by Brad Matsen
Five days later, on a soggy Paris summer morning, the world sent Cousteau into eternity with a funeral mass at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. A French naval honor guard carried his coffin into the cathedral, followed by his wife, their two children, Jean-Michel, the rest of his surviving family, President Jacques Chirac, and a thousand other mourners. Outside, thousands more stood in the rain, straining to listen through the open stained-glass windows as the archbishop of Paris chanted the mass and, in his sermon, called Cousteau “a poet of an inaccessible reality.” President Chirac, speaking on behalf of his nation, said Cousteau was “an enchanter who represented the defense of nature, modern adventure, and the dreamy part at the heart of all of us.” Jean-Michel spoke next, with the strained tones of a heartbroken man struggling to be brave: “The work of my father was a hymn to life. On the wall of my office is a quotation from him: ‘The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know about existence and to marvel at it.’”
The day after the funeral mass in Paris, Jacques Cousteau was buried in the cemetery at St.-André-de-Cubzac next to the tomb of his mother and father, facing northwest up the Gironde Estuary toward the ocean.
The Cousteau family tomb, St.-André-de-Cubzac, France (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR)
EPILOGUE
FOLLOWING COUSTEAU’S explicit wishes, the boards of directors of the Cousteau Society and L’Équipe Cousteau elected Francine Cousteau president of both organizations. Turner Broadcasting aired several tributes to her late husband, along with reruns of the Odyssey and Rediscovery series, but there were no Jacques Cousteau films in production for the first time in fifty years. Without the publicity from new adventures, membership in the society and L’Équipe Cousteau went into a steady decline, falling to about half its peak of three hundred thousand by the turn of the new century. Francine Cousteau had complete control over the film archives, records, photographs, publications, and the use of the family name. Jean-Michel, completely cut off from his father’s estate after the suit over Vanua Levu, turned his attention to his tourism ventures, speaking engagements, and planning for his independent return to filmmaking. He founded his own nonprofit corporation—the Jean-Michel Cousteau Foundation—and led a campaign to return Keiko the killer whale to the wild after years of captivity and fame as the central character in the movie Free Willy. When Jan Cousteau, Philippe’s widow, announced plans to establish a foundation using the Cousteau name, Francine successfully sued to stop her, banishing that branch of her late husband’s family as well.
“They want to capitalize on the name,” she said. “If their name was not Cousteau, nobody would know who they are. I have to put a stop to it.”
“Just because her last name is Cousteau, Francine thinks she is a Cousteau,” Jean-Michel said. “She will never be a Cousteau.”
A bitter fight raged between Cousteau’s two families over possession of Calypso. After Falco brought the ship back to France, it languished for two years on a barge in Marseille until Francine, backed by a court order, moved it to a dock at the French Maritime Museum in La Rochelle, several hundred miles to the northwest. There, Calypso rotted and sank lower into the water while a five-year legal battle dragged on between Jean-Michel and Francine.
Jacques Cousteau, the Sea King (AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)
Years before, Cousteau had told Jean-Michel that he and Simone wanted Calypso taken out to sea and scuttled when it was no longer fit for service. Neither of them could bear the thought of tourists roaming around her decks spilling their Coca-Colas on the ship that had been as important to them as their own hearts. Jean-Michel, and later Francine, begged Cousteau to reconsider, but he held firm. After his death, neither Cousteau’s new wife nor his son could sink the ship that had become so precious to France and the world as a symbol of exploration and enlightenment.
Jean-Michel; his children, Fabien and Céline; his niece Alexandra; Falco; Coll; and most of the original Calypso crewmen wanted the ship to become the centerpiece of a new oceanographic museum on the Mediterranean. They believed they could raise money from Cousteau’s millions of admirers to restore the ship and build the museum, which would be a public institution. Francine, meanwhile, made a deal with a cruise ship company to move Calypso to the Caribbean, where it would become an attraction for the company’s passengers and other tourists. Jean-Michel quashed that plan with a countersuit based on French customs law, under which Calypso was considered an object rather than a working ship, and therefore could not be exported so easily.
“Calypso belongs in France,” Jean-Michel said when he announced his victory. “It is a national treasure.”
With no end in sight to the ownership dispute, L’Équipe Cousteau came up with the money to repair Calypso’s hull enough to keep it from sinking, cover the leaking decks with tarps, and pay for continued moorage in La Rochelle. A full restoration was going to cost $1 million, maybe $2 million. In the wake of the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees fighting over the family name and dramatic declines in membership, neither L’Équipe Cousteau nor the Cousteau Society had that kind of money.
Despite the suits and countersuits filed by Francine and Jean-Michel, the estate of the late Loel Guinness was still the only legal owner of Calypso. Guinness had leased rather than sold the ship to Cousteau fifty years earlier for the token sum of one British pound. The lease was still held by Cousteau’s original nonprofit French Oceanographic Expeditions, whose board was made up of old Calypso hands loyal to Jean-Michel and the Mediterranean plan for the ship. As the head of L’Équipe Cousteau, Francine claimed a seat on the COF board, hoping to wrest control of the ship that way. To thwart her, the old hands canceled the meeting at which she was going to demand her place.
Finally, Carnival Cruise Lines offered L’Équipe Cousteau $1.3 million to rebuild Calypso and keep it under the French flag. Loel Guinness’s grandson, convinced that the offer was the only hope for saving the ship, canceled the original lease to COF and sold it to Carnival for one euro. After a final round in court, a judge approved the deal.
In the fall of 2007, a pair of tugboats carefully towed the rust-streaked, wallowing hulk north along the Atlantic coast from La Rochelle to a shipyard in Brittany for resurrection. It was unrecognizable as the magical set for such scenes as the storm on its first voyage under Cousteau on the Mediterranean, when it proved strong enough to survive anything; or Cousteau’s triumphant arrival in New York harbor for the World Oceanographic Congress; or its slow voyage up the Mississippi River with cheering crowds lining the levies and banks. It was impossible to connect the lifeless, dingy hulk to the thousands of days when divers left Calypso to explore the ocean, capture the underwater world on film, and bring it to televisions in hundreds of millions of homes, hard to imagine that this was the ship that had revolutionized human understanding about the sea and its creatures.
According to the Cousteau Society, Calypso will be ready for sea again in early 2010.
NOTES
Prelude: Autumn 1977
—Cousteau’s fund-raising mission in the United States and the event in Seattle are described in contemporary newspaper accounts and confirmed in a November 2005 interview with an official of the Bullitt Foundation. The foundation made a donation of $3,500 to the Cousteau Society.
—Cousteau’s preoccupations in the fall of 1977 are reconstructed from the timeline in Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Alexis Sivirine, Jacques Cousteau’s “Calypso” (New York: Abrams, 1983), an account of the ship’s voyages. According to that account, the pollution survey voyage began on July 27, 1977. In late October or early November, the crew of Calypso dove off the coast of Otranto, Italy, on the wreck of the Yugoslavian freighter Cavtat, which had sunk three years before while carrying 300 tons of tetraethyl and tetramethyl lead.
—Cousteau’s interview with James E. Lalonde and Richard Strickland appeared in the November 2, 1977, edition of the Seattle Weekly.
—The details of the Mediterranean survey are
from the film “Mediterranean: Cradle or Coffin?,” an episode in The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey series, which first aired on PBS on May 27, 1978; from a Cousteau Society background paper on the expedition and the television production; and from a report on the expedition in the November/December 1977 edition of Calypso Log.
—Confirmation of Philippe Cousteau’s presence in Los Angeles recovering from a leg injury suffered in the crash of his gyrocopter on Easter Island and the activities of Jean-Michel Cousteau are from an interview with Fabien Cousteau in the spring of 2006.
—The beginning of Cousteau’s affair in 1977 with Francine Triplet, who would become his second wife in June 1991, is established in an interview Francine gave to E: The Environmental Magazine in June 1999, in which she states: “I spent twenty years of my life with him …” Cousteau died on June 25, 1997, which therefore dates their relationship to 1977. The date of their meeting may also be inferred from the ages of their two children (Diane, fourteen, and Pierre-Yves, twelve) at the time the relationship became public knowledge after the death of Simone Cousteau in December 1990. Additionally, Jean-Michel Cousteau, in an interview in April 2008, states that during the autumn of the Involvement Day campaign (1977), his father was reported to have attended the event in Houston while accompanied by Francine Triplet.
—That Cousteau was rarely aboard Calypso by 1977 is confirmed in interviews with former crewmen André Laban and Marc Blessington, and Fabien Cousteau.
—Cousteau’s praise of Simone in her role as La Bergère is well known, but this specific statement at the end of the Prelude is taken from “Soul of the Calypso,” by Samuel G. and Debborah Lecocq, which appeared on the Web site http://www.portagequarry.com in March 2006. Samuel G. Lecocq sailed with Jacques and Simone Cousteau aboard Calypso on several occasions.
1: La Bergère
—Cousteau’s statement that marriage is archaic is from an interview by Sara Davidson for the New York Times Magazine, published September 10, 1972.
—The meeting of JYC and Simone in 1936 at her parents’ apartment in Paris is confirmed in an interview with Fabien Cousteau, and in many published accounts, including Leslie Leaney, “Jacques-Yves Cousteau: The Pioneering Years,” Historical Diver no. 13 (fall 1997).
—Descriptions of Simone Cousteau are drawn from early photographs.
—The details of Cousteau’s automobile accident and injuries in 1936 are from Leaney, “Jacques-Yves Cousteau;” Axel Madsen, Cousteau: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Beaufort Books, 1986), 13—20; and other sources.
—Descriptions of St.-André-de-Cubzac, the Dordogne and Garonne rivers, and the Gironde Estuary are from several visits to the region by the author in fall 2005.
—Historical facts on Bordeaux, St.-André-de-Cubzac, and Aquitaine are from the author’s visits to museums and libraries in the region; accounts in Delie Muller and Jean-Yves Boscher, Bordeaux: Aspects of Aquitaine (Bourdeaux: Editions Grand Sud, 2003); and tourist brochures for St.-André-de-Cubzac.
—Facts about Daniel Cousteau’s service to James Hazen Hyde are from Madsen, Cousteau; Richard Munson, Cousteau: The Captain and His World (New York: Paragon House, 1989); and accounts in many magazines about the birth of Jacques Cousteau.
—Cousteau’s birth in St.-André-de-Cubzac is confirmed by the author’s interviews with an administrator at the village hall and reliable local records. The town house across the street from the church is now a pharmacy, but Cousteau’s birthplace is commemorated by a plaque on the building.
—Cousteau’s memory of swaying in a hammock on a train is from many interviews and both the Madsen and Munson biographies.
—The description of Eugene Higgins and his high-life activities are from his obituary in the New York Times, July 30, 1948.
—The story of Cousteau’s first dive into the Vermont lake at the order of Mr. Boetz is recounted in many places, but confirmed in the June 1985 issue of the Calypso Log, the publication of the Cousteau Society.
—The clips of Cousteau’s earliest attempts at filmmaking were part of a Turner Broadcasting special, Cousteau: The First Seventy-five Years, June 1985.
—Information on the several generations of Pathé movie cameras and the history of the Pathé brothers and their company is from several Internet collectors’ sites, including http://www.moviecamera.it/pathee.html. Cousteau’s camera was undoubtedly the hand-cranked model introduced in 1923. A version with a spring drive was produced in 1926, so by the time he photographed Simone at their first meeting in Paris in 1936 he was probably using that model.
—The accounts of Georges Méliès’s discovery of the stop trick and other special effects are from a variety of sources, including Elizabeth Ezra’s Georges Méliès and Landmarks of Early Film, vol. 2, The Magic of Méliès (DVD).
—The account of Cousteau being shipped off to boarding school is from several sources, including an interview with him that was the basis for a Time magazine story, “Poet of the Depths,” which appeared on March 28, 1960. As recited by Cousteau himself many times, the story is presented solely as one of rescue by the discipline and challenges of the Alsatian boarding school, but it is obvious from peripheral facts, including the departure of his brother from the household, the numbing rituals of French education at the time, and the absence of his father, that he was very much a frustrated teenager and not a young filmmaker conducting an experiment when he broke the school windows.
2: Les Mousquemers
—The account of the meeting of Cousteau and Philippe Tailliez, and Tailliez’s insistence that Cousteau swim regularly as part of his recuperation, are from Philippe Tailliez, To Hidden Depths (London: Kimber, 1954); and from a biographical article by John Christopher Fine that appeared in Historical Diver no. 18 (1998).
—The physical details of water and the oceans are taken from The National Geographic Atlas of the Ocean, with thanks to its editor, Dr. Sylvia Earle, and the fantastic team of contributors to this essential work.
—Cousteau’s comment about his hunger for new developments in skin diving are from Jacques-Yves Cousteau, with Frédéric Dumas (and James Dugan), The Silent World (New York: Harper and Row, 1953), 5.
—The presence of precursory gill slits in embryonic chordates was confirmed in an interview with biologist Dr. Tierney Thys.
—John Guy Gilpatric was born in the United States in 1896, set an airplane altitude record of 4,665 feet when he was sixteen years old, flew for the Lafayette Espadrille in World War I, and became a legendary spearfisher who influenced diving pioneer Hans Hass as well as Tailliez, Cousteau, and Dumas. Gilpatric went on to become a journalist and wrote a famous series of books in which the central character is Mr. Glencannon, the ship’s engineer of the SS Inchcliff Castle. He also wrote the first book on free diving, The Compleat Goggler. Gilpatric died in 1950 by his own hand after first ending the life of his terminally ill wife.
—Cousteau’s impressions on his first dive are from The Silent World, his book published in 1953 chronicling his early years as an underwater explorer.
—Dumas’s account of meeting Philippe Tailliez is quoted by Cousteau in The Silent World.
—An explanation of atmospheric pressure and breathing can be found in many standard sources, but mine is informed by an interview with diving master Phil Nuytten in Vancouver, British Columbia, November 2005.
3: Breathing Underwater
—Cousteau’s exploration of ways to extend his time underwater is from The Silent World, 10.
—The survey of pre-Cousteau self-contained underwater breathing apparatuses is from Peter Jackson’s article in Historical Diver no. 13 (fall 1997), 34—37.
—The description of the Rouquayrol-Denayrouze apparatus is from the Miller and Walter translation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 105—6.
—The account of Cousteau’s near-disastrous experiments with an oxygen re-breather is from The Silent World, 10—11.
4: Sixty Feet Down
—Cousteau’s experiments
with the surface-feed Fernez diving apparatus and his and Dumas’s brushes with death while testing it are from The Silent World, 11—12; and Leslie Leaney, “Jacques-Yves Cousteau: The Pioneering Years,” Historical Diver (fall 1997).
—The insistence of Cousteau’s commanders that he continue his diving and underwater photography is from The Silent World, 11—12.
—The history of the Williamson brothers and their pioneering work in underwater cinematography is from Thomas Burgess, “The Men Who Made Undersea Films,” in Take Me Under the Sea (Salem, Oreg.: Ocean Archives, 1994), 163—244, and other sources cited in that essay.
—The purchase of the Kinamo 35 mm camera and Veche’s building the underwater housing for it is confirmed in Tailliez, To Hidden Depths, 30—32; and Leaney’s article. The description of the camera and housing is from scenes included in Cousteau: The First Seventy-five Years (June 1985), a Turner Broadcasting special honoring Cousteau.
—The details of shooting Par dix-huit mètres de fond (Sixty Feet Down) are from Tailliez, To Hidden Depths, 30—32.
—The premiere of Sixty Feet Down before a gathering of German officers and Vichy French officials in occupied Paris is reported in an article by John Lichfield in the Independent (London), June 26, 1999, “20,000 Lies Under the Sea: The Fishy World of Jacques Cousteau.”
