Jacques Cousteau (40 page)
Authors: Brad Matsen
With Jean-Michel gone, everyone in business with Cousteau was shaking their heads at the grim prospects for the future. Publicly, they expressed optimism for the continuation of Cousteau’s work, but most of them privately believed that all he had built might very well die with him. At the end of Francine Triplet’s career as an Air France flight attendant, she had been a senior executive overseeing in-flight service. She participated in the making of several promotional films but had no other experience that would explain why L’Équipe Cousteau hired her as a scriptwriter later that year. It was even more puzzling that Cousteau seemed to be grooming his wife to take over after his death. Increasingly, the new Madame Cousteau was making decisions about the society and L’Équipe Cousteau on behalf of her husband.
In 1995 Cousteau turned eighty-five. His lungs were failing, and he had withdrawn from almost all activity outside his home in Paris. The man who taught the world how to breathe underwater, he joked, was having trouble breathing on land. He was equally cavalier about the prospect of his own death.
Cousteau still granted interviews, intermingling charm, philosophy, and the inevitable promotion of the society and his television programs. “If I have cancer, so what? That’s a way to finish your life. It’s one more sickness. It’s nothing terrible. I mean, yes, it’s terrible, but death is terrible in itself. I have made friends with death,” Cousteau said. “I mean I have accepted it not only as inevitable but also as constructive. If we didn’t die, we would not appreciate life as we do. So it’s a constructive force.”
He said he regretted only that it was impossible for him to continue to live as an animal when he was sick. “When an animal is hungry, he will hunt several weeks without sleep. When he has eaten he will sleep for three days. That’s the way I go.”
Cousteau held out no hope for an encounter with a benevolent
and forgiving god after this life. “If there is a god and He’s interested in life, He’s just as interested in a French poodle as in you or me,” he told one writer.
Why were you able to expand human awareness of the need to protect the environment, a reporter asked? “If
The Silent World
was such a success when it came out it was, of course, because people were beginning to have a feeling for their surroundings and a curiosity about the sea depth that no one had seen before. But it was also because I knew how to make a movie.”
In another interview, he repeated his long-held conviction that humanity had to begin thinking about the long-term health of the planet or face the same destruction he had witnessed in Haiti.
The earth is probably two-and-a-half billion years old, and we know that in about five billion years life will be impossible on earth because the sun is going to expand and burn everything. So we’re about a third of the way in the life of the earth, which means that if we take care of it, humans can plan for several billion years on this wonderful planet. Things change, of course. The world is not what it was. We must plan long-term. Accordingly, to save it for our distant children, we must establish four priorities. The first one is peace. We know it is difficult, but there must be ways to live in peace other than leaving it in the hands of governments.
The second priority is limiting our own number. Rich nations have stable populations, poor nations are a time bomb. The third priority is education. If we want to do something for peace and population, for the Third World and the environment, we have to demonstrate the problem. The fourth priority is the environment. If I let my reason speak I am not optimistic. I don’t see any possibility to change people, the people who make the decisions. However, I believe that by action, faith, and hope we can achieve something. Each one of us must do something to fight for peace, for better cooperation among people, for education and the environment.
Among friends with a bottle of wine on the table, Cousteau’s pronouncements were much less pained and more hopefully eloquent:
I find poets closer to the truth than mathematicians or politicians. They have visions that are not only fantasy. They are visions that are, for some reason they cannot explain, an inspiration that guides them
and brings them by the hand, or by the pen, closer to the truth than anybody else. I believe we should follow the poets more than anybody else in life. It’s the light. It’s the star we should be guided by…The only remedies to the logical absurdities are utopias, reasonable utopias.
As Jacques Cousteau faded further into the background, his new wife emerged as the heir to all he had created. Falco, Raymond Coll, and the few original
Calypso
divers who were still around watched Cousteau’s health decline and prepared to quit, as did many writers, editors, and other staff. They had been loyal to Cousteau and Jean-Michel but could not understand why he was leaving everything in Francine’s obviously incapable hands. She seemed to know very little about running expeditions, managing nonprofit corporations, or making movies.
While Francine shored up her defenses against criticism and the abandonment by Cousteau’s loyal friends, Jean-Michel struggled to establish a separate identity. His father was still bristling because his son had quit on him, and the bitterness took on a sharper edge because Francine was increasingly protective of her husband’s privacy. It was hard for Jean-Michel to see his father even for purely personal reasons, and his misunderstandings with his stepmother deepened. Shut out and suffering from it, Jean-Michel turned his attention to lecturing and leading environmental tours and cruises. He went into business with a developer who was building a vacation village on Vanua Levu, one of the Fijian islands. The resort was among the first in a new wave of what developers were promoting as eco-friendly, a small collection of thatched huts around a pristine lagoon. Guests could scuba dive, snorkel, and learn about life on a primitive South Pacific island, but no fishing, motorboats, or Jet Skis were allowed. With Jean-Michel as a partner, Vanua Levu was billed as a Cousteau environmental resort. Despite his banishment from Cousteau’s inner circle and the obvious management of his father’s affairs by Francine, Jean-Michel was stunned when his father sued him to prevent him from using the Cousteau name.
After a brief exchange of legal threats, they settled out of court through their lawyers and without ever reconciling privately. Jean-Michel
agreed to use his full name—Jean-Michel Cousteau—for any of his own ventures to differentiate them from those of the Cousteau Society and his father’s other enterprises. He told reporters that the theatrics of a public lawsuit were completely uncalled for.
“My father and I could have solved our differences over a good bottle of French wine and an embrace.” Jean-Michel was certain their problem could have been solved because without Francine, JYC had never been a grudge holder. To hold people accountable for past transgressions would have violated his cherished code of living in the present. If someone betrayed or mortally offended Cousteau, they simply ceased to exist, something that was out of the question when family was involved. He had shown over and over that no matter how serious a breach or a rupture in his relationship with his sons, his heart had remained open to them. When Philippe tried and failed to go it on his own as a filmmaker, JYC took him back without hesitation. When Jean-Michel quit the Cousteau Society to protest the hiring of Fred Hyman as its director, he was still part of the family. Everything changed with Francine as part of the equation.
“JYC was not a superman,” Jean-Michel insisted ten years after his father’s death. “He was just an ordinary man who made a bad mistake. Living a secret life with a second family diminished him and darkened his outlook about himself and the earth as he grew old. By the time he died, he no longer believed that humanity could save itself from disaster. I disagree with him, but I do not hold his mistake against him. He was my father.”
As though to foreshadow the end of Cousteau’s life,
Calypso
sank in January 1996. After Simone’s death, Jean-Michel had finished the Mekong River expedition, left the ship in Ho Chi Minh City for almost a year, then took it to Singapore. Falco was there trying to get
Calypso
in shape for a final voyage back to retirement in France when a drifting barge slammed into it. In five minutes, it was on the bottom in 16 feet of water, with its funnel, masts, and the crow’s nest on its foredeck above the surface. A week later, Falco mustered a salvage crew, raised
Calypso
, and loaded it aboard a barge bound for Marseille. A few days before his ship made it home to France, Jacques Cousteau had a heart attack. He hung on for two days, fading in and out of consciousness, during which time Francine refused to allow Jean-Michel to see him. Jacques Cousteau died at two thirty on the morning of June 25, 1997.
Five days later, on a soggy Paris summer morning, the world sent Cousteau into eternity with a funeral mass at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. A French naval honor guard carried his coffin into the cathedral, followed by his wife, their two children, Jean-Michel, the rest of his surviving family, President Jacques Chirac, and a thousand other mourners. Outside, thousands more stood in the rain, straining to listen through the open stained-glass windows as the archbishop of Paris chanted the mass and, in his sermon, called Cousteau “a poet of an inaccessible reality.” President Chirac, speaking on behalf of his nation, said Cousteau was “an enchanter who represented the defense of nature, modern adventure, and the dreamy part at the heart of all of us.” Jean-Michel spoke next, with the strained tones of a heartbroken man struggling to be brave: “The work of my father was a hymn to life. On the wall of my office is a quotation from him: ‘The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know about existence and to marvel at it.’”
The day after the funeral mass in Paris, Jacques Cousteau was buried in the cemetery at St.-André-de-Cubzac next to the tomb of his mother and father, facing northwest up the Gironde Estuary toward the ocean.
The Cousteau family tomb, St.-André-de-Cubzac, France
(
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
)
FOLLOWING COUSTEAU’S explicit wishes, the boards of directors of the Cousteau Society and L’Équipe Cousteau elected Francine Cousteau president of both organizations. Turner Broadcasting aired several tributes to her late husband, along with reruns of the
Odyssey
and
Rediscovery
series, but there were no Jacques Cousteau films in production for the first time in fifty years. Without the publicity from new adventures, membership in the society and L’Équipe Cousteau went into a steady decline, falling to about half its peak of three hundred thousand by the turn of the new century. Francine Cousteau had complete control over the film archives, records, photographs, publications, and the use of the family name. Jean-Michel, completely cut off from his father’s estate after the suit over Vanua Levu, turned his attention to his tourism ventures, speaking engagements, and planning for his independent return to filmmaking. He founded his own nonprofit corporation—the Jean-Michel Cousteau Foundation—and led a campaign to return Keiko the killer whale to the wild after years of captivity and fame as the central character in the movie
Free Willy
. When Jan Cousteau, Philippe’s widow, announced plans to establish a foundation using the Cousteau name, Francine successfully sued to stop her, banishing that branch of her late husband’s family as well.
“They want to capitalize on the name,” she said. “If their name was not Cousteau, nobody would know who they are. I have to put a stop to it.”
“Just because her last name is Cousteau, Francine thinks she is a Cousteau,” Jean-Michel said. “She will never be a Cousteau.”
A bitter fight raged between Cousteau’s two families over possession of
Calypso
. After Falco brought the ship back to France, it languished
for two years on a barge in Marseille until Francine, backed by a court order, moved it to a dock at the French Maritime Museum in La Rochelle, several hundred miles to the northwest. There,
Calypso
rotted and sank lower into the water while a five-year legal battle dragged on between Jean-Michel and Francine.
Jacques Cousteau, the Sea King
(
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
)
Years before, Cousteau had told Jean-Michel that he and Simone wanted
Calypso
taken out to sea and scuttled when it was no longer fit for service. Neither of them could bear the thought of tourists roaming around her decks spilling their Coca-Colas on the ship that had been as important to them as their own hearts. Jean-Michel, and later Francine, begged Cousteau to reconsider, but he held firm. After his death, neither Cousteau’s new wife nor his son could sink the ship that had become so precious to France and the world as a symbol of exploration and enlightenment.
Jean-Michel; his children, Fabien and Céline; his niece Alexandra; Falco; Coll; and most of the original
Calypso
crewmen wanted the ship to become the centerpiece of a new oceanographic museum on the
Mediterranean. They believed they could raise money from Cousteau’s millions of admirers to restore the ship and build the museum, which would be a public institution. Francine, meanwhile, made a deal with a cruise ship company to move
Calypso
to the Caribbean, where it would become an attraction for the company’s passengers and other tourists. Jean-Michel quashed that plan with a countersuit based on French customs law, under which
Calypso
was considered an object rather than a working ship, and therefore could not be exported so easily.
“
Calypso
belongs in France,” Jean-Michel said when he announced his victory. “It is a national treasure.”
With no end in sight to the ownership dispute, L’Équipe Cousteau came up with the money to repair
Calypso
’s hull enough to keep it from sinking, cover the leaking decks with tarps, and pay for continued moorage in La Rochelle. A full restoration was going to cost $1 million, maybe $2 million. In the wake of the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees fighting over the family name and dramatic declines in membership, neither L’Équipe Cousteau nor the Cousteau Society had that kind of money.
Despite the suits and countersuits filed by Francine and Jean-Michel, the estate of the late Loel Guinness was still the only legal owner of
Calypso
. Guinness had leased rather than sold the ship to Cousteau fifty years earlier for the token sum of one British pound. The lease was still held by Cousteau’s original nonprofit French Oceanographic Expeditions, whose board was made up of old
Calypso
hands loyal to Jean-Michel and the Mediterranean plan for the ship. As the head of L’Équipe Cousteau, Francine claimed a seat on the COF board, hoping to wrest control of the ship that way. To thwart her, the old hands canceled the meeting at which she was going to demand her place.
Finally, Carnival Cruise Lines offered L’Équipe Cousteau $1.3 million to rebuild
Calypso
and keep it under the French flag. Loel Guinness’s grandson, convinced that the offer was the only hope for saving the ship, canceled the original lease to COF and sold it to Carnival for one euro. After a final round in court, a judge approved the deal.
In the fall of 2007, a pair of tugboats carefully towed the rust-streaked, wallowing hulk north along the Atlantic coast from La Rochelle to a shipyard in Brittany for resurrection. It was unrecognizable as the magical set for such scenes as the storm on its first voyage
under Cousteau on the Mediterranean, when it proved strong enough to survive anything; or Cousteau’s triumphant arrival in New York harbor for the World Oceanographic Congress; or its slow voyage up the Mississippi River with cheering crowds lining the levies and banks. It was impossible to connect the lifeless, dingy hulk to the thousands of days when divers left
Calypso
to explore the ocean, capture the underwater world on film, and bring it to televisions in hundreds of millions of homes, hard to imagine that this was the ship that had revolutionized human understanding about the sea and its creatures.
According to the Cousteau Society,
Calypso
will be ready for sea again in early 2010.
