I asked my assistant to find Jane Fonda’s number and when I called I got right to the point. I told her that I’d read that her marriage with Tom Hayden had ended and I wanted to see if she’d like to go out with me. She was taken aback and told me that her divorce had just gone through—she said she was flattered by my interest but that she needed six months before she thought she’d be ready to date again. I told her I understood and after a few more brief words, we hung up. I’ve always believed that if you really want something, hard work is important and so is follow-through. In this case, I really wanted to go out with her, so when she told me she needed six months, I made a note to call her back then. When the day arrived, precisely six months after our first phone conversation, I called her again. I said, “Hi, it’s Ted Turner. The six months are up. Will you go out with me now?” She must have appreciated my persistence because she said yes and we agreed to see each other for dinner during my next trip to Los Angeles.
I picked her up at her home in Santa Monica and I was taken with her the moment she met me at the door. From meeting her before and watching her in the movies I knew she was attractive, but as we talked through our dinner date I was surprised by the strength of our connection. Knowing that a lot of people assumed I was a male chauvinist and a greedy capitalist, I was up front with her. I let her know that my dad had raised me without a lot of respect for women and that this was something I’d been working hard to change, especially with my most recent girlfriend. And knowing of Jane’s political leanings, I even bragged to her about how many friends I had who were communists, including Castro and Gorbachev! I always tend to talk a lot when I’m excited or nervous and that night I was really excited.
Before our date I’d done research on Jane and while a lot of people saw us as an unlikely couple, we really did have a lot in common. We both had difficult, complicated fathers and we both had a parent commit suicide (Jane’s mother killed herself when Jane was just twelve years old). I could tell right away that she was very smart and a hard worker. My sense was that, like me, she had a difficult upbringing that contributed to her drive to be a super achiever. Jane and I also figured out very quickly that we cared about a lot of the same issues. Our first date together ended with a hug and I told her that I was smitten. I knew that Jane Fonda was someone I wanted to get to know better.
It took a little persuasion but I convinced Jane to come visit my ranch in Montana that I had purchased a year before. I’d already acquired quite a bit of property but by this point not much in the West. In addition to Hope Plantation, in the late 1970s I purchased St. Phillip’s Island (near Hilton Head, South Carolina) and I owned an 8,000-acre plantation near Tallahassee, Florida, called Avalon. I also owned a beautiful piece of land and house on the coast of Big Sur, California. (I bought this when I was dating J. J.) I’d spent most of my recreation time on southern plantations or on the high seas, but I quickly fell in love with the beauty of Big Sky Country. Not only was the scenery spectacular (and there were a lot fewer biting bugs than in the Southeast), I discovered that fly-fishing on a mountain stream calms my nerves and is a delightful pastime. Since I was no longer sailing, fishing and hunting became my main sources of relaxation.
My Montana ranch was beautiful, covering four thousand acres and with access to tremendous trout streams. Since it was the best property I’d seen out there, bar none, I decided to name it the Bar None Ranch. I remember how excited I was when I first went out there as a landowner. I went into the local store and bought a couple of pairs of stiff new jeans, western boots, and a cowboy hat. Walking out of the store I looked like a city slicker—I think I still had the price tag on my hat—and I’m sure the locals on the street got a good laugh!
Jane accepted my invitation to spend the weekend in Montana and we shared an incredible few days. Being out there together was a special time for us. It was a great chance to get to know each other better and by the end of that trip I was thinking that Jane was someone with whom I could spend the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, Jane wasn’t quite there yet, and shortly after she returned to Los Angeles, she let me know that she was dating an Italian soccer player turned actor who was seventeen years her junior. For Jane, I was a “younger man,” too—she had me by eleven months. I’d jokingly refer to him as her “Italian Stallion” and asked why she insisted on discriminating against older guys like me! I wouldn’t give up, and I continued to stay in touch—I’d call, send flowers, anything I could think of to help her realize that I was still interested.
Finally, in January of 1990, her sister-in-law called to let me know that Jane had broken up with the “Italian Stallion” and was ready to go out with me. It was a great beginning to what would prove to be another eventful decade.
“Give Me Land, Lots of Land”
A
fter buying the Bar None Ranch and spending increasing amounts of time in Montana, I fell even more in love with the area. When I enjoy something, I have a tendency to overdo it, and when I was told that a larger ranch was coming on the market, I was interested. Jane and I were still getting used to the scale of the Bar None when I told her that now I was going to look into a property that was many times larger. The Flying D Ranch is more than 119,000 acres, situated between the Gallatin and Madison Rivers. It’s a beautiful property with good trout streams and it had a lot of pasture that would be perfect for a large bison herd. Jane thought I was crazy but for $21 million (or about $200 an acre) it seemed like it would not only be a great place, but also a terrific investment. I bought it in 1989.
Like most large ranches, the Flying D contained a lot of signs of human impact, like power lines and poles and barbwire fences. One of the first things I wanted to do was get rid of all this junk and barbed wire. My goal was to restore the property to what it would have looked like 150 years earlier, before the white man came. It was a lot of work, but we removed just about every sign of human disturbance, save the dirt and gravel roads.
Part of my desire to own this land was to make sure that it was never developed. Conserving this property for future generations seemed like the right thing to do, especially with so much development happening in that part of the country. I worked out a conservation easement with the Nature Conservancy that guarantees that the Flying D ranch will remain open space. I also began work to repopulate the property with bison, an animal that I’d been fascinated by for years. I’d purchased my first bison back in the 1970s—a bull and two cows—and kept them at Hope Plantation (where I also enjoyed raising and breeding bears, cougars, and other animals that had been native to that area in earlier days). I knew that the bison population had once numbered in the tens of millions before dropping to below a thousand, and for the Flying D to look like it looked hundreds of years before, we needed a large herd.
A TED STORY
“A Giant Environmental Canvas”
—Russ Miller
(RUSS MILLER IS VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER OF TURNER ENTERPRISES, INC.)
I first met Ted in 1989 when he bought the Flying D. He invited ranch manager Bud Griffith and me up to the porch of the Spanish Creek house and we sat on the deck surveying the view shed in front of him. Ted had a book of prints by Karl Bodmer open on his lap. As we all sat there, Ted would look down at the print and up at the view shed, down at his lap, back up at the view. Finally, he looked at Bud and me and he said, “You see all that stuff out there?”
And we said, “What do you mean?”
“The haying equipment, the farm equipment, all of the buildings, all of the fences, all of the power lines, and the cattle, they’re all gone, because I want the landscape to look like these Bodmers.”
It was apparent to me then that Ted was a romantic artist and he saw the landscape as a giant environmental canvas.
Then, about a week later, Ted invited some of the leaders of the bison industry up to the Spanish Creek house again to talk about the prospect of raising bison on his ranches. After grilling them at length about the details of the prospective income and expense associated with bison he grinned at me and said, “Not only are we going to run bison, we’re going to make more money than cattle ranchers!”
At that point I knew that Ted also was an astute businessman and that he saw the landscape as a compelling spreadsheet. About three years later Ted asked me to go to New Mexico to go and look at the Ladder Ranch, which he was considering buying. When I reported back to him that his happier bison would roam in Montana and not in New Mexico, he reminded me that the Ladder Ranch was home to three kinds of indigenous quail. In this conversation I realized that Ted also saw his land as a haven—a safe haven for native species. Now all three of those vignettes came together eight years and ten ranches later at our ranch manager’s conference. All of us who worked for Ted knew what his land ethic was firsthand. We’d lived and breathed it for the last ten years. But Ted joined us because he wanted to formalize that ethic in a mission statement, which was to manage Turner lands in an economically sustainable and ecologically sensitive manner, while promoting the conservation of native species. That to me captures what Ted’s land ethic is. Bison are the common thread that runs through all the ranches, but there are others as well. The thread of native flora, the thread of native fauna, and all woven together they create a rich tapestry that’s unified, diverse, and strong.
During my early years of ranch ownership, my enthusiasm did lead me to make some mistakes. For example, the Flying D had hundreds of miles of barbed wire fencing and I had every bit of it removed, thinking this would allow the bison to roam free on about eighty thousand acres. I learned that when you do this, the animals tend to overgraze certain areas and undergraze others, and we had to bring back some limited fencing—not barbwire, I might add.
The Bar None and Flying D gave me so much pleasure that I decided to buy as many large properties as I could reasonably afford. By the end of the 1990s, I had purchased two more ranches in Montana, three in Nebraska, one in Kansas, and one in South Dakota (they’re used primarily for bison ranching). Then between 1992 and 1996, I bought three large ranches in New Mexico. The biggest, Vermejo Park, is nearly 600,000 acres, and together these three ranches cover more than one million acres. They are also used for bison ranching, as well as hunting and fishing, and Vermejo sits on top of valuable natural gas that is being extracted by an energy company that has the rights. They do this work very carefully, extracting the gas while protecting the ranch’s beauty and wildlife.
I’ve also enjoyed working on the return and protection of threatened and endangered species. In addition to bison (of which we now have about 45,000 head), we’ve worked to reintroduce about twenty other species. These include gray wolves, red-cockaded woodpeckers, and black-footed ferrets. These were all challenging projects so I looked for the best people I could to help manage the properties. I hired Russ Miller in 1989 and he’s been with me ever since, doing a terrific job as general manager of the ranches. In 1997 I created the Turner Endangered Species Fund, recruiting Mike Phillips (who led the effort to bring back the gray wolf to Yellowstone) to run the organization, along with my son Beau, who studied wildlife management at Montana State University after graduating from The Citadel.
In Montana, I learned to love fly-fishing. It’s one of the few things I do that’s not only interesting and challenging but also relaxing. Unfortunately, it’s not a sport you can enjoy during a Montana winter (except on rare occasions), but I learned that there are rivers and areas in the Patagonia region of Argentina that are similar to those in Montana. Since South America is counter- seasonal to the United States, I could fish there during the North American winter. In ’97 I purchased a nine-thousand-acre ranch in Patagonia named La Primavera, and in 2000, a 93,000-acre property named Collon Cura. I also bought a 24,000-acre ranch and fishing lodge on the island of Tierra del Fuego. These three properties all feature great fly-fishing.
Subsequently, I acquired two more ranches on the Great Plains of Nebraska and one in Oklahoma, primarily for raising bison. Today, with over 2 million acres, I’m the largest individual landowner in the United States. We operate our ranches responsibly from an environmental viewpoint and also have an outfitting business that allows hunters and fishermen to use our properties on a limited basis. With revenues from bison sales, some controlled forestry, energy leases, and private hunting and fishing, the ranches turn a small profit.
Owning the properties has given me tremendous pleasure. My connection to nature goes back to my early childhood when I spent hours outdoors either alone or with Jimmy Brown. I’d fish, gig for frogs, or just observe the wildlife around me and these times helped me through a lot of my loneliness and gave me great peace of mind. Being outdoors is my chance to unwind, clear my head, and think. The time I spend in nature refreshes and recharges me and reminds me how much raw beauty exists in the world—and how careful we should be to preserve it. The ranches are also great places for me to spend time with friends. On nearly every trip I make in the United States or Argentina, I invite friends and family. I’ve also hosted business colleagues and world leaders. (I’m proud to say that three Nobel Peace Prize winners have been among my houseguests—Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.) I also enjoy observing and interacting with nature and it’s a special feeling to be part of the natural environment.
One of my favorite experiences involves a bird I befriended several years ago at my Snow Crest Ranch in Montana. It was a baby magpie that had fallen out of its nest and was lying on the ground. My house staff and I pulled together a box, some paper towels, and an eyedropper, and gave it food and water. The little magpie responded and we pulled him through. In the process we bonded, and I named him Harry. We bought a traveling cage for him and took him with us when we moved from one ranch to another. He learned to talk and wound up providing great entertainment. We would let him out of the cage during the day and he’d follow me around. When I’m at a ranch I get a FedEx package from my office of the previous day’s mail. With Harry, I’d sit on my couch reading my mail and once I was through, I’d crush the pages into a ball and throw them on the ground for Harry to play with. He charmed everyone (including Gorbachev—he sat next to his coffee cup one morning at breakfast and gave him a couple of light pecks on his famous forehead). Harry became a little too feisty and ran into trouble when he started dive-bombing people and we were concerned that he might put someone’s eye out. We decided we had to take Harry to the Beartooth Nature Center in Red Lodge, Montana. He still lives there, and to this day, whenever I see magpies flying overhead, I think of my old pal Harry.