Jacques Cousteau

by Brad Matsen

  One of Cousteau’s families was there: Simone; Jean-Michel, Anne-Marie, and their children, Fabien and Céline; Philippe’s widow, Janice, and their children, Alexandra and Philippe Pierre Jacques-Yves; and Falco, Coll, and Papa Flash. When Perry Miller leaned down to embrace Cousteau in his chair, she knew they were both thinking the same thing: Philippe. She had been Cousteau’s most energetic promoter and confidant at the beginning of his television career in America and knew how deeply connected he had been to his younger son. Cousteau seemed old for the first time.

  “A birthday is entirely artificial,” Cousteau said, typically banishing sentiment. “Nature doesn’t count days. Monkeys and mosquitoes don’t have birthdays.” He was looking forward to his next seventy-five years, but even if he did not live to enjoy that birthday he was content. The Cousteau Society would continue his work long after he was gone.

  Three months later, after every network and newspaper in the United States and Europe covered the birthday party at Mount Vernon, WTBS and CNN broadcast the hour-long Cousteau: The First Seventy-five Years. It drew the highest ratings ever for a Jacques Cousteau special on the superstation.

  The Amazon series began to air shortly after the birthday party. Turner was sure his instincts had not failed him when he had decided to back Cousteau four years earlier, so he launched a massive publicity campaign. In magazine ads and endless promotional spots on all his radio and television stations, he touted the Amazon expedition as the most ambitious in history, the greatest and most difficult ever undertaken by Jacques Cousteau, the expedition of the century. The publicity surrounding the party in Mount Vernon had helped, too. Audiences soared when the first of the shows aired, with thousands of new subscribers paying to join his cable network. Turner was happy about the new business, but he also believed that Americans were living in ignorance of some harsh ecological truths and he had an obligation to bring Cousteau into their living rooms.

  “If there is a mother of the environmental movement it was Rachel Carson,” Turner said. “If there is a father, it is Jacques Cousteau.”

  Though the television audiences for the series were nowhere near what Cousteau had once drawn, many critics still applauded.

  “One expects a Cousteau documentary to be beautifully photographed, despite the dangers and technical challenges of filming in primitive terrain,” wrote the television critic of the Hollywood Reporter. “Journey to a Thousand Rivers exceeds expectation. Almost every frame of this production is exquisite.”

  Reviews of Jean-Michel’s less traditional approach to making a Cousteau documentary were generally good, though some writers thought his focus on social issues was misplaced and overdone. People magazine said “Snowstorm in the Jungle,” narrated by Orson Welles, had “the tone of Reefer Madness and High School Confidential, becoming almost more camp than compelling. Jacques Cousteau’s comment in the film that ‘the Western world may decline if the war on cocaine is not won’ seemed a bit much.”

  When the shows on the Mississippi aired, scientists and environmentalists agreed that they were charming and entertaining but they didn’t address a single important issue about the health of the Mississippi or its prospects for the future.

  “Cousteau is to oceanography what cancan is to Swan Lake,” a French oceanographer told the Paris newspaper L’Express.

  “Jean-Michel seems like a nice man,” wrote another critic. “But he’ll never be his father.”

  “Mississippi—Reluctant Ally and Friendly Foe” won Cousteau his first Emmy in a decade.

  21

  REDISCOVERING THE WORLD

  My favorite ocean is the one I haven’t been to yet.

  Jacques Cousteau

  AFTER THE AMAZON, the Mississippi, and the seventy-fifth birthday shows on TBS, Cousteau went to Atlanta to ask Ted Turner to finance a new series. Though the audiences on the cable channel were nowhere near as large as those on ABC or even on PBS, Turner had proven himself to be a publicity genius who made the most of his relationship with the world’s most famous explorer. Cousteau, with Jean-Michel as his second, arrived early and waited in an empty conference room. A half hour later, Turner finally rushed in with an entourage of production executives, greeted the Cousteaus warmly, sat down at the head of the table, and closed his eyes. In a minute, he looked like he was asleep.

  Cousteau glanced uneasily at Jean-Michel, shrugged, and started talking. On a five-year expedition, Calypso and Alcyone would retrace the routes of the great European ocean explorers, Balboa, Columbus, Cortés, Ponce de Leon, Magellan, and Vespucci. Cousteau would send his ships first to the Caribbean, then separately through the Panama Canal and around Cape Horn into the Pacific, across to New Zealand and Australia, and up into the great rivers that flow from the belly of Asia. His mission would be to document the changes in the pristine islands and continents that had been caused by human beings since the days of the great explorers. There would be plenty of adventurous underwater footage, but documenting the human interaction with the earth’s rivers and oceans was the most important work they could do. What was runoff from farming doing to the Caribbean Sea? What was the waste from Australian cattle ranches doing to the Great Barrier Reef? What were the rivers of China, India, and Indochina carrying into the oceans? The list was endless. He called the series Jacques Cousteau’s Rediscovery of the World.

  The windship Alcyone (AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)

  “The Rediscovery series will have little to do with the behavior of animals,” Cousteau said. “It will have to do with the behavior of people with respect to the water system. We will take a fresh look at the planet man believes he already knows.”

  Turner looked like he was still sleeping.

  Cousteau went on, not sure what else to do. From the five-year voyages of Calypso and Alcyone, he would produce four finished hours of television each year beginning with the 1986 season. He would direct two of them, Jean-Michel would direct the other two. It was going to be expensive, Cousteau said, not wanting to mislead Turner. He had a second ship and Calypso was probably going to need new engines before challenging the Pacific. He wanted to give his divers and crewmen an updated image with new technologies in underwater equipment, electronics, and cameras, a lesson he had learned from David Wolper. They would be fools to think that a new generation of television viewers was going to respond to the same thing their parents had when they watched The Undersea World and the Odyssey series. Each episode would cost $1 million.

  For a long minute after Cousteau stopped talking, the room was silent. Then, as though startled, Turner leaned forward in his chair and said, “Let’s do it.”

  When they worked out the details, Turner agreed to pay Cousteau $750,000 per episode in 1986, escalating to $950,000 for each of the four hours delivered in 1991. He paid an advance of $3 million for the first year right away, with similar advances to come after he got the fourth show of each season. Cousteau had complete control over the content of his documentaries. Turner had the rights to broadcast each new episode during a prime evening hour, and as many times as he liked as a rerun. Each hour was going to cost $1 million to $1.2 million to produce, so even with Turner’s backing, the Cousteau Society had to raise an additional $250,000 per episode.

  Jean-Michel would begin to gradually replace his father as the star of the series, appearing more frequently aboard both ships and taking center stage in the narration. By the end of the five-year contract with Turner, Jean-Michel and his father wanted to be interchangeable in the minds of their audiences to ensure the future success of the Cousteau Society and its television production company. They were infinitely practical about the realities of Cousteau’s age and inevitable death and the costs of keeping their film crews at sea. Cousteau would spend most of his time raising money.

  Though Alcyone had proved the fuel-saving concept of the Turbo-sail, the royalties Cousteau expected it to generate never materialized. Oil was cheap again, so shipping companies were no longer interested in spending money to refit their f
reighters and tankers with wind power. Cousteau continued to believe that the Turbosail would become irresistible as soon as the price of oil climbed, as it was bound to. For the time being, he needed a new idea to help finance his television shows.

  As they prepared for the Rediscovery of the World expeditions, Cousteau and Jean-Michel launched a venture they hoped would provide a steady stream of cash for film production to take pressure off the society. After the success of the oceanographic exhibits in Monaco and aboard Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, Cousteau was convinced that people would come from hundreds of miles around to see the wonders of the deep in an oceanographic park similar to Disneyland. With Jean-Michel in charge of the project, the Cousteau Society loaned Parc Océanique Cousteau $1 million. It was enough to build the park, but it would have to break even or make a profit immediately to survive beyond its first year of life. Jean-Michel was optimistic about his chances for success because he believed the parc would become the main attraction of the renovated Les Halles district in a section of Paris that had been plagued by urban blight. The hope was that shiny stores, restaurants, and amusements would revitalize it. If the concept of introducing people to the wonders of the ocean in a downtown theme park worked, Cousteau ocean centers would follow in Los Angeles, Norfolk, Brazil, and Japan.

  As Flying Calypso had been Cousteau’s paternal gesture to Philippe, the Parc Océanique affirmed his love for Jean-Michel. Cousteau had known instinctively that Philippe needed to succeed in some way apart from the glare of his own charisma if he were to continue as a member of his circle of intimates, on whom the future of his work depended. It was the same with Jean-Michel. Always a builder and a student of architecture, he had hungered to eclipse his famous father in at least one endeavor. Cousteau, like everyone else, could see that Jean-Michel was always going to be a less-than-stellar replacement when he died. Jean-Michel made documentaries simply because he had to and because his skill as a natural organizer transferred effectively to film production. Cousteau believed the Parc Océanique had a chance to make money, but if it succeeded, he also would have done his full duty as a father.

  Under Jean-Michel’s direction, the exhibit designers who created the Pirate’s Cove exhibit at Disneyland began building Parc Océanique Cousteau using the most interactive, sensational technology ever developed for an amusement park. When it opened in the summer of 1988, visitors would plunge from a rocket in space into the ocean depths, where animals seen only from research submarines came to life in the strange light of the abyss. If people had questions, they could ask them of a life-size replica of Jacques Cousteau, which would answer them in the familiar voice from their television sets. They would tour the inside of a full-size blue whale, touch its beating heart and other organs, and live to tell about it. On a jungle gym covered with carpeted sharks, children would overcome their fear of the ocean’s most frightening creatures. In a theater with a giant 45-foot screen, audiences would experience the films of Jacques Cousteau as never before.

  At the end of August 1985, Calypso and Alcyone sailed from Norfolk to rediscover the world. Haiti was the first stop, chosen simply because Cousteau had never been there before. He found a country of six million people packed into a third of the tiny island of Hispaniola, also home to the Dominican Republic. More densely populated than India, Haiti was in the midst of a catastrophic environmental disaster, an example of what Cousteau feared would happen to the rest of the world if people did not wake from their slumber of complacence about the places where they live. He toured the island with his own handheld video camera, creating a sociological portrait of desperate people somehow living optimistically in the ruins of their fields, watersheds, and forests. Haitians suffered from raging epidemics of diseases caused by pollution and contamination of their resources. One in ten infants died at birth. Cousteau’s own crewmen fell ill from eating toxic fish. In his narration of the episode shot in Haiti, Cousteau celebrated the brave people of the crippled nation, “the spirit of the Haitians themselves, who, while facing a troubling future, endow the present with an inviolable human grace.” On the day before Calypso and Alcyone sailed away, Cousteau visited Haiti’s most inspiring shrine, a waterfall, where, according to legend, the Virgin Mary had appeared fifty years earlier. He joined pilgrims under the sacred waters, where, as one of his writers noted, “celebrity and celebrant were the same, as each was refreshed and renewed in a rite celebrating the source of life—water.” Cousteau promised to return to help Haitians revitalize their streams, bays, and shoreline with sea farms. His title for the Haiti episode was “Waters of Sorrow.”

  Both ships then called at Havana, where Fidel Castro received Cousteau like a visiting head of state, listening attentively as Cousteau lectured him about the desperate need for the end of human rights abuses and appealed for the release of Cuba’s political prisoners. In Cousteau’s honor and with no fanfare, Castro freed fifty prisoners shortly after Calypso and Alcyone sailed away. One of the prisoners, a former art professor named Lázaro Jordana, broke the news about Cousteau’s amnesty only after he had fled the country for a new life in Paris.

  “Cousteau saved my life, and my father’s life, and the lives of all of the fifty people released,” Jordana said. “Then he didn’t say anything about it. No publicity. He’s the kind of man who does things—doesn’t talk about them—just does things.”

  Three months later, Alcyone, under the command of her captain Bernard Deguy and with Jean-Michel aboard, sailed for Cape Horn while Calypso headed for a shipyard in Miami. Even after an overhaul three years earlier, her forty-five-year-old engines were shot. Their blocks, cylinders, and clattering bearings produced barely enough power to run at half speed. Cousteau didn’t want to risk beginning an extended cruise around the Pacific without replacing them. He wrote a letter to the members of the Cousteau Society explaining Calypso’s plight and asking for a special donation to pay for new engines. They cost about $160,000, including propellers, shafts, gearboxes, and spare parts. A month after he wrote the letter, checks totaling $260,000 had arrived at the society’s office in New York.

  In July 1986, Calypso was ready for the sea. After another gala sendoff, with what Cousteau called “the courage of new engines,” she transited the Panama Canal and struck out across the Pacific for New Zealand and Australia. Calypso’s arrivals in Auckland, Melbourne, Sydney, and other major and minor ports were causes for celebration. The following summer, Calypso headed north via Papua New Guinea for a rendezvous with Alcyone. While Calypso was in the Miami shipyard, Alcyone had rounded Cape Horn in calm weather and worked her way up the coasts of South and North America, filming targets of opportunity on the way to Alaska and into the Bering Strait between Russia and North America. Every port call along the way was a chance to show off the Turbosail, make newspaper headlines and television broadcasts, and keep Cousteau and his adventures alive for millions of people.

  The routine aboard both ships was a steady grind of production deadlines and the uncertainties of life at sea. For the twenty-six men and Simone aboard Calypso, and the eleven men aboard Alcyone, the voyages from one shooting site to the next were scrambles to repair equipment and figure out what might or might not fit into a particular television hour. Alcyone was still a very hard ride in any weather, and Calypso still rolled when the wind blew. They shot without scripts, capturing whatever was interesting, both on land and in the water. They shipped videotape back to New York or Paris and picked up dispatches from editors about the progress of a particular story line with requests for footage to fill holes.

  With a few exceptions, the crews were French, the cameramen mostly Parisians, the divers and seamen from Brittany and Marseille. When Cousteau or Jean-Michel were not aboard, Falco and La Bergère were in charge of Calypso. As had been the custom since Calypso’s first expedition to the Red Sea in 1951, everyone aboard each ship had more than one job except for the cook. Everyone stood wheel watches. At an underwater shooting location, diving took three hours of the da
y, preparation and repairs another four hours, leaving another seventeen hours for sleep and socializing. Getting along aboard small ships was crucial to success. If a man failed as a pleasant companion, he wasn’t asked to stay aboard for the next leg of the voyage. The decision was made by vote of the crew. Being asked to remain was an honor.

  Once his ships were in the Pacific, Cousteau spent most of his time traveling to raise money and give speeches, or in Paris supervising his editing studio and tending to his second family with Francine. In 1988, he resigned as the director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. Though he continued to speak on its behalf at conferences and celebrations, he spent very little time on the Riviera. He was also far less interested in the daily grind of television production on location, much preferring the comforts of home or a good hotel. Cousteau was in constant demand as a lecturer. He sometimes appeared in cities on three continents in a single month to deliver his message, which had evolved from sounding the alarm about the deterioration of oceans and rivers into appeals for world unity, population control, and the abolition of nuclear weapons and power plants.

  The key to balancing human needs with available energy resources, he said, was the abolition of waste and the development of solar power. “Look at the English,” Cousteau told an audience at an international energy conference. “Its wealth was coal, but coal is finished. The United States has oil, and its reserves are running down. We’re drawing down everything on the planet. One day only solar energy will be seen as truly inexhaustible and sun-drenched, semi-tropical, and tropical countries will be rich.”

  Cousteau spoke to the Association of Space Explorers, an elite club of astronauts and cosmonauts who had flown in space. “Space explorers and divers all seem to share the belief that disputes among nations are vestiges of a less enlightened time when humanity did not clearly understand that all people were dependent upon one another for survival,” he told them. “We must solve our conflicts once and for all so we can begin our new adventure of exploring the universe.”