by Brad Matsen
“The captain was the key pioneer in nature filmmaking not just because he was among the first but because he recognized that productions had to be entertaining if they were to maintain the audience’s attention and loyalty,” said Christopher Palmer, the producer of the Audubon Society’s much more traditional television series on natural history. “Television gave him an audience beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.”
“One of the things that people forget about my father was that he was first and foremost a storyteller,” Jean-Michel Cousteau points out. “His ambition to tell stories was driven by curiosity. When he was a kid with his first movie camera the stories were about girls and himself. Later, about the ocean and its creatures because that’s what he was interested in.”
Cousteau’s audiences grew steadily through the next three episodes, “The Savage World of Jungle Corals,” “The Turtles of Europa,” and “Whales,” all of them shot during the first nine months of Calypso’s epic voyage. In the editing suite in Hollywood, David Wolper, Philippe, and JYC choreographed succeeding episodes with increasing confidence in the formula they had stumbled upon in the National Geographic special that aired in 1966. Cousteau’s charisma; his enviable bond to his similarly attractive son; exotic submarines and diving equipment; the members of Calypso’s crew, whose names also became household words; and the wonderful creatures of the sea were a magic blend unlike anything ever before seen on television.
Wolper sold his company to Metromedia after he finished producing the fourth episode in the fall of 1968, leaving Bud Rifkin and a squad of successor producers to carry on. The following year’s shows were even more popular than those of the inaugural season. “The Unexpected Voyage of Pepito and Cristobal” was a hilarious hour that added an unexpected dimension of sideshow humor to the series. “Sunken Treasure,” about Cousteau’s exploration of a Spanish galleon in the Caribbean; “The Legend of Lake Titicaca;” and “Whales of the Desert” left audiences hungry for more.
During the second half of Calypso’s four-year, 150,000-mile voyage that had begun in Monaco in February 1967, Cousteau’s crews shot two million feet of film, with which they produced twenty-eight more episodes of The Undersea World. After the first season, ABC extended its production deal with Cousteau and Metromedia for $500,000 per episode, with an escalation clause depending upon audience shares. The ratings settled into a dependable pattern of ten to twelve million viewers per episode, far outrunning any other natural history series. Cousteau’s formula never changed. He posed questions, met challenges in his quest to answer them, declared success even when his experiments failed, continued to capture animals to help him charm his audiences, and never failed to be the paternal presence that made learning about the sea and its creatures not only fun but important.
On July 20, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon, Calypso was off Unalaska Island in the Bering Sea, farther from France than she had ever been. From there, the voyage would be homeward bound. The ship’s log notes that Raymond Coll took one of Calypso’s Sea Fleas to 500 feet, becoming the deepest man on earth while two men were the highest up there on the moon. For Cousteau, who was not aboard Calypso but in Los Angeles that day, the men on the lunar surface were a footnote to the miraculous photographs of the whole earth that had been sent from space by the Apollo moon ships. “Now we can see for ourselves that the earth is a water planet,” Cousteau said. “The earth is the only known planet to be washed with this vital liquid so necessary for life. The earth photograph can drive a second lesson home to us; it can finally make us recognize that the inhabitants of the earth must depend upon and support each other.”
Two months after the moon landing, Cousteau held a press conference at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco to plead with the United States Congress to control the pollution along its coasts he had seen from Calypso. With the success of The Undersea World, every word he said about the ocean was being quoted in hundreds of news reports.
“The oceans are in danger of dying,” he said, speaking each word in English as though it were punctuated by a period.
People do not realize that all pollution ends up in the seas. Modern fishing techniques are scraping life from the floor of the sea. Eggs and larvae are disappearing. In the past, the sea renewed itself. It was a continuous cycle. But this cycle is being upset. Shrimps are being chased from their holes into nets by electric shocks. Lobsters are being sought in places where they formerly found shelter. Even coral is disappearing. Very strict action must be taken. Some scientists are sure that it is too late. I don’t think so.
The thirty-six episodes of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau that aired between 1968 and 1977 changed the way millions of people thought about the sea, but the voyage that created them had also transformed Cousteau. He still wanted to entertain his audiences. He loved the adventure of his life as an international celebrity. But now he was certain that his message about the fragile condition of the world’s oceans was far more important than a pleasant hour in front of a television set.
17
OASIS IN SPACE
COUSTEAU WAS STUNNED WHEN, in 1974, ABC didn’t pick up its option to broadcast The Undersea World beyond the spring of 1976. He had won Emmys every season and his audience still numbered in the millions for each episode. The network told him its programming philosophy had changed. The enormous success of after-dinner evenings of Happy Days, Starsky and Hutch, Laverne and Shirley, and the rest of the half-hour situation comedies had made ABC number one in the battle for ratings and advertising dollars. Its executives weren’t willing to preempt their hit shows to air documentaries about the ocean. The ratings for The Undersea World, they pointed out, had dropped steadily as the networks attracted younger people who were more interested in spending a mindless half hour with two amusing girlfriends in Milwaukee than in watching a parrot fish fight to control its territory on a coral reef.
When ABC canceled The Undersea World and cut off the money for future expeditions, Cousteau had plenty of footage on hand to deliver the final six episodes until the contract ended. After overhauling Calypso during most of 1972, he had sent his ship and film crews on a two-year voyage down the east coast of South America to the unexplored waters off the Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica. Calypso then headed back north into the endless archipelago off Tierra del Fuego, up the coast of Chile, Peru, and Ecuador, and through the Panama Canal for a full year’s exploration of the coasts, waterways, and islands of the Caribbean Sea. Cousteau had a helipad installed on the foredeck to shoot aerials and make it easier for him to get to Calypso for the brief scenes that gave the audience the impression he was always in charge.
Day to day, Cousteau was in constant motion. He had homes and offices in Monaco, Sanary-sur-Mer, Paris, and Los Angeles, from which he ran the Oceanographic Museum, U.S. Divers, his undersea technology workshop, an exhibit design firm, a lecture bureau, and his most recent creation, the Cousteau Society. In 1973 he had approached a Connecticut business consultant, Frederick Hyman, about incorporating the Cousteau Group, which would own and control all his enterprises. Hyman and his corporate connections evaluated Cousteau’s business plan and saw one critical flaw: Cousteau. He insisted on being in charge, but the advisers quickly figured out that he simply did not have the skill or temperament to run a multimillion-dollar corporation with several divisions. Cousteau reluctantly agreed with them.
Jacques Cousteau, sixty-five years old (© WILD FILM HISTORY)
Instead, Hyman suggested that Cousteau centralize under the umbrella of a nonprofit organization, which would limit his exposure to commercial risk while at the same time opening the way for accepting tax-free revenue and grants. They filed the corporate charter in Bridgeport, Connecticut, describing an organization whose mission was “the protection and improvement of life” and “the assumption of the role of a global representative of future generations.” Cousteau was its chairman, Fred Hyman was its president, and Jean-Michel and Philippe w
ere vice presidents. Cousteau organized an advisory board of scientists, friends, and fellow celebrities, including Papa Flash Harold Edgerton of MIT, biologist Andrew Benson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, political activist Dick Gregory, singer John Denver, and dozens of his other famous and influential fans.
When Jean-Michel learned that his father had named Fred Hyman president of the new Cousteau Society, he resigned. Hyman, Jean-Michel told his father, seemed like a good enough man, but he was an outsider who made sense only to the family as the business manager of a profit-making corporation. For an organization like the Cousteau Society, he was the wrong choice. He had no scientific background and no status in the environmental movement, and was part of the corporation only because a head hunter had found him when Cousteau was looking for a business manager. Cousteau was furious. He prized loyalty above all else, but as always, he let Jean-Michel know that he loved him and would always have something for him to do if he came back.
By the end of the Cousteau Society’s first year in 1974, 120,000 people had contributed an average of $20 each to become members. Many gave much more. Hundreds of people rewrote their wills to include bequests to the society or Cousteau himself. The popularity of The Undersea World was at its height, and every television hour was an unbeatable call for support. Cousteau made news constantly as he testified before Congress on a variety of hot topics, including energy, clear water, and clean air. He set up society offices in New York and Los Angeles. In Paris, he incorporated separately under French law as L’Équipe Cousteau. The staff of the society swelled to more than two hundred publicists, writers, policy analysts, artists, and clerical workers, who produced magazines, books, and brochures for a never-ending membership drive.
The Cousteau Society was a dramatic alteration of the power balance in the environmental movement that had taken hold in America and Europe in the early seventies. The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and dozens of other international, national, and local groups had created a landscape of advocacy in which they succeeded in fund-raising with single-issue campaigns such as the slaughter of baby seals for their fur, overfishing, nuclear energy, destructive mining practices, and ocean pollution. The Cousteau Society weighed in on most of those issues but concentrated on its overarching mission of convincing the people of the world that they are dependent upon one another for survival. In the society’s first press release, Cousteau wrote: “We are communicators, using words and pictures to educate living and future generations about our biological home. We are advisers, representing a kind of international State Department for the quality of life, trying to educate the world’s most powerful decision makers about the ecological ramifications of their decisions.”
In Cousteau’s mind, all of his exploration and television enterprises served that mission, so he brought them under the umbrella of the nonprofit society. Expenses were offset by tax-free revenue from fund-raising, television production, the undersea technology workshop, book royalties, and lecture fees. Cousteau wasn’t worried at all about his personal finances. His salary from the Oceanographic Museum and Aqua-Lung royalties provided him with more than enough, since an open expense account covered all his expenses for the society.
Without the backing of a major television network, Cousteau and Philippe began developing a new series for the Public Broadcasting System. PBS had been created by Congress in 1967 to counteract the overwhelming influence of the three commercial networks that were broadcasting over publicly owned airwaves. Funded by federal and local taxes, PBS was a loose network of independent stations, first producing programs and broadcasting in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and a few years later in dozens of cities around the country. With producer Andrew Solt, another of David Wolper’s protégés, Philippe went to KCET-TV, the PBS station in Los Angeles, with a proposal for six half-hour programs, each of which would illuminate a single threat to the overall health of the planet. By attracting a television audience with the name of Jacques Cousteau, Oasis in Space would force millions of Americans to look at the population explosion, the pollution of the oceans, hunger, the devastation of chemical waste, and the dangers of nuclear power plants. The series would connect the dots for viewers with roundtable discussions among nationally known experts, interspersed with documentary footage.
Once KCET agreed to host the series, Cousteau went looking for sponsors to pay for it. The budget for each of the six half hours shot on location around the world was about $70,000, for a total of $420,000. The national foundation that funded original PBS programming agreed to come up with $125,000. Cousteau then worked his way through a list of corporate sponsors, many of whom had happily paid for episodes of The Undersea World. At dozens of meetings with executives around America, Cousteau asked for money to make televisions programs that would expose truths about environmental disasters. We still love you and Calypso, they all told him after he outlined his six programs, but what you are talking about would be very bad for business. They make all corporations look like insensitive exploiters of a fragile planet. What’s more, they agreed, not many people are going to want to watch such a dismal television show.
Cousteau ended up drawing $295,000 from the society treasury to meet budget, then watched as the corporations that had abandoned him were proved right. The first episode, “What Price Progress?,” opened with shots of a Canadian pulp mill dumping mercury-contaminated effluent into nearby salmon streams and images of horribly deformed victims of mercury poisoning in Japan. Despite its grim departure from the cheery deck of Calypso, the first episode of Oasis in Space won Cousteau another Emmy. Philippe was named for producer of the best television documentary.
Ratings for the series from then on, however, plummeted. Cousteau was more convinced than ever that delivering the message that humanity had to stop fouling its own nest was his mission, but he realized that he would have to deliver that message more subtly to reach mass audiences. PBS was accustomed to the lowest ratings among the four national networks, but said it would have to see a lot more of Calypso and her divers or its relationship with the Cousteaus was over.
Cousteau was running out of television networks and sponsors. By the spring of 1977, membership in the society had swollen to 250,000 people, but expenses had skyrocketed. Cousteau had just closed a deal to buy a retired U.S. Navy flying boat, and his helicopter was much more expensive to fly and maintain than he had thought it would be. Calypso was out of commission after her vintage World War II engines had finally turned their last revolutions. He was traveling constantly, trying to raise money for a new television series he was calling The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey. He promised potential investors that each episode would be set aboard Calypso in the Mediterranean Sea, combining his proven formula for underwater adventure with his passion for protecting the health of the sea of his youth.
Cousteau was regarded as a national treasure in France, the recipient of every decoration his nation could give him, but he was most popular among the people of the United States. His television shows had been broadcast to audiences of millions in France, Germany, England, Japan, and a dozen other countries around the world, but only in America was the environmental movement shaking governments. Only in America did people seem willing to contribute millions of dollars to make that happen.
Using his network of society members, diving equipment stores, and fans around the United States, Cousteau organized environmental rallies called Involvement Days in sports arenas in six cities—Houston; Boston; Milwaukee; Anaheim, California; Lakeland, Florida; and Seattle. Every date was a sellout. Cousteau, Philippe, environmental luminaries including population theorist Paul R. Ehrlich and environmental theorist Amory Lovins, celebrities including actor Jack Lemmon and singers Don McLean and Malvina Reynolds, and a changing cast of national, state, and local politicians were irresistible during an era of gas lines and foul urban air. In each city, thousands of people joined the Cousteau Society, renewe
d their memberships, or simply wrote checks. Newspaper and television news coverage kept the campaign moving. At private receptions, Cousteau appealed to philanthropists for donations to continue the work of the society, which was doing nothing less than trying to save the world.
Cousteau was overwhelmed by the passionate hunger people had for forging a new relationship with the earth and its creatures. In Seattle, during the last Involvement Day, he and a crowd of fifteen thousand watched a group of elementary school students perform a primitive, powerful dance about the killing of whales. On the floor of the basketball arena, he watched the shadowy figures of about twenty children dressed in black move into position around what looked like a block of fabric. Two others stood outside the circle with a white sheet on a pole between them. When the kids settled, the rustling silence of the arena was broken by the distinctive racketa-racketa of a movie projector. The blurry black-and-white image of a ship’s bow appeared on the sheet, then a pod of spouting whales just ahead of the ship, then a harpoon gun mounted on the bow. Horrifically, the harpoon lance flew through the air trailing a rope and buried its shaft in one of the whales. After a minute, the projector ground to a halt, the two children holding the screen left the floor, and spotlights illuminated the others kneeling in a circle around a parachute that had been tie-dyed in shades of blue and green.
In turn, the children stood up and shouted the names of species of cetaceans—blue, sei, orca, humpback, gray, bottlenose dolphin, and others—their voices cracking with earnestness and stage fright. On their knees in the circle again, they shook the parachute, which rippled and gave the impression of water as soaring orchestral music blossomed from a bank of rock-and-roll concert speakers. For five minutes, the dancers rose and swam over the fabric on the floor, moving their arms in distinctly whalelike rhythms, and lifting their chins as though to breathe and spout. Their cavorting was idyllic, but then the music changed into a grating, urgent, car-chase allegro. The children began to move randomly as though confused. From the shadows on the sideline, a dancer rushed forward to the center of the floor, arms outstretched, hands together to form a point, trailing a length of rope. She struck another dancer with her hands, passed off the end of the rope, and withdrew. As the music intensified, other whale-children swam to comfort the harpooned animal. A minute later, the victim collapsed to the floor as the music fell into a mournful adagio. The other dancers gathered around their fallen comrade, lifted her over their heads on outstretched arms, settled her back on the floor, and wrapped her in the billowing fabric.
