by Brad Matsen
With his studio in Paris, Cousteau was, not coincidentally, in the same city as Francine Triplet. Though their life together was a secret, they had two children by this time. Simone was always aboard Calypso, saddened beyond redemption by Philippe’s death, so Cousteau’s second family had become his home. His parents were dead. His son Philippe was dead, his wife estranged though cordial. Only Jean-Michel was part of his daily life.
Jean-Michel’s arrival at the Cousteau Society was not cause for celebration among the staff. He went through the books and discovered that he had inherited responsibility for a swollen, inefficient bureaucracy with dramatically declining revenue after the cancellation of the PBS contract. Even with its membership at almost three hundred thousand, the Cousteau Society had somehow fallen more than $5 million in debt. His father and Philippe had shared a similar philosophy about money: spend what you have; get more when you run out. To a methodical thinker like Jean-Michel, the society was facing a financial crisis that could force it into bankruptcy. Within months, he had trimmed 20 percent of the staff and shaved hundreds of thousands of dollars off the operating budgets of the several dozen separate enterprises under the wing of the society. While he attempted to bring order to the ledgers, he shipped millions of feet of movie film from Los Angeles to Paris, and moved expedition equipment from Marseille to Norfolk along with the society’s membership and publication offices, which had been in New York.
Jean-Michel was above all else a builder. He relished the idea of creating a grand headquarters for the Cousteau Society in Norfolk, envisioning offices, warehouses for supporting Calypso, and a museum celebrating his father’s adventures. The politicians and business communities of Norfolk were similarly enthusiastic. Several cities on the Atlantic coast had competed for the privilege of becoming Jacques Cousteau’s home port, and Norfolk outbid the others with an offer of $75,000 to cover moving expenses, free office space, and a free dock for Calypso. That much of the deal was done, but the far more ambitious redevelopment of the waterfront, for which Cousteau wanted an additional $5 million to build his Ocean Center and Museum, was still not settled.
After Jean-Michel and Cousteau consolidated in Norfolk and brought the society budget under control, they still faced a cash shortage. Calypso, back from Venezuela, was docked in her new home port through the spring of 1980. During the city’s annual harbor festival in April, thousands of visitors streamed aboard to tour the famous ship, some of them wondering why it had been at the dock all winter and not off on a fabulous new adventure.
The adventure, when it materialized a month later, was launched by a million-dollar grant from the Canadian Film Board to produce two hours on the St. Lawrence Waterway for broadcast on PBS in Canada and the United States. Cousteau arrived from Paris to lead the expedition from Norfolk harbor in early June. Calypso’s departure made network news along the eastern seaboard with film shot by a society camera crew of Cousteau, Jean-Michel, Albert Falco, and a new generation of Calypso divers waving from the rails. Under the customary canopy of green and white balloons, with all flags flying and an escort of whistling tugs and launches, Calypso sailed into the North Atlantic and turned north for Halifax and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Four hours later, Cousteau left his ship by helicopter to connect with a Concorde flight back to France.
Even with his mother to smooth the way aboard Calypso, Jean-Michel had trouble assuming command. Falco was the expedition leader, Alaine Traounouil was the captain in charge of running the ship, and everybody else aboard seemed to know more about what was happening and how to do it than Jean-Michel. The Canadian film crew that joined the underwater cameramen for the voyage were stunned when they witnessed the first day of shooting one of Cousteau’s flyins for his close-ups. The camaraderie of the crew during the scenes seemed forced for the sake of the cameras, and Cousteau’s fondness for his own celebrity was unmistakable. It was as though Hollywood had come aboard, and nothing about that day in Halifax resembled anything they had seen on television.
From Halifax, Calypso sailed east, stopping at Sable Island, 95 miles offshore, to film shipwrecks, and off the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, the lone remnants of the French colonization of North America. While circling Newfoundland they came across a baby humpback whale tangled in a fishing net with its mother circling nearby. Neither Cousteau nor Jean-Michel was aboard, but old hands Bernard Delemotte and Raymond Coll led a team of divers into the water to cut the little whale free. It took them a half hour longer than it should have because neither Delemotte nor Coll wanted to report the incident to Cousteau without film in the can. The scene was touching and ripe with tension. Delemotte stroked the young whale and wondered aloud if he could cut away the net without injuring the whale. Once free, the baby whale swam on the surface for a mile with Delemotte on its back holding on to the dorsal fin. Then the mother and child followed Calypso until nightfall in a poignant ending to the encounter that fit perfectly into Cousteau’s view of marine mammals and humans sharing the natural world.
After skirting the east and north coasts of Newfoundland, dipping into fjords and bays to explore and film bird colonies, shipwrecks, and marine life, Calypso entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the easternmost of the chain of waterways that connects the Atlantic to the Great Lakes at the center of the North American continent. Well into the winter of 1981, with rare visits from Cousteau, Calypso roamed the Great Lakes. In September, he arrived for a welcoming celebration in Detroit when a flotilla of four hundred boats escorted Calypso to the city on the American side of the border. That visit was bittersweet because just a week earlier, thirty-year-old diver Remy Galliano had died of an air embolism on a routine descent to a shipwreck in Lake Ontario. Cousteau came back to his ship again in early November after a bitter cold spell had crippled Calypso in an ice storm, filming scenes in which he chipped ice from the rails and rigging with the rest of the crew.
Jean-Michel spent much more time aboard Calypso than his father. He led an overland expedition to explore beaver dams; dives to several shipwrecks, including that of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior; and a snowmobile excursion up the glaciated face of a hydroelectric dam in Hudson Bay. He left the ship in Montreal in late November, while a shortened crew, including Simone, made the monthlong trip back through the St. Lawrence Waterway, down the coast of New England, and into Norfolk to repair ice damage to Calypso’s hull and engines.
The film of the voyage that Cousteau and his editors in Paris cut for broadcast in the fall of 1982 was more of an inventory of Calypso’s equipment and technology than the natural history of the St. Lawrence expected by the Film Board. The whales, beavers, birds, and shipwrecks were strung together without any real links at all except for endless shots of the helicopter, La Souscoupe, Land Rovers, Zodiacs, and a hovercraft performing for the cameras. The crew no longer seemed to be the lucky-and-we-know-it band of adventurers, but rather a military unit weary from too much work and no days off. Critics panned the two episodes of St. Lawrence—Stairway to the Sea when they aired. The audience ratings for the shows on the Canadian Broadcasting Company and the few PBS stations in the United States were among the lowest ever for a Cousteau production. It was as though, one critic said, the Cousteaus came to Canada to be congratulated on being the Cousteaus rather than to reveal what they found in a meaningful way. One Canadian on the camera crew said he thought Cousteau had been content to use his famous name to get the Film Board’s million dollars.
While Calypso was on the Venezuela and St. Lawrence expeditions, Cousteau spent much of his time ashore on a venture on which he and Philippe had been working since the oil shortages of the mid-1970s. If the world was running out of oil or if oil was going to become prohibitively expensive, he reasoned, why not return to wind power to propel ships? Cousteau decided that his replacement for the aging Calypso should be a test platform for an improved version of a rotor sail system pioneered in the 1920s but never perfected. The Magnus rotor, invented by German engineer Anton Flettner, could the
oretically propel a ship with a vertical wind-driven drum turning at a speed of 200 miles per hour. The rotation created a partial vacuum on the front side of the drum, sucking in air and moving the ship by using the same principles of lift as those of an airplane wing. The problem was that at 200 rotations per minute, the drum was as deadly as a giant meat slicer. Flettner had given up.
Cousteau approached aeronautics professor Lucien Malavard, who had helped design the Concorde, and asked him to lead a team in preparing a request for a grant from the French government to develop a practical rotor sail. In September 1980, with the panic of expensive, scarce oil lingering like a haze over international commerce, France again went into business with Cousteau. He and Malavard received a million-dollar grant to perfect the Turbosail. Cousteau leveraged the grant into backing from Pechiney, a French metals conglomerate, with assurances that the prototype Turbosail ship would be built of aluminum, as would the Turbosails themselves. After demonstrating the concept, Cousteau told them, he could retrofit existing freighters of the class from 3,000 to 80,000 tons with Turbosails, run them in tandem with standard diesels, and save 35 to 40 percent on fuel costs. Propulsion control systems had already advanced far enough to manage both forms of energy by computer. Pechiney liked the idea but wanted to own the patents. In exchange for a portion of the royalties payable to the Cousteau Society, Cousteau agreed.
A year later, in a wind tunnel near Toulouse, Malavard demonstrated a working Turbosail for Cousteau and Pechiney executives. It was a 44-foot-high hollow aluminum column with a parabolic leading edge and a semicircular trailing edge, aerodynamically similar to an airplane wing. It generated forward force by directing air through the cylinder and producing a drop in air pressure on one side and an increase on the other. Malavard and his engineers had also figured out a way to link the Turbosail and the main engines of a ship to maintain a constant speed regardless of wind.
Cousteau bought a 65-foot catamaran, renamed it Moulin à Vent (Windmill), and had Malavard install his nonrotating Turbosail on its foredeck. In October 1983, Moulin à Vent was ready to sail from Tangier after testing in the Mediterranean, during which it had reached speeds of up to 10 knots under Turbosail alone. Cousteau instructed the Cousteau Society staff to prepare a gala welcoming ceremony in New York for mid-November, specifically requesting fireboats and fireworks for his entrance.
With Cousteau, Jean-Michel, and a crew of five, including a cameraman and gaffer, Moulin à Vent sailed for America. Calypso—and Simone—sailed north from Norfolk to make the entrance into New York Harbor together. For ten days, the voyage across the Atlantic was unremarkable except for the boredom and cramped conditions aboard the little ship. Then, 400 miles southeast of Bermuda, they sailed into a gale. In 50-knot winds and 20-foot seas, the Turbosail began to tear loose from the deck. Cousteau shut down the rotor, reinforced the stays and guy wires, and diverted to Bermuda for repairs. A week later, a day out of New York again in rough seas, the Turbosail broke completely free of the deck and tumbled into the sea, barely missing the cabin. Cousteau canceled the welcoming ceremony and took his crippled windship to Norfolk, where he held an impromptu press conference on the dock.
“We have lost only the hardware,” he told reporters. “The brains who have conceived the systems are already at work. Give me a little time and we will do it again. This is not dream stuff. This is economic reality.” His next windship, he promised, would be twice as large as Moulin à Vent and have two Turbosails.
20
CAPTAIN OUTRAGEOUS
AS THE ME GENERATION status seekers of the 1980s drowned out the altruism and environmental awareness of the previous decade, Jacques Cousteau somehow remained at the top of all the lists of the most recognizable faces in the world. The waning popularity of his television shows did nothing to reduce the magnitude of his fame, which he used to advocate for population control, nuclear disarmament, and the protection of rivers and oceans. Financially, Cousteau was teetering on the brink of catastrophe yet keeping the throttles on most of his enterprises wide open. The bill for repairing Calypso after the ice damage from the St. Lawrence expedition came to more than $100,000. His windship, Moulin à Vent, was a derelict on the Norfolk waterfront. At Cousteau Society headquarters at 777 East Third Avenue in Manhattan, the very real possibility of bankruptcy soured the workdays. Cousteau and Jean-Michel had no choice but to call a meeting of the society advisory board to construct a vision of the future that might not include the production of films for television. PBS and the three networks had emphatically slammed their doors. The French government was running as fast as it could from the Turbosail project. Only a relative trickle of memberships, renewals, and donations was keeping the society afloat. Despite their dire financial situation, Cousteau and Jean-Michel enthusiastically introduced their plan for a five-year expedition to the Amazon, the South Pacific, and the rivers of Asia.
After a particularly bitter session during which an accountant pegged the Cousteau Society’s debt at $5.1 million, John Denver, who had been a loyal adviser since the beginning, pulled Jean-Michel away from the dismal group. Denver said he was working on his own music special on the new television network owned by Ted Turner, who had recently emerged as a celebrity in popular culture when he won the America’s Cup yacht race. Turner is a little bit different, Denver said. Kind of an odd duck, a bit of a rager, but a powerful man with some very interesting and enlightened ideas about the ocean. Denver told Jean-Michel that he’d be happy to arrange an introduction. Jean-Michel led Denver to an empty office and told him to call Turner right now.
John Denver, Jacques Cousteau, an unidentified woman, and Ted Turner on Calypso, celebrating Cousteau’s seventy-fifth birthday in Washington, D.C. (COURTESY ROGER NICHOLS)
Robert Edward Turner III was the son of an advertising man who had specialized in billboards to build a business worth more than $1 million by the time he committed suicide in 1963. Ted inherited Turner Outdoor Advertising after his father’s death. Twenty-five years old, he had been expelled from Brown University three years earlier for having a woman in his dorm room. Afterward, he spent most of his time racing sailboats out of a yacht club in Savannah, Georgia. Five years after Ted took over, Turner Outdoor controlled the billboard market in northern Georgia and southern South Carolina, owned a half-dozen radio stations, and was looking for a television station to buy. He heard that Channel 17 in Atlanta was losing $50,000 a month with less than 5 percent of the city’s television viewers watching its programs. Turner had plenty of cash and thought it was a bargain compared with the price of a network affiliate. Federal law now required that UHF frequencies be built into new television receivers, along with the thirteen familiar channels broadcasting in VHF. What difference did it make, Turner figured, if a channel’s number was 17 instead of 4, 5, or 7? Why did NBC, CBS, and ABC mean any more than the Turner Broadcasting System if he could transmit a signal into every home with a new television?
Turner bought more television stations around the South, but WTCG-17 was his masterpiece. In 1976, with some more of his cash, he gave the people of Georgia a compelling reason to tune into WTCG-17 when he bought the Atlanta Braves baseball team and the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. After that, if you wanted to watch local baseball or basketball you had to watch it on Turner’s channel. The same year, he got permission from the Federal Communications Commission to bounce his signal off a satellite and down to local companies that sold Channel 17 as part of a package of channels piped into homes through cables instead of over the airwaves. Cable television offered not only more channels but clearer pictures. Ted Turner’s Channel 17, renamed WTBS (W Turner Broadcasting System), became America’s first cable television superstation. His programming consisted of Braves and Hawks games, reruns of other sporting events, old movies, sitcom reruns, and cartoons, all of which he either owned outright or bought for next to nothing.
In a year and a half, WTBS was worth $100 million. Turner was being celebrated in Fortune, Time, and
the rest of the front rank of American media as the country’s most successful swashbuckling entrepreneur. He became an even more prominent international celebrity in 1977 when he bought a three-year-old aluminum 12-meter yacht that was supposed to be a sparring partner for two new boats competing to defend the America’s Cup. Turner’s boat, Courageous, had won under its original owners three years earlier, but the newer Enterprise and Independence were supposed to be much faster.
With Turner himself at the helm, Courageous beat the other American yachts in challenge races and took the best-of-seven series against Australia’s challenger Australia in four straight races off Newport, Rhode Island. In a sport awash in egos, Turner bested them all with braggadocio, taunting, cigar smoking, and drinking against the glitzy background of international yacht racing. The media, delighted as always by a colorful showman who made good on rash promises, dubbed him Captain Outrageous and the Mouth of the South.
After John Denver’s introduction, Turner and Cousteau sat down to talk in the summer of 1981. They liked each other immediately. Jean-Michel, who went to Atlanta with his father, reported to John Denver that their meeting was love at first sight. Both men were cultural icons who radiated confidence as if they had invented it. Instead of clashing, as two such similar men usually do, their pragmatism and mutual respect prevailed. The adventures of Jacques Cousteau, recent gas shortages, and the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island had inspired a quirky environmental awareness in Turner. He was a runaway capitalist and developer, but contributed millions of dollars and free television time to promote population control, solutions to world hunger, and safe, nonnuclear energy sources. He believed that a single man like Cousteau who could deliver important but at the same time entertaining messages to the world was more essential than a thousand scientists who made sense only to one another.
