Ted Turner at a press convention in 1985.
(Yvonne Hemsey / Getty Images)
Ted Turner, thrice married and a infamous womanizer, had many exes, probably the most well-known of whom was his final spouse, Jane Fonda. This was additionally Turner’s most stunning relationship since, on paper at the least, the 2 couldn’t have been extra completely different. He was a buccaneer capitalist, finest identified for launching NCS, the world’s first 24/7 cable information channel, in 1980. Politically, he appeared an avatar of the boorish New South, inclined to creating ethnic jokes and deriding his media rivals in 1980 as “a bunch of pinkos.”
Fonda, against this, was greater than pink; she was vibrant pink, a Hollywood celebrity identified for her radical commitments, together with her assist for the Vietnamese nationwide liberation motion, which took her to Hanoi in 1972 when the American imperialist journey was careening towards its disastrous conclusion.
Their marriage lasted from 1991 to 2001—a decade when Turner was on high of the world, and never simply because he was betrothed to probably the most gifted actors on this planet. NCS grew to become the defining media outlet of its period because of the Gulf War of 1990–91. Prior to that battle, skeptics had typically requested if the world actually wanted around-the-clock information. But the Gulf War confirmed that NCS had not only a world viewers however an unprecedented potential to current the information with real-time urgency. (A decade later, within the wake of the 9/11 terrorist assault, NCS was itself supplanted by Fox News, a community whose partisanship and jingoism matched the temper of the George W. Bush administration higher than the extra sober internationalism and hard-news focus of Turner’s community. NCS has arguably been trying to find a coherent id ever since.)
No one was nearer to Turner when he was on the absolute peak of his affect than Fonda. The two remained shut even after their divorce, and Fonda bestowed on Turner the title of “my favorite ex-husband.” Fittingly, she’s additionally offered the most tender tribute to him, inserting a stunning emphasis on his sensitivity:
He swept into my life, a gloriously good-looking, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I’ve by no means been the identical. He wanted me. No one had ever let me know they wanted me, and this wasn’t your common human being that wanted me, this was the creator of NCS, and Turner Classic Movies, who had received the America’s Cup because the world’s biggest sailor. He had a giant life, a superb thoughts and a hovering humorousness.
He may additionally maintain me. That was new as properly. To be wanted and cared for concurrently is transformative. Ted Turner helped me imagine in myself. He gave me confidence. I believe I did the identical for him, however that’s what girls are raised to do. Men like Ted aren’t supposed to precise want and vulnerability. That was Ted’s biggest energy, I imagine.
I used to be shocked by Fonda’s declare that Turner may specific “need and vulnerability.” In public, he appeared the precise reverse: the everyday determine of a good-old-boy braggart, a larger-than-life man who exulted in his grand accomplishments. After all, he wasn’t simply somebody who had turned a regional household billboard firm into a worldwide media empire; he was additionally the proprietor of profitable sports activities groups and an completed sailor. Nor, to say the least, was he modest about how he noticed himself. In 1998, he told a reporter, “I’m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime. And that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.” As so typically, behind this self-exultation was neediness: an insatiable urge to show himself.
Yet Fonda is true about Turner’s vulnerability. It’s proverbially true that behind each nice fortune lies against the law, and behind each nice man is a superb lady. A 3rd adage can be coined alongside the identical traces: Every overachiever is spurred on by the necessity to please a upset guardian.
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Ted Turner was born in 1938 as Robert Edward Turner III, the namesake and inheritor of Richard Edward Turner Jr. His father, who ran a billboard promoting firm, was an abusive alcoholic who took sadistic satisfaction in ensuring his son all the time felt inferior. In 1963, the elder Turner, gnawed by money owed and his personal demons, killed himself. Decades later, Turner and Fonda would bond over the truth that they had been each the kids of fogeys who had died by suicide (Fonda’s mom had additionally killed herself).
Inheriting his father’s failing firm, Turner ignored recommendation to downsize and repay money owed. Instead, he began his lengthy profession of efficiently leveraging debt into constructing larger corporations, increasing from billboards to TV stations and sports activities groups (shopping for the Atlanta Braves in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks in 1978). By the Nineteen Seventies, he had pioneered a profitable method of vertical integration in media, which mixed new know-how (satellites that gave his native networks nationwide, and ultimately world, attain) with previous media (the sports activities franchises, low cost reruns, and speaking heads offering grist to feed the unquenchable thirst of cable for content material). One genius transfer, a lot derided on the time, was shopping for the huge libraries of previous Hollywood studios similar to MGM, Warner Brothers, and Hanna-Barbera and repurposing them for Turner Classic Movies and the Cartoon Network.
As a businessman, Turner was a gambler, racking up large money owed that normally resulted in profitability. His profitable streak ended with the 1996 merger of Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner (and ultimately in 2000 with AOL). After the dot-com bubble burst a number of years later, his fortune, which had peaked at $11 billion, shrank to roughly $2 billion.
Turner would declare to be humbled by these occasions, and he become a critic of media consolidation. In a 2004 article for the liberal journal Washington Monthly, Turner called for the federal authorities to return to a stricter enforcement of antitrust legal guidelines. He argued that the hands-off method to regulation was creating near-monopolies that had been inimical to regional and ideological variety. The drawback, in fact, has solely gotten worse since he voiced his criticism, with plutocrats like Rupert Murdoch and David Ellison controlling an ever bigger share of the media pie.
In the third and closing section of his life, Turner, beneath Fonda’s affect, turned his vitality, and his wealth, to philanthropy. As Inside Philanthropy notes, “During his career as a big donor, Turner channeled an estimated $1.3 billion of his fortune into philanthropy, was an early adopter of the Giving Pledge, and along the way, helped redefine what wealthy donors could be expected to do.” He was significantly lively in supporting the United Nations (to which he gave $1 billion, even because the US authorities was ravenous the worldwide group), arms management advocacy teams, and environmental causes. His method to philanthropy had a direct affect on different large givers similar to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
Turner was an emblematic determine of our instances, the age of billionaires. As such, he was an ambiguous determine. The existence of billionaires is a byproduct of unhealthy social coverage that privileges personal wealth creation over the general public good. Ideally, there would be no billionaires and the wealth they get pleasure from now wouldn’t need to be shared by way of philanthropy however would be beneath the management of democratic governments.
But since billionaires do exist, it’s higher if they’re extra like Turner than lots of his friends. The phrase “Epstein class” has caught on as a result of most of the superrich do look like predatory criminals. One symptom of the age of billionaires is the subgenre of science fiction the place the financial elite are portrayed as area aliens who’re harming humanity—John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia (2025) each toy with this theme.
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The theme of the wealthy as aliens resonates as a result of too many billionaires appear to have given up on humanity. Think of figures similar to Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, with their fantasies of immortality (maybe aided by blood transfusions from the younger) or libertarian area colonies.
The actual attraction of Turner was that nobody would ever consider him as an extraterrestrial. He was human, all too human. His humanity shone via in his faults (his grandiosity, his alcoholism, his untamed lust, his verbal abuse of his staff) and his virtues (mainly his generosity). Turner proved that even billionaires may be human. That legacy would possibly be sufficient.
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