by Lisa Napoli
Though the proud new owner declared the Atlanta airwaves ripe for an indie, the TV critic for the Atlanta Constitution dismissed the station’s schedule as lackluster—a hodgepodge of discards from the networks, like the crime drama Target: The Corruptors!, mixed with gems from long-ago, like I Was a Male War Bride and Come to the Stable.
But Rice, the newbie broadcaster, had a grander scheme in mind. Like a handful of hopeful businessmen around the nation, he believed that Americans obsessed with television would soon be willing to fork over small sums of money to watch premium programming—newer movies, sporting events, and filmed versions of Broadway shows.
Consider the math. Only six hundred thousand people had seen the smash musical My Fair Lady during its three-year, sold-out Broadway run. If every one of the 107 million households that had tuned in for the live production of Cinderella when it was staged for TV in 1957 had paid just a quarter, the take would total close to $27 million.
Pay television seemed a sure bet—and an obvious cash cow. As an experiment, the masterminds behind this service had been installing coin-operated set-top boxes on select televisions hooked up to special channels in test markets. So enticing was its buzz and promise that an investment banker managed to sell stock in Rice Broadcasting without a shred of evidence that channel 17 could turn a profit. Once this new service rolled out nationally, the money was sure to flow.
Theater owners and the networks decried as absurd this concept of charging viewers for what had long been free, like expecting them to pay for air. Their rancor was a shield for their terror; surely such a service would crush their control of entertainment. A fierce lobbying campaign was mobilized against this potential menace. The Joint Committee Against Toll TV derided Rice and his ilk as parasites and vampires aiming to “gouge the American people.” But their concerns were far less about the viewers than about their bottom line. The committee prevailed, and strict limits were placed on the development of pay TV.
Left now with only subpar programming and fuzzy reception, channel 17 failed to attract either viewers or advertisers. Rice’s folly began bleeding $50,000 a month.
The would-be media man waged a last-ditch effort to rally an audience for his faltering venture. He purchased space on a lone billboard on the Lakewood Freeway, which ribboned south of the city toward the airport, in the service of convincing passing motorists that WJRJ was Atlanta’s “number one independent station.” This wasn’t a false claim. Channel 17 was the number one indie. There were no others in operation.
The sign caught the eye of at least one person—the handsome young man who owned it.
* * *
Roadside advertising had been integral to the life of Robert E. Turner III since practically the moment of his birth on November 19, 1938. Ted watched his namesake father, Robert Edward Turner Jr., construct an empire, piece by piece, escaping his own heritage as the son of a struggling sharecropper in Mississippi who’d lost his farm during the Great Depression.
Unable to pay tuition at Duke University, the elder Turner, known as Ed, broke into the ad business as a human car counter, helping advertisers determine the number of eyeballs their boards received on the emerging matrix of America’s roads. To help cobble together enough money to launch his own “outdoor advertising” company, he sold Chevrolets in Cincinnati. There he met and wooed Florence Rooney, a tall beauty who delivered him a son fifteen months after they married. Ted was the first Turner born north of the Mason-Dixon line, but he took his rightful place as a southerner when his father’s work moved the family to Savannah, Georgia. There, over time, through might and acquisition, Ed built Turner Outdoor into the largest such concern in the southeast.
A charmer with a natty sense of style, he was determined that Ted not become soft or spoiled. While Florence begged him to stop, he walloped the child with a razor strap. “A few fleas are good for a dog,” he’d say as justification for the beatings. “Insecurity breeds greatness.” The lashes were a form of discipline, he explained to his son, “to try to make you do the right thing and grow up to be someone we are proud of.”
Besides, Ed said, it hurt more to strike than to be hit himself. To prove it, he once insisted that Ted turn the strap on him. The kid couldn’t do it. He collapsed in tears.
Believing that boys who spent too much time with their mothers turned out to be too much like girls, Ed sent his son to boarding school starting at the age of four. There, Ted endured crushing loneliness. After stints at various other schools, he was enrolled at McCallie, a prestigious military academy in Tennessee, where he became a hell-raising “show-off” and “smart-ass,” leading his dorm mates to beat him mercilessly, screaming of the native Ohioan, “Kill the Yankee!” Slapped with a pile of demerits for insubordination and disruption, young Ted walked holes in his shoes fulfilling the mandated punishment laps around the track.
As a self-described “skinny little shrimp,” Ted discovered that his true mettle was his wit. At bedtime, when the dorm supervisor asked who was responsible for a lingering light, Ted piped up, “Edison, T., sir.” Better to be a quick thinker, he decided, than a high school quarterback. In just two places did he excel—on the debate team and on the water, where he fearlessly, recklessly sailed Penguin dinghies. His drive to win at anything he undertook was fierce. “When basic characteristics were doled out,” he observed, “I got more than my share of competitiveness.”
On summer vacations starting at age twelve, Ted was expected to work full-time in the family business. Being the boss’s son didn’t exempt him from scut work. For a salary of fifty dollars a month, he dug holes for the poles that held up billboards, mowed the grass around them, and delivered water to crews in the field. Lest his son become an entitled brat, Ed charged the kid half of what he earned for room and board.
The virtues and merits of outdoor advertising were baked into Ted’s very being. Though he’d hawked papers at a streetcar stop during second and third grades, he adopted his father’s mistrust of newspapers for the editorials they ran decrying billboard “blight.” Fiercely loyal, Ed admonished Florence that she should purchase only products made by his advertisers.
A womanizer who bragged to his son about his conquests and believed men were naturally polygamous, Ed disappeared every few months on a bender that involved his other extracurricular passion: alcohol. He’d drink so much that he’d brawl in the bar, and, then, when he hit bottom, check into Silver Hill, a leafy resort-style rehab facility up north in New Canaan, Connecticut. Once the staff helped him sober up, he’d return home and get back to work, eventually resuming the cycle of destruction.
Ed’s innate tumult was amplified by the diagnosis of his beloved only daughter, Mary Jean, with lupus, a cruel, degenerative disease. As her brain swelled with encephalitis and her health spiraled downward, the girl would scream with pain, banging her head against the wall, begging the good Lord to have mercy and take her life. In a rare instance of defiance against her husband, Florence refused to relinquish the girl’s care to an institution. Unable to face the crushing travails of his dying daughter, Ed filed for divorce. Freed from the domestic trauma, he intensified his immersion in work. This also gave him more time to micromanage his son.
Mary Jean’s illness destroyed more than the Turner family unit. It shattered her brother’s faith. Before her decline, Ted professed to be deeply religious, saved four times in Christian crusades. A career as a missionary held appeal. He felt sorry for souls in those parts of the world who didn’t have access to Christianity. He believed they would burn in hell, and he intended to help them find salvation.
But the God that would allow his beautiful, innocent sister to fall so cruelly into the “dark shadows” of a horrific disease was not one the young man decided he could abide. When his daily prayers for her improved health continued to go unanswered, he swore off religion.
In its place, he became devout about the classics. Obsessed with ancient warriors and kings like Alexander the Great, Ted would spontaneou
sly launch into passages from Homer’s Iliad, or Babington’s Horatius at the Bridge. From Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, he developed a seize-the-day, live-life-to-the-fullest philosophy:
Ah make the most of what we yet may spend
Before we too into the Dust descend.
Dust into dust and under dust to lie
Sans wine, sans song, sans singer—sans end.
When it came time for college, Ed forbade Ted from attending the Naval Academy, his first choice of school. “It probably wouldn’t have been much fun without a war on,” Ted rationalized about his father’s decision, “without being able to push destroyers around and shoot each other.” Rejected by Harvard but admitted to two other Ivy-League schools, he opted out of the urban campus of the University of Pennsylvania and headed instead to Brown University in Rhode Island, perfectly situated to allow him to indulge his love of water sports.
The tweedy New Englanders couldn’t make sense of this redneck southern sailor with a dimpled chin and wild personality. In defiance of the school’s blue-blood decorum, he’d erupt into rebel yells on the fire escape of his dorm and shoot his gun into the sky, sing Nazi songs outside the Jewish fraternity, and “prank” black students with menacing notes on their doors that read, “WARNINGS FROM THE KKK.” Delighting in the shock it inspired among the northeastern liberals abundant on Brown’s campus, Ted would drone on about Hitler, whom he considered the “most powerful man of all time.” One classmate observed with incredulity that despite “his basic racist tendencies, his chauvinistic approach to women, his elitist view of society, and his fascist political ideology,” Ted was likable, even enjoyable. Said another classmate, “He’s an asshole, but a glorious, totally mad, larger-than-life asshole.”
Ted couldn’t blame booze for his behavior—yet. Ed had made him a bet: If the young man reached twenty-one without touching alcohol or tobacco, he’d be rewarded the princely sum of $5,000.
But when his father refused to let him take a summer job at a yacht club, Ted plunged into the substances he’d pledged to avoid before winning the award. Those habits were, if not exactly congenital, deeply ingrained in the Turner being.
A month into his new drunken lifestyle, he was caught partying and throwing chairs out the windows at Wheaton, the nearby women’s college. For this act of defiance, he was rewarded with a suspension. He rode out the lost semester by enlisting in the Coast Guard and, after returning to school, chose the classics as his major. This impractical course of study outraged Ed, who, in a five-page screed, declared his belief that Ted was “rapidly becoming a jackass.”
I can see you drifting into a bar, belting down a few, turning around to the guy on the stool next to you—a contemporary billboard baron from Podunk, Iowa, saying, “Well, what do you think about old Leonidas?” Your friend, the billboard baron, will turn to you and say, “Leonidas, who?”
Ted’s riposte? He turned the letter over to the school newspaper, which published it in its entirety. Then, he obediently switched majors, to economics.
But the familial damage was done. Ed refused to continue underwriting his foolish progeny. Left to struggle with his own tuition bill, Ted saw his troubles mount. Instead of dismantling his fraternity’s homecoming display, he torched it. When he ratted out a woman’s extracurricular love life to her steady beau, the cuckolded man retaliated by calling the campus cops and turning Ted in for the worst possible infraction at his all-men’s university: harboring a woman in his room. Suspension—again.
And with it, the end of Ted’s college career. Off he ran with a friend to sunny Florida, the perfect locale in which to indulge his love of sailing. Unable to find steady work and eager to stretch what little money they had, they resorted to living in Ted’s car in a poor Cuban neighborhood, using the phone book for toilet paper and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on a single paper plate they’d reuse again and again. It was the first time in his life that Ted had ever been hungry.
Experiencing poverty convinced him that “being a bum was not for me.” Desperate to head in any direction that didn’t involve working for his dad, he leapt when the Coast Guard sought him out to complete his service. His shipboard assignment on the USS Travis involved scrubbing wretched, rat-infested latrines, which seemed a picnic compared to starvation. Though the captain found his dedication worthy of admission to the Naval Academy, Ted capitulated to his fate, returning to work for his father. Ed relegated him to an outpost of Turner Outdoor in Macon, Georgia.
Along the way, as if to prove himself emancipated, he impetuously married Judy Gale Nye, the daughter of a famous sail maker, herself a skilled skipper. Nascent women’s lib had hardly caught up with Ted. Judy was expected to dress as her husband wished, to iron his socks and provide three square meals each day—comprised only of products purveyed by his billboard customers. Ted, meanwhile, worked almost constantly—unless there was a race in which he could sail or a woman he could seduce. In case it wasn’t apparent to his bride, he boorishly declared his priorities: business first, then sailing, then family.
When his sister’s tortured existence came to an end at age seventeen, Ted, like his father, subsumed his grief and ratcheted up the intensity of his drinking, smoking, and carousing. The only major difference between the two men was their haberdashery. The elder Turner favored silk robes, Panama hats, and white linen suits, and he impressed guests with his private-label whiskey. His perpetually rumpled offspring, on the other hand, took pride in cutting his own hair and didn’t seem to care that his jackets and pants didn’t fit quite right.
Ted Turner made no secret to his family that sailing was his priority. In 1966, when this photo was taken, he’d only just begun to amass the honors. (Floyd Edwin Jilson/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Together, they lived and breathed their business, talking about it to the exclusion of all else, exasperating everyone around them. What better form of advertising, they asked, than a billboard? The profit margins were unbeatable and surefire. Billboards required minimal upkeep, performed on location by unskilled laborers. Unlike ads in newspapers, which got trashed or redeployed as birdcage liners or fish wrap, outdoor advertising endured.
The tenacity and strategic sensibility that helped become Ted a formidable sailor helped propel him in the business world, too. Working fifteen hours a day, six and a half days a week, he doubled sales in his territory. At long last, he felt he’d won approval from the man he feared and admired and considered his best friend.
One day, he boldly asked his father for a moment alone. He’d figured something out, and he wished to discuss it.
“You’ve always said you’re leaving your business to me,” he told Ed Turner. “It hit me. That’s not it. You’re going to leave me to your business.”
The elder Turner took a deep breath, sat back, and acknowledged his son’s observation, as Ted continued with his emancipation proclamation.
“I’m not Ed Turner,” he told his father. “I’m Ted Turner. I’m your son and proud and happy to be so. But I’ve got to have a little room to be my own person and not just your idea of what I should be.”
Ed nodded in understanding, though it seemed unlikely that a man with such a strong personality had the capacity to allow Ted more space. Besides, he’d become fixated on the boldest business move of his life. In 1962, he teamed up with Bob Naegele, a friend and associate up north, to purchase the assets of a competitor, General Outdoor. Ed’s slice of the company would render Turner Outdoor the largest billboard concern in the south. The deal involved taking on several million dollars in debt, which, carefully navigated, he’d have no problem repaying over the five years stipulated in the deal’s terms. The expanded business would establish a Turner Outdoor presence in Atlanta and Richmond—the big leagues, compared with the smaller cities the company had conquered thus far.
Ed invited Ted to join him in Atlanta, the big-time, to oversee the leasing side of the operation. This proved an exciting but enormously
stressful development. With Judy having delivered a baby in the nest back in Macon, Ted’s weight plunged under the pressure of shuttling eighty miles back and forth between home and his new assignment. Meanwhile, Ed’s girth ballooned as he smoked three packs of cigarettes and downed a fifth of liquor each day.
On his typical cycle, the elder Turner headed back to rehab in Connecticut. This time he unwittingly swapped his addiction to alcohol for one to pills. With his tortured state of mind unabated, he retreated to his thousand-acre plantation in South Carolina for a weeklong vacation. A few nights later, he called his son, jabbering, his talk tinged with mania. Ted was mystified by his father’s state of mind—perplexed by the words and tone of voice beaming out of the receiver. The salient points in his rambling included his certainty that buying General Outdoor had been a colossal mistake. His life was a failure, he wailed. This business deal would ruin him. He couldn’t hack these extended responsibilities.
And because of this, he informed his heir, he’d decided to sell out his share of the business to Naegele. There was to be no arguing or debate. The deal was already done.
Over his short lifetime, Ted had experienced his father’s wide range of moods, but he’d never heard the fierce and focused fighter Ed Turner in a state like this. Quitting had never been an option before. Why was he giving up now? There was no indication of any problem, no sense of anything but upward momentum for Turner Outdoor, as long as he kept his usual pace. Was his father having a nervous breakdown? Was it the pills? Ted had no clue, but he was reconciled to the fact that he was helpless to intercede.
