition. Chief engineer Jean-Marie France directed the complete overhaul of both main engines and the removal of the twin auxiliaries that powered the electrical and hydraulic systems. He replaced the old auxiliary engines with a pair of brand-new model 6-71 diesels that were a gift to the society from the employees of the Detroit Diesel Allison factory that
built them. On one of the new engines, the factory workers had fastened a plaque honoring the environmental contributions of Cousteau and his ship.

The mission of the expedition was straightforward. Jean-Michel would travel overland and on smaller tributaries from the Amazon headwaters, and rendezvous with
Calypso
working its way upriver from the east. Both teams would concentrate on finding out how the human presence was affecting the Amazon and its surrounding watersheds. During Cousteau’s negotiations in South America, he had gotten permission to enter the waters and territory of the host countries by promising that scientists from those nations would accompany his expedition. Cousteau told them that his films would clearly tie the watersheds of the world to the oceans, making a monumental ecological statement. More than three-quarters of the earth’s population live within 10 miles of a coast or a major river. If the waters on which their lives depended were being polluted, they had to understand the relationship of the rivers and ocean to their survival in order to reverse course and avert disaster.

The Amazon was the perfect river with which to make his point. From the headwaters of its most distant tributary in the Andes Mountains of Peru, the Amazon and its countless branches collect more than 20 percent of the freshwater on earth and carry it to the Atlantic, 4,000 miles east. From the Amazon’s 200-mile-wide mouth, the muddy plume of the river is visible from space, penetrating 300 miles into the ocean and filling the sea to a depth of 6,000 feet. During the dry season, 100,000 square miles in the river basin are covered with water; during the wet season, 300,000 square miles are submerged. More than a third of the planet’s trees form the rain forest of the Amazon basin, which has the most diverse ecosystem of plants and animals on earth. More kinds of fish live in the Amazon than in the entire Atlantic Ocean. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the human population was limited to a few thousand widely separated bands living apart from one another and the rest of the world. In just fifty years, however, timber harvesting, large-scale agribusiness, and the resulting urban migration had thrown the once perfectly tuned ecosystem off kilter. No one other than scientists, a few hardy tourists, and the people of the Amazon themselves knew what was happening to the Brazilian rain forest.

Cousteau’s expedition left Norfolk aboard
Calypso
, followed by a freighter headed for Lima and airliners bound for Quito, Ecuador, and Manaus, Brazil, which were the logistical centers supporting a half-dozen separate film crews. By the time the expedition returned to Norfolk a year and a half later, everyone had had enough of the Amazon. Falco had almost been stung to death by a swarm of bees. Jean-Michel, Anne-Marie, and ten others had gotten malaria. Cousteau had been severely bitten by fire ants on both arms, and they had been threatened by Colombian terrorists who believed that
Calypso
, equipped with a satellite dome and bristling with antennas, was a spy ship working for the CIA. But their film and videotape would produce seven of the finest hours of television to carry the Cousteau name and illuminate the plight of a river suffering under the burdens of a booming human population, ignorance, and abuse.