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Xernona Clayton knew one thing was off when her former boss Ted Turner confirmed up for his or her conventional downtown walk-and-talk with out his safety element. As he was deciding to go public along with his Lewy physique dementia analysis, he had a favor to ask of his now-retired Turner vice-president of public affairs.
“Usually, we would walk down the street arm-in-arm with people shouting greetings to us,” remembers Clayton. “But this was different. He was so serious.” Turner requested his good friend to maintain a secret for him: “When I die, will you come to my funeral and say some nice things about me?” Recalled Clayton, “It shocked the daylights out of me.” But she agreed to Turner’s request and added one in every of her personal. “Neither one of us were spring chickens so I asked if he would do the same for me. He nodded and told me, ‘Xernona, I would do anything for you.’”
Clayton is now getting ready to maintain her phrase to her previous good friend.
Ted Turner, Atlanta’s beloved, inimitable “Captain Outrageous” and “the Mouth from the South,” died on May 6. The visionary NCS founder, Atlanta Braves proprietor, environmentalist, philanthropist, yachtsman, humanitarian, restaurateur, 1977 America’s Cup winner and Time journal’s 1991 Man of the Year was 87.
While Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati on November 19, 1938, his father, Ed Turner, a fledging outside billboard promoting salesman, moved his household to Georgia when his son was 9. Ed promptly enrolled Ted at a army faculty for boys. “They were so mean,” Turner later recalled of his education. “They used to yell, ‘Kill the Yankee!’ and would pile on me. So, I learned a Southern accent. It took a few years, but I finally got integrated.”
Of her nature-loving father’s boyhood, Laura Turner Seydel recollects within the 2024 HBO documentary Call Me Ted, “Dad was a handful. He would bring all kinds of wild animals home. He was doing taxidermy at nine years old, stuffing squirrels and bringing snakes and things home and putting alligators in the bathtub.” After his mother and father’ divorce, Ted would obtain an schooling about girls from Ed. “Real men aren’t faithful,” Turner recalled his father telling him. “Real men run around.”
Following his father’s suicide in 1963, Ted took over the household outside billboard enterprise however was more and more intrigued by broadcast media. “The idea of getting into the TV business was exciting,” Turner writes in his memoir Call Me Ted. “If my options came down to buying a lousy radio station or a lousy TV station, I wanted to bet on the medium that looked like it would grow.” In 1970, he purchased WJRJ-TV, the Atlanta UHF Channel 17 and modified its name letters to WTCG (which stood for Turner Communications Group).
Driving by WTCG’s West Peachtree Street places of work someday, WGST disc jockey Bill Tush determined to pop in and apply for an announcer place. He acquired the job. “I had no idea it was owned by this guy Ted Turner,” says Tush. “After all, Ted wasn’t anybody at the time except to other Atlanta businessmen. I was there about two weeks when I finally met him. From then on, it was a crazy ride for 30 years. Ted had a sign on his desk, ‘Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way.’ That really was his way of thinking. And I was happy to follow. I was having a ball. I had more fun at my first 20 years at that station than I had ever had in my life.”
Tush acquired his first glimpse of Turner’s imaginative and prescient for the way forward for cable tv when he got here up with the concept of creating Channel 17 a 24-hour station. “Ted explained, People who work shift work and then get off at 3 in the morning, come home, and there’s nothing on television,” recollects Tush. “Gene Wright, our chief engineer at the time told Ted, We can’t do it, the transmitter can’t handle it. It was almost like Scotty from Star Trek telling Kirk, We don’t have the dilithium crystals! Gene would actually sleep in his office in order to keep the thing on the air 24 hours. Our transmitter was constantly going off the air in those days. But that was when I thought to myself, A 24-hour TV station? This guy’s got something going on here.”
One of Bill Tush’s early job duties on the station included ripping the newest headlines off the UPI wire service machine within the corridor and making an audio recording of the information for broadcast at 3 A.M. whereas a “news” slide was placed on the air. To fulfill the fundamental necessities of an FCC license, stations had been required to air information and public affairs programming.
“I was the entire news department,” says Tush. “It wasn’t that Ted didn’t like news, it just cost too much to do. It cost local stations a fortune to run a news operation. One day, Ted came in and said, Is there anybody who could sit in front of the camera and [read the news]? I said, I’ll do it. That’s how my on-camera career started.”
Bored and believing nobody was watching in the course of the evening, Tush and crew began doing comedy bits throughout the information section, together with a send-up of WXIA-TV’s 11 Alive “Pro News,” calling it “Dull News.” Turns out, the boss was awake. “Ted came in the next morning and said, Boy, what you did last night was pretty funny. I thought, Christ, if he likes it, we’ll do more of it. And it just got crazier and crazier.” Eventually, Tush was doing the information sitting subsequent to a German shepherd or with a paper bag over his head because the “Unknown Newsman.” (In a 1979 Congressional listening to, Congressman Ed Markey grilled Turner about his station’s unorthodox information practices, asking him if it was true his newscasts aired at 3 a.m. Turner replied, “That’s accurate and we have 100 percent of the audience then!”)
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In 1976, Turner had one other brainstorm—by using new satellite tv for pc expertise, he may beam his new SuperStation, (later rebranded as TBS Channel 17) throughout the United States. Around the identical time, Turner acquired perennial National League East basement dwellers the Atlanta Braves for $10 million (given the staff was shedding one million {dollars} a 12 months, Turner talked Braves president Dan Donahue into taking one million up entrance and permitting him to pay the remainder over 9 years). Turner inadvertently made baseball historical past when he promoted the staff’s farm league supervisor Bill Lucas to Braves basic supervisor, making him the primary Black GM in baseball. He would later downplay the choice, explaining, “I was simply putting the best guy I knew in the position.” As Braves video games had been now being beamed out throughout the nation, the membership acquired a brand new nickname, “America’s Team.” In 1995, Turner’s decades-long religion lastly paid off when the Atlanta Braves gained the World Series.
Between acquisitions, Turner, a devoted skipper since his faculty days at Brown University, competed in yacht-racing. In 1977, he sailed his boat Courageous to victory, profitable the America’s Cup in 1977 and making the quilt of the July 4 situation of Sports Illustrated.
There’s a line in one in every of Turner’s favourite motion pictures, 1941’s Citizen Kane that all the time resonated with him. At one level within the movie, newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, performed by Orson Welles, proclaims to his beleaguered employees, “The news goes on 24 hours a day.” But for Turner, who typically labored 12-to-14-hour days, the entire community newscasts had been lengthy over by the point he acquired dwelling.
That gave the cable tv innovator had an concept. He would name the brand new channel the Cable News Network. On June 1, 1980, with a crowd gathered earlier than him at NCS’s headquarters on Techwood Drive, Ted Turner launched the nation’s first 24-hour cable information channel that might finally be beamed world wide. As the band performed the National Anthem, Turner took within the second. “It was thrilling,” he recollects in Call Me Ted. “We still had a lot of work to do to make NCS a success, but we had already cleared substantial hurdles and defied skeptics simply by getting on the air.”
Photograph by Archive Photos/Getty Images
While he was turning into a world media mogul, privately, Ted was nonetheless the identical previous Ted. Xernona Clayton, the primary Black girl to host a chat present within the nation at Atlanta’s WAGA-TV in 1967, was now producing Emmy-winning documentaries for Turner Broadcasting. To keep away from Atlanta’s infamous rush hour visitors, Clayton typically acquired to her downtown workplace to begin her workday at 5 a.m. She encountered her new boss earlier than dawn one morning when he knocked on her workplace door with an empty espresso cup carrying nothing however a towel, contemporary from showering in his workplace. “I hear this voice say, I saw your light on and was wondering if maybe I could get a cup of coffee,” Clayton recollects. “I looked at him and asked, Aren’t you Ted Turner?! But that’s Ted. He would just walk around in a towel. He used to sleep there.” Clayton laughs and provides, “That became a regular routine for us. After that, the coffee klatch was on!”
As Ted Turner’s monetary fortunes grew whereas he launched the Goodwill Games, TNT, Turner Classic Movies (after buying the MGM movie library that included his favorites Citizen Kane and Gone With the Wind) and Cartoon Network, he felt his social obligations improve as effectively. As he instructed ABC News 20/20 correspondent Sam Donaldson in 1997, “I think it would be tragic to just be remembered for making a lot of money.” Consequently, Turner helped to create the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Turner Foundation nonprofits. And on September 18, 1997, Ted Turner made historical past by donating one billion {dollars} to begin the United Nations Foundation. Among its different achievements, the inspiration has efficiently battled the unfold of HIV and malaria across the globe.
Explained longtime Turner good friend and fellow media mogul John Malone within the Call Me Ted documentary, “Ted is a believer. He believes he can stop nuclear proliferation. He believes he can do something to impact global warming. This is a guy who really believes he can make a difference. And he does it with integrity. That is so unusual in this world. That’s what makes him so unique.” In 1990, hoping to encourage the following technology of environmentalists, Turner got here up with the idea for a brand new cartoon, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, that might be beamed to children throughout the globe. Explained Laura Turner Seydel, who would turn into chair of the eventual Captain Planet Foundation nonprofit, in Call Me Ted, “This superhero worked with youth from all over the world. A big part of the show’s success was that youth who had never seen somebody that looked like themselves were playing starring roles.” Ted defined the necessity for the cartoon extra succinctly: “The environment is everybody’s business.”
• • •
After a pair of failed marriages and seeing his 5 youngsters, Laura, Teddy, Beau, Rhett, and Jennie, occasionally all through their childhoods as he expanded his companies, Turner had turn into smitten with two-time Oscar winner Jane Fonda, who was lately divorced. After rebuffing a sequence of invites from Turner, the daughter of Hollywood legend Henry Fonda lastly agreed to a dinner date. But she was hesitant to leap right into a relationship with the NCS founder, particularly after he unfolded a web page from his desk calendar to plan their subsequent date and Fonda acquired a gander at the entire days already occupied with the names of different girls he was relationship. She issued an edict—if he wished to be along with her, he needed to drop the opposite girls.
“Ted was known for all of his girlfriends,” recollects Clayton with amusing. “But now, Jane Fonda was in the picture, a movie star. I told Ted, You can’t treat a movie star like a commoner. He was buying all this land in Montana and had all of these bison. I would give him these lectures: You can’t treat a lady like a herd of cattle, Ted! He used to laugh about how I was always trying to give him some ‘how-to-do’s.’”
Photograph by Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images
Turner listened to his previous good friend’s recommendation. While driving them round his properties in Montana, the media mogul would cease the automobile to choose flowers for Fonda. Ted and Jane had been married on December 21, 1991. She moved to Atlanta, shelving her performing profession and turning into a devoted stepmother to Ted’s 5 youngsters. Fonda inspired Turner to foster nearer relationships along with his now-adult youngsters and his rising variety of grandchildren. “Here was a man so grand who was saying, ‘When I’m not with you I feel diminished,” defined Fonda in Call Me Ted. In her autobiography My Life So Far, Fonda revealed {that a} month into their marriage, she found Turner had resumed an affair with one in every of his former girlfriends. After coming into her Bel Air lodge room on his knees, Ted and Jane would finally reconcile.
Turner would want the steadiness in his private life as NCS merged with Time Warner in 1996, successfully dissolving Turner Broadcasting and making NCS’s founder Time Warner’s vice-chair and head of all the corporate’s cable networks. But following the corporate’s 2000 merger with America Online, Ted Turner was primarily squeezed out. And following the brand new firm’s colossal $54 billion quarterly loss in 2002, Ted Turner’s private fortune plunged. His ten-year relationship with Fonda was additionally over. “The marriage had run its course,” Turner writes in Call Me Ted. “I loved Jane very much and continue to love her to this day.”
Due to the AOL-Time Warner debacle, Turner’s private wealth had diminished from an estimated eight billion {dollars} to 2 billion as he was fired from the businesses he had based. Cast adrift professionally for the primary time in 40 years, Turner appeared for a approach to fuse his entrepreneurial spirit along with his ardour for safeguarding the American prairie and preserving the Native American bison inhabitants on the plains. He determined to associate with Atlantan Longhorn Steaks founder and CEO George McKerrow, Jr. to launch Ted’s Montana Grill in 2001. The eating chain would deliver bison burgers, bison pot roast, salads and malted milkshakes to the American plate, served up in trailblazing environmentally sustainable eating places.
As he defined to David Letterman on The Late Show, “We’re raising bison because I really like them but when I got up to 42,000, I had to do something with them because they keep breeding. So, we had to eat some of them.”
Turner’s sustainability efforts labored.
In 25 years, America’s bison herd inhabitants has doubled to roughly 600,000 and is now not thought-about endangered. Ted’s Montana Grill is now a worthwhile, debt-free firm working 38 eating places in 16 states.
“For 25 years, our partnership has existed on a single handshake,” displays McKerrow. “Ted says our business venture basically saved his life. Ted’s Montana Grill gave Ted something to be proud of, something he could be involved with and something he could feel highly successful with.”
Despite their 2001 divorce, Jane Fonda remained near Turner’s household and Ted, affectionately referring to him as “my favorite ex-husband.” Until Lewy physique dementia rendered him unable to take action, Ted would steadfastly present as much as Fonda’s annual advantages for G-CAPP, her Georgia-based teen being pregnant prevention nonprofit, donating not solely money however luxurious journeys to his Montana properties for dwell auctions.
Fonda mirrored within the 2017 NCS particular Ted Turner: The Maverick Man, “As he’s aging, he wants to know that he will go out with the love of his children and his grandchildren.” Her eyes brimming with tears, Fonda added, “That may not have always been the case, but it’s important to him now, and he’s doing what he needs to do.”
Photograph by Rick Diamond/Getty Images for GCAPP
At a Harvard University talking engagement captured in Call Me Ted, Turner summed up his profession, telling the younger enterprise college students assembled earlier than him “I’ve had a great life. In America, we’ve emphasized that how much money you have and how much you spend is what determines how happy you are. That’s not right. The thing that really determines your happiness is your relationships. With you family, with your friends. That’s what’s important.”
• • •
As a lifelong historical past buff who confronted down numerous enterprise challenges over the a long time and survived storms on the open sea as a aggressive sailor, Ted Turner was keen on quoting the top of Horatius, author Thomas Babington Macaulay’s epic poem of historical Rome: “Then out spake courageous Horatius, the Captain of the Gate: ‘To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than facing fearful odds. For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods. Now, who will stand on either hand, and keep the bridge with me?”
Reflects George McKerrow, Jr. of his friend and business partner: “Ted is the kindest, most loyal and generous friend and partner you could ever ask for. This disease is the worst of the worst. Ted has fought longer and harder than anybody. He has a real zeal for life. He fought with dignity and honor until the end. I’m simply proud to have been by his aspect.”
While addressing a packed stadium on the inaugural Goodwill Games in 1986, Ted Turner summarized his targets for creating the worldwide sporting occasion and maybe his life’s mantra as effectively: “I love this world of ours. It’s a beautiful, wonderful place that deserves to be taken care of. And in order to take care of it, the first thing we have to do is learn to live in peace and harmony and cooperation. Thank you all for being a part of it. God bless you.”
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