“I don’t know much about you, see, so . . . ahhh . . . I got CNN to do a printout of your archives and I read through it. The stack was about a foot tall. So . . . ahhh . . . then I had them do a printout of my files and mine is about three feet tall.” Pause. “Mine’s bigger than yours! Pretty cute, huh?”
I was astonished—by his comparing our files, by his telling me about it, and by his favorable editorializing
. . . Pretty cute, huh?
All I could do was shake my head and laugh, telling him that I hadn’t known much about him, either, and had done my own, far less extensive research. He was bowling me over and my whole body was abuzz.
“I need a driver when I’m out here,” he explained, “ ’cause I don’t know my way around even though I actually owned a Hollywood studio . . . did you know I bought MGM?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I read that.”
“But I didn’t get to keep it for long. They ran me out of town in a barrel. I didn’t even get to use the casting couch. Kept the library, though. I own thirty-five percent of the greatest movie classics of all time, and I’m colorizing ’em. Young people these days don’t want to watch black-and-white movies. What’s your position on colorizing?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
“Scorsese’s against it. But, hey, women put on makeup and nobody gives a hoot. I think it’s gonna bring in a whole new audience.” During the brief pauses he seemed to hoover me up with his eyes. It was hard keeping my breathing steady.
I
had made a reservation at a small dark Italian restaurant in a neighborhood where I knew we would not run into reporters. As soon as we were seated I apologized for not feeling well, reminding him that I would need to go home right after dinner, whereupon he excused himself, saying he had to use the john. I naturally assumed he was calling some Hollywood starlet to make a late date now that he knew he wouldn’t be scoring with me.
As soon as he returned to the table he launched into a long speech about how he had been raised by his father to be a male chauvinist pig (his words); how his father always told him that women were like a bus (“If you missed one, another would always come along”); how his father drank a lot, had lots of women, and would come in late at night, wake up his young son, and recount the details of his evening’s exploits.
“I just think you should know that . . . ahhh . . . well, from a feminist perspective you’d say I was a sexist because of how my father raised me. But my mistress, the one I just broke up with—”
“The blond pilot?” I interrupted, wanting to be sure we were on the same page mistresswise.
“Yeah, that one, J.J. She’s . . . ahh . . . a feminist and she’s helped me to see things differently. I was actually . . . ahhh . . . magn . . . ahhh . . . mong . . . ahhh . . . magnanimous with her.”
“Are you trying to say ‘monogamous’?” I asked, this time laughing for real.
Oh my God! He can’t even get the word out of his mouth!
Then he gave me a recap of his credentials, always punctuating his sentences with a drawn-out “ahhh”: how he was an environmentalist, how he’d gotten his network to pay for and broadcast all of Jacques Cousteau’s documentaries and National Geographic’s and Audubon’s.
He told me that he had become an environmentalist growing up on his father’s plantations in the South; how he’d had a pretty unhappy childhood, always moving; how every time he’d come home from school his father would have bought a new place in a new state.
“So I never had many permanent friends and I sort of found solace in nature. I was always outside and I notice things other people don’t see. That’s because I pay attention, and besides, I’m a hunter. Hunters are real environmentalists—they’re the first ones to notice how things are changing. For instance, I noticed early on that there were fewer and fewer ducks migrating up and down the flyway every year. Are you against hunting?”
“No, but I’ve never done any.”
“Hmmm. Well, the real problem is too many people . . . too many damn people. We have to stop people from having so many kids. I have five myself, but that’s because I didn’t know better back then. Excuse me, I have to tighten my skates,” he said, getting up to go to the bathroom again. It was a journey he’d make four more times during the dinner. Could he be having difficulty getting a late date? “Tighten his skates”? Yeah, sure! What’d he take me for, a fool?
I’m certain I must have said
something
during the dinner. Surely he asked me questions about myself (besides if I was opposed to hunting), but I don’t recall anything coming from me, only what was coming
at
me in that boyish, irrepressible flood of information.
No sooner was he back at the table than with an involuntary sideways glance at my breasts, he asked, “Have you had . . .” and immediately stopped himself, flustered. “Never mind. It’s . . . ahhh, nothing,” he stammered, dropping his gaze to a neutral place on the tablecloth and arranging his face in an appropriate expression somewhere between contrition and gravity. I realized that he had been about to ask if I had breast implants (I chose not to satisfy his curiosity). What I didn’t realize was that I had just witnessed a historic moment, perhaps the only such: Ted Turner had actually decided not to say what was on his mind. Not knowing this, I couldn’t appreciate and be flattered by the Herculean effort at self-censorship it represented.
As he walked me to my door following dinner, he asked, “Can I hug you?” and when I nodded, he gave me a sweet, long hug. Then, as I opened the door, he said, “I’m smitten. . . . Ahh . . . listen, can I call you tomorrow?” I nodded and disappeared into the house. Smitten. So was I.
He called first thing in the morning. “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”
“No, I’m an early riser.”
“Hey, that’s terrific. Me too. That’s a good sign. Listen, I really like you. Do you think you can come spend a weekend at my ranch in Montana?”
“I really like you, too, Ted, and I’d like to get to know you better. But . . . I’m . . . well, to be honest, I’m not ready to have an affair. And I have to assume you’d expect us to sleep together if I went up there for the weekend. I’m still kind of shaky. So, no. I don’t think I should come.” There was a brief silence on the other end—a first.
“Well, okay.” He sounded like a Boy Scout. “We don’t have to sleep together. I have an extra guest room where you can stay. I . . . ahhh . . . promise I won’t touch you. Aw, come on. You’ll love it. Heck, your brother lives in Montana. It’s a great place.”
“I know, I’ve been there many times.”
“Well then, come on. We’ll drive around and I’ll show you all the critters. I’ve got elk and deer and eagles and . . .” He was relentless. Of course I caved.
“Okay. I’ll come. But I can’t until June, ’cause I’m going to the Cannes Film Festival with a film of mine and I’m real busy with promotions and stuff.”
“No kidding? Well . . . but that’s two weeks from now!”
“Yeah, that’s right, but that’s as good as I can do.” He reluctantly agreed, and we set a date for early June.
F
lying to Ted’s Montana ranch, I had no idea what to expect. Would he fetch me in a chauffeured limousine? Would his be one of those marble-floored faux ranches with a huge staff? I needn’t have worried. He was driving a small Jeep, and the ranch, when we finally got there over an hour later, was a very modest log cabin. Ted, I would learn, is frugal when it comes to spending money on personal comforts.
During the drive I couldn’t help noticing that Ted was exceedingly agitated, and I asked him why. For you to understand why his answer appeared to me as a miraculous coincidence, I must give some backstory: Following in the footsteps of the Mel Gibson movies
The Road Warrior
and
Mad Max
had been other films that gave a dark, apocalyptic view of the future, and this had made me want to make a film that went against all these grim projections, one that showed what might happen if we avoided Armageddon and did things right. “People need to be able to envision what the world we’re working for will look like,” I had told my new producing partner, Lois Bonfiglio. I had actually begun researching it. So imagine my astonishment when in answer to my question about his agitation, Ted replied:
“I’m so excited about this idea I have. I’ve decided to launch a worldwide contest with a cash reward for the best story that gives a positive vision of the future. I’m going to call it the Turner Tomorrow Award.”
“I don’t believe this! I’ve had the same idea, Ted, only I’ve thought of doing it as a movie.” I knew I was in a psychically susceptible state, but this seemed amazing. (Two years later the Turner prize was awarded to the now cult classic
Ishmael.
But no movie ever ensued, from either of us. By then I’d retired from filmmaking.)
Bouncing over rugged dirt roads, thirty minutes after entering his property, we finally arrived at the small house where we’d be staying. As soon as he’d put my suitcase in the (basement) guest room, Ted asked me to watch a videotaped speech he’d made at a recent National Abortion Rights Action League dinner defending a woman’s right to reproductive choice.
No sooner was that over than he dropped dramatically on one knee and recited, “ ‘At the feet of Hannibal / Then like a ripe plum Rome once lay / Oft he put the time of conquest / To a later, better day.’ . . . I wrote that myself, in high school. Pretty strong, huh? I was a classics major at Brown. Thucydides? Have you read him? I know his
History of the Peloponnesian War
and everything about Alexander the Great. He was my hero until I switched from war to peace. Martin Luther King and Gandhi are my heroes now. . . . Whaddaya think, huh?”
“Pretty cute,” I replied.
I
may have descended the basement stairs alone that night, but I had a dizzying head full of Turner to take to bed with me—he’d made sure of that. Like one of those male birds in a nature documentary that puffs and struts and fans his plumage in a wild mating dance, Ted had, it seemed, decided to conquer me. His efforts were endearing.
The sun was barely up the next morning when he yelled down for me to get dressed so we could have breakfast and go for an early drive. “Do you mind making breakfast?”
“No, of course not,” I answered, grateful to have something to do while acting as audience.
In the daylight I could see that we were situated at the bottom of a long, narrow valley surrounded by rocky cliffs. Sixteenmile Creek, the creator of the valley, meandered close by, looking far more riverlike than the word
creek
implied. I asked him how he had discovered this place, and over breakfast he recounted how the previous summer he had been a guest of a longtime friend at a ranch in Wyoming.
“I love fishing,” he explained, “but it’s been mostly bass. I’d never fly-fished before and I really liked it, and when I saw the views . . .” Of course. This man from the piney flatlands of the South had encountered vistas to match his expansive vision. Before even leaving Wyoming, he had called his friend’s real estate broker and the very next day he flew to Montana and purchased this “starter ranch,” as I would later refer to it.
“At first I couldn’t think of a good name for the place,” Ted went on, “but I thought it was the best ranch bar none, so that’s what I call it, the Bar None Ranch.” The place has more than quadrupled in size since then, but at three thousand acres it was the largest piece of private property I’d ever visited as a guest. When singer Michael Jackson told me he had bought a two-thousand-acre spread near my ranch in California, I thought it was sinful—one person owning that much land. What to make, then, of this acquisitive man who already owned one of the barrier islands off the coast of South Carolina near Hilton Head, an old rice plantation in the same state, a quail-hunting plantation in north Florida, and a one-hundred-acre farm outside Atlanta?
After breakfast we took off in the Jeep, bouncing over miles of old logging roads that switchbacked from one pine-covered mountain to the next through breathtaking terrain. Elk and mule deer were everywhere, just as he’d promised. Even a black bear and a bald eagle managed to make an appearance, as if called up by Ted. At one point he leaned out the car window and pointed to a bird flying in silhouette high overhead. “See that?” he asked. “That’s a ferruginous hawk.” Another time it was a red-tailed hawk. I’d never known anyone who could recognize birds on the wing in silhouette. I was duly impressed.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“By how their wings move. I know a lot about birds. I’m sort of an ornithologist. You know that songbirds are becoming extinct? You know there used to be so many passenger pigeons that the sky would be darkened when they flew over? There are none left. We wiped them all out. And squirrels used to be able to travel through treetops from the East Coast to the Mississippi River without ever touching ground. Can’t do that now. The trees are gone.” I was mesmerized, thinking how much I could learn from this man.
“I gotta stop for a second and tighten my skates.” And with that he left the motor running, jumped out, and peed off the side of the road, his back barely turned.
In fact, nature called Mr. Turner every ten minutes or so. After several of these stops I had to laugh. “When you kept going to the bathroom during our dinner date,” I confessed to him, “I had assumed you were arranging a late date with a starlet, but I see it was just paranoia on my part.”