by Lisa Napoli
There was symmetry in this possible locale. The old hotel had once been owned by none other than Jack Rice, the man who’d started channel 17 and thus provided Ted’s entry into television. Another plus: The old hotel happened to be a stone’s throw from Harrison’s, the bar where media types in the city loved to gather.
The Brookwood, it turned out, was simply not big enough to accommodate Ted’s growing television army and the Jetsonian satellite farm that would be necessary to allow CNN to bring in news from everywhere.
Another fallow building, just a few blocks from existing headquarters, offered far more promise. The old Progressive Club, once a social and recreational haven for Russian Jews, featured a ninety-two-thousand-square-foot white-columned mansion with three swimming pools and tennis and handball courts on twenty-one acres of land. The faded beauty was surrounded by a tangle of highways, the campus of Georgia Tech, and Techwood Homes, the nation’s first public housing project. On the day in August 1940 that the stately, columned brick structure at Tenth Street and Techwood Drive had been dedicated, prayers had been led by Rabbi Harry Epstein and a time capsule tucked away in the cornerstone for the distant future when the club might outgrow this grand new facility. From that moment on, the Progressive Club thrummed with life, its cavernous halls filled with the sounds of dances, card games, slot machines, Hadassah Club meetings, and a winning basketball team.
The former Progressive Club sat empty for years, just blocks away from WTCG, before Ted Turner purchased it for $4.2 million in 1979. Some early employees recall attending social functions there back when it was still a country club. (Jeff Jeffares)
By the mid-1970s, club leaders followed a dwindling membership north from midtown to a new, smaller facility at 1160 Moores Mill Road.1 Twice since, developers had announced intentions to transform that sprawling enclave into towers of condominiums, office space, and a thousand-room hotel. But those plans had fallen through, and now, this once vibrant, majestic property sat empty, a gem forgotten by all except vagrants who took shelter there, frat boys from Georgia Tech who snuck in to party, and rats.
Reincarnating this parcel as the home for a growing, futuristic television empire seemed preordained. These twenty-one acres were capacious enough to accommodate the necessary “dish farm,” especially once the swimming pools were filled in. The listing price was $5 million, but Ted picked it up for $4.2 million. It would take an equal sum for the renovations.
Instead of turning to architects in New York or Los Angeles experienced in building television studios, Ted enlisted his childhood friend Bunky Helfrich. A sailor himself, Helfrich had served as a sail trimmer on Ted’s victorious America’s Cup crew. Most of his professional work involved the restoration of private homes in Savannah and the verdant Low Country. He didn’t have an office in Atlanta, nor had he ever created a television studio. Then again, no one had ever before dared to launch a round-the-clock newsroom, much less one that had to coexist with a so-called SuperStation that hosted weekly wrestling matches and did a brisk business peddling vinyl repair kits and Super-Bad Party Rings. A crew would need to work mighty fast to transform “Tara on Techwood” into a state-of-the-art broadcasting palace. (New hires cheekily referred to this building as the “news kibbutz” and “Kosher Kolumns”—and were quickly admonished by Ted’s assistant to stop.)
Along with choosing the architect, Ted made another crucial decision about the newly acquired building that chafed Reese. The plum first-floor space was to be reserved for cash-cow channel 17. The 80-by-140-square-foot ballroom, once resonant with the big-band sounds of Tommy Dorsey and Xavier Cugat, seemed a natural location for the likes of Dusty Rhodes, the Masked Superstar, and Nature Boy Ric Flair to toss one another around in front of a live studio audience. Cable News Network, as the newbie gamble, would be carved out of the locker rooms in the basement.
Reese worried what else Captain Outrageous might do without his approval while he was riding out his ITNA contract in New York. Would he try to hire his girlfriends? Ted had hastily gone and commissioned a logo for the channel, balking at the $5,000 fee he was charged and, ultimately, forking over only $2,800 for the simple design he chose—which featured the letters C-N-N bold, in red, bisected by a white line, presumably signifying a cable. To Reese, the logo looked, depending on your point of view, like either the Canadian railroad logo or “snakes fucking.”
Wishing to employ a set of eyes and ears on the ground since it would be months before he himself could arrive in Atlanta full-time, Reese offered Mad Dog Kavanau a job. Sure, he was tabloid, and yes, he carried that pistol, but his news instincts, drive, and energy were unmatched. Kavanau refused. The newsman couldn’t fathom leaving his beloved New York again—much less for rinky-dink Atlanta and a speculative operation run by some misfit sailor.
“I think I’d rather be broke and miserable up here,” he said, “than employed and miserable down there.” As much as he loved news, Kavanau included himself in the camp of doubters who could not possibly imagine how an all-news television operation could work. To agree to be part of CNN, he said, “I’d have to be even crazier than I already am.”
Fortunately for Reese, his old boss, Burt Reinhardt, now an executive at Paramount in Los Angeles, had no such hesitations. He eagerly agreed to step into the role as his former employee’s factotum—especially after Sid Pike assured him that Atlanta was a “safe and welcoming place” for Jewish people.
Reese finally convinced Ted and channel 17 to join the ITNA, which achieved two goals: a guaranteed, steady flow of legitimate news for Bill Tush to run on his grown-up newscast and, equally important, the right for Reese and Ted to be in touch every day before Reese could migrate south for good. He counted the minutes.
Of crucial concern to CNN’s founding president was the design of the newsroom. This would set the tone for the entire channel. The space, as he imagined it, should be the opposite of polished and perfect. It had to look giant, buzzing, important—a nonstop hive of activity. The gathering of news and the people collecting it would be as much a part of the story as the news itself. “The idea was to demystify news,” he explained. The set had to allow viewers to peer behind the curtain the networks held up to shield the newsgathering process. They only took to the air with their ties perfectly knotted, presenting fully formed, slick stories, polished to a sheen. Reese’s roughhewn approach, he believed, would allow his audience to create a personal relationship with the network.
The basement locker rooms were cleared out and prepared for conversion into . . . (Jeff Jeffares)
Behold: The director in the control room, “the pit,” situated in the center of the action. The technical director calling up shots on the Grass Valley 1600 switcher, breezing from one story to another. The crew on the studio floor, stage directing and operating the cameras. A never-ending stream of video feeding in on the monitors.
The doors on the edit bays must be glass so the cameras, and thus, the viewers, could peer in at stories as they were formed. This, Reese believed, would create a sensation of excitement, especially on days when there wasn’t much of consequence to report.
At the same time, what CNN absolutely could in no way afford to resemble was some homespun, third-rate public-access cable facility.
Channel 17’s engineers argued that Reese’s open-newsroom plan was too much of a technological challenge—particularly because of the sound issues posed by such an active space. To them, this demanding man from New York personified the division between the old WTCG guard and the new, and why some felt this ridiculous CNN idea was going to destroy the company. Dozens of people bustling around a newsroom would surely drown out the most important voices: those of the anchors.
. . . a state-of-the-art television facility, which included a Grass Valley 1600 switcher (top; such an impressive bit of technology it made an appearance in the first Star Wars) and a mechanized turntable set that never quite worked (bottom). (Jeff Jeffares)
To convince Helfrich his idea coul
d work, Reese—paranoid that his ITNA brethren would take umbrage—would sneak into Atlanta for clandestine meetings conducted in the men’s room at the airport. Meanwhile, from a tiny desk in the station’s temporary work quarters—a seventy-year-old white house that another new hire described as “a place Sherman forgot to burn”—Helfrich worked from copies of the blueprints given him by the original architect, scrambling to draw up sketches for one part of the building while workers brought them to life blocks away.
Even before a strike of sheet-metal workers slowed progress on the studio transformation, building and wiring a newsroom proved to be the least of CNN’s problems—which now piled up each day into an overwhelming heap.
Ted had run off to sail again, this time to England, for one of the most challenging races in all of yachting: Fastnet, named for the lonely rock at the southern tip of Ireland that served as the midpoint of the competition. Back in 1971, on his boat American Eagle, Ted had performed respectably well, earning a fourth-place finish. Now, with his sixty-one-foot Tenacious, he was resolved to add that victory to his list of triumphs. It would not be easy: the 605-mile course ran through the English Channel from the seaport town of Cowes on the Isle of Wight to the rock and back down to Plymouth. The trip got off to an inauspicious start when Ted forgot his briefcase in a taxi en route to the airport and then wrangled his entire posse into the VIP lounge for cocktails, much to the consternation of the beleaguered flight attendant, who threatened to call airport police.
Once overseas, as they embarked on several shorter races, he subjected the crew, which included his namesake eldest son, now sixteen years old, to a week of shouting and berating.
As the day dawned on the main event, an ominous weather forecast loomed. Hurricane-force winds were predicted in the Irish Sea. When the storm blew in on their third day out on the water, the angry gales proved worse than anticipated—howling, as one crew member described it, with the force of a bomber.
Among the 303 yachts from around the world that had entered Fastnet, some were half the size of Ted’s. Many were far smaller, and ill-equipped. Having whipped his men into shape, Ted was by then confident in their ability and certain that his boat was prepared. He’d learned that he needed to be ready for anything. The first time he’d raced to Europe, in 1966, proved to be a sleepless twenty-day journey where he’d run out of drinking water and other supplies while dodging whales, icebergs, and waves. The unpredictability of the ocean and Mother Nature was exactly why he loved the sport.
The winds howled from the west, and the churning waters pierced like a sniper assault. Fighting against these winds, the state-of-the-art Tenacious suddenly became a surfboard, riding thirty-foot waves and narrowly escaping ones twice that size. The worst of the storm hit during the black of night, and Ted’s crew steered in the dark, entirely by feel. Night—when others dared to sleep—was typically prime time to master this kind of race. But this was no ordinary competition. The seasickness among the men was so fierce that even the well-stocked porno locker went untouched.
Frantic, crackling radio calls of “Mayday! Mayday!” painted an ominous picture on the seas. Rescue operations had begun, and many boats were missing. Ted knew the situation for his fellow sailors was dire, but he’d been so far out in front that his crew hadn’t themselves witnessed the carnage. The reality was far worse than the reports he heard. Later, he would say that what got him through was his fear of losing. It was more intense than his fear of dying.
News of the worst disaster in the history of yachting reached the studios of independent station CHAN-TV in Vancouver just before Reese arrived with Bunky Helfrich to survey the station’s news facilities. Reese had overcome his resistance to this friend of Ted’s and had actually grown to like him. The two men had traveled to Canada to scope out a newsroom they’d found that seemed to riff on Reese’s open-concept dream, featuring the studio control in the center of the newsroom and the action unfolding around it. Perhaps they could learn something to convince the engineers in Atlanta that the idea actually was technologically viable.
Rescuers in helicopters had not been able to find Ted or his boat. Other sailors had been plucked dead from the waters. The Tenacious crew was assumed to be among the fatalities.
An anxious station employee greeted his visitors with the terrible news. “Go home,” he said. “Your boss is dead.”
Having crewed with Ted in stormy waters, Helfrich didn’t believe it. Ted was no doubt screaming at his men, slapping them, riding them like mules, as he always did, yammering nonstop. His nervous fidgetiness escalated to new heights when he was racing. Once during a competition as he worked to “hike” the boat upwind, his foot began shaking so uncontrollably he fell out of the straps and nearly lost his footing. Most likely, Helfrich reasoned, the weather had knocked Ted out of radio contact, or, perhaps, he’d sequestered himself safely in the cabin below. Landlubber Reese could not be so sure. He was swept by panic. If Ted was gone, since it was on Ted’s name and personal fortune that CNN was being built, the news channel would evaporate without a trace before pumping out one frame of news. In an instant, his opportunity to change the news business would go up in smoke.
Since they’d bothered making the trip, they figured they might as well take a look around CHAN-TV’s facilities. And as they did, there on a studio monitor, as if a mirage, appeared Ted, drawling to a reporter in England about how much he liked rough weather. Tenacious had crossed the finish line, seventy-nine hours, fifty-two minutes, and twenty-two seconds after launch, and Ted was very much alive.
“That ain’t the ultimate storm,” Captain Ted said dismissively of the devastating force that had demolished nearly two-thirds of the competition. Human fatalities were still being tallied. Eventually the death toll would reach nineteen. Sniffed Ted, his trademark arrogance proof that he was very much alive: “It’s no use crying over the dead.”
In Colorado, Daniel Schorr was moments away from delivering a speech at a cable convention when he learned on the evening news that Ted was missing. Since he had signed on to the network in May, there hadn’t been much else to do but trundle from one speaking engagement to the next, opining about freedom of the press and, thus, the need for CNN. His initial dubiousness about Ted and his “frivolous” new venture had morphed into admiration for what he’d come to consider the man’s “enormously adventurous vision.” In his new boss, he’d begun to see shades of the legendary, dashing broadcasting pioneer William Paley, who’d parlayed his family’s cigar fortune and a handful of radio stations into a powerful idea: the CBS network. On several occasions now, Schorr had obsequiously compared the two men. Seated beside him on the late-night talk show Tomorrow with Tom Snyder on NBC, he even went so far as to praise Ted as a “cultured gentleman.”
But most of all he’d begun to believe in the mission: “The public is manipulated in a savage fight for ratings,” he’d say. “People feel control of their lives and their institutions slipping away under the impact of the media giant. Twenty-four-hour news will allow people to regain control of their lives.”
Stunned by the possibility that Ted was gone and the implications for his future, Schorr made his way to the hotel lobby, where he was greeted by young Turner executive Terry McGuirk, who shared the important update: Ted was, indeed, okay. This fact became a blinding glimpse of the abject unreliability of the networks for conveying the most up-to-the-minute information. Denver was two time zones behind New York. Of course! The newscast Schorr had watched had been taped hours earlier. By the time the show aired in Mountain Time, network news staffs in New York were busy ordering their second post-show cocktails. For the veteran newsman, this realization reinforced the need for an all-news station, as well as his enthusiasm for this new direction in his career.
To the audience he’d been invited to address, the situation offered the perfect proof of concept.
“If you’ve been watching TV and if you heard that Ted Turner is missing, let me tell you that he’s not missing
,” he told them. “The reason you might have thought he was still missing is because you were looking at old-fashioned television, which is delayed across the country. And that’s one thing CNN won’t do. Because it’ll be carried live everywhere.”
Because of a complex handicapping system, it hadn’t been immediately clear if Tenacious had indeed won. Surviving Fastnet should have been triumph enough. For a moment, a declaration of victory in Ted’s favor was rescinded. Then came the official, bittersweet, final award of first place. Despite the fact that lives had been lost, Ted complimented himself for his triumph. “We won because we had a good crew and a strong boat and a lot of experience, and the people who didn’t have those went to the big regatta in the sky. I’m not going to say I’m sorry I won. I’m not going to say it.”
“This,” he preened, “was the greatest sailing accomplishment in a long time.”
* * *
The next disaster to befall the nascent news channel involved not a missing boat but a wayward hunk of crucial technology.
It was sheer coincidence that the launch of RCA’s Satcom 3, the satellite that would soon carry CNN’s signal up to the heavens and down to the nation, had been set for early December, just as everyone who was anyone in the cable industry was gathering in Anaheim, California. It had been exactly one year since Ted had first floated the idea for the all-news channel at the Western Cable Show—a year since the industry had spurned him. Now, here he was returning triumphantly, with just five months till launch.
