by Brad Matsen
Over dinner while working on the National Geographic special, Wolper had discovered that he and Cousteau shared the philosophy that poets are closer to the truth than mathematicians or politicians.
In Monaco, Wolper enjoyed renewing his connection with Cousteau. Calypso was another story. He inspected the ship at the dock and pronounced it unfit for duty as a television star. “It looks like shit,” he told Cousteau. Calypso had to sparkle, and so did the divers. Black suits underwater were simply not photogenic. In his notebook, Wolper sketched out silver wet suits and yellow diving helmets with full face masks that looked like something an astronaut would wear in space. He drew streamlined plastic housings for the air tanks on the divers’ backs. Cousteau’s ship and his divers had to look every bit as out of this world as the NASA astronauts, Wolper said. They were the competition for airtime. Cousteau told Wolper that the cost of sprucing up Calypso, its divers, and its equipment would be enormous. More than $1 million. He couldn’t afford to front the money. The only way Cousteau could do it was to have a deal for at least a dozen episodes, to be filmed over three or four years.
Wolper went back to New York and pitched the three networks with his idea for a series on ocean exploration built around a charismatic explorer who had already mesmerized theater audiences and won two Oscars. NBC didn’t think a series about French sailors swimming underwater would hold their viewers’ attention for more than a single movie-length production. CBS liked the idea, but wouldn’t commit to even one season without seeing the first episode, despite having broadcast the Conshelf III National Geographic show that Wolper had produced. At ABC, head of programming Tom Moore said yes but only to four hours.
In the spring of 1966, Wolper still hadn’t nailed down a broadcast partner. He and Cousteau continued to negotiate a production deal on the telephone. Wolper persuaded Encyclopedia Britannica and DuPont chemicals to sponsor twelve episodes—with the condition that a network agree to air them—and offered Cousteau $300,000 per episode. In return, Wolper Productions would own the broadcast rights for English-speaking countries and South America; Cousteau would own the rights for shows for broadcast in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the rest of the world. Wolper, who by that time was convinced that Cousteau was one of the most pleasant but hard-nosed businessmen he had ever met, suggested they get together in New York as soon as possible. Cousteau was dazzlingly brilliant, Wolper had discovered, but what made him so adept in dealing with people was a kind of primitive instinct for finding a solution to whatever problem was at hand.
While Simone remained aboard Calypso for a scientific mission to measure the optical properties of seawater, Cousteau and Philippe flew to New York. During the six weeks since Rifkin and Wolper had proposed the deal of a lifetime, Cousteau and his younger son had become increasingly aware that the magnitude of the venture called for smooth collaboration between them. Cousteau’s older son, Jean-Michel, clearly did not have the stage presence of Philippe, and seemed quite happy managing logistics and equipment design ashore. Philippe, however, devoured life as a filmmaker, diver, and on-camera star in World Without Sun and the National Geographic special on Con-shelf III. He was a gifted cameraman and editor, and an expert diver. At the same time, he maintained the boyish curiosity about the undersea world and its creatures that had made his father so compelling. As much as Philippe flattered Cousteau by emulating him, father and son often clashed furiously in differences of opinion that startled people who witnessed them. Still, there was no doubt in Cousteau’s mind that Philippe would be his second in command of television production. He would eventually be his creative heir.
In New York, Philippe was not part of the actual negotiations with Wolper, but his father consulted with him daily on their progress. The rest of the time, Philippe found out what it was like to be a handsome underwater adventurer who had been on national television and spoke English with a French accent. It was spellbinding to American women. One of them, a fashion model from California named Janice Sullivan, was as irresistible to him as he was to her. They met at a party, after which they were together almost every night. Sometimes they ate dinner with Cousteau, who liked the young American woman but pointedly excluded her from the conversation by speaking only French.
The day before Cousteau and Philippe were to leave New York, they had lunch with Wolper at the St. Regis Hotel. ABC’s Tom Moore, who was sitting a few tables from them, came over to say hello. Moore was then president of the Explorers Club, an association founded in New York in 1904 whose members, over the years, had included Roald Amundsen, Robert Peary, Ernest Shackleton, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Yeager, John Glenn, and a few hundred other bona fide explorers, along with several thousand associates who paid to join chapters of the club scattered around the world. Cousteau was not a member, but his name had come up more than once at the meetings, during which nominations were proposed. Moore, despite his apparently firm reluctance to offer Cousteau and Wolper the deal they wanted to broadcast a dozen episodes on ABC, invited them to join him for dinner that night at the Explorers Club. They finished the evening with cognac and cigars in the second-floor library, surrounded by memorabilia from the most celebrated expeditions of the twentieth century. There was a framed flag that had circled the earth in space, a ragged page from Shackleton’s diary, Lucky Lindy’s flying gloves. Moore never made them an offer.
A month later, Wolper got a call from Moore, who desperately needed a speaker for the Explorers Club gala at the Waldorf Astoria, which would be held in two weeks. It’s a great party, Moore said, with a meal of exotic wild game and glamorous women in evening gowns. If Wolper talked Cousteau into delivering the after-dinner speech, Moore would try to persuade ABC to air twelve one-hour episodes of their underwater adventure series. It was after midnight in Monaco, but Wolper didn’t hesitate. Cousteau, who sounded like he was in the middle of his workday, listened for the minute it took Wolper to outline the offer, then said one word: Oui.
“If Tom Moore had not been stuck for an after-dinner speaker, my father probably wouldn’t have gotten the series,” Jean-Michel Cousteau remembered. “When he told us about it, he said that his life was a lot of little things that came together just right.”
It took Cousteau three months to disentangle himself and Calypso from scientific and industrial charters, including one in which his divers were helping to lay a pipeline through which an aluminium plant would discharge red-mud waste into deep water. Better, scientists reasoned, to deposit the mud in deep water, where it settled immediately as sediment, than to allow it to ruin the near-shore shallows.
In the fall of 1966, Cousteau put Calypso into dry dock in Marseille for a face-lift. During the fifteen years since its metamorphosis from Maltese ferryboat to all-purpose research vessel, the ship had been reincarnated many times, depending on the task at hand. Moviemaking had been a part of every mission, but rarely its sole purpose. Now, Cousteau and the shipyard crew transformed Calypso into the perfect underwater motion picture support ship as well as an attractive movie set capable of sailing around the world. They stripped the interior, converted the wet lab used for storing scientific samples into a darkroom, rebuilt the crew’s quarters into comfortable two-berth staterooms, and added a new cabin for the Cousteaus aft of the wheelhouse. They took out the engines, generators, steering gear, and hydraulic pumps, sent them to machine shops for overhaul, and rewired the electrical system to accept shore power of the several different voltages in foreign ports. They installed two new davits, each of which could lift a ton-and-a-half motor launch, and rebuilt the large crane on the fantail to handle the recompression chamber, La Sous-coupe, and the two new one-man subs—Sea Fleas—that had just been built by the Office of Undersea Technology. The Sea Fleas used the same water jet propulsion technology as the two-seat diving saucer, could dive to 1,000 feet, and were perfect for multiple camera shots at depths beyond those which could be reached by scuba divers. Taking out the seismic equipment for oil exploration, with its cable storage
bins, made stowage room for more camera equipment, diving gear, food, and water for extended voyages. Cousteau replaced the original bow observation chamber with a new one that had much more room, eight viewing ports, and a closed-circuit television camera to send a constant stream of images to a monitor on the bridge.
As soon as Calypso went back in the water at the end of December, Philippe left for Paris to marry Jan Sullivan in a small ceremony with only his brother, Jean-Michel, and his grandfather, Daniel, representing the family. As Philippe’s affair with Jan had deepened during the course of her several visits to France over the past nine months, Simone had made sure he knew that she and his father objected to making their arrangement permanent. A Cousteau should not marry an American, she bluntly told him, especially an American whose sole achievement consisted of wearing clothes for photographers and fashion designers. Philippe’s defiance of their wishes sent shudders through the family, Calypso’s crew, and the rest of the Cousteau empire. The tension deepened when Simone and Jacques Cousteau refused to attend the wedding, sending as their gift a certificate enrolling Jan in an intensive French language course. After the ceremony, Philippe flew to Los Angeles to set up an office for Cousteau’s production company, Les Requins Associés (Sharks Associated), near David Wolper Productions in Hollywood. Philippe then returned to Monaco to work on the first episode of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.
Cousteau asked his older son, Jean-Michel, and his wife, AnneMarie, to stay in Los Angeles to maintain a presence for the family while he, Simone, and Philippe were at sea. After his success at turning the institute in Monaco into a profitable oceanographic museum and aquarium, Cousteau believed such institutions had the potential not only to introduce people to the sea but to make a profit. Jean-Michel’s first assignment in California was to design an underwater exploration exhibit aboard the retired ocean liner Queen Mary, permanently moored at a dock in Long Beach. The promoters, who were turning the giant ship into a hotel, shopping mall, and shipping museum, were delighted to attach the Cousteau name to their enterprise, regardless of which Cousteau did the work.
At a press conference in Monaco on February 18, 1967, Cousteau told the world what he planned to do with the $4.2 million he was getting from ABC television. Aboard Calypso with Simone, Prince Rainier, and Princess Grace at his side, he began with a passionate statement about the deterioration of the oceans caused by overfishing and pollution, which he had witnessed during the relatively brief fifty-seven years of his own life.
“I am not optimistic that the destruction can be reversed, but I am embarking on a four-year expedition to film the oceans and their inhabitants so future generations can know them as I have known them. Calypso and its crew will become real residents of the sea,” Cousteau said. “On every part of the voyage, scientists from the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco and other institutions will supervise the accuracy of their discoveries.”
Television, Cousteau emphasized, was the very best medium for informing the people of the world about the condition of the ocean and inspiring them with its beauty. “On a single evening in the comfort of their homes, millions of people will witness what we witness,” Cousteau said in closing. The first episode would be set on the now familiar coral reefs of the Red Sea, presenting sharks as no one had ever seen them before.
At the farewell reception after the press conference, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace presented Simone with a rare St. Hubert dog. It was as big as a St. Bernard and looked like a bloodhound; though Cousteau doubted it would take to shipboard life, the dog was aboard when Calypso left Monte Carlo. Simone named it Zoom in honor of their sailing off on an adventure as great as riding a rocket into space.
With Calypso’s crew waving from the rails, the bright white ship sailed off under a canopy of confetti and balloons released by hundreds of people lining the cliffs surrounding the narrow harbor. After a brief appearance on the bow, Cousteau left Calypso in command of Captain Roger Maritano and gratefully retired to his cabin, where he remained for the better part of three days. Two weeks earlier, with preparations for departure reaching a fever pitch, the car in which Cousteau was riding had swerved off the road on one of his endless commutes between Marseille and Monaco. He had badly wrenched his back but refused to put off the sailing date, telling Simone that all he needed was the soothing warm waters of the tropical ocean.
The days when life aboard Calypso was like a party on a yacht were over. The ninety-minute Silent World and World Without Sun had taken Cousteau and his divers two years each to shoot and edit. Producing four finished hours of television in a single year was going to be an endurance test, with contractual delivery dates carrying the added weight of enormous penalties for failure. Cousteau became a taskmaster, transformed by the fact that his reputation as a filmmaker was on the line every day of his life at sea. The equipment had to work perfectly every time, and most of it was new to them because it had just been invented by the Office of Undersea Technology. In the same way that Cousteau could charm people into doing what he wanted them to do, his intensity brought anger and disgust down on anyone who failed to perform up to his expectations. The few divers remaining from the salad days of The Silent World and World Without Sun were immune from criticism, having proven themselves for a decade at sea with Cousteau. New men tiptoed around him, knowing that they could be fired in the next port if they didn’t please him. And everyone noticed that Cousteau was particularly hard on Philippe.
Cousteau sent Philippe, Falco, Laban, and a team of divers to the Red Sea ahead of Calypso aboard the cargo boat Espadon. Their mission was critical: to test the two Sea Fleas, reconditioned diving saucer, new diving suits, streamlined plastic tank fairings, full-face helmets equipped with lights and radios, Galeazzi decompression chamber, electric underwater scooters, inflatable outboard skiffs, lights, and cameras. When Calypso arrived, everything had to be working perfectly. Cousteau’s inventory of cameras, lights, tape recorders, cables, and the rest of the gear he needed to shoot high-quality motion pictures underwater sometimes made him long for the days when he, Dumas, and Tailliez had simply waddled into the sea with their Kinamo from the beach at Sanary-sur-Mer.
To film the first episode of his television series—“Sharks”—Cousteau and his crew had eighteen cameras. For topside work, they would use two 35 mm and two 16 mm Arriflex cameras, two 16 mm Eclairs, two dozen lenses, and three Perfectone synchronized sound recorders. Underwater, they would use four 35 mm and eight 16 mm Arriflexes in pressurized housings, and several Nikon still cameras in water-and pressure-proof housings. For lighting on the surface and in the water, they had sealed 1,000-, 750-, and 250-watt quartz flood-lamps that could be powered by rechargeable battery packs or the 110-volt electrical system aboard Calypso.
The first six months set the tone for what would become a six-year epic, during which Cousteau and the Calypso divers would shoot hundreds of thousands of feet of film that would be cut into thirty-six episodes of The Undersea World. Calypso was still a good-humored ship, but with twenty-six men, La Bergère, a 70-pound dog, and all the equipment aboard, its rhythms were transformed from those of a yacht packed with energetic friends to those of a military campaign. Under French maritime law, Calypso’s hired crew—Captain Maritano, two mates, a boatswain, a cook, and all the divers—could remain aboard for only six months before being replaced by a second complete crew. As nominal owners, Cousteau, Simone, and Philippe were exempt, but it meant that the informal camaraderie of the early years was replaced by a much more rigid set of routines that produced thousands of feet of film every month. The plan, therefore, was to return to Marseille for crew changes and to resupply every six months.
The crew quickly learned that opportunities to film whales, sharks, turtles, and other creatures materialized suddenly and were just as suddenly gone. Like fighter pilots sitting runway alert, a camera team of divers was always ready to splash at a moment’s notice unless the weather was too bad. Divers spent countless hours dismantling, insp
ecting, and reassembling their cameras, lights, scooters, and the rest of their gear, sometimes grumbling like soldiers forced by their officers to clean their weapons over and over.
After testing the new equipment on the familiar reefs of the Red Sea, Cousteau set a southeast course for the Maldive Islands off the tip of India, where he knew from many reports by fishermen that they would find swarms of sharks. Nearing the islands, 1,800 miles from the nearest shipyard, the starboard propeller shaft snapped at two in the morning. In the pitch-black water, with sharks gliding ominously in and out of the beams from their helmet lights, Falco and two other divers managed to lash the shaft to the hull so it wouldn’t damage the rudder or fall away completely. Cousteau had a choice to make. He could head back to Djibouti or Port Sudan for repairs, or take his chances with one engine. He thought he had enough footage of feeding frenzies and menacing blue sharks from earlier voyages and recent dives in the Red Sea, but he wanted shots of the magnificent reefs and the exotic whale, tiger, and hammerhead sharks he knew he would find off the tip of India. After a raucous consultation in the wheelhouse with Dumas, Philippe, Simone, and Falco, Cousteau decided to keep going.
