Turner later created two independent film production companies, Ted Turner Pictures and Ted Turner Documentaries, which produced the major motion picture Gods and Generals and the critically acclaimed PBS documentary Avoiding Armageddon , respectively. McKerrow Jr. Turner is also chairman of Turner Enterprises, Inc. For many years, Turner has devoted his time and energy toward promoting the use of clean energy sources. In June , Turner launched his latest hospitality venture, Ted Turner Reserves , a groundbreaking initiative inviting the public to visit and enjoy four unique, Turner-owned locales, totaling over one million acres of diverse, stunning landscapes.
It is through these experiences led by Ted Turner Reserves that Turner hopes others will develop a keen appreciation for and understanding of nature, and in turn, consciously take steps, small or large, toward improving our environment.
WarnerMedia has established a scholarship, internship program and exhibition hall at the University of Georgia to be named after maverick media mogul Ted Turner. I had done a lot of reading, and when I had spare time, a lot of times I would just think and not waste my time watching TV. I watched very little television growing up, hardly any at all.
Your mind is just like any other muscle in your body. If you want to have a sharp mind, you need to use it. Just like if you want to have strong muscles, you better work out a lot, so I worked my mind out all the time, and then when I needed it, I would put it to use. Like developing CNN, for instance…. And I said the threat is going to come from a right wing news network, and it was 18 years later before Fox got started, 18 years.
I was worth billions, where I had been worth nothing at the beginning. I liked being straightforward with the news. Like The New York Times. They stand there, and I give them credit. I wanted to be The New York Times of the television news business. Ted Turner: Yes. Particularly, Headline News. But Larry King is still there, pretty much doing the same thing. They have gone a little more tabloid, but then, whenever you sell or merge your company — I made a mistake doing it.
The mistake I made was losing control of the company. As long as it was just Time Warner, I had seven or eight percent of the company when I merged with Time Warner, but when we merged with AOL, I went down to three percent, and that is when they phased me out.
I got in the restaurant business. I did. It stands on its own, and I really have enjoyed that a lot. You get beat on Friday? And if you get beat all year like the Braves — the first four years I owned them, they came in last every time in their division, and set a record that stands today with the most consecutive last place finishes since divisional play was started.
And 18 years later, I won the World Series, and we had the best team in the history of sports. For 13 consecutive years, we won our division. Nobody has ever done that in hockey, football, you name it. A really interesting example of turning something dark into something positive was when you were suspended in from showing up at the stadium for the Braves. It hurt.
Ted Turner: When I was about ten years old, I went out. My father had a sailboat, and I went out with him, and then I started racing when I was 11 or 12, and for 33 years it was very important to me, and I raced in thousands of races and won hundreds of them. Ted Turner: It takes the same things it takes to be great at anything. I had some ability, not a great amount.
In the first eight years that I raced sailboats, I never won. I was second almost all the time, but I never won once in eight years. I was learning how to win. From then on, from my first year in college, I won just about all the time.
Not all the time, but I won way more than my normal share of the races. I was named Yachtsman of the Year four times. No man has ever done that, before or since. They have an award that yachting writers select.
Could you tell us a little bit about what you went through in ? You won that race, but unfortunately, lives were lost. Ted Turner: The Fastnet race. It was the roughest race in history. I think 16 or 17 people were killed, and of the boats, like 50 of them sank or were disabled, and about 90 finished, and the other 50 dropped out. Ted Turner: They were with me. Ted Turner: Right.
We got knocked down repeatedly, knocked right down flat, but we came back up because we had a lead keel on the bottom of the boat. I knew I had a strong boat, but we hit the waves so hard that when the race was over and we inspected for damage, we found that the whole front of the boat, all the welds had cracked and broken. So the plates were floating. The hull plates were floating on the frames. All the welds had broken in the front part of the boat, and we had to take the boat out of the water and completely re-weld it in the boat yard.
Ted Turner: From society. It started with my father. I went to military school — boarding school — for a number of years.
Ted Turner: Pretty good. I was a pretty good student. I was a B-plus student for the most part. That was the best I ever did. Ted Turner: At one time. I was going to a religious school when I was in high school.
We were exposed to a lot of evangelists and I got converted to Christianity. Ted Turner: I was. At boarding school, we had required study hall, and I was usually able to get my homework done in less than the two-and-a-half hours, and I read the rest of the time. I did some reading, just for information, on my own. Ted Turner: When I was young, mainly I read history. I was fascinated by history, and I read a lot about animals and birds.
I was fascinated by nature, but I really was interested in lots of things. I was interested in movies and somewhat in sports. I was interested in just about everything. Your interest in the Civil War has been demonstrated by a number of your films and TV shows.
Was that an interest when you were young as well? Ted Turner: When I studied history, I was perhaps most fascinated by military history. Growing up in the South, and having moved down from the North, the Civil War was all around us. I went to school for six years in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Missionary Ridge, where one of the great battles was fought.
So there were monuments all around. World War II, because my father fought in that, and I was alive during it, even though I was a young boy, I remember it vividly. The Civil War probably drew my interest a little bit more than some of the others. Ted Turner: Not really. I would have rather been home because it was pretty confining. Ted Turner: I was a mild problem kid.
The usual things. Were there any books that particularly meant a lot to you when you were growing up? Ted Turner: Sure, lots of them. Lots of them. When I got to college, I was a classics major, and that was mainly the study of Greek — and to a lesser extent Roman — history and culture, and that fascinated me: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid by Virgil. I enjoyed Gone With the Wind and history books, as I said, of all types. I was fascinated by naval history. Then I ended up, you know, spending a good bit of my time racing sailboats, and when I did that, I fancied myself a modern Horatio Nelson.
Did that have an influence on your own love of the land? Ted Turner: Yes, no question about it. My father loved land, too, and so did my grandfather, and I love the outdoors and nature and flowers and trees and plants and everything from insects to elephants. Ted Turner: Yeah. He lost his business and his farm, my grandfather did, and my father had to drop out of college. He never did declare bankruptcy, but he lost everything in the first year of the Depression. Ted Turner: No question about it.
He hated to see his father lose everything, and he was tremendously afraid that that would happen to him, too. He had an almost paranoid fear of going broke. Ted Turner: He got into it while he was in college taking traffic counts for the billboard company that he was working for, counting the number of cars that passed their billboards in certain streets. You stand there with a clicker, and you click every car that comes by that has a chance to see the billboard.
You do that for an hour. Ted Turner: Oh, yeah. He went into business for himself later on. I have good relationships with a lot of people. I want to see serious news. Instead, he spends an average of an hour and a half each day reading nonfiction — The Economist from cover to cover, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal whenever he can, along with substantive tomes including environmentalist Lester R.
After reading, Turner retires. In addition to taking medication for an irregular heartbeat, in mid he learned he had sleep apnea, a disorder involving abnormal interruptions in breathing. He wakes around 4 a. He says all this with little of the flamboyance that was once his mark. Several acknowledge the man they found was quite different from the human tornado of the past. He retains, according to Forbes, a? His energy may be flagging, but some drive keeps propelling him forward, in an unending race to achieve more — or outrun his inner demons.
The departure of Jane Fonda from his life, after a year marriage, may have fueled this. He admits it shook him profoundly and perhaps contributed to the sense one has of his being emotionally adrift, no matter how vast his accomplishments.
Often, during our conversations, he tunnels down a track of his own — spending 15 minutes on his Voluntary Initiatives, for instance — as if his mind is full of his own thoughts and private obsessions. He has replaced Fonda with a new arrangement, alternating among four girlfriends, each of whom gets approximately a week per month of his time.
Charming and refined, she assures me in the few seconds we get to speak that Turner is? But though he has several girlfriends, it is a very small number, and he does not take them? When asked if they are OK with this division of spoils, he hesitates.
He pauses. Ensconced in a vast windowless basement at the U. He barely moves, rarely talks. I miss a lot. Foundation, established with former Democratic Sen. Timothy Wirth of Colorado as its president to promote the aims of the U.
Sam Nunn of Georgia, championing projects such as the conversion of reactors around the globe; and the Turner Foundation, which among other pursuits bestows ecosystem-? And going back, I was concerned about the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and worried that if there was another world war, it could be the end of civilization.
The U. You could go right-wing like Fox News, you could go after a segment of the market and maybe you would be more successful than if you were going for the whole market. We spent several days when Jessica McClure fell down the well, and we covered O. But those were such interesting stories.
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