by Lisa Napoli
Also by Lisa Napoli
Radio Shangri-La: What I Discovered on My Accidental Journey to the Happiest Kingdom on Earth
Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away
Copyright © 2020 Lisa Napoli
Cover © 2020 Abrams
Published in 2020 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939895
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4306-1
eISBN: 978-1-68335-826-8
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.
Abrams Press® is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books
195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007
abramsbooks.com
In memory of my father, Vincent,
a news junkie before anyone called it that
and
For “the other” Ted, my one and only,
who voluntarily gave up the sets
Someday, I’m going to be the first person in the history of the world to talk to everyone. I’ll be able to talk to all the world’s leaders and bring peace to the world through television.
—Ted Turner
Contents
March 2001
CHAPTER ONE:The Little Girl in the Well, 1949
CHAPTER TWO:The Lunatic Fringe
CHAPTER THREE:Girdle ’Round the Earth
CHAPTER FOUR:Watch This Channel Grow!
CHAPTER FIVE:Captain Outrageous
CHAPTER SIX:“No News Is Good News”
CHAPTER SEVEN:Every Drop of Blood
CHAPTER EIGHT:Reese’s Pieces
CHAPTER NINE:Until the End of the World
CHAPTER TEN:Duck Hunting with Fidel
CHAPTER ELEVEN:The Little Girl in the Well, 1987
AFTERWORD:June 2000
APPENDIX:Timeline
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
March 2001
His handsome face tired, his silver hair and mustache now fully white—his speech as bombastic as when reporters first anointed him the “Mouth of the South,” a nickname he despised—Ted Turner grabbed the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism as he ascended the stage at the Forum of Public Affairs at Harvard University.
He found the honor amusing. Before him, it had been bestowed on luminary broadcast journalists like Ted Koppel, Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, and Lesley Stahl—venerable practitioners whose networks Ted had charged after with nuclear force, changing the very nature of TV. Though he’d never reported a story in his life—though he’d long ago derided news as “evil”—he supposed he had been a journalist of sorts. After all, he still drew a paycheck from a media company, Time Warner, which had acquired his Turner Broadcasting years earlier, including the service for which he was being feted that night—CNN, a source of news to two billion people around the globe. Heck, way back in grade school, he’d hawked newspapers at a streetcar stop for a penny a pop. Didn’t that count as journalism?
Even as a kid, he’d been a salesman above all else, shouting, “EXTRA!” to the passersby to suggest that the latest issue promised big, breaking news.
“It wasn’t an extra,” he confessed to the audience, who lapped up his irreverence, “but I was trying to sell these goddamned papers.”
After a few too many drinks at the pre-event dinner party, he propped up the framed commendation on the seat of a chair next to the podium. The citation proceeded to fall to the floor. He left it there.
“It won’t stand up,” he said, “and I’m having trouble doing the same myself.”
As much as the cocktails, the dismal facts of life since the dawn of the new millennium had knocked him off-kilter.
When clocks ticked into the year 2000, the world had not imploded, as many had expected it might, but Ted’s universe had.
Days into the new year, his third wife, the actress Jane Fonda, had moved out. He’d honored her wish that he not run for president of the United States, a job he wanted if only to promote his passion for environmental preservation. Fonda had said she’d leave him if he ran, so he didn’t—she went ahead and split anyway. He loved her still.
“The best lay I ever had,” he’d lamented to the dean’s wife earlier that evening—the ultimate compliment by this inveterate ladies’ man.
Just a few days after that personal loss, a different life-altering bombshell exploded, this one dropped by Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin. Levin had altered the course of Ted’s life before. In 1975, he’d sparked a media revolution when he catapulted a faltering pay-cable service called HBO into space—then a brand-new frontier. When Ted learned about this pioneering use of a satellite to transmit a television signal, he was inspired to make the copycat move for his little independent station in Atlanta. This changed everything for him, and for the station, and, ultimately, for all of television.
Swept up in this new century by the “irrational exuberance” of the World Wide Web, Levin, now Ted’s boss, had negotiated the sale of their company to a preposterous suitor, the red-hot America Online. Ted had his doubts, but he no longer had any say. Wall Street so disapproved of this merger that Time Warner’s stock tanked. In the past months alone, his personal fortune had shrunk by $3 billion.
Just a week earlier, he’d suffered another incalculable loss—of power. He’d been shunted aside into an emeritus role. The networks he’d created, including CNN, would no longer fall under his control.
Absent his job, his wife, or a healthy slice of his fortune, now he had to stand tall here in Cambridge at the august university that had, decades earlier, rejected his application for admission.1
“If I had come to college here, God knows what I would have accomplished,” he mused, as the audience erupted in laughter. Because, aside from the recent tumult, no one could argue that his achievements had been anything but formidable.
In introducing Ted, his Harvard host extolled him as a “visionary” in the spirit of the savior of the venerable New York Times, Adolph Ochs, or, better yet, Elvis. Elvis Presley changed music. But Ted had done one better. He’d changed America.
Yet few in that audience remembered—if they ever knew at all—the improbable empire-building that had emboldened Ted to believe he could start the very first all-news channel in 1980. Hardly anyone thought the idea could work, much less last—much less that a rogue like him could pull it off. Then, there was the parade of obstacles that had threatened to derail him every step of the way.
That evening, the audience at Harvard wasn’t concerned with history, especially history they didn’t even know. They were worried about CNN’s future and what would become of the news network they relied on now that Ted would no longer be a part of it. Layoffs had just been announced, and the accelerating power of the Internet loomed large. How would that change CNN? a student asked. It already had, Ted responded, his voice tinged with regret. But, he added, he had no crystal ball. All he could do was hope for the best.
Before the digital revolution unleashed a never-ending tsunami of information; back before videotape and portable camera gear and time-code editing and live shots allowed television news to rev more quickly and vividly than ever; way back when the world was a slower, quieter place and television’s crackling black-and-white glow b
egan to muscle radio for mindshare, Ted had been a little boy with a ferocious disciplinary problem about to be shipped off to military school, selling newspapers to commuters on their way home from work—fretting, as he voraciously memorized the stories of kings and battles and explorers, that there were no new worlds left for him to conquer. It was as if the medium of television was waiting for him to come along to upend it.
“I was like Columbus when he left Spain for the new world,” Ted told the amused audience, wistful for that strange and wonderful and faraway moment in time. “He didn’t know where he was going when he started, he didn’t know where he was when he got there, and he didn’t know where he’d been when he got back.”
1 After his rejection from Harvard, Ted attended Brown, a school to which he reminded the audience he’d just gifted $100 million—the same sum he’d given Jane Fonda after she’d left. She turned around and pledged $12.5 million of that to fund a gender studies program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. (The award was later rescinded for various reasons, most notably the collapse of the stock.) “Goddamn it,” Ted groused. “I want you to know it’s my money. I love her still.”
CHAPTER ONE
The Little Girl in the Well, 1949
That late Friday afternoon in April, before the world shook for one family and shrank for everyone else, the sun beamed clear over an open field in San Marino, California, a perfect day for carefree outdoor play. Two sets of cousins frolicked in a footrace with a fox terrier named Jeepers, while their mothers prepared dinner, keeping an eye on the kids out the kitchen window.
At a quarter after four, the day turned instantly dark, as the kids stomped inside—only three of them.
“Where’s Kathy?” asked the girl’s mother, Alice, about her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter. Neither Kathy’s sister, Barbara, age nine, nor her cousins Stanley, ten, and Gus, five, had an answer.
Alice jumped in her car and rode up the street, assuming the little girl had strayed toward the nearby school and a swing set she loved. Not a trace of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Kathy Fiscus. The family frantically fanned out across the field, calling her name. As they approached an uncapped well, fourteen inches wide, circled by weeds, they could hear her cries beneath the earth.
“She’s here!” Gus shouted.
Police and fire crews were summoned. Awaiting their arrival, the frantic mother dropped a telephone cord into the narrow hole, amazed that her daughter could fit down there and certain she could hoist her out. No luck.
“Can you hear me, Kathy?” her mother pleaded. “Are you standing up?”
“Yes, Momma,” the child responded, crying.
“Are you lying down?”
“Yes, Momma.”
Suddenly, as if conjured from the heavens, half a million dollars of equipment arrived with a host of skilled workmen who began tearing into the earth in pursuit of this child they didn’t know and had never seen.
Law enforcement issued a call to the nearby Santa Anita racetrack in search of a brave jockey willing to burrow down to bring the girl to the surface. Central Casting’s files were scoured for diminutive actors who might volunteer. No one who answered the call was small enough. With dusk about to fall, film studio 20th Century Fox dispatched fifty towering klieg lights so would-be rescuers could work into the night.
The fracas intensified with the arrival of the press corps—reporters and photographers from each of Los Angeles’s five dailies and more than a dozen other newspapers from the nearby communities that dotted the Southern California landscape. Film crews from the newsreels and radio reporters added to the pack. They knocked on the neighbors’ doors, hoping to use their phones to dictate dispatches back to their editors. Couriers stood poised to ferry exposed film to area newsrooms so that images of this drama could be developed and transmitted around the globe over the wire.
As word spread about the trapped little girl, hundreds, and soon thousands, of curious onlookers began to gather. So, too, did opportunistic vendors, who arrived to peddle coffee and ice cream to the public, turning the usually quiet street into a circus. To keep the volunteer rescue crew hydrated and nourished, a Red Cross canteen mushroomed near the excavation site—a reminder that this nail-gripping drama was not theater or frivolity; it was a real-life, fraught scene of distress.
Miles away, over on Loma Linda Avenue in Hollywood, the phone rang at the home of KTLA station manager Klaus Landsberg. Since his childhood in Germany, he’d displayed a passion for electronics, building his first radio set at just six years old and later earning two degrees in engineering. Though he had been marginalized because of his Jewish heritage, so great was his knowledge of technology that he was permitted, at age twenty, to work on the pioneering crew assembled to televise the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Adolf Hitler believed that this new medium of television was a “cultural development that promises to be of unsuspected importance to mankind.”
Landsberg escaped the Third Reich thanks to his invention of an aircraft navigation system, which earned him a coveted visa to emigrate. After arriving in New York Harbor, he scored an invitation to work in the laboratory of Philo T. Farnsworth, one of the inventors of television, who was racing to bring this radio-with-sound creation to a mass audience. Mere invention was one sort of achievement; popularizing it and commercializing it for the marketplace was quite another.
Next came the command to assist with TV’s dazzling public debut at the 1939 World’s Fair. Millions of Americans who visited the grand pavilions erected in the New York City borough of Queens were enthralled by their first glimpse at this new medium about which they’d only read.
When the film studio Paramount Pictures decided it needed to experiment with television on its brand-new soundstages in Hollywood, Landsberg had been the natural choice. In 1941, carrying two suitcases stuffed mostly with electronic gear, he hopped a train west.
The blank canvas before him was thrilling, from building the station to inventing and producing all manner of new programs that would fill the brief programming day—debates, discussions of community issues, musical variety shows. Among his talent discoveries was the bandleader Lawrence Welk.
The West Coast was still an island sequestered from the television production revving up in New York. The almighty phone company AT&T had agreed to drop out of the business of producing TV in exchange for the exclusive right to build out an essential “golden web” of high-speed lines necessary to transport it from city to city. It would be several years, at least, before California was connected.
Landsberg’s air, then, was entirely his own. Each day presented a fresh petri dish for experimentation in this new frontier. He relished start-up mode; no technological obstacle seemed insurmountable. If a tool didn’t exist, he’d set about inventing it. “The word ‘cannot’ simply did not exist in his vocabulary,” said his adoring and tolerant wife, Evelyn, who quipped that she found herself in a ménage à trois with her husband’s mistress—television. So addicted was Landsberg to TV that he’d proposed to her from high atop Mount Wilson on a visit to the station’s transmitter. On their wedding day, after a celebratory lunch, he’d popped into the studio to attend to an equipment malfunction.
Then came that Friday, when collective eyes and concern focused on the plight of young Kathy Fiscus. Callers who’d heard the radio bulletin jammed KTLA’s switchboard, pleading for the station to cover the rescue. The growing attachment to radio had primed the public to rely on it for up-to-the-minute news. But this was a story they wanted to see as well as hear.
Most of the nation’s television stations—in 1949, there were fewer than a hundred—didn’t carry much in the way of news. What there was of it on TV consisted of a man sitting behind a desk reading headlines from the local paper. The scant visual might be a still photograph, held up for the camera, or two-day-old newsreel footage. The technology didn’t allow for much more than that. Conveying commercial messages, though, was a cinch. In the midst of his fifteen-minute rep
ort, the newsreader might pause for a word from the sponsor, picking up a soup bowl handed to him by a stagehand and enjoying a few slurps.
The tone had been set nationally. Those in the east who were able to tune into NBC’s nightly fifteen-minute national news couldn’t miss the ubiquitous logo of cigarette maker Camel, which sponsored the broadcast, allowing the suave host, John Cameron Swayze, to “hopscotch the world for headlines” from the comfort of his news set.
Journalists and executives alike agreed that news was something better covered by the papers, radio, and newsreels. Besides, the best of them didn’t wish to be bothered or demeaned by this nascent medium.
Like most of his colleagues, Landsberg was certain viewers who’d heard a story on TV would surely clamor to read more, leading to a boom in newspaper readership. Television’s true raison d’être, many believed, was as an extension of movies—a medium for entertainment and escapism. Not that so many people could tune in. Though each day a thousand new sets were sold across America, still only 1 percent of the country owned a TV. Fewer than twenty thousand of them could be found in the metro area’s four million homes. A basic television cost $385—a tenth of the average annual salary, and a third of the price of the far more utilitarian purchase of a new car.
Still, the arrival of television was so wildly anticipated that in some towns without a station yet to service it, eager consumers bought and installed the clunky consoles just so they’d be ready.
The size of the audience wasn’t the point to Landsberg, especially at this moment, with an urgent matter unfolding. The rescue of a little girl seemed tailor-made for the medium he loved and was helping to invent. As it became clear that it would take more time than expected to release her from her prison, he rerouted his experimental mobile unit from a wrestling match in downtown Los Angeles to the drama a dozen miles away in San Marino, and headed out there himself. Police attempted to keep back the crew, but Landsberg persisted. Beaming out pictures on television, he explained, would keep away more looky-loos than a physical barricade.
