"I didn't set out to make a lot of money," says Turner. "I went after the best ideas that would benefit the most people." He reached them through a thicket of personal troubles. After the 1963 suicide of his stern and difficult father, Ed, 24-year-old Ted, who had already inherited his old man's tumultuous disposition, also acquired a billboard company that was deeply in debt. Taking a huge risk, Turner borrowed heavily and saved the company. Suddenly in the black, he used his profits to buy a small local TV station and began beaming its signal via satellite to cable customers nationwide. The result—TBS, the first "superstation"—transformed the future of television.
Twice more Turner bet the corporate farm on big ideas. Hollywood laughed when he bought the ailing MGM studio for $1.6 billion in 1986; today his early acquisition of that company's vast film archive is seen as shrewd. Money guys told him that a 24-hour news channel would be a financial disaster; Turner started CNN anyway, in 1980. By the early '90s the world had watched the collapse of Communism and the Persian Gulf "War on his new network. CNN became the centerpiece of a media empire that grew to include everything from the Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies and two film companies to the World Series champion Atlanta Braves and World Championship Wrestling.
Turner sees it all this way: "I'm sure there were a lot of people telling Columbus that sailing to the west was a disastrous idea." He knows something about disasters too. His workaholism helped lead to two failed marriages before he wed Fonda eight years ago. According to The New Yorker the two have undergone marriage counseling ("Jane wants me to be a saint—but I'm not," he told diners at a benefit last fall), but he counts "finding and marrying Jane Fonda" among his crowning achievements. "I had always wanted a very meaningful, intimate relationship," he says, "and I finally found it with Jane." His heroes used to be the great warriors of the past. On his desk these days he keeps busts of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. "From a man of war, I became a man of peace," he says.
In 1996, Turner Broadcasting System merged with Time Warner (the owner of PEOPLE), making Turner the company's vice chairman and largest shareholder, owning about 10 percent of Time Warner stock. Though he still chafes a bit at not being entirely his own boss—"the biggest compromise I made was merging with Time Warner"—he found new realms in which to act on his own in his customary big way. In 1997, Turner pledged a phenomenal $1 billion to the United Nations for medicine, food and aid programs, a donation that was also a challenge to the other big checkbooks of the business world to give as generously.
When he calculates the things of greatest value in his life, Turner, now 60, starts with the successful upbringing of his five grown children. Aside from his family, what he cares about most, he says, is the fate of a fragile planet. "A lot of things worry me," he says. "The exploding population and the pressure that's putting on the natural world. Global warming. Air pollution. Deforestation. Overfishing the oceans." Oh, and one more thing. What's this talk about a presidential bid? "I don't rule it out," he says. "I didn't get where I am by ruling things out altogether."
Richard Lacayo
Gail Cameron Wescott in Atlanta
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- Gail Cameron Wescott.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
