Sharing His Ocean Views

His rough-cut hair and beard shine silver like sunlight off water. His eyes are dappled with hues of the reef. He wears a dive-suit sewn in shades of ocean blue. His name seems derived from the sea, too: Cousteau.

When he splashes off the stern of a dive boat, Jean-Michel Cousteau folds at the waist. His arms draw to his side. His swim fins flex and bite into the water. He is fluid, streamlined, serene. A cascade of chrome bubbles rise from the scuba regulator in his mouth.

Descending through tropical sunbeams into the bottomless azure of the ocean, this heir to a legend, this champion of the oceans, glides like a fish. A man fish. That was the word coined by his father, the late Jacques Cousteau.

But, let’s remember, Jacques had to discover the undersea world. Jean-Michel, his only living son, was born to it. That was 61 years ago on the Mediterranean coast of France, near Toulon.

Dad strapped his new invention, an Aqua-Lung, on the boy when he was 7 and sent him over the gunwale of a fishing boat. For the longest time, Jean-Michel assumed that other children spent weekends the way he did: swimming with the fish at the bottom of the bay, gathering sea urchin roe for picnics, and diving again.

There have been tumultuous years since, and unbearably sad times, too. Jean-Michel Cousteau has never been as sure-footed as his father, or as naturally flamboyant as his late brother Phillipe. But by perseverance and a generous measure of personal charm he has come to assume his birthright: He is the most recognizable defender of the larger part of our planet.

“People,” he says, with a resolute French accent, “protect what they love.”

And whatever they happen to love, he continues, it is inescapably linked to the sea.

Cousteau is a man in motion: a globe-trotting documentary filmmaker; a regular on the international conservationist speaking circuit; the lightening rod at oceanic trouble spots; a pitchman for scuba diving; environment columnist for Skin Diver magazine; an eco-resort owner; a camp leader and caretaker of Keiko, the storied killer whale.

The list does not quite convey the whole, however. For Cousteau is one of those easy-mannered, seemingly balanced people who have not forgotten that loving something means enjoying it. His nervous tic is to greet the moment with his own applause, clapping his cupped hands, Fiji-style, creating the loudest possible pops.

Attaining Serenity the Goal of Diving

I am a visitor, but not a stranger. This is home.

The odd thing underwater is that you never feel wet.

Also strange, the dense pressure of water around you is the mechanism by which you are released from gravity.

This is where I am at peace. Here, in the silent glory where the reef meets the deep sea at the changing of the tide.

Close your teeth and suck air between the opening of your lips. The hiss is similar to that of a scuba regulator.

The diver breathes slowly. If you are a good diver, very slowly. One, two, three, four, five. You exhale even more slowly, bubbles gurgling past your ears, your chest deflating--five, six, seven. Each breath underwater creates an acute awareness of breathing.

The perfection of diving is the attainment of serenity. The more graceful you are, the easier you move, the less air you consume, the longer your tank lasts. The person who wins is not the fastest or strongest but the one most tranquil. Diving is Zen.

Everyone who dives becomes an ambassador for the sea.

Jean-Michel Cousteau reaches bottom at 75 feet and planes out, his fins working rhythmically in a gentle dolphin kick against the current of the incoming tide. He holds his position on the edge of an abyss.

Here, one of Fiji’s vast outlying coral reefs ends at a cliff, dropping vertically into the open Pacific. At this spot the reef is cut by a channel where the lagoon empties and fills with each tide. On both sides of Cousteau are looming canyon walls of flamboyant hard and soft corals for which this South Pacific atoll is famed. Beneath him, the clean-swept sand bottom of the channel. Ahead, the mysterious, unfathomable purple-blue of the deep.

Small fish gather to feed in the upwelling of nutrients drawn by the incoming tide. Small fish attract larger fish. This busy convergence lures the man fish too.

Why do I do the same thing over and over? If I could not dive, I could not do what I do.

The man fish is not the biggest fish here today. A gray reef shark materializes from the purplish depths, all muscle. Two sleek white-tip reef sharks prowl.

I look forward to the sharks. I anticipate them. They are so absolutely, spectacularly beautiful. And behind the beauty they are so formidable.

Confronted by sharks, Cousteau first asks himself, what kind? Reef sharks of five and six and seven feet pose no problem. Hammerheads are a degree more exciting.

Something like a tiger shark, that would be different. That would be cause for concern. What would I do? I would face the animal. I’m not going to chicken out, or try to swim away. That’s a sure way to lose. It’s their world.

The hub of Cousteau’s life is his Santa Barbara-based Ocean Futures Society, the result of a merger earlier this year of his long-standing private institute and the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. The society offers free membership to everyone and has assembled a priority list that includes fisheries management, coastal habitat, coral reefs, marine mammals and clean water. It is a vocal opponent of development projects that imperil the sea, from a salt works project in Baja to a gold mine in Fiji.

“Our mission can be said in one sentence,” says Cousteau. “Protect the ocean and you protect yourself.”

Keiko, the orca of “Free Willy” fame and captive suffering, has become Cousteau’s “new Calypso”--a symbol, like his father’s famous research ship. Keiko has drawn more than a million letters and calls, many from children. They want Keiko freed in real life, just like in the movies.

“Keiko was a kick in the pants to me. Children felt they were lied to,” says Cousteau. His team now supervises the much-traveled orca in a holding pen in a bay in Iceland, preparing for an attempted release, perhaps by next summer.

Cousteau’s 52-minute film about the saga--”Keiko, Born to Be Wild”--has already appeared on French television and is to premiere in the U.S. on Nov. 7 at Los Angeles’ California Science Center. The event is also a coming-out party for Ocean Futures.

“We must comprehend our ties with the oceans,” he says. “When you take an aspirin to get rid of a headache, those chemicals end up here in the sea. It’s that simple.”

An Explorer Worthy of the Ages

It took the resources of superpowers to set humans free of gravity and send them into space. Jacques Yves Cousteau, or “Jeek” to his family--for his initials, JYC--did the same in the undersea world.

Although not the first to devise a way to carry one’s own air underwater, as he sometimes is credited, he made it feasible. He was first to popularize human penetration of the 72% of the globe that is ocean. He was, wrapped into one, an explorer worthy of the ages, a scientist and a pioneering conservationist. Before he died in 1997 at 87, his jaunty red watch cap sat atop one of the best-known faces in the world.

Jean-Michel has been, at times, both part of and apart from his father’s work. He has never been so far, though, as to escape the Captain’s towering shadow.

“Have I told you the book I’m writing?” he blurts out one day. “It’s called, ‘Son of.’ ”

He’s joking.

“No I’m not,” he says.

As a young man, he decided to extend his father’s work. He would be an architect and open the oceans to homesteading, becoming the first to build cities underwater.

An oddball idea? Of course. But at the time, human fascination with this water world was boundless. Space colonies were a popular fantasy. Why not oceanic colonies to harvest the sea?

He graduated from the Paris School of Architecture. The French war in Algeria sidetracked him into the military, but peace arrived before he saw combat. He finished his service as a government architect in Madagascar.

He built no underwater cities. But his spare time was devoted to scuba.

Curiosity and Risk Key to Diving’s Allure

Each dive to me is a kind of liberation.

Cousteau fins to the edge of the cliff. He gazes down. It is like hovering over the rim of the Grand Canyon, except there is no bottom to see, no tether to terra firma. Just weightless, noiseless purple fading darker. To push oneself farther out provides the sensation of being swallowed whole by the ocean.

It is disorienting and alluring at the same time. Something in you wants to go down.

Staring into the liquid empty of blue water works tricks on the mind. What diver hasn’t wondered about the dark water below? Lured at first by curiosity, and by risk. Everything is sweetened by risk, poet Alexander Smith said that. Then pulled down farther by the lightheadedness of pressurized nitrogen on the blood, narcosis, the rapture of the deep.

I understand why people go down, beyond where they can ever come back. They die, and we say they had a couple of fuses loose. I may be a fuse away from trouble myself.

2 Deaths in Family Change Everything

In the summer of 1967, Cousteau’s life took a change.

“My father called. He said, ‘I need you.’ That was the first time he ever said that. I told him, ‘Jeek, I’ll be glad to help.’ It was a turning point for me.”

Jean-Michel assumed the logistics responsibilities for Calypso’s expeditions, advancing the ship’s journeys from ocean to ocean. He was sent to Hollywood to get his father’s work on American television. Jean-Michel has made Southern California his primary residence since, although he still carries a French passport.

Increasingly, he became involved in the production side of Cousteau films, and has now produced more than 60 shows for his father and himself. He brushed up on his architect’s past and designed a Living Sea Museum for the Queen Mary in Long Beach. He married and fathered two children: Fabien, who is now 31 and “flying on his own” as a fabric importer for New York fashion houses, and Celine, 27, a graduate student and jewelry maker.

Two deaths in the Cousteau family changed everything. Jean-Michel was yanked first in one direction and then unexpectedly pushed away in the opposite.

Twenty years ago, his brother died attempting to land a seaplane and this brought another call from dad. The Cousteau Society was in debt. Jean-Michel was needed if Calypso’s work was to continue.

He uprooted his life and career, and for 14 years Jean-Michel tended the moorings as the administrative chief of his roaming father’s international enterprise.

Then Jean-Michel lost his mother. Simone had been at Jacques Cousteau’s side so long and was so deeply a part of his adventures, that it was hard to imagine the old man standing alone. It turned out, he wasn’t alone. Jacques soon revealed that for more than a decade he kept a hidden life with another woman, a former airline flight attendant named Francine. How French, everyone said.

Francine stepped boldly onto the stage. The resulting family friction was the ugly stuff of tabloids. Francine came between father and son. The father allied himself with his new wife. Jean-Michel left the Cousteau Society, calling her disdainfully, “My out-of-step mother.”

Before it was over, the feud spilled into the courthouse. The father sued his son on the cruelest of all grounds--for using the name he had bequeathed him.

Jean-Michel had found a tiny resort on the outlying island of Vanua Levu in Fiji. On a white-sand point, the site of an old coconut plantation, he set out to build a small-scale enterprise worthy of the name “eco-tourism.” Here, he could renew himself.

The lawsuit asserted that Cousteau had no right to use his name in a commercial venture.

“I could have solved this with my dad in a half-hour over a bottle of wine,” he says, with a sigh. But all face-to-face contact with Jacques had ended.

With lawyers as intermediaries, the suit ultimately was settled with the specification that Jean-Michel had to use his first name along with his last for the resort.

Only in 1997, with the old man’s health failing, did Jean-Michel reach out and reestablish contact. Both were guests at a scuba diving convention in Orlando, Fla., that January. Jean-Michel was mistakenly served a bottle of wine reserved for the guest of honor, the elder Cousteau. Glass in hand, the son stood up. He turned and walked to the head table. Whispers could be heard throughout the convention hall. Everyone in diving knew of the estrangement.

Jean-Michel strode up to his father. “Jeek, I’m here to celebrate that you are being honored,” he said. “And I’m doing it with your wine.”

Two weeks later, Jacques Cousteau was hospitalized. The illness dragged on for five months. Only in the final days was Jean-Michel summoned. Jacques Cousteau was bedridden and could no longer talk. The son held the old man’s frail hand and spoke. He could feel his father squeeze back.

After his father’s funeral, Jean-Michel rushed back to California, where he had promised to participate in the scuba diving’s annual Great American Fish Count. He found himself in a boat with 80 people off Southern California’s Anacapa Island. The fog was thick, cold and gloomy. He asked, please, may he have three minutes in the water alone.

He recalls the day: “As I stepped off the boat, the fog completely lifted. Streaks of light streamed through a forest of kelp. There were flashes of orange--garibaldi fish. When I got to the bottom, I found myself on a patch of bright sand surrounded by this giant swaying forest and the light coming down. I fell on my knees and I spoke to my father. I said I was missing him. Missing him real bad.”

Slow down. Enjoy. Time is a treasure. It’s the most valuable thing we have.

Jean-Michel Cousteau is standing on his head in 60 feet of water. Straight as a pencil and motionless, he is upside down peering underneath a coral outcropping. Something small has caught his eye.

Unlike many dive leaders, he does not bang on his tank to draw others so they can see too. In waters like Fiji’s, there is something interesting under practically every outcropping, for those willing to look. Whatever they discover, they appreciate and are willing to protect. That’s what he teaches. Fiji is his free-study classroom. He calls it the best diving in the tropics. Whatever he sees, he contemplates in solitude.

I am asked my dream for the future: It is to do what I can to change our definition of happiness. There is a misconception. We connect happiness with possessions. But these are the wonders that really make you happy.

‘Teaching a Few Very Deeply’

For nearly three decades, Jean-Michel has led small groups of people, usually youth, on excursions. Sometimes they were extended voyages to the South Pacific. More recently, he has been bringing families to outdoor camps on Catalina Island to appreciate and enjoy the ocean and coastal environments.

At any given moment, whether the crowd is one or a dozen, he is apt to spontaneously deliver a mini-tutorial on whatever subject is at hand--the Fijian ceremony of drinking Kava juice made from the root of the Yaqona plant, or the dangers of touching the poison-tipped fins of the beautiful lion fish, or the overrated advantages of buoyancy-control vests for divers.

“Captain Cousteau thought this kind of thing was a complete waste of time. He wanted to reach millions through television. But shouldn’t we also be teaching a few very deeply?” asks Richard Murphy, a marine biologist who dived for the elder Cousteau on Calypso and subsequently became Jean-Michel’s chief scientist, kindred spirit and close friend.

Cousteau himself faces many such questions in the months ahead. Cousteau’s family squabbles are now behind him. His Ocean Futures Society is about to debut. As never before, the spotlight shines on him without interference. At the same time, critics are not apt to be forgiving. Until now, Cousteau has been barely scrutinized. Here and there, scientists are heard to grumble that he is too glib. But many of them agree with Cousteau’s concerns. Besides, who wants to argue about the oceans with a Cousteau?

Leaders of the scuba industry fume when he calls their equipment and attitudes antiquated, and when he says it’s stupid to prohibit young children from obtaining underwater certification. But industry officials also are grateful of his nonstop advocacy of diving.

His associates worry that Cousteau spreads himself too thin and is too quick to say yes to invitations, even trivial ones. His father was a master at generating news coverage, but Jean-Michel has yet to prove his equal.

On the other hand, those around him believe that Cousteau is so naturally likable and passionate that his following will surely swell. For once, they say, the timing is just right for him. Many signs point to growing interest in the oceans--from the public outcry over Keiko to the explosive growth in civic aquariums around the world. Over-fishing and coral reef destruction are no longer niche issues, but part of the mainstream conservationist agenda. Most important, the name that once caused him grief is now an asset no one else can match.

Half a Century and Still Astonished

Today’s dive is over. Jean-Michel breaks the surface. While still swimming he unbuckles his fins and hands them into the dive boat. He lumbers up the stern ladder. Once again constrained by gravity, the man fish stands unsteadily against the swells underfoot. His hair hangs in a mat over his ears, his beard drips like a wrung-out towel. But even before he pulls the mask from his face you can see his toothy smile, big, square and lopsided a little to the left.

Such grins are familiar on dive boats. The mouth works silently as if to find words, then gives up and settles into an astonished gape. It is prevalent on the face of new divers. And on Jean-Michel Cousteau’s too, even now after a half-century underwater.

He looks around the boat, silently gauging those around him as if wondering if others were as moved as he was.

*

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue assisted with this story.