by Brad Matsen
Later, Cousteau proposed a way to remove the threat of nuclear war that he devised with futurist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Nations facing one another in a nuclear standoff, such as the United States and the Soviet Union, would simply agree to exchange all their children for at least a year. “Imagine a world where all the children from seven to eight, for example, would have to spend a year on the other side of the fence,” Cousteau said. “From an educational standpoint it would be a great opening of the mind. It is because of the hope that I have in the future of mankind that I want to join forces and forge a better world for future generations.”
From New York, Norfolk, and Paris, Jean-Michel orchestrated the production of four hours of television a year for five years, rarely spending more than two or three days in one place. His father spent perhaps a weekend a month aboard one of the ships, usually arriving late, disturbing the routine, walking through his close-ups, and leaving. Jean-Michel told his camera crews to use back shots and doubles for Cousteau if they absolutely had to have him in the frame and he wasn’t on location. Otherwise, he edited in sequences from other locations when his father had been aboard or on the scene of a similar shot on land. Because the demand for convincing doubles was high, the job of a crewman who from behind looked like Cousteau in a red knit watch cap was among the most secure on both ships.
When Jean-Michel wasn’t with his film crews on the Pacific, he was in Paris coaxing the Parc Océanique to life. Six months after it opened, however, it was obvious that the venture would fail. L’Équipe Cousteau and the promoters of the Forum des Halles development launched it with a brief publicity campaign. Newspapers and television stations reported on the wonderful new way to learn about the ocean without an aquarium or any live animals at all. But after the grand opening, the crowds fell to a trickle. Some days only a few dozen visitors bought tickets. The critical mistake, the Cousteaus quickly figured out, was to have built the Parc Océanique in an underground mall that was part of a massive downtown development project. Not many people, it turned out, wanted to tour the ocean at a subterranean amusement park with no live animals. By the autumn of 1990, with the initial capital from the Cousteau Society running out and no chance of other investors, Jean-Michel and his father began an orderly retreat into bankruptcy. Parc Océanique was a separately incorporated venture, so the Cousteau Society could lose only its initial investment with the default on the million-dollar loan. For reasons Jean-Michel could not fathom at the time, his father’s generosity in encouraging him to build the Parc Océanique turned bitter, as Cousteau allowed the failure to rest squarely on his son’s shoulders.
With two ships, crews, and camera teams at sea all the time, Cousteau was barely paying the bills. There was no chance that the Rediscovery series was ever going to be worth any more than the society was already getting. Turner had been right about cable television revolutionizing the industry, but the unintended consequence of offering viewers hundreds of channels twenty-four hours a day was a watering down of audiences for all but the most sensational sporting events and other unique offerings. Jacques Cousteau’s Rediscovery of the World had a built-in following of society members who ritualistically tuned in once a quarter to see what their money was buying. Entire cable channels were dedicated to airing natural history and sociological documentaries, which competed with the adventures of the Calypso and Alcyone in the Pacific. Turner was known for unsentimental financial decisions, so even his closest advisers and executives were puzzled when he extended Cousteau’s contract for three more years, until 1992. Then, as though to contradict himself, he downgraded the importance of the Cousteau series by placing a junior producer in charge. Cousteau was furious, at first refusing to even acknowledge the presence of the young producer, Tom Beers, at meetings. Beers quickly saw that Cousteau was not at all involved in the day-to-day details of production and that Jean-Michel, with whom he got along well, was really in charge, so he waited out the conflict and survived.
Cousteau was also less than fully engaged in the life and camaraderie of Calypso and its crew, which had sustained him for four decades, withdrawing most of the time to his apartment in Paris. He continued to make public appearances, accepting awards and honorary degrees, speaking on behalf of the society, and attending conferences, but he saw few people outside his immediate families. Dumas was dying. Tailliez was rarely in touch from his villa near Toulon, where he presided over the memory of Les Mousquemers and the beginnings of scuba diving. Laban, who had pulled away from Cousteau after the death of Philippe, spent most of his time painting at home on the Mediterranean coast. Cousteau knew thousands of people, millions claimed to know him, but intimate moments of friendship did not exist in the glare of celebrity, except in his secret life with his mistress.
Cousteau and Simone had led distinctly separate lives since Philippe died. They were friendly during their encounters aboard Calypso, at family gatherings in Paris or Monaco, or when they were together at award ceremonies or formal occasions. Otherwise, Cousteau’s life had flowed into that of Francine and their children. Simone rarely left Calypso. In early 1990, she went ashore to see a doctor for a checkup, found out that she had an aggressive cancer, and went back to her ship to die.
On December 3, 1990, Jean-Michel flew into Bangkok to rendezvous with Calypso and called his office in Paris from an airport pay phone. The day was already tinged with melancholy because the Mekong River expedition was going to be the last for Calypso. After fifty years at sea, she was constantly breaking down and the repair bills were endless. A week before, his father had ordered it to be tied up after the shooting in Southeast Asia until he decided how to bring it back to France for good. From then on, they would use Alcyone and begin planning for the construction of a new ship, Calypso II.
When Jean-Michel finally got through to Paris, there was only one message that mattered. La Bergère was gone. She had died after a mercifully brief encounter with her disease. His assistant in Paris told him that Cousteau had reached Simone’s bedside in time for a farewell.
Later that week, Cousteau and his first family gathered in Monaco. On a bright afternoon for December, they boarded a launch owned by the Oceanographic Museum and motored slowly from the harbor. On the headlands, dark clusters of people stood silently as the funeral passed beneath them. Two miles offshore, after the ceremony of military honors conducted by a detachment from the French navy, the ashes of Simone Melchior Cousteau became part of the winter-blue Mediterranean Sea.
22
CHAOS
JEAN-MICHEL STAYED IN FRANCE for a while after Simone died. He wanted to be near his father, even though Cousteau was keeping his distance from everyone, including his son. Shortly after the new year, Cousteau asked Jean-Michel to lunch. They had eaten countless meals together but never one for which his father had extended so stiff and formal an invitation. I have something important to tell you, Cousteau said. At the cafe, Cousteau wasted no time after the waiter left their table to turn the world upside down. Cousteau said that he and Simone had not lived as man and wife for a long time before her death. For fifteen years, he admitted, he had been with another woman, Francine Triplet, whom he intended now to marry. They had two children together, both of them, by then, teenagers. Jean-Michel’s stepsister was Diane, his stepbrother Pierre-Yves. Cousteau said he had kept his life with Francine secret out of respect for Simone, but it could no longer remain a secret.
Jean-Michel had known his father loved women. It was part of his charm, one of the reasons women loved him. He also knew that his mother’s separate life aboard Calypso was a practical solution for maintaining appearances and above all not damaging her husband’s reputation. She was, after all, a navy wife, the daughter and granddaughter of French admirals. Appearances mattered. Jean-Michel had no quarrel with his father’s insatiable appetite for women, but he never thought one of them would replace his mother. The news that Cousteau had a second family and a deeply concealed secret life was devastating to Jean-M
ichel for one reason alone: Did his mother know? Cousteau told him he wasn’t sure. Possibly.
After that day, Jean-Michel lost himself in his work. He had to get Calypso out of Southeast Asia. The Parc Océanique was collapsing, and now he knew that it was probably Francine who had led his father to blame him for the failure. He had to deliver two episodes to Ted Turner right away. Then suddenly on June 28, 1991, none of it mattered. Just six months and a few days after Simone had died, his father and Francine Triplet were married in a quiet ceremony. Whether by design or coincidence, the day was the twelfth anniversary of Philippe’s death.
Jacques and Francine Cousteau (AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)
Since Cousteau revealed the truth about his second family, JeanMichel had been tormented by thoughts of his mother in her self-imposed exile aboard Calypso. Had she known that the man with whom she had opened up the undersea world, with whom she had raised two sons, and with whom she had mourned the death of one of them, had replaced her with a younger woman? That his father had the audacity or the ignorance to marry his mistress on the very day his brother had been killed twelve years earlier was unforgivable. As soon as Cousteau surfaced after his wedding, Jean-Michel told him he was through. He would see the last two episodes of the second Rediscovery series to completion. Then he wanted nothing more to do with Cousteau, his new family, the society, or anything else that was still alive in the smoking embers of what had been a grand life. Cousteau embraced his son, said his affection for him would never diminish, but as he had with everyone who committed the ultimate act of betrayal by leaving him, he banished Jean-Michel into the unmentionable recesses of the past.
With Jean-Michel gone, everyone in business with Cousteau was shaking their heads at the grim prospects for the future. Publicly, they expressed optimism for the continuation of Cousteau’s work, but most of them privately believed that all he had built might very well die with him. At the end of Francine Triplet’s career as an Air France flight attendant, she had been a senior executive overseeing in-flight service. She participated in the making of several promotional films but had no other experience that would explain why L’Équipe Cousteau hired her as a scriptwriter later that year. It was even more puzzling that Cousteau seemed to be grooming his wife to take over after his death. Increasingly, the new Madame Cousteau was making decisions about the society and L’Équipe Cousteau on behalf of her husband.
In 1995 Cousteau turned eighty-five. His lungs were failing, and he had withdrawn from almost all activity outside his home in Paris. The man who taught the world how to breathe underwater, he joked, was having trouble breathing on land. He was equally cavalier about the prospect of his own death.
Cousteau still granted interviews, intermingling charm, philosophy, and the inevitable promotion of the society and his television programs. “If I have cancer, so what? That’s a way to finish your life. It’s one more sickness. It’s nothing terrible. I mean, yes, it’s terrible, but death is terrible in itself. I have made friends with death,” Cousteau said. “I mean I have accepted it not only as inevitable but also as constructive. If we didn’t die, we would not appreciate life as we do. So it’s a constructive force.”
He said he regretted only that it was impossible for him to continue to live as an animal when he was sick. “When an animal is hungry, he will hunt several weeks without sleep. When he has eaten he will sleep for three days. That’s the way I go.”
Cousteau held out no hope for an encounter with a benevolent and forgiving god after this life. “If there is a god and He’s interested in life, He’s just as interested in a French poodle as in you or me,” he told one writer.
Why were you able to expand human awareness of the need to protect the environment, a reporter asked? “If The Silent World was such a success when it came out it was, of course, because people were beginning to have a feeling for their surroundings and a curiosity about the sea depth that no one had seen before. But it was also because I knew how to make a movie.”
In another interview, he repeated his long-held conviction that humanity had to begin thinking about the long-term health of the planet or face the same destruction he had witnessed in Haiti.
The earth is probably two-and-a-half billion years old, and we know that in about five billion years life will be impossible on earth because the sun is going to expand and burn everything. So we’re about a third of the way in the life of the earth, which means that if we take care of it, humans can plan for several billion years on this wonderful planet. Things change, of course. The world is not what it was. We must plan long-term. Accordingly, to save it for our distant children, we must establish four priorities. The first one is peace. We know it is difficult, but there must be ways to live in peace other than leaving it in the hands of governments.
The second priority is limiting our own number. Rich nations have stable populations, poor nations are a time bomb. The third priority is education. If we want to do something for peace and population, for the Third World and the environment, we have to demonstrate the problem. The fourth priority is the environment. If I let my reason speak I am not optimistic. I don’t see any possibility to change people, the people who make the decisions. However, I believe that by action, faith, and hope we can achieve something. Each one of us must do something to fight for peace, for better cooperation among people, for education and the environment.
Among friends with a bottle of wine on the table, Cousteau’s pronouncements were much less pained and more hopefully eloquent:
I find poets closer to the truth than mathematicians or politicians. They have visions that are not only fantasy. They are visions that are, for some reason they cannot explain, an inspiration that guides them and brings them by the hand, or by the pen, closer to the truth than anybody else. I believe we should follow the poets more than anybody else in life. It’s the light. It’s the star we should be guided by…The only remedies to the logical absurdities are utopias, reasonable utopias.
As Jacques Cousteau faded further into the background, his new wife emerged as the heir to all he had created. Falco, Raymond Coll, and the few original Calypso divers who were still around watched Cousteau’s health decline and prepared to quit, as did many writers, editors, and other staff. They had been loyal to Cousteau and Jean-Michel but could not understand why he was leaving everything in Francine’s obviously incapable hands. She seemed to know very little about running expeditions, managing nonprofit corporations, or making movies.
While Francine shored up her defenses against criticism and the abandonment by Cousteau’s loyal friends, Jean-Michel struggled to establish a separate identity. His father was still bristling because his son had quit on him, and the bitterness took on a sharper edge because Francine was increasingly protective of her husband’s privacy. It was hard for Jean-Michel to see his father even for purely personal reasons, and his misunderstandings with his stepmother deepened. Shut out and suffering from it, Jean-Michel turned his attention to lecturing and leading environmental tours and cruises. He went into business with a developer who was building a vacation village on Vanua Levu, one of the Fijian islands. The resort was among the first in a new wave of what developers were promoting as eco-friendly, a small collection of thatched huts around a pristine lagoon. Guests could scuba dive, snorkel, and learn about life on a primitive South Pacific island, but no fishing, motorboats, or Jet Skis were allowed. With Jean-Michel as a partner, Vanua Levu was billed as a Cousteau environmental resort. Despite his banishment from Cousteau’s inner circle and the obvious management of his father’s affairs by Francine, Jean-Michel was stunned when his father sued him to prevent him from using the Cousteau name.
After a brief exchange of legal threats, they settled out of court through their lawyers and without ever reconciling privately. Jean-Michel agreed to use his full name—Jean-Michel Cousteau—for any of his own ventures to differentiate them from those of the Cousteau Society and his father’s other enterprises. He told reporters that the the
atrics of a public lawsuit were completely uncalled for.
“My father and I could have solved our differences over a good bottle of French wine and an embrace.” Jean-Michel was certain their problem could have been solved because without Francine, JYC had never been a grudge holder. To hold people accountable for past transgressions would have violated his cherished code of living in the present. If someone betrayed or mortally offended Cousteau, they simply ceased to exist, something that was out of the question when family was involved. He had shown over and over that no matter how serious a breach or a rupture in his relationship with his sons, his heart had remained open to them. When Philippe tried and failed to go it on his own as a filmmaker, JYC took him back without hesitation. When Jean-Michel quit the Cousteau Society to protest the hiring of Fred Hyman as its director, he was still part of the family. Everything changed with Francine as part of the equation.
“JYC was not a superman,” Jean-Michel insisted ten years after his father’s death. “He was just an ordinary man who made a bad mistake. Living a secret life with a second family diminished him and darkened his outlook about himself and the earth as he grew old. By the time he died, he no longer believed that humanity could save itself from disaster. I disagree with him, but I do not hold his mistake against him. He was my father.”
As though to foreshadow the end of Cousteau’s life, Calypso sank in January 1996. After Simone’s death, Jean-Michel had finished the Mekong River expedition, left the ship in Ho Chi Minh City for almost a year, then took it to Singapore. Falco was there trying to get Calypso in shape for a final voyage back to retirement in France when a drifting barge slammed into it. In five minutes, it was on the bottom in 16 feet of water, with its funnel, masts, and the crow’s nest on its foredeck above the surface. A week later, Falco mustered a salvage crew, raised Calypso, and loaded it aboard a barge bound for Marseille. A few days before his ship made it home to France, Jacques Cousteau had a heart attack. He hung on for two days, fading in and out of consciousness, during which time Francine refused to allow Jean-Michel to see him. Jacques Cousteau died at two thirty on the morning of June 25, 1997.
