by Lisa Napoli
On March 5, 1963, as he did each day, Jimmy Brown, a trusted family employee, served Ed breakfast. Brown noticed that his boss seemed more content than he had in a long time. After the meal, Ed retreated to his upstairs bathroom, picked up a gun, and shot himself in the head. When Brown heard the blast, he rushed to Ed’s side but quickly discovered that his beloved boss could not be saved. He was fifty-two.
This incalculable loss pierced the heart of twenty-four-year-old Ted. As he had after his sister’s demise, rather than grieve, he jolted into action. He soon discovered that his father had, indeed, signed a deal to sell to Naegele the day before his suicide. Ted blamed it on temporary insanity.
Take what he’s left you, counseled the elder man’s advisor, and do what you love—go sail.
Yes, he loved the water and stole off for races every chance he got, but sailing his life away was not how he wished to avenge the hard work and death of Robert E. Turner Jr. He was a fighter, not a dilettante who lived off the fat of the land. Like his hero, Alexander the Great, who’d been twenty when his father, the Macedonian king, was assassinated, Ted was determined to forge ahead. Rescuing the business his father had struggled to build, and making it larger, was the best memorial he could imagine.
Ted hopped a plane to meet with Naegele and implored him unsuccessfully to rip up the deal. When that failed, he laid on the guilt. “How can you take your best friend’s business away from him?” Next, he tried dirty tricks, orchestrating an elaborate sabotage. Finally, Naegele responded with steep terms. If the young man could deliver an eye-popping $200,000 cash in the next ninety days, he could buy back what Ed had sold him. With little capital and no prospect of raising any, Ted counteroffered the counter. Aware that the tax gains a rich man like Naegele would have to pay on such a sum would be steep, he offered company stock instead. This time, Naegele bit.
Ted’s advisors were incensed. This kid simply didn’t have the maturity or the finesse to handle the management of the company. They were sure he’d crap out with this roll of the dice.
That the family industry was in the crosshairs of a growing movement to regulate billboards didn’t help Ted’s odds of success. The state of Georgia intended to clamp down on what President Lyndon Johnson disparaged as “unsightly man-made obstructions” that had transformed the nation’s thoroughfares into “junkyards.” The “stop billboard blight” movement sparked by the national highway beautification bill could very well destroy the entire industry. He took this as a clue to diversify.
Advertisers eager for a mass audience had already begun to route more of their dollars to broadcasting. To stake a claim in the medium of radio, he overbid on a jalopy of a station in Chattanooga, simply because he owned a billboard company there. First, he converted the station to the wildly popular Top 40 format. Then, he deployed his unsold inventory to promote it. The tactic worked. In short order, Turner swapped cash and stock to purchase three more radio stations across the south.
All the while, he found comfort in the only place on earth he felt wasn’t spoiled—the water. The vast, limitless potential of the seas was the only kind of “field” expansive enough to match his dreams. The stifling confines of a stadium, where other sports were played, was too restrictive. He began collecting accolades, shocking the world of sailing by pushing boats to the limits, from St. Petersburg to Fort Lauderdale, Sydney to Hobart, Cape Hatteras to Montego Bay, spending tens of thousands of dollars on racing and less and less time at home. Which was just as well. Acrimony ruled the roost.
Judy filed for divorce, but when she immediately discovered she was pregnant again, Ted implored her to stick around, though even with a new baby on the way (Robert Edward Turner IV), the renewed relationship never mellowed. The sport that had brought them together ultimately did them in. When he rammed Judy’s boat during a race in order to win, she decided she’d had it, once and for all. She packed up the kids and returned to her hometown, Chicago.
He hated being alone. “F. Scott Fitzturner,” as he called himself, had no shortage of female companions. He wasn’t single for long. At a fundraiser for the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater, the politics weren’t as much the draw as the chance to meet women. There, he’d been introduced by a friend to Janie, a home economics major and flight attendant. Initially, this belle bristled at the divorced man with children. “My impulse was to run as fast as I could the other way. And he came on so strong,” she said. The gap in his teeth and his bright blue eyes trumped that he seemed crazy and ferocious and was forever bragging. Her father’s intense admiration of this paramour provided the final push of her doubts. After marrying less than a year later, a new baby was born, a son Ted insisted on naming Rhett—after the lead character in his favorite movie, the epic Civil War drama Gone with the Wind. By now, Ted had grown a mustache, emphasizing his resemblance to the character as brought to life in the film by Clark Gable.
As his family continued to expand, he wavered about his future. Radio didn’t turn him on as much as he’d hoped. In fact, Ted found it to be more hassle than it was worth. Too much competition in each market meant commercial airtime sold too cheap. Personnel hassles with what he described as “drugged-out deejays” proved tedious. The impractical reality of geography—all the stations were scattered around the southeast—made managing them all the more complex.
In search of new capital, Ted paid a visit to banker Lee McClurkin of the august Atlanta investment firm Robinson Humphrey. Maybe if he could buy a radio station in Atlanta or infuse his business with cash by taking his company public, that might ignite his passion for broadcasting.
McClurkin, for his part, had a problem on his hands, and the visit from young, enthusiastic Ted sparked an idea about how to solve it. Just like the owners of the other 145 independent stations around the country, his client over at channel 17, Jack Rice, was bleeding money to the tune of $600,000 a year. Indies just couldn’t compete with the networks, and now that the great promise of pay television had proven to be a bust, so had Rice’s interest in continuing on the “lunatic fringe.” Perhaps McClurkin could solve both men’s problems by merging the businesses together.
Ted confessed to the banker that he didn’t watch much television. He was too busy and too hyperactive to sit down and engage in such a passive indulgence. He also wasn’t ashamed to admit that he had no idea what “UHF” was. Still, he was smitten—television, even a low-power independent station high on the dial, seemed far sexier than radio. He figured TV commercials were just like billboards, except that the visuals moved, right? They’d be fun to sell. Besides, the losses incurred by channel 17 would offset the profit he was reaping in the outdoor advertising business, which were sure to soar when a new rule banning tobacco advertising on television soon went into effect. Plus, he could deploy the same tactic he had in Chattanooga, putting fallow boards around Atlanta to work promoting his new station.
When Ted announced his plans to merge with Rice, his advisors erupted yet again. The $2.5 million stock swap was bad enough. That this channel 17 came saddled with hundreds of thousands in losses underscored the deal as an unmitigated dog. But Ted was unrelenting. Ownership of a broadcast license seemed, to him, the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket. A new media playground awaited!
A garbled proxy vote submitted by a member of Ted’s board of directors unintentionally green-lit his plan. By the time it was discovered that the ballot had actually been cast as a no, it was too late. The merger squeaked through.
Even before he officially took over, channel 17 sank from fourth of four stations to fifth of five. A well-funded UHF competitor with the catchy call letters WATL announced it would debut on channel 36, hardly vanquishing the skepticism of Ted’s advisors. No way could a market the size of Atlanta sustain two independent stations. Right out of the gate, WATL possessed an advantage: a psychedelic, twenty-eight-hour-long weekend music marathon hosted by two local rock deejays called The Now Explosion, which promised “TV so turned on
you can’t turn it off.” The tube had never seen anything like it before—gyrating go-go girls in miniskirts dancing to music of the day, embellished by wild, pulsating special effects made possible by state-of-the-art television equipment that allowed for fancy zooms and color bursts and fades in time with the music, an acid trip without the windowpane.2
Another setback: the call letters Ted wished to name his new acquisition—WTBS, for “Turner Broadcasting System,” an aural cousin of the mighty CBS—were already in use up north at a radio station on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Instead, Ted settled on the letters WTCG, for “Turner Communications Group,” as the name for his baby.
And so, on the first day of January 1970, channel 17 began broadcasting in its reincarnated state. There seemed to be just one person in town who believed it could be a winner.
This proud new owner quickly discovered that his new plaything was rife with problems beyond its physical decor, pathetic finances, location on the television dial, and cellar-dwelling ratings. The general manager had the temerity to lounge around all day with his feet propped up on the desk, lazily leafing through the newspaper as if it were a Sunday morning. Personnel, who routinely reported to work stoned, often loaded what few commercials had been sold upside down in the film projector. Not that anyone was watching or noticing besides Ted.
In search of bargain-rate equipment that would enable channel 17 to broadcast in color, Ted trekked north to call on another struggling UHF channel, this one in Charlotte, North Carolina. WCTU had been launched by an overambitious dentist named Harold Twisdale and had been bleeding money from the start. (Fortunately, said Dr. Twisdale, he’d never given up his thriving dental practice.) The plug on the station was about to be pulled, freeing up the one tangible asset he possessed: gear. By the end of the meeting, Ted wasn’t just buying that. He was buying the whole damned station in a fire sale.
Once again, his board erupted in anger and disbelief. Several members expressed such exasperation with Ted’s latest show of fiscal irresponsibility that they resigned.
One associate wasn’t surprised by this latest impetuous twist. Jim Roddey, an executive now in charge of Turner Outdoor, had concluded that his boss, while “very, very bright,” was also “wacko, semi-loco.” What kind of person admired Hitler for his organizational skills? Who else likened billboard painters to Michelangelo and allowed his staff to paint an anatomically correct fifty-foot sign of the Coppertone girl? During sales calls to potential clients, Roddey had personally witnessed Ted writhing on the floor to show his desperation. “I’m a dead man if you don’t buy,” he’d plead. At station meetings, he’d whine to his team that business must be conducted like the Frank Sinatra song: “My Way.” A man who’d chosen Black Cat and Pariah as the names of two of his boats was hardly trying to convey the straight and narrow.
And yet, as unorthodox a businessman as Ted was, Roddey knew how masterful he could be at creating the illusion of success. He dwelled in a perennially positive fantasyland the staff referred to as Planet Hope, refusing to buckle to fear or prudence. Yes, Ted was a motor-mouthed egomaniac who dominated every conversation—for his continuous, impenetrable monologue, even people who liked him called him “Radio.” But he plunged into this new business of television with his characteristic manic zeal, devouring the trade magazines and studying the demographics by fifteen-minute segments so intently he could recite them like poetry. And he crafted an ingenious spin on the station’s biggest liability—its location on the dial.
“UHF viewers are more intelligent than the people who watch the other stations,” he explained. “Only an extremely smart person could figure out how to work that antenna in order to tune in a UHF station like ours.” This ballsy, circuitous logic impressed Roddey, even if it had yet to yield much fruit. The general managers at the other stations in town felt such pity for this Turner kid for buying into such a pathetic part of broadcasting that they paternalistically agreed to meet this TV newbie for lunch. As they witnessed how he deployed his arsenal of billboards in the service of promoting channel 17 and started snapping up movies and programs to air, they recognized that this newbie to their business might sound like he fell off a turnip truck, but, in reality, he was dumb as a fox.
The more people said something couldn’t be done—or that Ted Turner couldn’t do it—the deeper he plunged in. A wild risk taker was the perfect fit, perhaps the only fit, for a station on the lunatic fringe.
One night, after strategizing channel 17’s future over drinks at the local watering hole, Ted and Roddey made their way back to the station parking lot. The soaring tower loomed. By its mere existence, it teased an intrepid onlooker to ascend. Frat boys from Georgia Tech, located just across the highway, routinely scaled the steel giant as part of a hazing ritual. Ted himself couldn’t resist. He proposed a challenge: “Let’s do it.”
Before Roddey could say a word, Ted was on his way, climbing higher and higher, one rung after the other, as if the tower were the mast of a ship. Up and up he ascended, until he was out of sight, shrouded by the darkness of night and cloud.3 Never mind the uncertainties he was facing; never mind the doubters and the challenges and the improbabilities. In that instant, the journey before him didn’t seem one bit daunting. Though he had no idea what the next day would bring, right that instant, he could see clear ahead to the future. “Hang on to my coattails,” he shouted. “We’re going to the stars or the moon.”
1 Rhymes with “crush.”
2 For an archive of The Now Explosion, please see http://www.thenowexplosion.com/3segmaster1.html.
3 Production manager R. T. Williams told writer Christian Williams that he climbed the tower while Ted stayed on the ground. It took nine hours to get down from the top.
CHAPTER THREE
Girdle ’Round the Earth
Since he arrived on earth on November 5, 1931, Maurice Wolfe Schonfeld had been adjacent to greatness, this close to the A-list. To be born in Newark, New Jersey, in the shadow of New York City, the indisputable center of the universe, was to perennially feel kicked around—an also-ran.
The neighbors on the Schonfelds’ block included Newark’s power elite: the police chief, a prominent rabbi, and a gangster. Reese’s father, meanwhile, dutifully worked as an executive at a glass manufacturer. He was successful enough that he made his wife stop working, lest the neighbors perceive that meant he wasn’t able to support the family.
Early on, Reese—his baby sister, unable to pronounce “Maurice,” unwittingly gifted him his nickname—had shown himself to be a daring ringleader. Unlike other kids his age, he didn’t play football—he ran the football pool, which yielded his other nickname, Big Mo, a nod to his towering frame. He was constantly stirring up trouble, cutting school, lashing out at teachers, and pulling pranks, such as stealing the rabbi’s daughter’s diary, which mortified his father, who was devout.
As Jews during the precipitous march into World War II, the Schonfeld family closely monitored Hitler’s ominous rise. It felt a matter of life and death to devour the news conveyed in the latest issues of Time, Life, and The New Yorker—to gather around the radio, as most of the nation anxiously did, for the latest dispatches from the likes of H. V. Kaltenborn and Edward R. Murrow, who, one columnist explained, had “more influence on America’s reaction to foreign news than a shipful of newspapermen.” Together, the Schonfelds listened hopefully to Gabriel Heatter’s daily show, which promised, “There’s good news tonight,” though good news seemed in short supply. From all of this, Reese discovered a wide world beyond Newark’s borders. He yearned to inhabit it, to be part of the conversation—to jump across the river to the big time.
Though his grades were mediocre, he tested well on the college boards, landing him admission to Dartmouth in 1949, just as TV was beginning to roll out on a wider scale. The postwar era was liberal, but Reese, the eternal contrarian, considered himself archconservative. It wasn’t politics so much. If he could, he was always going
to take the other side.
At school in rural New Hampshire, his strategic mind and fiercely competitive nature allowed him to excel at cards. The money he raked in from winning at bridge boosted his meager allowance.
After graduation, he earned a spot at the most prestigious of law schools: Harvard. Months into his studies, a fellow student ratted him out for drinking, cutting class, and running a poker game in his dorm room. He was summarily expelled. Though his heart wasn’t in the legal profession, filial duty compelled him to continue his course of study. His father had abandoned his own dream of becoming a lawyer when he dropped out of school at age fourteen to help with the household expenses. While Reese was certain he hadn’t inherited the elder man’s ambition, he wasn’t quite sure what else to do with his life. He’d sold subscriptions to the Newark Evening News and worked as a clerk there, but the idea that this could be a career for a grown man hadn’t crossed his mind.
For his second try, he enrolled closer to home, at Columbia University in New York. In 1956, a campus employment office placed him in a summer job as a copyboy at the news service United Press–Movietone News. The thirty-five dollars a week he’d receive would turn out to be the least consequential part of the experience.
His employer was a fusion of two companies at the forefront of a growing appetite for visually presented news. The table had been set in movie theaters in the 1920s, back when commercial television was but a glint in its inventors’ eyes. While the very notion of moving pictures was pure magic, a live keyboard player provided the only soundtrack possible. To make the evening at the cinema more of an event, Movietone and a handful of competitors began providing newsreels, appetizer-length briefs that ran before and in between the feature films.
These weekly dispatches transported the audience to the scene of current headlines far more dramatically than the static text and photographs available in print. Brief captions on title cards punctuated dramatic images of politicians and celebrities, war and natural disasters. Even without sound, they opened a window to the world most people could only dream of peering through—and made them feel, if but for a moment, a tiny part of it.
