A woman I knew dated Ted Turner. (In front of Jane.) I was fascinated. Has that kinetic kingpin ever slept? Was the “Mouth of the South” talking about the finals 24 hours a day, like his wonderful creation, CNN?
Ted rested sometimes, he assured me. But he it was actor, he said, recounting the story of the first time he visited Turner at his home in Georgia.
When he got out of the car, he went to the door and Turner came out to say hello. He was dressed as Rhett Butler and played music from “Gone With the Wind.” He hugged her and took her inside.
Turner was, as his third wife, Jane Fonda, said when she died at the age of 87 on Wednesday, “a serious romantic criminal.”
His idol was the ultimate cinematic swashbuckler, Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler. (Turner named one of his sons Rhett.)
“Ted bought MGM to own ‘Gone With the Wind,'” Fonda said in a 2020 interview. “I mean, ‘Gone With the Wind’ – you live with that. ‘The world is the only thing that matters, Scarlett. The world is the only thing that lasts!’ That’s why he owns two million acres, because of Scarlett O’Hara.”
When Turner created Turner Classic Movies in 1994 — I’ll always love him for that — he introduced his favorite movie, the same way he introduced the TNT network six years earlier.
“He recited the ‘Gone With the Wind’ lines a lot,” Fonda recalled. “He was obsessed with Scarlett O’Hara. You know the painting in the movie, the huge painting with Scarlett? He owns it.”
I asked Fonda if she ever played Rhett too, and she laughed.
“No,” she said. “However, one day when we were driving to one of his farms in his Jeep over the desert roads with my brother and his wife, he stopped the car and got out, took me in his arms and sang, ‘Don’t fence me.
Turner was a wild man. He was known to give friends tours of his Flying D ranch in Montana, pointing out all the places he and Fonda had made love to over the years.
He once told me how, during a previous marriage, his doctor advised him and his wife to stop drinking and use one cocktail a day. “I stopped on the way home and bought the biggest glasses I could find,” he said with a roar of laughter.
He would stumble, of course, as he pursued his biggest dreams. He rose to Hollywood royalty when he colored other black-and-white classics, such as “Casablanca,” “42nd Street” and Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life.”
I covered congressional hearings on profanity in 1987 where Woody Allen and Ginger Rogers voiced their opposition. Allen called the practice “sinful” and Rogers read Jimmy Stewart’s statement that the colorization of “It’s A Wonderful Life” turned the film into an “Easter egg dye bath.”
Turner himself was so colorful that he almost couldn’t imagine life, or art, bound in black and white. But he backed down. Turner created TCM, a popular cable channel dedicated to film preservation, after acquiring the MGM film library. (By the way, Woody Allen and Ginger Rogers are everywhere on TCM in glorious black and white.)
Despite his sins – including promiscuity, bad language and public indecency – his eloquence, imagination and tenacity (he named one of his champion boats “Tenacious”) were irresistible.
I love the story that, when he first covered CNN, he used to sleep on the couch in his office in Atlanta to run errands, wander around the newsroom in his bathing suit and eat at the vending machines or in the cafeteria.
The first, round-the-clock news channel went live during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. During the bombing of Baghdad, President George HW Bush exclaimed, “I learn more from CNN than I do from the CIA.”
Unlike today’s greedy and soulless millionaires, Turner was happy to be rich. Cloud kings are not shields; they just hold their own against President Trump.
Although his father’s crippling debts from his billboard business helped him kill himself, Turner didn’t seem worried about going into debt. He bought the Atlanta Braves, promoting the team with wet t-shirt contests, and later taught Hanoi Jane how to do the tomahawk chop. (His right-wing politics had waned by then and so had he, when he started taking lithium.)
He learned to sail and became “Captain Outrageous,” who won the America’s Cup in 1977 with his boat “Courageous.” (This man was so competitive that when his first wife beat him in a boat race, he ran his boat into hers. The marriage ended soon after.)
He was generous – another quality lacking in most plutocrats today. In 1996, at the urging of his friend Tom Brokaw, I invited Turner to write a column on his pet page: the parsimony of billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
Turner, two years earlier, had invested more than $200 million in relief. He told me that he sympathized with the fear of giving away so much money that he would fall on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans.
But he challenged his peers — or “ol’ skinflints,” as he calls them — to shut down those fears and loosen their purse strings.
He proposed a list that focused on who the givers were rather than what they were, proposing an “Ebenezer Scrooge Award” to shame evil billionaires and a “Golden Heart Award” to honor the most generous.
“Scrooge felt very happy when he saved Tiny Tim and bought a turkey for a poor family, didn’t he?” he said. A column I wrote inspired Michael Kinsley, then editor of Slate, a pioneering online magazine, to start Slate 60, a list of the most generous philanthropists. The following year, he donated $1 billion to the UN
I actually met the visionary once at dinner at Brokaw’s New York apartment. He came with Fonda and brought Braves caps for everyone.
He told us that he has thought of a way to overcome his rivalry with Rupert Murdoch. The two moguls both bought baseball teams – Murdoch’s Fox team acquired the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1998 – and built powerful media empires.
“I can get off my lithium, get off Rupert, plead guilty by reason of insanity, be released, and go back on my meds,” she said with a big smile.
Decades later, they finally settled their differences amicably, over lunch at Ted’s Montana Grill in Manhattan.
