THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 2, 1995 TAG: 9508020048
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY KEITH MONROE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
THE TED TURNER story shows that the best start toward being a self-made man is inheriting a few million. According to ``Citizen Turner: The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon'' (Harcourt Brace, 525 pp., $27), Ted got it from his father, Ed. For good and ill, he was the most important role model in Ted's life.
Ed Turner made a fortune in the billboard business in the years after World War II. He was also an epic womanizer and drinker who raised Ted by a stern regimen to be a world conqueror. Ted was beaten whenever he misbehaved - which was often. He was sent off to a military school meant to teach him discipline. It only partly took.
On the eve of the biggest business coup of his life in 1963, however, Ed Turner suddenly panicked, tried to cancel the deal and sank into depression. Ted, by then 25 and working for the company, called his father a coward to try to snap him out of his funk. Instead, Ed put a bullet in his brain.
Much of what has ensued in Ted Turner's life, according to father-son writing team, Gerald Jay and Robert Goldberg, has been an effort to live up to the old man - or outdo him. The Goldbergs do not engage in two-bit psychologizing; Turner himself admits his motivation. The first thing he did was reinstate the company-expanding deal that so spooked his father. Soon the business was more profitable than ever, and Turner had learned a lesson he was often to repeat: If you've got a chance to make a great leap forward, take on the debt, bet the company, beat the odds.
It's when things are going smoothly that Turner apparently gets bored. When crisis looms, he excels. He has seemingly stumbled into one coup after another - turning a rickety UHF station into the first cable superstation, making loser sports franchises into cable bonanzas, founding an all-news network even though he's bored by news, buying MGM's film library at a bankrupting price only to exploit it into a new fortune.
Others could easily have done all that Turner did, but he's the one who acted. His willingness to move fast and make the gamble has repeatedly won the day. And when he's found himself threatened with ruinous competition, he has faced it down with single-minded ferocity and unrestrained histrionics.
``Citizen Turner'' reveals that Turner also has emulated his father in womanizing and drinking to excess. His first two marriages were ruined by compulsive infidelity. At one point he had one mistress appearing on his TV channels and another serving as the pilot of his private plane, often ferrying the long-suffering Mrs. Turner around the country.
Turner got bounced out of his fraternity and then out of Brown University for various sexual and alcoholic peccadilloes. Similar stunts made him persona non grata at staid yacht clubs when he was a champion sailboat skipper. Though the book doesn't dwell on them, his various pathologies are interesting. He often seems publicly to be an overgrown frat rowdy, but there are darker strains to his character.
After his father's suicide, Turner became obsessed with dying young and regularly announced in business meetings that if his latest bet-the-company gamble didn't pay off he could always kill himself, like Daddy. Part of his philandering may have been due to a fear of being alone. His unfaithfulness borders on the compulsive, and his drinking on alcoholism. His hyperkinetic behavior was eventually diagnosed as manic and lithium was prescribed.
Yet his energy and romantic self-image as a swashbuckler made him unbeatable when he locked onto a target. He has been an abusive, obsessive, demanding leader, but his troops would follow him anywhere. His take-no-prisoners style won him yachting trophies and a $2 billion business empire.
At several points during CNN's struggle to survive, RCA, Westinghouse, ABC and CBS had chances to supplant Turner in the cable news business. Each time, Turner's kamikaze vows to fight to the last dollar, to cost his competitors untold millions while ruining himself made the more timid corporate types retreat in confusion and abandon the field to him.
Today Turner looks more like an extinct volcano, hamstrung by a cautious board that will no longer sanction his all-or-nothing bets, mellowed out on lithium, married to Jane Fonda, raising buffalo on a ranch bigger than many national parks, collecting honorary degrees and sponsoring philanthropic good works. The old psycho Ted has turned into Mr. Turner, avuncular statesman. But who knows? He's only 57. The swashbuckler might have one last adventure left in him.
The Goldbergs - father Gerald Jay an English professor and novelist; son Robert a television critic for The Wall Street Journal - tell Turner's tale in workmanlike fashion. As the title indicates, the authors lapse occasionally into the kind of prose and sentiments found in People magazine, if not the tabloids. But the title character is so much larger than life that it would be impossible for a biography to lack interest. A few flaws in this one don't detract from enjoying this page-turner of a life. by CNB