by Brad Matsen
At 3 knots, Calypso limped across the Indian Ocean to the archipelago of more than a thousand coral islands. On the way, Philippe led crews in a pair of speeding Zodiac inflatable boats to film sperm whales by getting ahead of the swimming pod, stopping the engines, and keeping the cameras rolling as the giant mammals surged past them. In the calm water of the great lagoon at the center of the northern Maldives, Calypso divers spent two weeks baiting sharks with dead barracudas from the safety of steel cages while cameramen captured the action. They tagged some of the sharks for Dr. Eugenie Clark, who had joined Calypso in Djibouti as the scientist in residence to study their migratory patterns. Known among marine biologists as the Shark Lady, Clark had just accepted a job as a professor at the University of Maryland and conducted most of her research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida. She met Cousteau through the National Geographic Society and had jumped at the chance to accompany him to the Indian Ocean.
In early April, still running on one engine, Calypso sailed for Mombasa, Kenya, where there was a shipyard that could handle the replacement of its propeller shaft. Two weeks later, with a new shaft and repairs to the frozen reduction gear that had caused it to break, Cousteau headed for the Red Sea to rendezvous with Espadon. He was sure he had enough footage to assemble the first episode on sharks and the second on coral reefs, but more footage would give him some insurance. He also wanted to inspect the diving saucer garage and the rest of the site of Conshelf II to find out how it had held up after five years. Most of all, he wanted to bring Calypso closer to the Suez Canal. For a month he had been hearing radio reports that war between Israel and Egypt was imminent. If it began before he could get back into the Mediterranean and the Red Sea ports collapsed into wartime shortages, he would be faced with long supply lines and a voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to get home.
On June 5, as Israeli planes struck Egyptian airfields and the Middle East detonated into open warfare, Cousteau talked his way onto one of the last planes out of Djibouti. Philippe, Simone, Dumas, and Falco had agreed that it would be absurd to risk their entire venture by allowing the one man on whom everything depended to be stuck for who knew how long in a war zone. Calypso and Espadon sailed north for Suez, anchored side by side on the Egyptian side of the ship channel, and waited. They immediately went on short food and water rations, since the Egyptians, who boarded for an inspection when they arrived, prohibited resupply. Caught in the middle of a crossfire, with exploding bombs and sizzling bullets all around them, Philippe and Dumas persuaded the Egyptians to let them bring some of their exposed film, cameras, and other vital gear ashore for shipment to France. They shuttled as much as they could to the dock just before dawn on the morning of June 9, then watched from Calypso’s deck as Israeli F-4 Phantom jets bombed the waterfront, completely destroying the warehouse in which they had stowed the film and equipment. The next day, the warring nations declared a cease-fire. For another week and a half, Egyptian troops refused to allow Calypso’s crew to leave the ship. Finally, new crew members came aboard to replace the first crew, bringing with them the devastating news that the Egyptian air force had sunk dozens of tankers in the canal to deny passage to its enemies. No one could say how long it would take to clear a channel through the wreckage.
For two months, Calypso and its new crew stewed in the brutal desert heat. Simone reluctantly left her ship after Cousteau convinced her that she would be of greater value in Monaco, helping him come up with a new plan. Philippe went back to France, then to Los Angeles, where he and Jan, relieved to be away from his parents, put together a team of divers to film gray whales. Even though Calypso would eventually return to work, a second film crew on the Pacific seemed like a good idea. Cousteau and his son agreed that Philippe should be in Los Angeles when Wolper and his editors started cutting the first episode in early October for airing just after the new year. Though the tension between them was sometimes unbearable aboard ship, there was no question that they trusted each other’s judgment about the film they wanted to make on sharks. Before Philippe left Monaco, he and his father also agreed to coauthor a companion book, with the help of James Dugan, to be published when the show aired.
In early September, Cousteau flew into Djibouti with Simone and crates of equipment to replace what had been destroyed during the Six-Day War. Aboard Calypso, he told his crew that they had no choice but to sail back into the Indian Ocean and go to work. They had lost two months, but his intention to explore and film as much of the undersea world as he possibly could had not changed. On a map on the galley table, he showed them his plan for the next two years. Calypso would completely avoid the Middle East and its uncertainties, and make crew changes in foreign ports instead of in Marseille. Taking advantage of opportunities to film the unexpected, they would cruise down the east coast of Africa with stops off the Seychelles, Madagascar, and Europa Island, around the Cape of Good Hope, across the South Atlantic to Brazil, through the Caribbean to the southern tip of Florida, then to the Panama Canal. From there they would explore the west coast of South America as far south as Matarini, Peru, where they would ship their diving gear and two Sea Fleas by railroad to film underwater in Lake Titicaca. From Los Angeles, Jean-Michel was already making the arrangements for the expedition into the Andes. Back on the Pacific, they would visit the birthplace of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the Galápagos Islands, then explore the entire west coast of Central and North America all the way to the Bering Sea off Alaska. Canoe Kientzy, who had taken over from Falco as chief diver on the new crew, clapped once, then again and again, until the others joined in to beat a tattoo with their hands until they burst into cheering.
16
AN HONEST WITNESS
THE FIRST EPISODE OF The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau aired in January 1968. Calypso was at sea off East Africa with La Bergère aboard as always. Cousteau had joined the ship in Madagascar a month earlier to film his scenes swimming with giant turtles off Europa Island, then went back to New York for a promotional tour. In dozens of interviews, he explained himself to reporters. They knew he was a famous underwater explorer who had made award-winning movies, but wondered how he was going to entertain television audiences for a whole hour four times a year.
“My goals are many,” Cousteau said.
The expeditions of Calypso seek to expand knowledge that would help threatened species. From cages made from Plexiglas we will film life that is serene, savage, or beautiful. We will explore the graveyards of the sea for whatever treasures are hidden, knowledge or gold. Each time we dive, each time we enter the sea, we learn something new. It is the promise that lures us, and we have never been better equipped to see, to learn, to record. This voyage is the culmination of my life’s work to explore and unravel the mysteries of the sea.
Philippe Cousteau watched the premiere with his wife, Jan, in San Diego. Though the wounds of the wedding disaster continued to fester in Simone, Philippe and his father had forged a classic Cousteau truce. They left the past behind and went to work to take advantage of the greatest opportunity of their lives. For his part, Philippe compromised by enthusiastically playing second banana to his father on camera, and supervising the editing with Wolper in Los Angeles. Cousteau reciprocated by promising Philippe that after the first season was finished, he would let his son charter his own ship on the Pacific to independently film an episode on whales. Cousteau, of course, would appear in enough scenes in Philippe’s whale show from earlier footage aboard Calypso to ensure the continuity of the series.
Jacques and Philippe Cousteau during the filming of an episode of The Undersea World, 1973 (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
Philippe had spent two months in Los Angeles supervising the editing of about 100,000 feet of film down to 2,000 feet for the 56-minute episode of “Sharks.” He was credited as codirector with Jack Kaufman, who had worked as Wolper’s assistant on the National Geographic special two years earlier. The script, written by another of Wolper’s protégés, Richard Shoppelry, was a loosely c
onstructed series of transitions linking dramatic footage of sharks and shots of Calypso’s sincere, funny, handsome, brave divers doing the dangerous work of filming them underwater. Cousteau’s narration, in English with a heavy French accent, was larded with affection not only for the creatures of the sea but for his men.
“The sharks are splendid savages,” Cousteau declared in the narration. “A feeding frenzy on the carcass of a dolphin is as natural to them as me eating with knife and fork. Canoe Kientzy, knowing full well the danger to himself, carefully plants a tracking tag in precisely the right place behind the dorsal fin of a tiger shark.”
Tom Moore was out on a limb with The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. The real power at ABC and the other two networks was still held by the news departments. Moore was in charge of entertainment, which had been dominated for a decade by variety hours, quiz shows, and stand-up comedians. Though Moore was fascinated by Cousteau and his adventures, he had no idea how families watching television together after dinner were going to react to the first episode. ABC promoted “Sharks” as a “beautiful, terrifying study of the most ferocious creature in the ocean,” putting a news report—like spin on it, not realizing that it would be Cousteau and the Calypso divers who would win over the audience and bring them back for more.
“One crewman rode the back of a 60-ton whale shark,” wrote Time magazine in its review of the show. “Cousteau’s red-capped divers fearlessly ran off experiments right in the menacing midst of the sharks.” Saturday Review called the episode “unusual adventure-entertainment … [that] successfully combined the derring-do of divers amid dangers underwater with some meaningful marine experiment laboratory work.” Variety called Cousteau “a master of the entertaining message.” In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote, “The intimacy with the explorers, intelligently and humorously set up, is largely responsible for the vivid sense of participation one gets from the films. At the end, you, Captain Cousteau, his crew, and their dog are friends.”
A few critics, including Shark Lady Eugenie Clark, who had been aboard Calypso for some of the filming in the Indian Ocean, accused Cousteau of misrepresenting himself as a scientist and sacrificing accuracy in favor of theatrical impact.
“Cousteau’s films are misleading in a way because they portray him as a scientist,” Clark said. “I can’t think of any particular scientific contributions he’s made, because he just doesn’t have the time. He’s trapped. He needs to keep up that big image, to make it look like he’s moving forward. When you get up there, when you have all that power, sometimes you lose track of what you started out to do.”
“Our films have only one ambition,” Cousteau wrote in an article in the New York Times Magazine rebutting such criticism. “To show the truth about nature and give people the wish to know more. I do not stand as a scientist giving dry explanations. I am an honest witness.”
No matter what the critics said, Cousteau never forgot that storytelling was the foundation of all of his work. The overwhelming applause for The Silent World, World Without Sun, and the “Sharks” episode of the new television series told him he was right. Viewers wanted to see him and his crew challenged by a dramatic threat of some kind every ten or fifteen minutes or they would change the channel. They wanted layers of engagement with characters among his crew—the twinkling, rugged Falco, Philippe’s handsome power, Cousteau’s weathered face breaking into a smile in a shark cage with man-eaters swarming around him. They wanted the animals to be characters, too. Zoom, the ship’s dog, was too big and too much trouble, so Simone replaced him with a photogenic dachshund. The dog’s close-ups against plinking music signaling curiosity were cartoonlike counterpoints to the problems Cousteau and his men were having launching a Zodiac from Calypso’s aft deck. Cousteau devoted plenty of screen time to the creatures of the sea in their natural states, but the payoff for his audiences was their admission to the wonderful, exotic world of a bunch of French sailors with nothing to do but play in the ocean on their famous white ship.
Further ignoring the criticism that his documentaries were not really the whole truth, Cousteau orchestrated many scenes purely for effect, some of them patently absurd. On the coast of Africa, he dressed two of his men in ridiculous costumes as hippopotamuses and filmed the men in disguise trying to get closer to real hippos to film them. When he edited the footage, he played the scene as farce, and it was perfect. During the same encounter, he tried a different tack, mounting his camera on a barge, nudging it forward into the herd of hippos with an outboard Zodiac. Cousteau got the shot he really wanted when one of the terrified animals bolted for freedom and almost sank the barge on its way to open water. Almost everyone who sat down to watch a nature documentary had seen a hippopotamus, and though they were pleased to see some more, they were absolutely enchanted by the antics of Calypso’s crew to capture them on film, with Cousteau’s seductively French-accented narration explaining it all to them.
Often, the animals in Cousteau’s films were less than willing actors. He had had a change of heart after Kiki in Monaco and publicly opposed removing animals such as dolphins from their natural environment to display them as acrobats in marine parks. “It is useless to pretend that captivity in any form is less than cruel,” he told one reporter. “I detest the idea of training and conditioning animals and teaching them tricks as people do in zoos and circuses.” For Cousteau, the exception to that rule was capture in the name of science. If an experiment had an outcome that added to the world’s understanding of wild animals, the compromise was worth it.
After the premiere of The Undersea World, for instance, Cousteau flew back to Port Elizabeth, South Africa, to join Calypso for the voyage across the Atlantic to the Brazilian coast. He was in a hurry to leave because the mild weather of the Southern Hemisphere summer was ending and his advance parties in the Caribbean already had firm dates for shooting in a dozen locations. Calypso’s crew had been filming sea lions on the islands around the Cape of Good Hope when Cousteau arrived. They reported that they had not gotten the close-ups and interactive shots they needed for an interesting episode because the sea lions were too wary of the human interlopers in their territory. The divers had tried going down in shark cages with no luck, and sea lions had bitten several when they didn’t use the cages. Cousteau hated to waste the footage they already had of the enormous herds of the quarter-ton beasts swimming so gracefully and solved his problem by ordering his men to capture two sea lions to take with them on the voyage across the Atlantic.
The crew caught a pair of smaller sea lions and named them Pepito and Cristobal, in honor of what were to become their new home waters off the coast of a continent three thousand miles away that had been colonized by Spain and Portugal. The voyage was hell for the crew. The sea lions lived in a cage with a child’s plastic swimming pool on Calypso’s aft deck. They ate 30 pounds of fish every day, which had to be caught, and fouled their cage and pool with an equal amount of waste that made every trip aft on the ship a nauseating ordeal. Cousteau kept the cameras rolling, filming his men hand-feeding Pepito and Cristobal and teaching them to clap their flippers as though applauding their captors.
Sea lion training stopped aboard Calypso halfway across the Atlantic, when word reached the ship that Daniel Cousteau had died at his home in Paris. PAC’s children, Françoise and Jean-Pierre, had tended him during the last years of his life. Daniel had been ninety-three years old and ready to depart, but the news cast a pall over the rest of the voyage. For the crew, Daddy had been the ideal, doting grandfather whose diplomacy and tact had smoothed over crisis after crisis when his son had no time for details. For Cousteau and Simone, he was a patriarch who had united a family that had been almost destroyed when his sons had taken different sides in wartime France. Later, Cousteau would admit what he felt when his father died. “I did not regret my father’s death,” he said. “It was natural, as will be my own. I do not fear it.”
Calypso reached Natal, Brazil, took on supplies, and headed
for Puerto Rico. At each anchorage divers filmed the sea lions underwater, controlling them with harnesses to get them used to the cameras. Eventually, they believed, they would tame them enough to let them swim free and return to the ship because they wanted to. Cousteau built his narration for the sea lion episode around the hypothesis and conclusion in the same way a scientist frames an experiment.
“Would the sea lions follow our divers in the depths of the sea the way that dogs follow their masters for a walk through the woods?” Cousteau intoned over images of Pepito and Cristobal looking confused but cuddly in their cage on Calypso. “Will we be able to mount cameras on the back of one of these creatures and direct it to enter areas too small or dangerous for my divers? Can we establish friendship with these animals?” Pepito almost eviscerated one of Cousteau’s divers and was put back in his cage except when on a harness. Cristobal fled and was recaptured when he surfaced next to a fisherman’s boat to beg for food. Hand-fed in captivity, he had become unable to capture food in the wild.
Cousteau waxed philosophical. “Cristobal’s need for freedom was something that he shared with us.” He then declared success. “Two marine mammals were our willing companions in the sea. It would be useless to continue our experiment. We had already proved what we set out to prove: that marine mammals are almost as capable of attachment to humans as land animals.”
“The Unexpected Voyage of Pepito and Cristobal,” the fifth show in the series, drew the highest audience rating since the first episode of The Undersea World. Tom Moore breathed easier. He still had a hit.
The critics who accused Cousteau of showmanship at the expense of real science stung him because he knew they would hound him as long as he was telling adventure stories to attract his audience. Most scientists, however, recognized that their own passions for the natural world had found a powerful voice at the same time that television arrived to carry them to millions of people. It was a combination that could change the world.
