Terrible Ted Turner?

'Turner was known for shouting "Show me your tits!" whenever he passed a boat with pretty women on deck–this from a man who forbade his kids from watching R-rated movies.'

Here’s a book review of Citizen Turner, a biography of the recently deceased Ted Turner, that I wrote for September/October 1995 issue of The American Enterprise magazine, back when I was a lowly assistant editor at Reason.

TERRIBLE TED, by Nick Gillespie

Citizen Turner: The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon

By Robert Goldberg and Gerald Jay Goldberg (Harcourt Brace: New York) 504 pages, $27

Perhaps it was inevitable that a biography of Ted Turner would cast itself as a real-life retelling of Citizen Kane. The comparison between the founder of Cable News Network and Charles Foster Kane is too easy to pass up. Inevitable perhaps, but unfortunate all the same.

Citizen Turner: The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon, by the father-son team of Gerald Jay and Robert Goldberg, is facile in its treatment and superficial in its insight. To be fair to the authors, the problem may rest with their subject and not their analysis. Robert Edward “Ted” Turner is arguably the most innovative-and ubiquitous-media mogul of our time. He commands a personal fortune of between $2 and $3 billion and a televisual empire that includes TBS, CNN, TNT, the Cartoon Network, MGM’s film library, Hanna Barbera animation, Castle Rock Entertainment, baseball’s Braves, and basketball’s Hawks.

Like filmdom’s most famous—and overreaching—fictional newsman, Charles Foster Kane, Turner possesses a flamboyant personality—hence such nicknames as “Terrible Ted,” “The Mouth of the South,” and “Captain Outrageous.” He also has the hubris to pontificate on any and all topics, from abortion to media violence to environmentalism. Turner likewise recalls Kane in his gargantuan appetites, exuberant energy levels, and massive contradictions. A self-styled champion of “family entertainment,” the thrice-married Turner was a shameless, boozy skirt-chaser who once grabbed CNN anchor Mary Alice Williams’s crotch at a business party. A successful yachtsman (his crew won the America’s Cup in 1977), Turner was known for shouting “Show me your tits!” whenever he passed a boat with pretty women on deck–this from a man who forbade his kids from watching R-rated movies.

Throughout the 70s and ‘80s, Turner lambasted the major networks for “polluting minds” even as his own channels aired shows on the order of World Championship Wrestling and Petticoat Junction. There’s even a “Rosebud” lurking in Turner’s past: the 1963 suicide of his distant, alcoholic father Ed when Ted was in his early 20s.

Where Kane coped with the childhood loss of his sled by buying everything in sight (remember the detritus-packed Xanadu), Turner, the Goldbergs tell the reader, is driven by his father’s posthumous taunts: “And after Ed died, his ghost continued to peer over Ted’s shoulder-shoving him, prodding him, demanding to know ‘Why in hell ain’t you doin’ any better?’”

The Goldbergs supplement the Kane angle with additional psychological analysis, but they ultimately do very little to illuminate Turner’s specific triumphs and failures: How exactly did a guy whose first TV station ran only the FCC minimum of 40 minutes of news a day come up with the idea of an all-news network? In the Goldberg account, Turner comes off more as the unconvincing, unappealing protagonist of a badly written TV miniseries than, as the authors would have it, “some two-fisted Indiana Jones of the boardroom.”

As I suggested earlier, this may not be entirely the Goldbergs’ fault. They don’t help matters with ham-handed lines such as, “Half visionary, half crackpot, and allAmerican character, Ted Turner is a genuine original,” or “Using second-string producers, third-rate correspondents, and recycled network programming, [Turner] has gone about his task with a singleminded determination. “

But beyond the Goldbergs’ often labored prose, Turner himself seems capable of only the most banal thoughts and insights. In the 1980s he became convinced that he would be shot by an assassin, and told his then-mistress what he would say to his killer: “Thanks for not coming sooner.” At another point, he boasted to a reporter, “I want to set the all-time greatest personal achievement record, greater than Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison, Napoleon or Alexander the Great.” Or consider this deep conversation Turner reports having had with Fidel Castro in 1982:

“After three drinks with rum ... I said [to Castro] ‘Are you interfering in Nicaragua and Angola?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you are, too.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but we’re the United States. We’ve got every right to be there.’ And he said, ‘How come?’ I said, ‘Because we’re right, we’re capitalists. We’ve got a free country.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but what about people that don’t agree with that?’ I went back and scratched my head. I never even thought there was another side to the picture.”

The secret shame of Ted Turner may be that, like much of the programming for which he became famous, he just isn’t very smart or interesting. Indeed, by the end of Citizen Turner, the protagonist seems less reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane and more like another great fictional millionaire: Jay Gatsby. Turner, now in his fifties, has been spared Gatsby’s tragic fate. But just as Gatsby turned out to be less real than imagined, so too does Turner seem unmasked as more shallow than deep.

Nick Gillespie is assistant editor of Reason.

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