by Brad Matsen
Starfish House was mainly a movie set and a test of endurance, but Deep Cabin, the two-man station at 82 feet, was a far riskier exploration of the limits of the human body. To counteract the buildup of nitrogen at 3.5 atmospheres and deeper dives to 400 feet, the Deep Cabin aquanauts breathed a mixture of helium and oxygen. After two abortive attempts by a dozen divers to anchor the one-room cylinder that would be their home, ten-year Calypso veteran Raymond Kientzy—called Canoe because he had once fallen out of one—and André Portelatine moved in. Within hours, it was apparent that they were in for a miserable week. The temperature, which all had assumed would be relatively comfortable at that depth, was over 90 degrees, worse even than that on the surface, where their support crews at least caught a hint of a breeze. Kientzy and Portelatine were prohibited from rising above the depth of Deep Cabin, so they were also denied the occasional visits to air-conditioned Starfish House, which were prize plums for camera crews and divers from the surface.
During the second week, Simone Cousteau dove to Starfish House to escape the brutal heat aboard Rosaldo and spent the afternoon helping Guilbert make dinner, after which she refused to return to the surface. She called up for clothes and toiletries and took one of the three visitor’s berths for the night. Back on the surface, after a careful ascent through recompression stages, La Bergère announced that the celebration of the twenty-sixth anniversary of her marriage to Captain Cousteau would be held at Starfish House on July 12.
Two days before the end of Conshelf II, the Cousteaus toasted each other with flat champagne, its gas bubbles remaining suspended in liquid under two atmospheres of pressure. A procession of divers, cameramen, and a pair of oil company geologists swam down from the surface to celebrate with them. Their younger son popped through the moonpool to wish them well. Philippe, twenty-two years old and finished with military service, had flown south to join the expedition, fitting smoothly into the mélange of skills and personalities aboard Calypso. Their older son, Jean-Michel, intent on a life on his own as an architect, had remained in Paris.
“Simone and I had passed many unusual wedding anniversaries, but this was the most imaginative and symbolic,” Cousteau wrote later. “Calypso’s festive good humor was carried to our house on the ocean floor.”
The party in Starfish House also celebrated the end of major photography for the documentary Cousteau had promised to Columbia Pictures. Louis Malle was gone, making movies on land that were already fixing his star in the firmament of the great French filmmakers. Pierre Goupil, who had been Malle’s assistant cameraman, had taken over as chief of Calypso’s film crew. The ingredients of World Without Sun were about the same as those for The Silent World. The plot was simple: Put men on the bottom of the ocean. Place obstacles in the way of their survival. Show them overcoming those obstacles. Bring them back safely. The contribution of a vast store of scientific knowledge about what happens to human beings under those conditions was the real payoff of the expedition, but the entertainment was in the details: La Souscoupe descending 1,000 feet into the abyss and returning like the family sedan to its bright yellow garage; men playing chess and listening to Mozart while 35 feet underwater; the sweating, obviously distressed occupants of Deep Cabin, who sounded like Donald Duck when they spoke because the helium they were breathing caused their vocal cords to vibrate faster than they do in ordinary air. The Calypso divers were again menfish in an alien world, confidently swimming among sharks, into and out of underwater buildings, and playing with fish that seemed to have become their pets. Two of them adopted a vicious-looking barracuda they named Jules, encouraging the fish to follow them around by tapping on their Aqua-Lung tanks. Guilbert, the cook, had conditioned a triggerfish to swim to the moonpool to receive food scraps when he tapped on a window. The reef itself was a character, blooming at night into spectacular displays of bioluminescence as its creatures ventured forth or revealed themselves under cover of darkness.
World Without Sun opened in theaters just before Christmas 1964. Audiences were huge, the film won Cousteau his second Oscar for best documentary, and critics, for the most part, applauded. A few skeptics, including Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, accused Cousteau of faking some of the most dramatic scenes in the movie. How, Crowther wondered in his review on December 23, could La Souscoupe have really entered a deep-sea cavern more than 1,000 feet down in the last scene of the movie? Does such a cavern exist? If it did, wouldn’t it be filled with noxious gas instead of the air that allowed Falco to open the hatch and look around? Obviously, Crowther pointed out, the camera had to have been set up outside in the cavern to film Falco opening the hatch. How did that happen? In another scene, Crowther said, the camera moves from inside Starfish House, through a window, and out into the darkness of the sea at night. “It is too bad that this obvious faking should finally excite one’s doubt and mar one’s complete enjoyment of this otherwise plausible film,” Crowther wrote.
Cousteau was livid. In a letter that took up three columns in the Times three weeks later, he wrote that the film never says the cavern is 1,000 feet down. In the dialogue between him and Falco, Cousteau pointed out that he says, “We’re going up” before the scene in the cave. As for the tracking shot out the window, Cousteau said, it was a matched interior and exterior sequence that had taken an entire day to get right. Crowther called Cousteau in Paris after he read the letter, and Cousteau admitted to him that the entrance to the cavern was really only a few fathoms beneath the surface and not airtight.
Crowther had the last word. “My original objection to the staging of this incident is not altered,” he wrote in the New York Times. “It still tends to deceive, and provoked some gnawing skepticism as to the validity of the rest of the film. This is too bad, because World Without Sun is so exciting it doesn’t need a tricky kicker at the end.”
Regardless of the objections of Crowther and others that World Without Sun depicted fantasy as well as fact and therefore should not be called a documentary, theater tickets sold steadily well into 1965. For Cousteau, the share of the gate was a windfall, but not enough to keep his expanding ocean enterprises running in the black. He had two hundred scientists, engineers, divers, administrators, and sailors on the payroll now. To run his Office of Undersea Technology, Calypso, and a fleet that had swelled to a dozen ships and launches, Cousteau had to come up with at least $2 million a year. His business philosophy placed no absolute value on money. His fiscal strategy was simply to go out and get more money when he started to run out.
With Conshelf I and II, Cousteau had demonstrated that men could live and work for weeks at a time at depths down to 100 feet. Now, the French petroleum engineers told him, show us how deep a diver can go to work on a mock-up wellhead. Offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, and off the coast of California was proving the existence of vast pools of oil beneath the seafloor. To fully exploit it, divers had to find a way to work at depths of 300 feet and more.
On September 17, 1965, Calypso towed a yellow-and-black 20-foot steel sphere from the dock at Monte Carlo. Inside, six men were already at 11 atmospheres after staged pressurization that took place at the dock. During the first two Conshelf expeditions, divers could reach the aquanauts in minutes if something went wrong. The deep sphere, however, would be moored 325 feet down off Cape Ferrat on the coast just east of Monaco. For twenty-seven days, the divers of Conshelf III would be as isolated from the world above as they would have been in space. André Laban was in command, with Oceanographic Museum physicist Jacques Roillet assigned to medically monitor the crew, the working divers Raymond Coll, Yves Omer, and Christian Bownia. Philippe Cousteau, who had just graduated from the French national film school, was the cameraman.
Before Calypso and the Conshelf sphere reached Cape Ferrat, a mistral blew up, forcing the ship and the sphere it was towing back to the harbor at Monte Carlo to wait out the storm. The men inside had to remain under pressure, so the scene at the dock turned into a media event, with the aquanau
ts mugging through the windows and reporters covering it like a space launch gone bad. One reporter asked Simone Cousteau if she was concerned about her son in the sphere.
“I have six sons in there,” La Bergère snapped at him. “And I am thinking about all of them.”
Inside, the sphere was divided in half horizontally. In the lower half were six berths, a toilet, and storage racks for scuba gear around a moonpool. Upstairs, the six men had a comfortable galley, kitchen, food pantry, and a communications station. They were linked to the surface by telephone, a freshwater tube, and an air hose supplying a mixture of 98 percent helium and 2 percent oxygen. No human beings had ever before breathed the rarefied, unnatural mixture of gas, but at 11 atmospheres any nitrogen at all would have killed them in minutes. As it had in the Deep Cabin of Conshelf II, the helium pitched their voices up several octaves, only this time the amount of helium was so great that conversation was all but impossible. Worse, the helium seemed to dull their senses. They couldn’t taste their food or smell aromas. The sea outside, rather than appearing beautiful, looked gray and sad in the eternal twilight at 400 feet. Still, they proved that divers were quite capable of tending undersea oil drilling and pumping equipment. In one sequence, two of them changed a 400-pound valve in forty-five minutes, while oil executives in Paris watched on closed-circuit television. After two days of careful decompression and the slow restoration of their gas mixture to surface air, none of them had any problems returning to the world above.
Cousteau hadn’t been able to convince Columbia Pictures that Conshelf III was worth a full-length documentary so soon after World Without Sun. Instead, he orchestrated a live broadcast of the aquanauts’ return on seventeen television stations in Europe. A week later, Cousteau flew to Washington, D.C., with thousands of feet of film he had shot of Conshelf III from La Souscoupe, eerie sequences of life inside the helium-filled sphere, and images of the abyss photographed by his son, Philippe. National Geographic executive producer Melvin Payne loved it and sold it to CBS as a one-hour special: The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, narrated by Orson Welles and edited by a hot young Los Angeles producer named David Wolper. It was scheduled for broadcast in April 1966.
The deal with CBS could not have come at a better time. Cousteau was subsisting on petroleum and oceanographic charters, money from lectures, royalties, and his share of the Aqua-Lung sales. He was desperate to find a way to push all of that aside and do nothing but make movies.
15
THE UNDERSEA WORLD OF DAVID WOLPER
IN THE SPRING OF 1966, David Wolper sat in his living room in Los Angeles watching Jacques Cousteau’s National Geographic special, which Wolper himself had produced, and had an epiphany that would change Cousteau’s life forever.
“Look at that,” Wolper said to his wife. “On the TV set, the fish look like they’re in a fishbowl. This is beautiful. I’m going to get a hold of that little Frenchie.”
That night, Wolper dreamed up the concept for what he thought could be years of television programs: Jacques Cousteau explores the entire world underwater. The next morning, he asked the vice president of his production company, Bud Rifkin, to fly to Monaco and find out if Cousteau was interested.
David Wolper was thirty years old when he produced his first television documentary in 1958. Born in New York City, he had migrated west to the film school at the University of Southern California. He became the business manager for the campus humor magazine Wampus because he thought it would be a good way to meet girls. Wolper was the only member of the staff who owned a camera, so he chose and photographed the Co-ed of the Month. He was also in charge of publicity for the USC variety show, directed by classmate Art Buchwald. To promote the show in 1948, Wolper crashed the Academy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium with a man in a gorilla suit wearing a sign around his neck that read: “If you think this is good, see ‘No Love Atoll,’” which was the name of the variety show that year.
Ten years later, Wolper ran into a friend in New York who was buying cartoons produced in the Soviet Union, dubbing them with English voices, and turning a profit by releasing them in the United States. The company that was selling the rights to the cartoons was also trying to sell an hour of black-and-white footage of the launch of Sputnik I and Laika, the dog the Russians had just sent into orbit aboard Sputnik II. The dog didn’t survive the trip, but it was the first living creature sent into space. Wolper had no particular interest in space travel or dogs, but he recognized that what the Russians were doing and the reaction of panicked Americans was a great story. He borrowed money from his father, bought the rights to the Soviet footage for $5,000, hired an unknown announcer named Mike Wallace to narrate, and wrote a story about German rocket scientists responsible for Sputnik.
David Wolper, creator of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Wolper showed his film to the advertising agency that represented Old Spice deodorant for men, which was the way television shows were bought for broadcast at the time. They liked it, but none of the three networks—CBS, NBC, or ABC—was interested. Wolper had pitched his film to them through their news departments, all of which said they would not broadcast anything unless they had total control of the material. Since Robert Flaherty had produced the first full-length documentary film, Nanook of the North, in 1922, news departments had shunned the documentary as a form that was inferior to real reporting. Flaherty and his successors were known to stage scenes, make up situations, and add music to enhance the drama of their films. So what? Wolper replied. A documentary is the creative interpretation of reality. It is not reality.
Wolper went back to Old Spice and asked if they would sponsor his documentary if he could get independent stations around the country to air it instead of the networks. They said yes. It would be cheaper, in the long run, than paying the premium for airtime on the networks. Wolper, who had been selling cartoons and music revues to independents during the decade since he left USC, showed his documentary to the New York and Los Angeles stations with the biggest audiences. They liked what they saw. With their recommendations, he had no trouble convincing a hundred more. The Race for Space, with music by Elmer Bernstein, drew rave reviews and was nominated for an Oscar as best documentary film of 1958. The New York Times, in a front page story, hailed Wolper not only as a brilliant producer but also as the man who created his own network to broadcast his movie on television.
“I devised my philosophy of filmmaking making The Race for Space, and I never changed it from that first show,” Wolper told the Times. “I want to entertain and inform, not just inform and not just entertain. I want to do both in the same piece. I saw a film in school once, and I came home and told my father. You know I saw this film in school, it was terrific. And my father said well you probably didn’t learn anything. I said no, Dad, I learned more today because it was terrific. I enjoyed it, I did learn a lot. He said how can you learn a lot just watching film? And when I did The Race for Space I wanted to get that entertainment.”
Before flying to Monaco to see Cousteau, Bud Rifkin, a veteran producer who had just sold his own company to join forces with Wolper, called Melvin Payne at National Geographic to ask for his impressions of the famous explorer. Payne told him that Cousteau was irresistibly charming, and immensely valuable to the world as a popularizer of the ocean and its creatures. He was a showman, not a scientist. The National Geographic Society had financed Cousteau’s expeditions for a decade and given him its Gold Medal. The only problem Rifkin and Wolper would have, Payne said, was keeping Cousteau on budget. The man had absolutely no sense of what things cost and was more cavalier about financial planning than any producer Payne had ever known. Somehow, Payne added, he always makes things come out right, but it’s very hard on people around him.
In Monaco, Simone Cousteau, who famously did not care for the company of most women, either liked Rifkin’s wife Tedde or acted as if she did for the sake of making a deal. The two of them swanned around the Riviera whi
le their husbands talked business. Rifkin told Cousteau that Wolper thought he could sell a television series based on the adventures of Calypso, its crew, and the ocean. The formula was simple. Each episode would pose a challenging question about the sea and its inhabitants. In an hour, Cousteau and his men would answer it. For instance, are sharks the vicious killers everybody thinks they are? Or how do the creatures of the coral reef depend upon one another for survival?
Cousteau and Rifkin toured Monte Carlo and the Oceanographic Museum, batting story ideas around while carefully avoiding the big question that was paramount in their minds: how much was each show going to cost? Rifkin suggested that Cousteau come up with ideas for a dozen films, fly to New York, and try to work out a deal with a network. Rifkin set the hook when he told Cousteau that if the show was a success, thirty-five or forty million people would see dolphins on a single evening.
A week later, Wolper flew to Monaco to talk to Cousteau himself. From working with him on the National Geographic special, Wolper had great admiration for Cousteau, believing him to be a brave man who believed passionately in what he was doing and who genuinely loved the oceans of the earth. He knew that Cousteau poured every penny he made back into Calypso, his museum, and his expeditions. There wasn’t a mercenary bone in his body. Wolper had no illusions about Cousteau. He knew he was a tough guy who was hard on everyone around him, including his own family, none of whom, including his wife, seemed completely comfortable in his company. Wolper, a perfectionist himself, identified with Cousteau’s insistence that things be done his way and done correctly the first time. They worked well together because they were equals committed to the same objective. Wolper also got along well with Cousteau because he seemed to have an air of mystery and the unexpected about him. Cousteau was gregarious and charming, but he kept his own counsel about his thoughts and desires. He was a man, Wolper believed, who though he appeared genuine in the moment, was capable of living a secret internal life.
