by Brad Matsen
The music stopped, the children froze. The cavern of the arena was dead silent until Cousteau and Paul Ehrlich rose clapping from their seats and the audience erupted in applause that went on for ten minutes. The dancers bowed, curtsied, and smiled. Finally, the children left the floor, gathering in a locker room that smelled of sweat and wintergreen liniment, accepting hugs and kisses from their parents, who swarmed backstage. Unannounced, Jacques Cousteau materialized among them. The friends and parents moved away from the children, who fell into a ragged line. Cousteau bent to them in turn to buss their cheeks, asking which whale each child represented in the dance. They recited: orca, humpback, sperm, bowhead, blue, gray, fin…By the time he reached the end of the line, the children were grinning and crying at the same time. Cousteau tossed his head and laughed out loud, making a show of wiping the tears from his own eyes. He looked like one of the little dancers in black costume himself, at the center of the cluster of children, their arms reaching up to him like the tentacles of sea anemones.
As the locker room fell silent, Cousteau rose to his full height and said, “Children, you have the most important job in the world. Growing up.”
The sponsor Cousteau found for the Odyssey series surprised him. Robert Anderson, the chairman of Atlantic Richfield Petroleum Company (ARCO), was a rarity among oil barons, a casual, seemingly absentminded man who no one would have guessed was the last of the great wildcatters. He was the son of a Chicago banker, attended the University of Chicago, where he read in its Great Books curriculum, and graduated thinking he would become a philosophy professor. His father specialized in making loans to petroleum companies, and after a summer working in the bank, Anderson was much more interested in oilmen with their tales of exploration and bonanzas in exotic climes than in the academics he met on campus. A year later, he was running a gasoline refinery in Mexico, beginning his climb to the top of an industry that had no upper limits. When Anderson’s path crossed Cousteau’s, he was working at ARCO’s headquarters in Los Angeles, leading the assault on the North Slope oil reserves in Alaska. He was the largest single landowner in the United States. Cousteau was surprised to learn that Anderson was also attending rarefied conferences on technology, the environment, governance and social change, and Western thought. Anderson had known about Cousteau since World Without Sun, when every major player in the oil business was trying to figure out how to drill wells at the bottom of the sea. When Cousteau broadcast to the world the blurry black-and-white television pictures of two of his Conshelf divers replacing a valve on a wellhead at 400 feet, Anderson was one of the men watching them.
For Cousteau, there was no conflict or irony in approaching an oil business billionaire for money to produce a television series. He believed it was the duty of those who profited from the extraction of the world’s resources to make sure that what they were doing to the earth did not destroy its ability to sustain life. Anderson agreed with Cousteau. Anderson also knew that in a world of soaring gasoline prices, long lines at filling stations, and year after year of record oil company profits, ARCO could use the good publicity. Attaching its name to that of an explorer and environmental crusader whose name appeared on lists of the most respected people in the world was good for business. He told Cousteau that he didn’t want to see another Oasis in Space, and Cousteau assured him that the new series would be much more like The Undersea World. Anderson wrote a check for $6 million to KCET for twelve one-hour Cousteau specials. The contract named Cousteau and Philippe as co-executive producers, and specifically excluded Robert Anderson and ARCO from any decisions about content.
Anderson’s check shored up the foundations of the Cousteau Society and its television production company. Cousteau turned to making sure that his always tenuous relationship with Philippe was intact. Jean-Michel continued to work on developing ocean exploration exhibits and was in demand as a speaker, but Cousteau desperately needed Philippe. With the money from ARCO and the KCET contract, Cousteau could send two separate teams to sea to produce the four finished hours of film he needed for each of the next three years. Philippe would lead one, Cousteau the other. Cousteau would fly in to both ships for his close-ups, but he was taking a giant step in the direction of an inevitable future in which his son would take his place.
At about the same time Cousteau was managing his negotiations with Robert Anderson and the whirlwind of the six Involvement Days, he was also starting a second family. Cousteau loved women. At sixty-seven he was handsome, funny, energetic, and tireless. Most irresistibly, he never concealed his passion for romance, whether for a long flirtation or a searing single night in a foreign port. He was a legend as a womanizer among his crew, who themselves enjoyed the sexual advantages of being handsome, adventurous men with charming accents. But Cousteau was famous.
During his Involvement Day swing through Houston, Texas, the local paper ran a story about Cousteau scuba diving with an unnamed woman. She had gotten into trouble in the water and had to be rescued by other divers because Cousteau was busy dealing with a bad earache. The news reports glossed over the identity of the woman diving with Cousteau, granting discretion to the male celebrity that was typical of the times.
“We are not absolutely sure,” said Jean-Michel Cousteau later, “but the woman who got in trouble diving in Houston was almost certainly a woman years younger than my father who became his mistress for the rest of his life. Their life together had already begun at that point, and we know that their children together were born soon after. He kept it secret from everyone.”
If JYC’s natural habitat during the forties, fifties, and sixties had been the undersea world, in the seventies it was the first-class cabin of jet airliners, where he most likely met a beautiful flight attendant named Francine Triplet. Born in the landlocked Limousin region of central France, she had gravitated toward working for an international airline because of her talent for foreign languages, and was enjoying a successful career in the air. After Houston, Francine Triplet disappeared completely from public view for the next fourteen years.
18
ODYSSEY
ROBERT ANDERSON WAS TRUE to his word about staying out of the creation of the Jacques Cousteau Odyssey series, but the first two episodes pushed his patience. “Cradle or Coffin?” was a tedious report of Calypso’s five-month voyage to measure pollution and the impact of industrialization around the Mediterranean, cosponsored by the Cousteau Society, the Oceanographic Museum, and the International Commission for the Scientific Exploration of the Mediterranean Sea. Cousteau was aboard his ship for only a few hours during the voyage, spending most of his time negotiating with governments for the rights to enter their territorial waters. His crew, with La Bergère in de facto command, took water samples from 126 anchorages off the coasts of Monaco, France, Spain, Gibraltar, Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania, Turkey, Cyprus, and Egypt. Laboratory testing of the samples for radioactive sediments, PCBs, and other toxins showed that the Mediterranean was not in grave danger but clearly a different sea from the one Cousteau knew when he was young. In Los Angeles, Cousteau and Philippe juxtaposed repetitive scenes of Calypso’s crew lowering drogues and sampling tubes into the sea; underwater shots of dingy, barren reefs and seafloor; and footage he had shot thirty years before in which the sea teems with life. “Cradle or Coffin?” was not the undersea adventure promised to Anderson and KCET. With Cousteau’s melancholic narration, it was the most graphic depiction of the deterioration of the ocean that ordinary people had ever seen on television.
In the next episode, “Time Bomb at Fifty Fathoms,” Cousteau put a much finer point on the human threat to the oceans of the world. On July 14, 1974, the 330-foot Yugoslavian freighter Cavtat had collided with the much larger Panamanian bulk carrier Lady Rita in the Strait of Otranto, between the southeastern tip of Italy and the Albanian coast. Lady Rita survived, but Cavtat and its cargo of nine hundred 55-gallon drums of tetramethyl lead went to the bottom, 300 feet below. Tetramethyl lead is a flammable,
colorless liquid with a slightly sweet odor that is used primarily as an additive in gasoline to prevent engine knocking. If TML, as it is known, is inhaled, swallowed, or absorbed through the skin, it attacks the central nervous and cardiovascular systems, causing nausea, convulsions, and death.
Philippe Cousteau (© BETTMANN/CORBIS)
The sinking Cavtat was moving at 20 miles an hour when it slammed into the seafloor, rupturing its hull in uncountable places and scattering broken drums of TML into a poisonous corona around the ship. Instantly, fish, crustaceans, and mollusks within a half mile of the wreck began to die; many rose to the surface in the enormous oil slick marking the site of the collision. Two years later, after constant pressure from coastal villages whose people were afraid to eat from the sea, and an article about it in Saturday Review by Jacques Cousteau, the Italian parliament agreed to pay $12 million for a salvage attempt.
“Time Bomb at Fifty Fathoms” begins with Cousteau, in a plaid lumberman’s jacket and his red knit diver’s cap, inspecting primitive diving chambers that had been used for deep salvage attempts before the Aqua-Lung. The scene shifts to the village of Otranto, where Cousteau, now more stylishly dressed in khakis and a blue chambray shirt, walks along a cobbled street among playing children. “Around us children wheel like birds,” Cousteau says, with a note of tenderness in his familiar voice. Cousteau stops in front of a half-dozen boys and asks if they remember the Cavtat. “Oh, yes,” they say. “It is the ship that sank with the poison.”
From there, a narrator with an accent similar but not identical to Cousteau’s takes over with an account of the collision of Cavtat and Lady Rita, over images of the crowded shipping channel between Italy and Albania. A third narrator and the writer of most of the series, Ted Strauss, then recites in plainspoken, sonorous English the history of the battle led by a local judge that resulted in the salvage attempt. The seven or eight hundred drums of TML that did not rupture when Cavtat hit the bottom are ticking bombs, he says. Soon, they will rust and break open, leaking deadly poison into the sea for a generation. The only hope is to dive to the wreck, pick up the drums of TML, and bring them to the surface.
The Italian government hired an international offshore exploration company for the job. In a month its salvage ship, heavy-lift crane, and supply boat were anchored over the wreck. Cousteau arrived aboard Calypso. In a scene shot during lunch around the familiar table in Calypso’s galley, the Italian judge credits Cousteau and his magazine article with turning the tide in his battle to save the Strait of Otranto, its people, fishing fleets, and tourist trade. Cousteau, dressed exactly as he had been in the shots of the children in the village, listens and nods, radiating pride and resolve. The narrator stresses that it is the judge and the people of the southeastern Italian coast who are really responsible for saving themselves and their piece of the ocean.
Over images of the wreck shot by Falco in La Souscoupe, with the Italian judge as a passenger, the narrator explains that death waits in orderly rows in the crumpled cargo hold. Apparently, he says, the toxins released during the initial impact have completely dissipated. The wreck is swarming with fish, barnacles, and other sea life. The scene cuts every thirty seconds or so to Calypso’s wheelhouse, where Cousteau barks advice into a handheld microphone to Falco about the strong currents on the bottom.
For the rest of the episode, Cousteau is an honored guest, arriving by Calypso’s helicopter for guided tours of the salvage ship and explanations of the difficult, dangerous work of diving to retrieve drums of poison lying 300 feet beneath the surface. Using techniques that Cousteau pioneered during the Conshelf experiments fifteen years earlier, divers live in a compression chamber for three weeks, allowing them to work at 300 feet without fear of nitrogen narcosis. They are transported from the chamber on the deck of the ship to the wreck of the Cavtat inside a steel diving bell, in which they return at the end of their workday. Most of the time they read, listen to music on headphones, play checkers, and eat meals delivered through an air lock. Like Cousteau’s Conshelf divers, the Cavtat divers are tested daily for signs of sickness or gas contamination.
On the bottom, captured on film by Falco from La Souscoupe, the divers, wearing loose white biohazard suits over their dry suits, glide like finned ghosts among the drums of poison amid the tangle of wrinkled steel in Cavtat’s cargo hold. They breathe through air hoses from compressors on the surface, and communicate with telephone sets built into their full-face masks. The tension of men surrounded by torn metal is magnified by a music track a lot like that from the recent hit movie Jaws.
The diver in the frame wipes a glove over one of the white drums, clearly marked with a skull and crossbones on the label. Rust stirs from the surface. But it is not rust. The drum is leaking. The diver swims quickly upward through his own bubbles to the open hatch of the diving bell, sheds the biohazard suit, and climbs into the bell. In the next scenes, two men on the surface are shown burning a load of used biohazard suits, while others on the ship carefully wash the divers’ dry suits and masks. On closed-circuit television, a doctor examines the diver who brushed off the contaminated surface of the drum, and analyzes his blood passed through the air lock. He is suffering from a mild case of TML poisoning from his brief contact with the ruptured drum. After a day off in bed, he is cleared to go back to work. One by one, he and the other divers lift the drums into a steel basket that can hold a dozen of them. The basket is hoisted to the ship on the surface, where a gang of men, also wearing biohazard suits and masks, loads them aboard. From there the TML is taken to shore and burned.
After the last load of drums came aboard in October 1977, Calypso’s crew shot the final scene of the celebration as soon as Cousteau returned from the last of the Involvement Days in Seattle. All but 3 percent of the poison had been taken from the sea. The episode was Cousteau’s greatest critical success in a decade, a powerful, entertaining statement of what he wanted the Cousteau Society to tell the world: the oceans are in trouble, but we humans are not helpless to save them.
Though the rest of the Odyssey series was nowhere near as tense or dramatic as “Time Bomb at Fifty Fathoms,” PBS ratings shot up when an episode aired. In “Diving for Roman Plunder,” the narration of Greek superstar Melina Mercouri saved Cousteau’s hyperbolic return to the proven plot of salvaging ancient artifacts, which he had used many times before. “Lost Relics of the Sea” was a hodgepodge of shipwrecks and their links to ancient sea battles, commerce, and storms, but it was mostly Calypso divers doing what millions of Americans expected them to do. The two-part “Calypso’s Search for Atlantis” was a breezy quest for the lost continent of Atlantis in the Aegean Sea north of Crete. In it, Cousteau hypothesized but didn’t really prove that the Greek island of Santorini was the former home of the lost civilization destroyed by a volcanic eruption thousands of years ago. But his failure didn’t really matter. A television show about Atlantis was perfect for the late 1970s, when songs about the lost continent were on the Billboard charts. “Calypso’s Search for Britannic” drew a huge audience. Britannic, which was almost identical to Titanic, was sunk by a German mine off Greece four years after the iceberg disaster claimed her famous sister. Until Cousteau found the wreck, its location had been veiled in wartime secrecy, because the Germans alleged that Britannic, sailing as a hospital ship, had really been carrying troops and munitions. The British wanted nothing to do with proving it one way or the other, and suspiciously mismarked the location on admiralty charts. Cousteau’s divers, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen to descend to the wreck at 400 feet, found a huge gash in the hull. Cousteau and his on-camera experts solved the mystery by theorizing that the hole came not from exploding munitions but from the ignition of coal dust in the ship’s bunkers.
For the two episodes they shot on the Nile River, Cousteau and Philippe left Calypso to showcase their latest acquisition, a surplus U.S. Navy PBY amphibious airplane. For Cousteau, adding the twin engine seaplane to his equipment inventory gave him much m
ore mobility and shortened production time because he could keep two or three camera crews on land and at sea all the time. Flying Calypso, tail number N101CS, also allowed him to share his own passion for flying with his son, who remained uncomfortable and irascible in the shadow of his father. The plane was also a peace offering to Philippe, whose love for flying far exceeded his attachments to diving and filmmaking. Philippe was already licensed to fly hot air balloons, helicopters, and single-engine light planes, and he easily made the transition to a multi-engine seaplane rating. A few years earlier, after a blowup with his father, he had come very close to leaving the family business altogether and becoming a commercial airline pilot.
In the acronym “PBY,” “PB” stands for Patrol Bomber and “Y” is the code for Consolidated Aircraft, the company that built the planes. Nicknamed the Catalina by the navy, the PBY could be armed with bombs, torpedoes, depth charges, and machine guns. From its first flight in 1935, it was in military service in twenty countries for fifty years. Flying Calypso was a PBY-6A, the final model in a production run of about 4,500 planes built between 1936 and 1945. Unlike earlier PBYs, the 6A was fully amphibious with retractable tricycle landing gear, so it could land on a runway or on the water. It had stabilizing floats on the wing tips that folded up in flight. The two main wheels tucked into the sides of the middle of the hull, the nose wheel into a compartment that was sealed for water landings.
