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Text File | 1992-10-19 | 26KB | 501 lines

                ,                                                            ╚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