Bluesky

Ted Turner, thrice married and a notorious womanizer, had many exes, the most famous of whom was his last wife, Jane Fonda. This was also Turner’s most surprising relationship since, on paper at least, the two couldn’t have been more different. He was a buccaneer capitalist, best known for launching CNN, the world’s first 24/7 cable news channel, in 1980. Politically, he seemed an avatar of the boorish New South, prone to making ethnic jokes and deriding his media rivals in 1980 as “a bunch of pinkos.”

Fonda, by contrast, was more than pink; she was bright red, a Hollywood superstar known for her radical commitments, including her support for the Vietnamese national liberation movement, which took her to Hanoi in 1972 when the American imperialist adventure was careening towards its disastrous conclusion.  

Their marriage lasted from 1991 to 2001—a decade when Turner was on top of the world, and not just because he was betrothed to one of the most talented actors in the world. CNN became the defining media outlet of its era thanks to the Gulf War of 1990-91. Prior to that conflict, skeptics had often asked if the world really needed around-the-clock news. But the Gulf War confirmed that CNN had not just a global audience but an unprecedented ability to present the news with real-time urgency. (A decade later, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack, CNN was itself supplanted by Fox News, a network whose partisanship and jingoism matched the mood of the George W. Bush administration better than the more sober internationalism and hard-news focus of Turner’s network. CNN has arguably been searching for a coherent identity ever since.) 

No one was closer to Turner when he was at the absolute peak of his influence than Fonda. The two remained close even after their divorce, and Fonda bestowed on Turner the title of “my favorite ex-husband.”  Fittingly, she’s also provided the most tender tribute to him, placing a surprising emphasis on his sensitivity: 

He swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I’ve never been the same. He needed me. No one had ever let me know they needed me, and this wasn’t your average human being that needed me, this was the creator of CNN, and Turner Classic Movies, who had won the America’s Cup as the world’s greatest sailor. He had a big life, a brilliant mind and a soaring sense of humor.He could also take care of me. That was new as well. To be needed and cared for simultaneously is transformative. Ted Turner helped me believe in myself. He gave me confidence. I think I did the same for him, but that’s what women are raised to do. Men like Ted aren’t supposed to express need and vulnerability. That was Ted’s greatest strength, I believe.

I was taken aback by Fonda’s claim that Turner could express “need and vulnerability.” In public,  he seemed the exact opposite: the typical figure of a good-old-boy braggart, a larger-than-life man who exulted in his grand accomplishments. After all, he wasn’t just someone who had turned a regional family billboard company into a global media empire; he was also the owner of winning sports teams and an accomplished sailor. Nor, to say the least, was he modest about how he saw 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 often, behind this self-exultation was neediness: an insatiable urge to prove himself. 

Yet Fonda is right about Turner’s vulnerability. It’s proverbially true that behind every great fortune lies a crime, and behind every great man is a great woman. A third adage can be coined along the same lines: every overachiever is spurred on by the need to please a disappointed parent.

Ted Turner was born in 1938 as Robert Edward Turner III, the namesake and heir of Richard Edward Turner, Jr. His father, who ran a billboard advertising company, was an abusive alcoholic who took sadistic pride in making sure his son always felt inferior. In 1963, the elder Turner, gnawed by debts and his own demons, killed himself. Decades later, Turner and Fonda would bond over the fact that they were both the children of parents who had died by suicide (Fonda’s mother had also killed herself).

Inheriting his father’s failing company, Turner ignored advice to downsize and pay off debts. Instead, he started his long career of successfully leveraging debt into building bigger companies, expanding from billboards to TV stations and sports teams (buying the Atlanta Braves in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks in 1978). By the 1970s, he had pioneered a successful formula of vertical integration in media, which combined new technology (satellites that gave his local networks national, and eventually global, reach) with old media (the sports franchises, cheap reruns, and talking heads providing grist to feed the unquenchable thirst of cable for content). One genius move, much derided at the time, was buying the vast libraries of old Hollywood studios such as MGM, Warner Brothers, and Hanna-Barbera and repurposing them into Turner Classic Movies and the Cartoon Network. 

As a businessman, Turner was a gambler, racking up big debts that usually ended in profitability. His winning streak ended with the 1996 merger of Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner (and eventually in 2000 with AOL).  After the dot-com bubble burst a few years later, his fortune, which had peaked at $11 billion, shrank to roughly $2 billion.

Turner would claim to be humbled by these events, and he turned into a critic of media consolidation. In a 2004 article for the liberal magazine Washington Monthly, Turner called for the federal government to return to a stricter enforcement of antitrust laws. He argued that the hands-off approach to regulation was creating near-monopolies that were inimical to regional and ideological diversity. The problem, of course, has only gotten worse since he voiced his complaint, with plutocrats like Rupert Murdoch and David Ellison controlling an ever larger share of the media pie.