Ted Turner’s Focus Shifts From Getting to Giving

In a sprawling office perched atop an empire he no longer rules, the man once called Captain Outrageous is cowering-- chin on his knees, hands clasped over his head.

Ted Turner is obsessed with nuclear weapons, with their potential for blowing the world into bits, even after the Cold War. At the moment, he is demonstrating a 1950s civil-defense drill for schoolchildren: “Duck and cover,” he says.

Ten years ago, Turner ducked from no one. He was the self-styled “Mouth of the South,” Time’s Man of the Year, the mogul who turned the globe into a village that watched itself on cable 24 hours a day.

Now his title is vice chairman and senior advisor of AOL Time Warner, a corporate monster two mega-mergers removed from swallowing up the broadcasting empire that bore his name.

“If only I had a little humility,” Turner once said, “I’d be perfect.”

And now he has his wish.

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Most of the pictures and framed magazine covers in Turner’s penthouse office at CNN Center are years old, his hair no darker than a salt-and-pepper mix. They show a different man--the one who had to apologize for calling Christianity a religion “for losers.” The one who compared Rupert Murdoch to Hitler.

Today, Turner’s hair is white. And the man who vowed CNN would be on the air until the end of time makes vague references to the end of his own.

“I’m 62 years old,” he said flatly in a recent interview with the Associated Press. “I’m closer to the end than the beginning.”

It is a strange sound--an admission of mortality from the man credited with changing television forever and helping to change the face of the West with his 1.7 million acres of ranches in Western states.

Along the way, Turner became a symbol of money and power. It was never clear which he wanted more.

That all changed in the mid-1990s, when Turner became a player in billion-dollar corporate mergers. He traded control for cash, piling up a $9.1-billion fortune while loosening his grip on his own kingdom--and watching his firecracker reputation slip away.

First he folded Turner Broadcasting System into giant Time Warner, accepting an unfamiliar No. 2 role and becoming the largest single shareholder of the world’s biggest media and entertainment company.

“When he merged with Time Warner, it was almost, I think, treated with a very subtle kind of disrespect,” said Reese Schonfeld, who helped Turner launch CNN in 1980. “They honored most of his wishes and sneered at him behind his back.”

Then America Online swallowed Time Warner whole, and Turner became a vice chairman, an advisor and--many would argue--a figurehead. He’s watched as the new corporation has divvied up his creation and fired some of his closest friends.

The AOL announcement came just days after Turner and actress Jane Fonda made their separation public, breaking up one of America’s best-known couples.

Schonfeld, who recently published a book lashing out at CNN as a bold idea that has wasted away to failure, said Turner knew his life-- business and personal--was changing in the late 1990s.

“Ted is a very smart man,” he said. “I feel certain that he knew what was going on and was happy enough to end this. I think he just started looking for other fields.”

He was a man with nothing to do --and billions of dollars to do it with.

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Listening to words come out of Ted Turner’s mouth is like watching water come out of a kinked garden hose. The information trickles out in stops and starts, unpredictable.

Asked about his role in AOL Time Warner, he freezes and folds his arms across his tie, which features a blinding collaboration of foreign flags. “I’ve talked enough about that,” he says sharply. He will not say even that much about the end of his marriage; it is one of the ground rules for this interview that the subject not be raised.

But ask him about all the money he is giving away--hundreds of millions of dollars he has donated over the past five years to a dizzying array of causes--and he gushes.

“I’m concerned about everything on the planet,” he said. “The health of the human race. You have to have your heart, your brain, your lungs, your kidneys. You have to save everything in order to save anything.”

And the receipts say he is trying to do just that.

Turner gives about $50 million each year to the Turner Foundation, sending the money to causes ranging from promotion of population control to saving wolves and black-footed ferrets.

He is spreading out a $1-billion donation to the United Nations in pieces, making sure it goes to four priorities--women and population, children’s health, the environment and security. Last year he added a $34-million pledge to the United Nations to cover a reduced U.S. contribution to its budget in 2001.

And he has matched the millions with smaller gifts, assigning them with microscopic range, like the $500 he gave to the volunteer fire department of Gordon, Neb., which helped fight a blaze on his ranch there.

Most wealthy philanthropists have a handful of different interests, but Turner’s laundry list of causes is unusual, said Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

“He gets wrapped up in a lot of passions,” she said. “And his philanthropy reflects that.”

For the moment, Turner’s biggest passion seems to be nuclear weapons. He raves about “Thirteen Days,” the Kevin Costner drama about the Cuban missile crisis, when the world paused on the brink of annihilation.

He is fond of the phrase “hair-trigger alert,” slang for nations’ capability to launch weapons of mass destruction with only precious minutes of warning.

“We assumed that the world would become safer when the Cold War was over,” he said. “The world basically moved on to other problems--the economy, the Internet. We’ve lived with these things for so long that we just kind of got used to them. I figured we needed to get it back on the agenda.”

Turner committed $250 million over five years to reducing nuclear arsenals, joining former Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, who commended the mogul for committing his “energy, creativity and resources” to the problem.

“He has more time as he steps back from some of his business commitments,” Palmer said. “It’ll be interesting to see what his next phase is.”

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Turner acknowledges that he is only a small part of the AOL Time Warner giant, controlling 3% of the conglomerate. He talks about the 1980s and early 1990s, “when CNN reported to me.”

But control and competitiveness, two hallmarks of his reputation, remain key to his character. About the same time Turner focused his attention on giving away his fortune, he came up with an idea to encourage other billionaires to do the same.

Why not rank them? Why not list them, the way Turner’s class is ranked by their success in business?

“There was no similar way in which you were rewarded [for giving],” Palmer said. “He started putting the word out to magazines. It’s clear that some of that competitive juice had been stirred up.”

He topped Fortune magazine’s list in 1998, which counted his $1-billion gift to the United Nations. And he chided Microsoft pioneer Bill Gates for not giving more: “What good is wealth sitting in the bank?”

Gates and his wife led a list released in January by the Chronicle, giving $5 billion in 2000. Turner ranked 14th.

“I started giving money because I had money,” he said. “If you’re a dancer, dance. If you’re a writer, write. If you’ve got a lot of money, contribute.”

Peter Arnett, a Turner friend who reported from Baghdad during CNN’s Gulf War heyday but left the network after a reprimand for a 1998 story that was retracted, said Turner’s new role has left him much more time to devote to advancing causes.

“He’s sitting up there, but he’s not in the chain of command anymore,” Arnett said.

“When you look at the man, he’s done such a hell of a lot. Any one of those areas would make a great obituary item. And who knows what he’ll do in the future?”

What, if anything at all? Ted Turner, who built a reputation on restlessness, who for years seemed to fire off his mouth and his checkbook without warning, talks as though he is satisfied, finally, with what he has created.

Not that he shies from the notion of leaving a legacy. He makes no secret of wanting the money he has given away to ensure his influence decades from now, even as his corporate influence dwindles before his eyes.

“I’m perfectly happy,” Turner said. “In the old westerns, the hero would ride over the hill into the sunset.”

He grins. “And disappear.”

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Turner Foundation:

https://www.turnerfoundation.org

U.N. Foundation:

https://www.unfoundation.org

Turner Endangered Species Fund:

https://www.tesf.org

Nuclear Threat Initiative:

https://www.ntiscope.org

The Chronicle of Philanthropy:

https://www.philanthropy.com