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                ,                                                            ╚MAN OF THE YEAR, Page 34

TED TURNER

The Taming of Ted Turner


Forget about those legendary tales of excess. Taking the biggest
risk of his life, Turner confronted the dark legacy of his father
and prevailed.

By PRISCILLA PAINTON


    Ted Turner's life may best be understood as a startling
series of narrowly missed disasters. When he skippered his yacht
in Britain's prestigious Fastnet race in 1979, he was so
absorbed in victory that he did not even know a gale was killing
15 yachtsmen in the boats behind him. His costly acquisition of
MGM's movie library in 1986, widely considered a bonehead move
at the time, now looks like a bargain the Japanese would envy.
The Atlanta Braves, which Turner bought in 1976, snuffled along
in the gutter for years, then went from last place to first in
their division this year and lost the World Series by only a
bat's whoosh. And CNN, once derided as the "Chicken Noodle
Network" for its low wages and amateurish presentation, is now
the video medium of record.

    But these public triumphs are nothing compared with what
he achieved on Nov. 19 of this year: Turner, alive and well,
stabilized by medication and psychiatric counseling, beloved by
Jane Fonda, celebrated his 53rd birthday. Fifty-three was the
age at which Turner's father shot himself through the head with
a .38-cal. pistol, and it was an age that many people who know
Turner did not expect him to reach. While most Americans think
of Turner as the loud cheerleader of the Braves, the corporate
Don Quixote who went after CBS or the peace-loving impresario
of the Goodwill Games, those close to him have always known
Turner was haunted by a self-imposed deadline. "Ted felt that
his father had died tragically and it was his duty to die
tragically," says Dee Woods, his assistant of 16 years. Says
James Roddey, a former Turner Broadcasting executive and sailing
partner of Turner's: "He envisioned himself as part of a tragedy
being played out onstage. While everyone kept stopping the show
with applause, he knew how it was going to come out."

    For Turner, life has been a struggle to master what he
calls his "greatest" fear -- the fear of death. "Because if you
can get yourself where you're not afraid of dying, then you can .
. . move forward a lot faster," he says. Until a few years ago,
his top executives would hear Turner talk of suicide in moments
of depression. At other times he was convinced he would be
killed. "Years ago, I came up with what I was going to say to
an assassin if he came to shoot me," he said recently. "You want
to know what it is? `Thanks for not coming sooner.' Pretty good,
huh?"

    If Turner can sound lighthearted about his death
obsession, it is because he does feel much better about life
these days. One of the main reasons is that at the urging of his
second wife Janie, who was hoping to save their marriage, he
began to see an Atlanta psychiatrist, Dr. Frank Pittman, in
1985. Pittman did two important things for Turner. The first was
to put him on the drug lithium, which is generally used to
treat manic-depression as well as a milder tendency toward mood
swings known as a cyclothymic personality. Turner's colleagues
and J.J. Ebaugh, the woman for whom he left Janie, suddenly saw
an enormous change in his behavior. "Before, it was pretty
scary to be around the guy sometimes because you never knew what
in the world was going to happen next. If he was about to fly
off the handle, you just never knew. That's why the whole world
was on pins and needles around him," says Ebaugh. "But with
lithium he became very even tempered. Ted's just one of those
miracle cases. I mean, lithium is great stuff, but in Ted's
particular case, lithium is a miracle."

    TURNER AGREES THAT THE MEDICATION HELPED calm him down.
But Pittman's second contribution was to help Turner exorcise
his father. To understand why Turner and the father he
worshipped had no ordinary filial competition, consider this:
when young Turner did something bad, his father Ed beat him with
a wire coat hanger. When young Turner did something very bad,
Ed once ordered his son to beat him. "He laid down on the bed
and gave me the razor strap and he said, `Hit me harder,' "
Turner told interviewer David Frost. "And that hurt me more than
getting the beating myself. I couldn't do it. I just broke down
and cried." The most famous story of this dynastic war is the
time Ed Turner sent Ted a letter at Brown University to
excoriate him for having chosen to study the Greek classics. "I
almost puked on the way home today . . . I think you are rapidly
becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy
atmosphere, the better it will suit me," Ed Turner wrote. The
angry son retaliated rather cunningly: he published the letter
in the college newspaper. But he eventually switched his major
to economics.

    Ed Turner, who became a millionaire in the billboard
business after his family lost its cotton farm in the
Depression, was determined to give his son both ambition and the
self-doubt that keeps ambitious people going. "He wanted Ted to
be insecure because he felt insecurity breeds greatness," Judy
Nye Hallisey, Turner's first wife told biographer Roger Vaughan.
During World War II, Ed Turner served in the Navy; he brought
along his wife and daughter but left behind Ted, age 6, at a
boarding school in Cincinnati. Ted's father sent the boy to a
military academy from the fifth grade on, punished him at home
for such omissions as failing to read a new book every two days,
and charged him rent during summer vacations.

    When Ed committed suicide, Turner says, "that left me
alone, because I had counted on him to make the judgment of
whether or not I was a success." Until then, Turner's only
success was as a sailor, a sport he turned to because he was too
scrawny and uncoordinated to play ball. After getting kicked out
of Brown in his senior year for entertaining a woman in his
room, he bummed around Florida for a few months before returning
to Georgia and his father's business. Turner's first test as a
businessman came when he discovered that his father, despondent
because of his billboard firm's mounting debts, had sold its
big, newly acquired Atlanta division just before killing
himself. The young Turner did everything he could to nullify the
contract and win back the business, luring away employees from
the Atlanta unit to the Macon, Ga., division he retained,
shifting lucrative contracts between companies, threatening to
destroy financial records and "to build billboards in front of
theirs." Turner ultimately persuaded the buyers to rescind the
deal in exchange for $200,000 worth of stock in the company.

    Turner proved far more adept even than his father at the
billboard business. So as the money rolled in, he turned to
sailing and broadcasting in pursuit of his father's elusive
benediction. By 1982, when he was 43, he had successfully
defended the America's Cup, launched the first station
distributed nationally to cable systems via satellite and the
first 24-hour news network, and made the first edition of the
Forbes 400 list -- enough success, he says, to have begun to lay
"the ghost" of that paternal judgment "to rest." But he was
still an emotional cripple. Turner's role model as a grownup
remained an alcoholic father whose behavior was as extreme as
it was unpredictable, who boasted about his sexual conquests,
fought often with his wife and ultimately divorced her after 20
years.

    Until six years ago, Turner was doing his best to imitate
his father. He drank, but not well ("Two drinks and Ted was
gone," says his friend Roddey), and earned early notoriety for
showing up at the America's Cup press conference knee-walking
drunk. He was such a determined womanizer that he made clear to
Janie before their marriage in 1964 that he had no intention of
becoming monogamous, according to several intimates. "I didn't
like being alone when I was on the road" is how Turner today
explains his numerous entanglements. Robert Wussler, his former
senior executive vice president, says Turner's amorous
philosophy was "a port in every storm." In some cases, it was
literally a woman in every port: he once scandalized the
yachting circuit by sailing around with a blond Frenchwoman
tending galley, sometimes topless. As a husband to Janie, he
could be mean, and publicly so. Roddey recalls the time Turner
brought his wife over to a table to introduce her to a group and
"somebody said, `You sure have a beautiful woman there.' And Ted
said, `Yup, and if she doesn't stay beautiful, the next one will
be even better.' That kind of remark was not uncommon."

    In his sailing days he was rarely home, and during one
period he missed three consecutive Christmases. When he did
spend time with his family, says his eldest son Teddy, he
behaved as though "kids were a necessary evil." He forbade
crying, snapped at the slightest imperfection (such as a dinner
delayed or a skateboard in the driveway) and ran his weekends
at his South Carolina plantation on a militaristic schedule of
dawn-to-dusk hunting. Teddy remembers the canoe trip he and his
two brothers took with their father when Teddy was about 11.
Turner, he says, "yelled and screamed the whole time. It was a
nightmare. So when we had finished and we were just going down
the Chattahoochee River and Dad said, `Well, did everybody have
a great time?' I said no. And, boy, he smacked me hard."

    Turner did not confine his pugnaciousness to his home. As
a skipper, he occasionally struck crew members who made
mistakes. He abruptly ended his Playboy interview with Peter
Ross Range in 1983 by smashing Range's tape recorder. At the
office his bursts of violence were verbal, but almost all his
top executives say they have felt them. After one tirade, says
Gerald Hogan, the former president of TBS Entertainment
Networks, "he had me, not in tears, crying, but at that point
my eyes had welled up, I was so angry."

    In some ways the bruised and bruising Turner was a patient
perfectly suited to Dr. Pittman's specialty. Although Pittman
will not discuss Turner's case specifically, he says, "What I
do is help men who don't have a very good image of masculinity
because of a failure in their relationship with their father"
learn to have "a partnership with a woman they can see as their
equal." Turner approached counseling with the same ferocious
concentration on results that made it possible for him, say, to
start a second CNN channel, Headline News, in 90 days in 1981.
He asked four of his top executives to see Pittman so the
psychiatrist could understand him better. And after he moved in
with Ebaugh in August 1986, he agreed to see other counselors
with her, including one who specialized in what Ebaugh describes
as "high-performance" couples.

    That someone as autocratic as Turner would accept guidance
from another man is not as surprising at it seems: Turner is
above all a pragmatist. "I've never met anybody who can so
quickly recognize a truth and internalize it," says Jane Fonda,
whom Turner married on Dec. 21 after a two-year courtship.
``When he feels something is right, he just does it. Without a
backward look." When he launched CNN, the Turner who at his WTBS
Su perstation had relegated the news to a 3 a.m. comedy show
that occasionally featured a German shepherd and lemon meringue
pies became Turner the Newsman, who traveled from Nicaragua to
the Soviet Union to see things for himself and who told CNN
president Tom Johnson to spend whatever he needed (it turned out
to be $30 million) on the Persian Gulf war coverage.

    ED TURNER, THE EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT of CNN and no
relation to his boss, says Turner's personal transformation was,
at some level, the result of a professional one: Turner's
adjusting to his new environment. "He went from the hearty
camaraderie of the Chamber of Commerce and locker-room crowds
to the world of great leaders." More important, what Turner
recognized in the mid-'80s was that his roller-coaster emotional
life, which had served him well in his risk-taking
entrepreneurial days, was not particularly useful in running an
international company with long-term ambitions and an estimated
worth well in excess of $7 billion. The businessman who three
times in his life had leveraged almost everything he owned and
borrowed heavily -- to buy back his father's billboard company,
to start CNN and to purchase MGM -- says he came to believe he
did not "have to take desperate gambles anymore."

    It was not just that Turner had more to lose; he was also
convinced that through some cyclical inevitability he was doomed
to lose what he had. "He was hung up on the fact that a lot of
people said, `Well, Ted Turner is the ultimate entrepreneur, and
entrepreneurs when they get to $250 million or $1 billion or $2
billion, they crap out, and either they fall to the bottom or
they turn their companies over to others,' " says Wussler. "He
didn't want that to happen."

    In 1986 Turner's premonition came close to happening: his
acquisition of MGM/ UA for $1.4 billion buried him so deeply in
debt that he had to be bailed out by a consortium of cable
operators (including Time Warner, which owns TIME) that invested
$562.5 million in the company in exchange for minority
ownership. Turner remained chairman, but he was forced to give
cable operators seven seats on the 15-member board and veto
power over any decision that would cost the company more than
$2 million. It was a major setback for a man who lived by his
father's homespun sermons, including the idea, in Wussler's
words, that "you hang on to as much of your business as you can
yourself."

    But once Turner had resigned himself to the company's
shotgun marriage, it came almost as a relief: it forced
stability on Turner just as he was growing weary of his own
high-wire act. "One of the first things he said to me," says
Fonda, "was, `I feel like I'm constantly at war, always fighting
to survive, risking everything, putting all the cards on the
table.' It was always that white-knuckle, fingernail-biting,
nerve-destroying kind of situation." In late 1986 and early
1987, according to his longtime assistant Woods, Turner felt so
run-down that some doctors thought he had contracted the
Epstein-Barr virus; after numerous tests they determined instead
that his lack of energy was a kind of altitude sickness from the
frequent takeoffs and landings of his travel schedule.

    Turner had more than career incentives to search for a
psychological resting place. A student of Citizen Kane -- he has
seen the movie more than 100 times and now owns it -- he began
to be worried that his life would leave him as grimly isolated
as the late newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who was
the inspiration for Kane. "Here's a guy who had everything in
the world -- a big business, a big family, couldn't be more
successful -- and he was all alone," says Teddy, now 28. "Who
was there? Janie? His kids? His mom? His friends? What friends?
The thought of going out alone was more scary than anything
else." And then, of course, there was J.J. Ebaugh, possibly the
first woman Turner truly loved.

    HE MET HER IN 1980 IN NEWPORT, R.I., WHEN SHE was dating
Tom Blackaller, a legendary sailor whose boat, Clipper, shared
a dock with Ted Turner's Courageous. The adventuresome
California blond, who could drive race cars, pilot sailboats and
fly airplanes, caught his eye, and that winter Turner invited
her to sail with him on the Southern Ocean Racing circuit out
of St. Petersburg. Although he did not own an airplane, he hired
Ebaugh as a pilot, and she moved to Atlanta in 1981, bringing
along a used one she had bought for him. The relationship (and
the piloting) lasted until 1986, when she announced she was
leaving him for a California podiatrist. The news devastated
Turner, who cut short an African vacation with his family and
rushed back to Atlanta. Says Ebaugh: "He put up the most
aggressive campaign to get me back that I have ever heard about
or read about in my entire life."

    Just as demanding was the education he undertook to make
his love affair with Ebaugh work the second time a round. In
counseling, the man about whom it is said that talking to him
is like listening to a radio began to tame his mouth. "I started
to listen, and not be judgmental, and wait until someone was
through rather than interrupting them, and then think about what
they said before I prepared an answer," he says. "I learned to
give and take better than I had previously."

    The more flexible Turner made a variety of sacrifices. He
left his wife (the final divorce settlement in 1988 cost him
$40 million) and gave up philandering. After moving in with
Ebaugh, he agreed to spend more time with her in California and
even bought a cliff-hanging house in Big Sur. The couple split
up two years later. By the time he started dating Fonda in
early 1990, however, Turner was so reformed that the first thing
he told the actress when he took her out was, "I want you to
know I was brought up a male chauvinist." Says Fonda: "I
thought . . . really, I mean, how ingenuous. He's just so open
about it."

    Turner agreed to spend half his time in Los Angeles while
Fonda's son Troy was still in high school there. When Fonda
decided she would quit drinking a year ago, Turner announced he
would too. She has given up making movies for now. ("Ted Turner
is not a man that you leave to go on location. He needs you
there all the time," she says.) He has given up hour-to-hour
management of his company. He now eats much of the health-food
menu her cook prepares and has lost 10 lbs. They designed and
decorated together the log home they share on Turner's
130,000-acre ranch near Bozeman, Mont. He follows her on hikes
and bike rides; she follows him hunting and fly-fishing and to
baseball games.

    For all his days on the sailing circuit, Turner had struck
some of those who know him as a joyless monomaniac who pursued
achievement not out of passion for the undertaking but out of
a tortured focus on the finish line. "He told me 20 times that
he never liked sailing," says Wussler. "He said, `You know, Bob,
I got cold and I got wet.' He was more in love with just
winning." These days Turner talks about the "Zen experience" of
fly-fishing. He has stopped pacing around his home and office
(Wussler once counted 74 consecutive circles). And when it is
suggested that heaven for Turner might be an eternal baseball
game, he protests with the tone of a late-blooming flower child:
"No, no, no, that would be too much pressure. I wouldn't want
to go and spend all eternity competing at the level that I have
in this life."

    Turner is also showing signs that he wants to enjoy his
family. Four years ago, he began organizing regular family
vacations; this year he formed the Turner Family Foundation,
whose board is composed of Fonda and his five children, all of
whom gather twice a year to allocate money to charitable causes.
He is openly affectionate with his children and checks in
regularly with Fonda's two kids. And when the Fonda and Turner
broods get together, says Teddy, Turner can be talked out of his
compulsively active outdoors routine. "You never thought of
having fun with Dad before, but now you can," he says. "He does
laugh a little more and play a little more." (There have been
some cultural clashes between the two families: last Christmas
at Turner's Avalon plantation outside Tallahassee, the Fonda
children objected to being served by Turner's black help and
announced they would clear their own plates. Turner insisted
they remain at the table; tempers cooled when Fonda took her
children aside for a heart-to-heart.)

    BUT TURNER HAS REINVENTED HIMSELF MOST BY shifting his
longtime preoccupation with self-destruction away from himself
and onto the world. He has always been an environmentalist --
as long, in fact, as he has been a hunter. He told Audubon
magazine this year that he spent his life watching sea turtles
and whales disappear off the coast of Savannah and ducks
disappear from the Eastern flyway. He plans to turn his Flying
D ranch near Bozeman into what amounts to a privately owned
national park: he has sold all the cattle, uprooted miles of
barbed-wire fence, let pastures of hay and alfalfa return to
native grasses and started raising a herd of buffalo he hopes
will swell to 4,000.

    For the past six years, Turner has made a public career of
saving the planet. In 1985 he founded the Better World Society,
which petered out late last fall but until then was meant to
educate people about pollution, hunger and the arms race by
producing documentaries. His heroes used to be Alexander the
Great and Napoleon; now they are Martin Luther King and Gandhi.
He used to talk about war as an efficient way to weed out the
weak members of society; in 1986, to promote world peace, he
staged the Goodwill Games in Moscow, on which he lost $26
million, and staged them again last year in Seattle, losing an
additional $44 million. And everywhere he goes -- including a
November press conference on next June's Earth Summit held in
a Manhattan studio decorated with a Christmas tree made of
fallen twigs and soy-based-ink ribbons -- he preaches salvation.
"If we don't make the right choice after we have all the
information, then we don't deserve to live," he told members of
People for the American Way, a liberal organization that awarded
him its Spirit of Liberty prize in November. "I don't think
that's the case, but it's going to be real close."

    Turner may sound like a modern Cassandra, but it is
possible to detect in his quest the messianic reflex that
overcomes people with big checkbooks and egos to match. He
invented the Turner Tomorrow Awards to inspire writers the world
over to write about "positive solutions to global problems," but
the contest this year degenerated into a spat over who should
get the $500,000 prize. He has issued what some are calling the
Ted Commandments, a list of 10 voluntary initiatives that would
make the world a better place. (It includes "I promise to have
no more than two children" -- a belated pledge, since he has
five.) He has told intimates he hopes to receive the Nobel Peace
Prize. "Ted is the great `I am,' and anybody he comes in contact
with is a means to an end -- his end," says Wussler, who remains
on good terms with his former boss. Others are convinced
Turner's latest ambition is the purest expression so far of the
hero complex he developed as a child while devouring history
books. "The culmination of his life would be if our country gets
into such a crisis that there is an outcry that Ted take over
and save us all," says former associate Hogan. "He carries that
dream around every day."

    It is also possible to see Turner's global pursuits as an
elaborate attempt to heal from the first two traumas of his
life. When he was 20 and she was three years younger, his sister
Mary Jane died of a severe form of lupus erythematosus, a
disease that causes the body to make antibodies against its own
tissues. Until he saw her degenerate during five horrible years,
Turner had been a practicing Christian. At 17 he even planned
to be a missionary. But the loss of his sister killed his faith
in God. While Turner never recovered that faith, he has found
a way to recover his proselytizing impulses as an apostle of
peace and preservation. "It's almost like a religious fervor,"
he says.

    His new crusade is also a sure, efficient way of outliving
his father. For the one lesson Turner drew from that suicide --
the lesson he repeated year after year to his children -- is
that people should never set goals they can reach. "My father
told me he wanted to be a millionaire, have a yacht and a
plantation," says Turner. "And by the time he was 50 he had
achieved all three, and he was having a very difficult time."
Turner has carefully arranged to avoid that situation. "I'm not
going to rest until all the world's problems have been solved.
Homelessness, AIDS. I'm in great shape. I mean, the problems
will survive me -- no question about it."

    In the meantime, Turner has found in Fonda a companion who
comes not only with her own wealth, trophies and fame but also
with childhood pains that echo his own: a mother who committed
suicide when Jane was 12, a stern taskmaster of a father who
left her craving approval, and a loneliness that drove her
outdoors. "By necessity, both of us created ourselves and then
re-created ourselves a number of times," says Fonda.

    Nowadays Turner and Fonda are re-creating themselves as
each other's soul mate. "The right woman at last," he wrote to
her shortly after they began dating. "I feel it is destiny,"
says Fonda. And as a grand rebuke to his father's final
repudiation of life, Turner plans to write about his own. He put
a stop to an autobiography written with a collaborator five
years ago because he felt the first draft made him sound like
a rube and the second draft made him sound boring. Now, at last,
Turner believes he will like the sound of his own voice.