The Greening Of Ted Turner -- How The Godfather Of Cable Traded His Outrageous Nature For A Flag Of Peace And Preservation
Coming this fall, Gaia, spirit of Earth, will wake from a millennium nap to discover the devastation humans have wreaked on the environment. Fearing for the future, she will assemble five youngsters from different corners of the globe. Each will be endowed with control over one element of nature - earth, fire, water, wind and heart. The Planeteers also will have the ability to combine their powers to summon Captain Planet, a super-human environmental crime fighter. Together, they will battle villains out to destroy the earth.
Just as there was a lot of Dr. Frankenstein in his monster, there appears to be a lot of Robert Edward ``Ted'' Turner III in his latest brainchild, a globally syndicated, animated series called ``Captain Planet and the Planeteers.'' Turner and his forces have similarly embarked on a mission, which includes staging the Olympics-style 1990 Goodwill Games in Washington state later this month, to steer mankind off its course toward self-destruction.
J.J. Ebaugh, a former Turner companion through much of the '80s, goes as far as saying, ``No question, Ted Turner is Captain Planet.''
But there is a major difference. Unlike Captain Planet, Turner was not summoned by anyone to save the world. An electronic prophet who uses his video empire as a bully pulpit, he is more a self-appointed savior.
A decade ago, it's doubtful Turner would've been the one commissioned to clean up the mess the world had become. Back then, despite his expanding notoriety, he was not exactly a man to be taken seriously. He once rode an ostrich to publicize his Atlanta Braves major-league baseball franchise. He openly womanized and was somewhat of a public skunk who
showed up stinking drunk to his own nationally televised America's Cup victory party. His acrid tongue lashed mercilessly at Establishment enemies and insensitively at the downtrodden. And he was in the midst of launching the Cable News Network, an enterprise deemed by industry experts as doomed from the start.
For the most part, Turner was acting on hyperactive impulse, playing out his fantasies on a public stage.
Today, while Turner is less rambunctious, as head of Turner Broadcasting System he has the country-club resources - money, power, gumption and vision - to act on notions most would be content to leave untouched.
In admiration of the intoxicating lifestyle of Rhett Butler, Turner adopts it, right down to the pencil-thin mustache.
Tired of the ``stupidity, violence and sleaze'' of network programming, Turner conceives the SuperStation and beams ``Gilligan's Island'' reruns and National Geographic specials to a wanton nation.
Disappointed that classic movies were filmed unnaturally in black and white, Turner buys those movies and colorizes them.
Frustrated with the Cold War, Turner pursues peace.
One dream realized led to yet another, bigger dream, also realized. As the dreams grew, so did Turner.
This is important to remember while examining Turner's metamorphosis to Captain Planet. The cartoon version is a crystalline being - colorless. Turner explains, ``Superman and Batman are both white men, and white men have been telling the world what to do for a long time. People are tired as hell of us telling them what to do, particularly because what we told them was mostly wrong.''
Turner, a white man, has been in the process of being crystallized through a kind of personal catharsis. His public life has undergone a progression from Captain Courageous, swashbuckling risk taker and yachtsman; to Captain Outrageous, erstwhile Mouth of the South and drunken America's Cup victor; to Captain Video, tamer of the airwaves; to Captain Comeback, the resilient rescuer of his own
company.
And, finally, to Captain Planet, aspiring world savior.
The question is: What's in it for Turner? Money? He already has more than most people dream of accumulating. Power? Same story. Position? Ditto. The bulk of the evidence suggests it is none of these.
Asking Ted Turner why he wants to save the world may be a little like asking a mountaineer why he wants to climb Everest. Because it's there. And because he believes he could pull it off.
Motive is an issue because Turner is a businessman. And people do wonder if, somewhere among his save-the-world efforts, there is a bottom line. Yes and no, it seems.
``I don't think it's money,'' says Bob Walsh, a Seattle promoter who's known Turner for a few years. ``Turner doesn't think that way. He throws so much money at worthy things, and keeps throwing and throwing money at them.''
One of those things, Walsh - as president of the 1990 Goodwill Games Seattle Organizing Committee - knows intimately. Turner, who came up with the concept, lost $26 million on his collaborative effort with the Soviets in 1986. TBS officials forecast another loss of $10 million to $20 million in 1990. Other, less optimistic observers say Turner Broadcasting's losses could be as high as $30 million.
Turner says such losses are a small price to pay for world peace. A case could be made that the Goodwill Games had some role in that regard. Yet, Turner and Turner Broadcasting officials also speak of the Games in terms of being a ``franchise'' or ``investment'' with escalating value.
``Maybe he's just so very farsighted,'' says Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, one of Turner's conservative critics. ``Maybe he wanted to get there first, have his foot in the door when the Soviet empire finally collapsed.''
Money has been an issue surrounding Turner because earning and spending it has a lot to do with his past as well as his present. Turner's father, Ed, was a successful businessman in the early '60s. But worried that he had overextended his billboard business, Ed Turner put a .38-caliber pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. That was on the morning of March 5, 1963; Ted Turner was only 24.
Ed Turner's mistake was limiting his horizons. His life's goal had been to make a million dollars. When he had done so, there was nothing left. Ted Turner did not repeat his father's mistake. He has made money; Forbes magazine estimates he is worth at least $1.75 billion. But for his life's ambition, he could not have chosen a loftier goal: to save the world.
One of Turner's first idols had been Alexander the Great because ``he decided to go farther than anyone had ever tried to go; there were no limits to his imagination.'' Turner later decided he didn't want to share the fate of Alexander, who wept because there were no more worlds left to conquer.
It's probably telling that Alexander has since been replaced in Turner's heart by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was buried in Atlanta without having realized his dream. Turner believes he also will go to his final resting place with his ultimate dream unrealized. The world might be safer and cleaner, he believes, but not completely saved.
``The world will heal itself; it's the people I'm concerned about,'' Turner says. ``The world's been here four billion years; life's been here three billion years. And the earth's got another four billion years before the sun goes out. Life would come back. The real question is, what happens to us? Really, all I want is to see myself and my species survive. And the other things that lived here during our time, I'd hate to see go.''
``Turner's Windless Sails: The comeuppance of Captain Outrageous''
- Newsweek headline, February 9, 1987
``Captain Comeback: Ted Turner is back from the brink and thinking big again.''
- Business Week cover story, July 17, 1989
``He has recovered so often from seemingly suicidal financial escapades that many Atlanta businessmen are by now convinced he is indestructible.''
- The Economist, July 15, 1989
Xernona Clayton, Turner Broadcasting's assistant corporate vice president for urban affairs, is one of the company's earliest birds. So she was one of the few already at TBS headquarters when its president, having spent the night in his office, would roam its halls in the wee hours, searching for coffee. Years of sharing her own freshly brewed pot has provided Clayton considerable insight into the psyche of Ted Turner and his company.
``See that sofa?'' she says, gesturing to one in her office. ``If someone said it is easy to move, Ted Turner wouldn't bother with it. He'd say, `Let someone else move it.' But if someone said people have tried and haven't been able to move this sofa, he'd roll up his sleeves and do it. He and his company are spirited by difficult challenges. There is an attitude that, if it's ordinary, let someone else do it.''
On March 25, 1985, the day he bought MGM, Turner encountered a sofa that seemed destined to break the back of his company. Until then, he had proven to be almost indestructible.
At 24, Turner discovered that his father, just before dying, had signed an agreement to sell the family billboard business. He reclaimed the company by hiring away the staff of one of its key divisions, then threatening to go to court and construct new billboards in front of the ones no longer his.
There was no stopping Turner after that.
In less than a year, from the winter of 1976 to the summer of 1977, he turned a financially troubled independent UHF station in Atlanta into SuperStation WTBS; bought two major-league sports franchises, Atlanta's Braves and Hawks; managed the Braves for a game; was suspended from baseball for vowing to sign Gary Matthews when Matthews was still a San Francisco Giant; and won the 1977 America's Cup, reversing his efforts in 1974, when he finished last in the national trials.
On June 1, 1980, Turner founded Cable News Network, the first live, 24-hour, all-news television network. More than a signal event in broadcasting history, it was Turner's first escalation in what had been a war of words against the country's established ``nitworks'' - ABC, CBS and NBC. Two years later, he added Headline News to his collection.
Turner's winning streak appeared to end when he purchased MGM/United Artists from Kirk Kerkorian for what amounted to $1.4 billion. To meet a $600 million debt-service payment six months later, he sold off United Artists and the MGM studios. He ended up with a library of 3,300 vintage films, about $1.2 billion in debt and gleeful ridiculing from the industry.
Like a decade earlier, this was a time of extraordinary activity for Turner. During 1985 and 1986 in addition to purchasing MGM, he made a $5.4 billion bid for CBS, spent $64 million for the Omni shopping mall-hotel-office complex in Atlanta, provided $500,000 to form the Better World Society, lost $26 million on the Goodwill Games and began a separation from his wife, Janie, that led to a reported $40 million divorce settlement.
The price Turner paid for MGM was estimated to be over $330 million more than convention dictated. At the time, one Hollywood executive told Fortune magazine, ``Turner got the worst screwing in the history of American business.''
On the contrary, says Paul Beckham, who is in charge of TBS finances, ``the risk to the company was much greater at the inception of CNN. Ted built CNN in the view of experts saying it couldn't be done and there'd be no market for it. The fact that he pulled it off reflected Ted's ability to see.''
CNN required that TBS stretch itself to its financial limits for start-up costs. It lost $77 million during its first five years of existence. Back in the embryonic days of the so-called ``Chicken Noodle Network,'' recalls Bill McPhail, head of CNN Sports since the beginning, ``people joked that you'd better save that paycheck because it may be your last.''
Now the most profitable segment of Turner Broadcasting, CNN is carried in 89 different countries, from Barbados to Bangladesh. It is required viewing for an audience that includes intelligence agencies and heads of state around the globe. It also has a sturdy sense of self-importance - hence, the network's motto: CNN is the News.
The network's owner has proven to be an even more reliable and resilient newsmaker.
In 1987, TBS received a $568 million bailout from a consortium of 31 cable systems operators. In return, Turner yielded considerable control over the company. As Ebaugh says, ``Ted no longer is the sole captain of his own ship.''
But at least the ship is still afloat.
It is one that Turner continues to successfully sail into uncharted waters. The MGM film library provided the programming foundation for Turner Network Television. Launched in October 1988, TNT became an immediate hit.
Though Turner admits his company has not made a penny from its inception, TNT's losses have dropped steadily, from $187 million in 1986 to $136 million in 1987 and $91 million in 1988. Reporting a loss of $70 million in 1989, TBS would have been profitable if not for the debt linked to the MGM purchase. Its stock, which dipped below $6 a share after the MGM purchase, rocketed to $62 a share during the third quarter of 1989. The worth of the company also rocketed to more than $5 billion.
What detractors of the MGM purchase seemed to overlook was another of
Turner's signature maneuvers - the acquisition of assets not so much for their intrinsic value, but as programming sources. Sports, in fact, have played a key role in that regard. The stellar yachtsman bought the Braves amid rumors they had one foot out of Atlanta, and later the NBA's Hawks and World Championship Wrestling, to provide programming for his SuperStation.
Another development overlooked amid the scrambles for CBS and MGM was one combining all the Turner ideals: A project that bucked convention, drew opposition from the Establishment, represented ownership of a programming source, had roots in sports and could play a central role in his save-the-world efforts. The Goodwill Games was not necessarily etched into the Turner game plan from the start, but it can be argued they were the culmination of the direction Turner and his company had taken.
``Ted had enough understanding to know he had to take it one step at a time,'' says Terence McGuirk, an executive vice-president at TBS who has been with the company almost from the beginning. ``First, Atlanta. Then, the southeast region, then the United States. And then he could attack the world. That's the way he operates. He's always looking over the horizon as the rest of us are fighting on the surface.''
Old Mouth of the South:
- Said, ``You think Farah Fawcett is so great? Sleep with her five times, and she'd be just like your wife.''
- Described two black players as ``really shuffling'' during their last days with the Braves.
- Called a 1977 America's Cup competitor ``a lying, no good, unsportsmanlike s.o.b.'' for supposedly reneging on a deal to sell Turner some sails.
- Said, ``I don't want Bucky Woy coming around my organization killing anyone else,'' after the funeral of Atlanta Braves General Manager Bill Lucas, who died in 1979 of a brain hemorrhage at the time the Braves were involved in tense negotiations with Woy and his client, Bob Horner.
New Mouth of the South:
- Says, ``The best kind of war to go to is where everyone walks out and punches each other with their fists. If you beat the other guy up, as soon as you knock him down a couple times, he says, `I give up.' Then, you don't want to kill him anymore. Normally, you help him up.''
- Says, ``I've discovered that the Soviets weren't our enemies; they were just our friends in disguise.''
- Says, ``When you hate somebody, who's worse off? The guy you hate, or you? You're worse off because hatred eats your stomach out. Hatred kills the man who does the hating. You may kill the other man, but at least he dies with a clear conscience. You die of the hate.''
The Tri-Cities region in Eastern Washington, its inhabitants like to point out to visitors, is blessed by approximately 300 rain-free days every year. Unfortunately, this is not one of them. And Lisa Toomey, director of Tri-Cities operations for the 1990 Goodwill Games, has yet another thing over which to fret.
``I'm usually calmer than this,'' she says while shuttling an advance Turner Broadcasting contingent from the Pasco airport. ``We were so nervous, we didn't sleep last night.''
The object of Toomey's concern is revealed as she pulls into the Red Lion Inn complex. The hotel's marquee reads, ``The Tri-Cities Goodwill Games Welcome Ted Turner.'' This month, the region will host the elimination rounds of the Games' ice-hockey competition.
``I can't remember having such a big name come through here the past few years,'' a Kennewick cab driver says later in the day. ``Chip Hanauer probably comes the closest,'' he adds in reference to the unlimited-hydroplane driver who makes an annual summer trek to a boat race held on the Columbia River.
Great expectations are an inextricable part of the Turner package.
If this hadn't been their one, scarce glimpse of greatness, the 280 people who jammed a banquet room that night might have thought the better of plunking down $75, as they did, for a plate of salmon and the helping of Ted Turner that followed. Turner can be a rambling, somewhat unpolished public speaker who relies on charisma, sincerity and strength of message to disarm even the most discordant audiences. This night, he is slow in getting started.
Turner finally kicks himself into gear, drawing his first prolonged applause with a comment on using defense-budget funds to better the world instead. Just then, a Kennewick resident leaps from his chair and hollers an obscenity at the speaker. As the crowd murmurs in shock and embarrassment, Turner remains nonplused. ``That's OK,'' he says. ``You feel the way you do. That's all right.''
The man, a local Goodwill Games volunteer who is obviously drunk, retorts, ``You do not know what you are talking about.''
``I may not know what I'm talking about,'' says Turner, who is delivering an antinuclear message in a bastion of the nuclear industry. ``But it's the best information I have.''
As the man is forcibly removed from the room, Turner adds, ``I'd be more than happy to hear your complaints in further detail, if you want to drop me a note. I really would.''
This is the way Captain Planet defuses a delicate situation. Who knows what fate might have befallen the heckler had the clock been turned back a few years and his quarry been Captain Outrageous? Before the greening of Ted Turner, such a challenger may have had his head served on a platter as the banquet's next course.
But that was Ted Turner, erstwhile red-neck conservative and windmill-tilting, play-by-my-own-rules rascal. The process of having beaten and joined the Establishment has rendered inappropriate the old antagonistic ways. New information and new allies have forged a kinder, gentler Ted Turner, now spanning the ideological Jesses as friend to conservative Helms and liberal Jackson.
Today, Turner bears more than a lust for mischief. He has a message and the media through which to deliver it. The indubitable godfather of cable, he orchestrates a quartet of networks, with himself a veritable fifth.
At 51, Turner wants to stop the superpowers from using nuclear weapons to turn the earth into ``a Kentucky Fried planet.'' He wants to stop breathing polluted air. He wants to stop depleting rain forests and stop killing whales and elephants and other living creatures.
``It is a mystery,'' Reed Irvine says. ``He was always very patriotic - even outrageously so. He changed rather suddenly. People wondered why.''
No mystery, says Robert Wussler, formerly senior executive vice-president of TBS. ``Ted has grown into his 50s very gracefully,'' he says. ``And the stronger CNN has gotten, the more believable Ted has become. When I first met him, one of his longtime friends told me that Ted is a man who during any five-year period will see lots of changes. Having been with him for 10 years, I saw him change a couple times around.''
Turner describes many of his past indiscretions as ``regrettable slips.'' Former CNN anchorman Daniel Schorr, echoing sentiments shared by others, once described Turner as ``looking around for a way to account for his sins, and he just happens to have a powerful new technology to work with. I think Ted's motivation is to pay back past slights, pay back the newspapers. He wants to vindicate himself.''
Business associates draw links between Turner's expanding, greatly anticipatory vision in commerce to a similarly expanding personal vision. Still others point to what they describe as Turner's computerlike knack for distilling new information, and a willingness to toss out old assumptions and adopt new ones amid ever-changing circumstances.
In the last regard, much credit is given Turner's relationship with J.J. Ebaugh, a strong, progressively thinking woman, and his associations with various world leaders. Turner himself says his quest to become better informed, launched in conjunction with his founding of CNN, was a major turning point in his life.
One day, on an impulse, Turner pulled from his bookshelf a copy of Limits to Growth, a report by an international environmental think tank called the Club of Rome fraught with dire forecasts of international world-population and environmental trends. He pondered those ideas until 1980, when he simultaneously launched Cable News Network and his own efforts to become better informed about the world. He then came across the Global 2000 Report, a study commissioned by the Carter administration, thus carrying more credibility with Turner.
The Global 2000 Report not only echoed Limit to Growth's findings but cautioned that it underestimated its own. Reading it, Turner was reminded of the piece of beautifully untamed land he and his father used to drive past every day on the way to school. One day the bulldozers appeared, the trees disappeared and in their place went subdivisions and a shopping mall.
``Oh boy, that's great,'' Turner remembers his father saying. ``Progress! More people to see our billboards!''
``We've all seen our cities grow, and we used to think it was good for business,'' Turner adds. ``The Chamber of Commerce. Bring plants into town. More jobs, more deposits in the banks. All that real estate around town that used to be forest and farmland was converted into subdivisions and shopping centers. And, buddy, everybody makes a killing. Then comes the
congestion and the pollution.''
And then comes the real killing.
Poisoning the environment represented a kind of slow, lingering suicide for mankind, however. Of more immediate concern was the globe's Cold War-induced homicidal state. Like most Americans, Turner had long regarded the Eastern bloc as mortal enemies. Eventually, his own curiosity led him to a different point of view.
In 1982, Turner accepted an invitation to visit Cuban dictator Fidel Castro because ``I'd never seen a real live Communist before.'' Turner keeps a scrapbook of his visit. Flipping through it, he points to candid photos of Castro and says, ``They love him down there. You can't help it. Look at those eyes. The Commie dictator!''
Turner chuckles.
In one photograph, taken during a duck-hunting expedition, Turner is standing in a boat. Castro, the object of several CIA-inspired assassination attempts, is standing in one right beside it. ``Look!'' Turner says, pointing to the picture. ``I've got a loaded shotgun there. I could've blown his head off.''
Instead Turner picked Castro's brain, eventually leading him to the conclusion that communists were people just like him. That judgment was confirmed a year later, when Turner visited the Soviet Union for the first time. There he glimpsed a benign, somewhat tragic people.
``I know what my image of those people used to be,'' Turner says. ``Tanks and missile carriers rolling through Red Square with those somber generals in their overcoats, scowling down. And - Oh, my God! - all those red banners. On the Soviet flag, I thought the red was blood, the hammer was to hit us over the head with and the sickle was to chop our legs off. Actually, the sickle was to represent farming, the hammer was to represent industry and we've got red in the stripes of the American flag.''
Turner's mostly conservative, Southern upbringing, which included a military-school education, had ingrained in him the notion of ``my country, right or wrong.'' But his country had disappointed him, and he began to feel the weight of its follies on his shoulders.
There was, foremost, the possibility that Turner, with his money, influence, inclination and video empire, was among a handful of people positioned to curtail the world's path to self-destruction.
Taking a cue from the Bible, Turner came up with the Ted Commandments, a personal rewrite of the Ten Commandments that he calls ``the voluntary initiatives.''
``We needed an updated set of rules,'' he explains. ``Unlike the Constitution, the Ten Commandments had no amendment procedures. And things change. When Moses was around, there were no nuclear weapons, no environmental problems, no population pressures on the globe. They were rather simple problems like `Thou shalt not kill.' ''
Ted's ten, also full of nots, have to do with peace and the environment. Numbers 3, 4 and 5 read like this: ``3. I promise to have no more than two children, or no more than my nation suggests. 4. I promise to use my best efforts to save what is left of our natural world in its untouched state and to restore damaged or destroyed areas where practical. 5. I pledge to use as little nonrenewable resources as possible.
See, Turner hasn't set out to merely colorize the world to match his new vision of it, as he has done with his MGM motion-picture library. He is determined to rewrite the whole darned script.
CNN has become the vehicle through which Turner educates the world on what he believes ails it. The Goodwill Games were part of his solution. Programs from the Audubon Society, National Geographic and the Cousteau Society have been longtime staples of WTBS, which also airs an environmental newscast called ``Earthbeat.'' TNT and WTBS have telecast numerous antinuclear, pro-environment, pro-choice and pro-Soviet Union programs.
Turner also launched the Better World Society, which underwrites shows on environmental and peace issues. He has offered the Turner Tomorrow Awards, prizes of up to $500,000 for outstanding unpublished works of fiction dealing with saving the planet.
On more personal levels, Turner doesn't allow styrofoam cups at his company and won't hire smokers. He doesn't accept plastic, nonbiodegradable containers at fast-food restaurants, doesn't use air conditioners, forbids use of the F-word (foreigner) at TBS, flies the U.N. flag at company headquarters, has a rule against killing rattlesnakes on his properties and has driven a fuel-efficient Japanese car since 1974. Highly decorated by civil-rights organizations, Turner sits on the boards of some of them, including the NAACP and the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change.
Turner has signed over all development rights to his properties - including his 110,000-acre Montana cattle ranch, and several plantations in South Carolina, Florida and St. Phillips Island, off the coast of South Carolina - to the Nature Conservancy, a national conservation organization. The Big Sur Land Trust holds similar rights to Turner's Southern California property. The agreements prohibit commercial development, mining and pesticide use, and allow only limited farming. Among all his property are six pair of nesting eagles, which Turner says he personally monitors.
What kind of staying power does this quest have?
Well, Turner always has been committed to a progression of bigger ideas, sterner challenges and grander associations. His business dealings have revealed a continually broadening scope. So has his private life, as illustrated by his recent switch of companions from Ebaugh to Jane Fonda, renowned for her political causes almost as much as for her acting.
Turner's budding relationship with Fonda also is symbolic of the somewhat contradictory bridges he has built with the mainstream.
While part of Hollywood excoriates him for colorizing his MGM films, another flocks to him in the form of high-profile talent for his made-for-TNT productions. Those with a good ear will recognize voices such as those belonging to Ed Asner and Whoopi Goldberg in Turner's ``Captain Planet'' cartoons. In addition, Turner can be found in alliance with old network enemies - namely, CBS - in ventures such as Winter Olympics broadcasts, among others.
Turner hardly finds vindication in this recent acceptance by his old, Establishment naysayers. While his business triumphs are legion, he has suffered stinging losses on more personal fronts. For example, Turner considers the end of his 23-year marriage to Janie, his second wife, ``the major setback in my life.''
More than anything, what keeps Turner going is results - results that show progress. He recalls painting during his boyhood a billboard for the local gas and electric company that said, ``Use more gas and electricity.'' About 15 years ago, he saw a billboard from the same company that said, ``Use less gas and electricity.''
``Things have changed a lot, and they're going to change a lot more,'' Turner says. ``I'm kind of hopeful about it. People can change. That is our greatest asset. The thing we have over other animals is that we can adapt.''
U.S. Rep. Robert Dornan, R-Calif.: `` . . . Why, they might as well have brought back the Minister Potemkin from the grave, put Ted in drag in those gowns of Catherine the Great that are in the museum at the West end of Red Square and taken him for a tour down the Volga and the Don, because everything he saw when he came back he had fallen for, the major Potemkin tour of this century. . . . ''
Rep. Ted Weiss, D-New York (later): ``Does the gentleman or does he not consider Ted Turner to be a Russian dupe?''
Dornan: ``Not in my book, but I wish
you would take off that gown of Catherine the Great and stop letting them potentationize him.''
Weiss: ``Well, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the clarification.''
- Congressional Record, U.S. House
of Representatives debate over
$1 million funding of 1990
Goodwill Games cultural events,
July 18, 1987
It is a glowing summer day in Atlanta, during the 1984 Olympic Games. Turner is perturbed. He walks into an adjoining office belonging to his right-hand man, Robert Wussler.
``Wussler, that's wrong,'' Turner says, pointing to a television beaming proceedings from Los Angeles. ``We never should have boycotted the Olympics in 1980, and the Soviets never should have boycotted this one. Where's the next one? And when is it?''
``Seoul, South Korea,'' Wussler answers, ``in 1988.''
Oops, Turner figures, the Soviets will never go to South Korea. ``You know the guys in Moscow,'' he tells Wussler, a former president of CBS Television. ``I want you to go over there, tell them we're going to buy all the rights to the next Olympics and make sure nobody boycotts.''
Just weeks later, Wussler is in Moscow with an extraordinary proposal - that Turner Broadcasting and the Soviet Union, for all purposes, buy the 1988 Summer Olympic Games. Wussler is hearing a lot of ``nyets,'' until one Soviet official rises to counter. The Olympics is not something to be tampered with, he says. Why not hold a separate event in 1986, he suggests, to commemorate the 1976 Montreal Games, the last Olympics both the U.S. and Soviet Union attended?
``All of a sudden,'' recalls Wussler, who left TBS last summer to become president of COMSAT Video, ``those around the table who were shaking their heads `No' started shaking their heads `Yes.'
``Going over, I thought I'd get blown out of the water. Never in my wildest dreams did I think anything as big as the Goodwill Games would be born out of it.''
But the Soviets were amenable. Though he had not yet assumed the mantle of power, Mikhail Gorbachev already was exerting great influence over Soviet policy. A theory held by several, including some Soviets, is that the Soviets were looking for an initial showcase for glasnost, and the idea of the Goodwill Games happened along at precisely the right time.
And in Turner they had a partner with the experience to pull off something as sweeping as the Goodwill Games. In all his other ventures, he came up with the grand idea; said, ``Let's do this,'' and it was done without much quibbling over why it couldn't be. As Beckham says, ``When Ted makes a decision to do something, you'd best be ready to go.''
Good thing, because there were only 11 short, frenetic months to prepare. Because Turner and the Soviets steamrolled through all obstacles, political and logistical, the 1986 Goodwill Games were held in Moscow. The Soviets, still the ``evil empire'' that had just shot down a South Korean airliner over Kamchatka, provided the arenas and athletes. Turner - overcoming the objections of the International Olympic Committee and Ronald Reagan, whom he called ``the worst president in American history'' - brought cash, cameras and commentators.
Because of the way he'd pulled it off, Turner himself became a major obstacle to the renewal of the Goodwill Games in 1990.
Hampered by a company in financial difficulty and a new set of partners poised to subject any major expenditure to great scrutiny, Turner's pockets weren't as deep as they had been. It appeared unlikely that Walsh and his organizing committee, who'd pulled a similar end run in Seattle, would be able to make up any considerable financial shortfall.
One source of financing, the federal government - especially its conservative wing - was still stinging from Turner's affronts, however. Using personal opposition to Turner as a galvanizing force, conservative U.S. Reps. Dornan and Wally Herger, R-Calif., managed to get Goodwill Games-related funds temporarily deleted from the 1988 and 1989 federal budgets.
Opposition to the Goodwill Games has since waned because, as Accuracy in Media's Reed Irvine points out, ``there is more good will toward the Soviet Union these days.'' Still, there are lingering suspicions that Turner was somehow duped by the Soviets.
Turner says he was engaging in some friendly persuasion. ``You don't change people by trying to force them,'' Turner says. ``You change them by getting to be good friends with them, making them feel real at ease. Then let them draw their own conclusions that your system is better than theirs, and they'll adopt it.''
This, Turner believes, is what happened with the Soviets, who now are moving to embrace aspects of democracy and capitalism. How much did Turner's Goodwill Games have to do with this extraordinary turn of events? It probably had at least some small part. Even Soviet officials mentioned the 1986 Goodwill Games' role when they signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the U.S. in December 1987.
Preservation. That, simply, is the Ted Turner mission. It is a mission that started where Turner started. At the original headquarters of what used to be called Turner Communications. With a single tree.
In a way, it is an anomaly. An oak tree on a thoroughfare called West Peachtree. The street runs through the heart of Atlanta; the tree is rooted in the heart of a prominent Atlantan.
``Ted was very concerned about the future of that tree - what happened to that tree if we expanded,'' Beckham recalls. ``When we were thinking about moving, his concern was what happens to that tree. We moved to the first home of CNN in 1979. A lot of things have happened on West Peachtree since, but that tree is still there. That was part of the deal.''
So the tree sits in a small oasis amid an expanding desert of progress. Prime Cable, current owners of the West Peachtree property, has two buildings that sandwich the tree's haven. If not for the tree, Prime could have consolidated its headquarters or, at least, provided a more generous parking lot for its customers.
But no. The tree stays, and broadcasts a signal that may be even stronger than those emitted by the transmission towers that stand behind it.
Progress is in the eye of the beholder. If progress means chopping an old tree to facilitate a new business, if progress means assembling new technologies to fuel an old arms buildup, then progress, in Ted Turner's view, is really regress. It's going back to a time when humankind did not exist on this planet.
Beside the most fortunate oak tree in Atlanta now are a couple of saplings. Like the tree, Turner has branched out and flourished. Both remain firmly rooted at 1018 West Peachtree St.
``Ted's been concerned ever since I've known him,'' says Beckham, who hearkens to the days when Turner's medium was the billboard. ``It's expanded, as his whole viewpoint has expanded. As the company grew, his scope grew. Now he has become global . . . even galactic.''
GLENN NELSON IS A REPORTER FOR THE SEATTLE TIMES SPORTS SECTION. ROB KEMP IS A TIMES NEWS ARTIST.