by Brad Matsen
Daniel and Elizabeth Cousteau’s first son, Pierre-Antoine, was born in Paris in December 1906. A week later, Daniel headed south for the winter aboard James Hyde’s yacht. Elizabeth returned to St.-André-de-Cubzac to show off the baby to her family, after which she joined her husband and traveled with Hyde’s entourage for four more years. Though the high life continued to appeal to the Cousteaus, the constant traveling and frequent separations took their toll on Elizabeth and Pierre. They had their own apartment in Paris but were rarely there. They returned home to the Gironde only for funerals and weddings. In the spring of 1910, Elizabeth was pregnant with her second child and the Cousteaus decided that she should return to St.-André to have the baby with the help of her family. On June 10, 1910, the boy they named Jacques-Yves arrived in an upper bedroom of the Duranthon house across a courtyard from the village church. Though the Cousteaus were only nominally Catholic, Daniel returned to St.-André for the baptism of their second son.
For three more years, the indulgences and adventures of James Hyde continued to determine the patterns of the Cousteau family. “My first conscious memory was of swaying in a hammock in a railroad coach as the train steamed through the night,” Cousteau later said. “It was all okay until the war.”
In September 1914, when Jacques-Yves was four years old, the German army reached the Marne on the outskirts of Paris. From there, the bloody western front extended along the river from Verdun to the English Channel. The French government retreated to Bordeaux, the lush life in Paris shriveled to one of subsistence, and James Hyde left Europe to lie low in America until things quieted down. He reluctantly let Daniel go in the winter of 1914, forcing the Cousteaus to survive for the next four years on Elizabeth’s family money. Jacques-Yves developed chronic enteritis and a cascade of stomach inflammations, which added to the family’s wartime woes and marked him as a sickly child. The plump, smiling infant in the earliest family photographs became a gaunt, earnest little boy with the guarded expression of a child who didn’t feel very well and wondered what was going to happen next.
The Cousteaus stayed in Paris until they had trouble finding enough to eat, and then went back to St.-André, where at least the family gardens could feed them. By the time Jacques was seven, he had become a quiet little boy with no interest in games or sports, uncomfortable with children his own age. He wasn’t defiant, but seemed indifferent to most of what happened around him. His parents were encouraged only by his apparent attraction to mechanical things. He could spend hours using tree branches to move roots and rocks around in the garden.
When the war ended in 1918, a new generation of rich and restless Americans migrated to Paris, where they could live well on inflated dollars against nearly worthless postwar French francs. Among them was a bon vivant named Eugene Higgins, the son of a carpet manufacturer who had inherited $50 million when his father died in 1890. Middle-aged in 1919, Higgins had never married but was seen with the most glittering women in New York and Europe. He spent his time and money perfecting his hunting, horseback riding, fishing, golfing, and boating, and throwing extravagant parties. At one of his galas in Paris, Higgins was introduced to Daniel Cousteau, who, thanks to his years with James Hyde, still circulated among well-off expatriates. After a cordial first conversation and a week of checking references, Higgins offered Daniel a job as his factotum. There was only one catch. Higgins owned the house in Paris, a brownstone on Fifth Avenue in New York, and an estate in the rolling hills of New Jersey across the Hudson. Daniel and his family would have to move to New York for part of each year when Higgins joined the social season in Manhattan.
In early 1920, the Cousteaus sailed for the United States aboard a French Line ship. Jacques had never been happier in his life than he was during the eight-day voyage. He explored every passageway and compartment aboard the liner and became a pet to stewards, engineers, and deck officers who were happy to show him around. Daniel and Elizabeth were stunned by how gregarious their timid son was on the ship, finally showing an interest in something other than tinkering quietly by himself. Previously, they had been genuinely worried that he was doomed to be a frail, unhealthy loner.
In New York, the Cousteaus settled into an apartment on West Ninety-fifth Street that would be their home for two years. Daniel traveled with Higgins, but Elizabeth stayed put, insisting that their sons needed something resembling a normal childhood to have any chance for success in life. Fourteen-year-old Pierre-Antoine, by then known as PAC, went to DeWitt High School. Ten-year-old Jacques, who was calling himself Jack because it sounded more American and, not incidentally, rhymed with PAC, went to Holy Name School. Both boys struggled at first with conversational English but were finally comfortable enough in the new language to appreciate that American schools were much more relaxed than the rigid academies they were used to in France. Jack continued to bond to his older brother as a safe haven in a sea of American boys who never completely accepted him because of his accent and his social reticence. PAC was Jack’s single friend, creating the enduring sense that only a member of the family could ever be fully trusted.
Eugene Higgins demanded that Daniel Cousteau compete well with him at tennis and golf, and shadow him among his residences, a yacht, and the resorts he favored as the seasons changed in Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Deauville. Those absences created a pattern of serial abandonment that forced Daniel’s sons to adjust to the strict but feminine nature of their mother. They lived with the unspoken fear that displeasing her might result in the unthinkable: abandonment by both parents. For Jack especially, the presence of a woman became as essential to survival as oxygen. Without her, he and PAC would have been alone in a foreign country. The thought terrified him.
Despite Daniel’s comings and goings, the Cousteau brothers and their mother found a comfortable routine in New York. PAC, who was stocky and muscular, thrived on playground games with the other boys, and his life began to ripen away from the apartment on Ninety-fifth Street. Jack was more gregarious than he had been in France, but he still conveyed the image of a frail child, and being around other boys was hard for him. He wasn’t good at hitting and throwing balls. He didn’t like games of chase that left him winded and always the first one tagged out. He hated boxing, which was one of the highlights of the gym class at school. Part of it was his still-fragile constitution. Part was that he just didn’t want to spend time on what did not interest him. As a student, he barely kept up. What Jack did like was building things. Stacks of blocks had led to wooden levers in the garden, which became wood-and-glue models of boats, planes, and machines. Most of the time, after a ceremonial presentation to PAC and his mother, Jack’s creations languished in his bedroom, neatly arranged on shelves he had built himself. During his second winter in New York, when he was eleven, he built a working scale model of a dock crane from a set of plans published in Popular Mechanics magazine. The crane was as tall as he was, and could be controlled by cranks and pulleys to lift, swivel, and move forward and backward on rolling cams he added to the design. The next time his father was in New York, Jack demonstrated the crane for him in their apartment living room. Later, Daniel described the crane to an engineer working on one of Higgins’s yachts, who told him that moving the crane with the rolling cams would be a genuine improvement in the real crane. If it wasn’t on the blueprints, Jack could probably apply for a patent. Daniel and Elizabeth didn’t push Jack to file a patent for the crane, but they were very relieved that he was finding a passion in building models that might translate into a productive career as an adult.
Jack still seemed shy, reluctant to assert himself with other children, and fearful of rejection, so his parents sent him to summer camp on a Vermont lake in hopes of improving his social life. It was a two-week endurance test of tightly scheduled days filled with crafts, forest lore, swimming, canoeing, and horseback riding. Jack handled most of it, but he hated the horses. On the first day, Jack’s horse threw him; rather than sympathizing with the frightened little boy, the ri
ding instructor, a German émigré named Boetz, scolded him and threw him back in the saddle. With Boetz and the other boys glaring at him as though he was a pathetic failure at an essential manly duty, Jack glared back, got off the horse, and refused to get back on. As punishment, Boetz ordered Jack out of the class and sent him to clear dead tree branches from the camp’s swimming pond, a chore no one else wanted to do because groping around underwater was as frightening as entering a haunted house. For Jack, submerging into the brown, silty lake was bliss. He opened his eyes underwater for the first time in his life, and even though he could see only a few inches in front of his face, he was relieved to be insulated from the world above with its horses, Boetz, and a pack of jeering boys. For the rest of his life, Cousteau would tell the story. He was not at all frightened as he methodically dove to grab the waterlogged limbs, surfaced, and swam them across the shallows to shore. The water soothed him and banished all fear. “I loved touching water,” Cousteau said. “Physically. Sensually. Water fascinated me.”
By 1923, when Cousteau was twelve years old, Paris had regained some of its elegance and vitality, at least for the upper class. Eugene Higgins packed up his mistress, the Cousteau family, and three other servants and moved back to France. Elizabeth dug in again and refused to travel with the entourage, preferring the placid routines of guiding her sons through their lycée years from their Paris apartment. Soon, however, PAC talked his father into allowing him to quit high school a year early, skip university, get his military service out of the way during peacetime, and go to work making money. Because the Cousteaus lived in the rarefied atmosphere of wealthy expatriates, politics were of little interest to them, even when billions of francs of war debt collapsed the French economy. Riotous collisions between the left and right dominated newspapers, with each side promoting its own vision of a hopeful future for the republic. Most people searched for solutions to the chaos of France by focusing on Stalin and his Communist experiment in the Soviet Union or on Mussolini and his fascists in Italy. Daniel, Elizabeth, and Jacques barely noticed any of it. PAC alone dove into the political fray like a man hungry for a fight, becoming an opinionated leftist while he performed his military service for eighteen months. Initially, he argued for reforms to benefit the working class, quick to point out that a leftist or a worker had no business in any army that might demand his life in defense of what, to him, was a corrupt, inhumane society.
When his brother left home, Jacques missed him terribly. He told everyone that he would now like to be known as JYC, pronounced Jeek, as Pierre-Antoine had become PAC. Without his brother, it became even harder for JYC to connect with the outside world. He had crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice, lived in New York City, and traveled Europe with his family, but venturing into the unknown world of other kids who had never been out of Paris was frightening to him. He was desperate to be liked, but had none of the tools for becoming popular. He still hated sports. He was a poor student. He had not deciphered the codes of small talk. Most of all, he had become a gangly boy with a large nose and a long face who knew that by no stretch of the imagination could he be considered attractive to girls. JYC sleepwalked through his days at school, kept his mother company when his father was away, and spent as much time as he could in the dependable haven of his bedroom workshop. Alone, he tinkered with his models and read about the flood of interesting machines, amusements, and technology that had inundated newspapers and magazines as the world exploded with new inventions during the Roaring Twenties.
In the summer of his fourteenth year, JYC came across an article about the Pathé brothers, who owned the patents for the original movie cameras that had been invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière. It was impossible for anyone living in Paris, even a reclusive teenager, to be unaware of the French dominance of the sensational new art of the cinema. The Lumière brothers’ film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (A Train Arrives at the Station) had launched the revolution in 1895, and in less than a decade the technology of moving pictures had spread around the world. JYC knew all about the Lumières, and also idolized Georges Méliès, who made the first science fiction film, Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), in 1902. When he saw it twenty years later, the silent classic that ended with the astounding image of a rocket ship stuck in the eye of the man in the moon enchanted JYC. He learned that Méliès was a stage magician before he was a filmmaker, and had invented cinema’s first special effect by accident. While he was shooting a man walking, his camera skipped a few frames. When he looked at the developed film, the man disappeared, then reappeared. The next day, Méliès stopped his camera on purpose as he shot a scene of a magician and a woman assistant. The magician waved his wand; the assistant disappeared. Méliès called his effect the stop trick and used it in his 1907 adaptation of Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), another film that spoke directly to JYC in his adolescent seclusion.
By 1924, the Pathé brothers had transformed their gramophone shop in Paris into a motion picture supply house cluttered with used equipment and workbenches from which innovation flowed constantly. After one visit to the shop and three months of saving part of the allowance his mother gave him each week, JYC bought a used Pathé Baby, a hand-cranked camera that exposed sixteen frames of 9 mm film through a 20 mm lens. Two turns of the handle produced one second of running time. JYC bought the camera mostly because he wanted to take it apart to see how it worked, and he spent hours dismantling and assembling it before shooting his first roll of film. The chemicals and techniques of film processing also fascinated him. With a metal tank and jars of developer, stop bath, and fixer he bought at Pathé Brothers, he turned a minute of panning around the street outside his house into a sequence on a strip of cellulose that, incredibly, reproduced motion. A month after buying the Pathé Baby, JYC shot his first full movie of a cousin’s wedding. He was nervous when he developed the film because all those people at the wedding had seen him with his camera. If he failed, they would all know it. When he uncoiled the last of the rolls from the developing tank and saw that it was as perfect as the other two, it was the most satisfying moment of his life to that point. With instructions from one of his cinema magazines, JYC cut and spliced his movie with special tape he brought at Pathé, then rolled it in a continuous strip onto a large reel. When the bride and groom returned from their honeymoon, he exhibited his incredible record of their wedding day with a hand-cranked projector in a room full of relatives, including his mother. It was three minutes of grainy images shot in a church and at the party following the ceremony. People waved, smiled, and did little dances, obviously delighted and impressed by the fourteen-year-old boy dipping and turning to record that moment in their lives. After the last images flickered through the projector’s gate to be replaced by the glare of the unshielded lightbulb, the little crowd burst into applause. JYC was overwhelmed by the reception his first movie received but more so by the astonishing privilege he had enjoyed at the wedding itself. He could go anywhere he wanted to go. Everyone wanted their pictures taken. With the camera, he was popular.
JYC’s films soon had plots, villains, and dramatic effects borrowed from the cinema masters of the times. He mounted his camera on a moving car to give the point of view of a passenger, as E. A. Dupont had done in his film of a trapeze artist in Varieties. Cousteau featured himself in front of the camera in costume and false mustache as a hero or villain, developing an ease with himself as the center of attention. In one of them, the camera tracks an open roadster coming to a stop. The young man driving looks exasperated and gets out to see what’s wrong, leaving a girl who was sitting beside him in the car. JYC enters from out of the frame, mugs at the camera, which is now in someone else’s hands, and jumps over the door into the car. He grins deviously in a close-up before a hand reaches into the car and, using Georges Méliès’s stop trick, yanks JYC back over the door. Another of Cousteau’s earliest films begins with the camera in the hands of someone other than hi
m, a scene in which JYC and a pretty girl are arguing with exaggerated gestures in a rowboat on a lake. They stand up, she pushes him, and he goes over the side into the water. After a sidelong glance at the camera, JYC sinks beneath the surface and the words “The End” appear. JYC taught himself how to shoot titles and credits on signboards listing J. Cousteau as producer, director, cameraman, and actor. He named his production company Société Zix.
Even with his camera and a troupe of players waiting for him when he finished school every day, JYC had no patience for being pent up in a classroom and very little interest in what his teachers were telling him about mathematics, literature, art, and culture. In the spring of 1928, his grades were so bad that Elizabeth took away his movie camera to punish him. A week later, JYC broke some windows in one of the stairwells at school. He was caught in the act but insisted that he was conducting a scientific experiment to determine if a weakly thrown stone makes a bigger hole than a strongly thrown stone. The headmaster suspended him for a week, and JYC’s parents had had enough of their rebellious, self-contained son.
After consulting with Daniel during one of her husband’s brief interludes at home, Elizabeth dispatched JYC to a boarding school in Alsace-Lorraine, 250 miles from Paris. Without his camera, and with none of the new friends he had made as a filmmaker, he somehow thrived. The school was full of unruly boys sent there for discipline, and the harsh treatment of their teachers and overseers created a camaraderie among them that inspired JYC. With the assumption that he was going to be criticized and punished no matter what he did, he was free to excel on his own terms.
After graduating at the top of his class in the spring of 1929, he returned to Paris for the summer but knew he couldn’t live at home for long. His prospects for making a living as a cinema director were dim, so he began thinking of making movies as a hobby. Instead, he chose the second of his childhood ambitions, to fly airplanes in the navy, and took the exams for admission to the French naval academy in Brittany. No one was more surprised than he was when he passed. Life at sea itself did not appeal to him, but he had vivid memories of his voyages to and from America and knew ships could connect him to the wonders of the world outside France. Four years later, after a globe-circling cruise aboard a training ship, he received his commission in the French navy. In January 1936, just before receiving his wings as a pilot, he drove his father’s sports car off a mountain road. Within hours of regaining consciousness in a hospital, Cousteau knew his career as an aviator was over.
