For Ted Turner, 1996 was another banner year. By merging his phenomenally successful Turner Broadcasting with global media conglomerate Time Warner, Turner emerged as the largest single Time Warner stockholder, retaining shares valued at about $2.7 billion. Last year Turner also celebrated the 20th anniversary of TBS Superstation, CNN’s 16th year on the air and, on a personal note, five years of marital bliss with actress and fitness queen Jane Fonda.

Despite his successes, however, critics continue to nip at Turner’s heels. At every step on his roller-coaster ride from outdoor advertising salesman to cable television magnate (with side ventures as America’s Cup champion, major league baseball owner and buffalo rancher) the naysayers have predicted Turner’s inevitable fall. Just as consistently he has proven them wrong, often surpassing even his own overly optimistic predictions before blithely moving on to the next seemingly insurmountable challenge.

Few would have anticipated Ted Turner’s success. He posted only mediocre grades at a high school military academy – while resetting the school’s record books for hours spent marching off demerits for his numerous infractions.

Modest academic record aside, Turner’s school days offered glimpses of the competitive fire and persistence that would characterize his later successes in the business world. Lacking any real athletic skill, the young Turner eagerly turned his attention to sailing, a sport where he could replace strength and coordination with determination, intelligence and skill. His desire to win every race quickly earned Turner the nickname “Turnover Teddy” for his frequent capsizings.

In his high school sailing club Turner was eager to prove that he could sail year-round, causing one teacher to recall that Ted would sail “in weather where no sane human being would ever set foot in a sailboat,” according to the Porter Bibb biography It Ain’t As Easy As It Looks. Turner has explained that his early dedication to excellence stemmed from one singular desire.

“I was interested in one thing,” he says in Bibb’s book, “and that was finding out what you could accomplish if you really tried. My interest was always in why people did the things they did, and what causes people to rise to glorious heights.”

Continuing his competitive ways at Brown, in his sophomore year Turner helped the University sailing team win the prestigious Timme Angston Trophy Regatta in Chicago. To win the regatta’s final race, Turner boldly chose to sail across a patch of ice the other boats had skirted. If his boat managed to cross the ice safely, he would gain a pivotal advantage. If not, the consequences could be dire.

Holding their breath, the Brown team pulled up rudder, wobbled across the patch and nearly capsized on the other side. But they made it. With chattering teeth, frozen toes and a boat half-filled with water, the Brown crew triumphantly crossed the finish line and brought home the trophy. The race was quintessential Ted Turner. He was to frequently follow the same pattern facing future challenges, succeeding by using his instincts as a guide, taking bold risks and flouting conventional wisdom.

The billboard wonder kid

Turner returned home to Georgia after his departure from Brown and began work for his father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising. A legendary salesman who had turned a small-time outdoor advertising firm into a multimillon-dollar enterprise, Ed Turner cast a considerable shadow. He insisted, however, that his son bring in his share of new customers before being considered for management. Having the good fortune to inherit his father’s charm, the younger Turner was more than up to the challenge.

Former Turner Advertising sales rep Hudson Edwards recalled to unauthorized Turner biographer Porter Bibb, “Ted was one of the greatest salesmen in the world. Just like his father. Either one of them could charm a rattlesnake.”

In 1960, with new bride and fellow sailing aficionado Judy Nye at his side, the 21-year-old Ted took over Turner Advertising’s Macon office, throwing himself into the work with missionary zeal, often logging 15-hour days, seven days a week at the office. His personal credo was “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise,” and in just two years Turner doubled sales at the Macon office, simultaneously insinuating himself into local business circles.

By 1962 Turner Advertising was doing so well that Ed Turner decided to make the leap into the big time. He decided to acquire the Atlanta, Richmond, Norfolk and Roanoke offices of General Outdoor Advertising, the country’s largest billboard company, using money borrowed against General Outdoor’s own assets. Turner Advertising would become the largest billboard company in the south.

Ted was ecstatic about the deal, especially after being named assistant general manager of the Atlanta branch, but his father’s enthusiasm seemed to dim. Despite all indications that he had landed a plum, Ed Turner slowly began to sink into a deep depression, increasing his already-dangerous binge drinking and chain smoking. Just five months after closing the deal and against his son’s objections, the elder Turner resold the new holdings to his business partner, Bob Naegele, for little more than he had paid. Surprising as this turn of events must have seemed to friends and business colleagues, however, a greater shock was yet to come when on March 5, 1963, Ed Turner took his own life.

Ted at the helm

Ted was devastated by the news of his father’s death. Ed Turner left his son money in the bank and what remained of Turner Advertising, but the ambitious Ted could only be satisfied by recapturing the entire business. Flying out to Palm Springs to confront Naegele, Ted dropped the bombshell that he intended to renege on his father’s deal. Naegele had bought the business from Ed more out of friendship than any Machiavellian aims, so he easily acquiesced, even giving Ted five years to come up with the cash to finance the buyback.

At just 24, sitting atop a mountain of debt but thrilled to have his father’s company whole again, Ted assumed the task of running Turner Advertising. To his pleasant surprise, Turner discovered that the billboard business practically minted money.

While Turner Advertising was thriving, however, all was not rosy at home. Long weary of Ted’s mood swings, Turner’s wife, Judy, left him after only two years, taking their two children with her.

By the late ’60s Turner began growing bored with the day-to-day tedium of running a successful regional billboard company. He started casting around for new challenges and soon set his sights on the broadcasting industry, specifically WAPO, a small-time Chattanooga station. Despite his eagerness to own the station, Turner decided to play it cool and told WAPO’s financially strapped owners he needed time to think over the deal.

Before he could make an offer, however, another buyer stepped in and closed a deal. Turner was beside himself. Never one to accept defeat, he wound up buying WAPO from the new owner for an additional $300,000 and stock options. Turner learned from the WAPO negotiation never to hesitate over a decision. In future deals of much greater consequence, he would simply decide on the spot. On the heels of WAPO the company acquired another Chattanooga radio station as well as one in Jacksonville and two in Charleston.

Turner also had a unique ability to inspire others to share his dreams. Longtime family financial advisor Irwin Mazo says that it was well nigh impossible to avoid getting caught up in Turner’s enthusiasm.

“He could have retired anytime during those early years and never looked back,” Mazo told Porter Bibb. “But then we started making acquisitions, always trying to use the other guys’ money. That was Ted’s genius. He could charm the pants off anybody when he wanted to. Usually the fellow we acquired would turn around and work twice as hard for Ted as he ever had for himself. When Ted made his next move, into radio, it didn’t make a lot of sense until you heard Ted explain it. Then, suddenly, we weren’t Turner Advertising anymore, we were the Turner Communications Company.”

Turner and television

After radio, Turner Communications took the next logical step into the burgeoning television market. When WJRJ, a local Atlanta uhf station, came onto the market, Turner jumped at the chance. Hemorrhaging money at $50,000 a month, and within 30 days of going under, WJRJ appeared to observers as a singularly poor investment for Turner. Even though the station was Atlanta’s number-two independent uhf station, WJRJ’s internal research showed that only 5 percent of the city’s households could even pick up its signal.

Turner ignored the appeals for caution from the company’s board of directors and from Mazo, who foresaw the station sinking Turner Communications, and went ahead with the purchase. He considered television merely another means of selling advertising, and advertising was one business he knew well.

For the actual deal, however, Turner did carry an ace up his sleeve. As with the purchase of Outdoor Advertising, Turner reverse-merged Turner Communications with the station’s ownership in a tax-free stock swap, exchanging no cash in the process.

Turner wound up in control of the combined company and went public in the process. Without skipping a beat he then turned around and bought another television station, this one in Charlotte, North Carolina, causing Mazo to resign in protest. Turner Communications took on an additional $3 million in debt for the Charlotte station and Turner himself borrowed $250,000 against his signature.

Despite valid criticisms that the company could not afford these deals and that he knew absolutely nothing about the broadcasting business, Turner followed his instincts and forged ahead.

“I love it when people say I can’t do something,” he is quoted as saying by biographer Robert Goldberg. “There’s nothing that makes me feel better, because all my life people have been telling me that I wasn’t going to make it.”

Turner discovered synergy long before it became a corporate catch phrase: He began using his unsold billboard space to promote his radio and television stations to the public. In television he discovered the practice of counterprogramming, running Star Trek reruns and old movies against the networks’ news shows and Sunday morning religious programs and thereby drawing the greatest possible audience. Unlike most independent stations, which leased the rights to show old movies, whenever possible Turner bought films outright so his stations could run the films as often as he wanted.

And run them he did. With a minuscule operating budget and antiquated facilities, the Atlanta station (renamed WTCG for Turner Communications Group) offered its small viewing audience a steady black-and-white diet of dusted-off Hollywood fare – reruns of Lassie, Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver – and professional wrestling’s savage ballet.

A significant chunk of the station’s advertising consisted of low-cost direct advertising – WTCG hawked everything from wok steamers and priceless recordings “not available in stores” to invincible Ginzu knives, which could cut through a tin can.

Natural-born salesman

Always a lightning-quick study, Turner immersed himself in the business of running a TV station, poring over every available broadcasting journal and rating book. Of course he also added a peculiar selling and managerial style few had encountered. Despite WTCG’s lackluster programming Turner encouraged his salespeople to go after nationwide accounts like Sears that they had little chance of landing. He never faulted them for failing either.

“Never look back,” he would tell them about the big fish that got away. “Don’t worry about it. Just keep moving forward,” according to biographer Goldberg.

Not that he went easy on prospective customers himself. His sometimes bizarre selling tactics rapidly achieved legendary status around the station halls. From jumping onto tables and screaming to kissing a prospect’s feet, Turner pulled out all the stops. Facing a particularly stubborn client Turner would fall to the ground yelling, “You’re killing me!”

To stem the flow of red out of the Charlotte station he even staged a 24-hour “Beg-a-thon,” imploring viewers to send money in to save the station. His act brought almost $50,000 into the struggling station in donations ranging from 25 cents to $100. As much as they questioned his sanity, none of Turner’s critics ever denied his prodigious talent for sales.

And it wasn’t just his customers who found Turner’s come-ons persuasive. Local bankers nearly fell all over each other to lend him money. Turner later described his early strategy for squeezing capital from otherwise reluctant bankers: “What you do is you get a bank, and you borrow all you can borrow,” he would tell business groups. “You borrow so much that they can’t foreclose on you.” He would refer to this as “the secret of my success.”

Soon enough the bankers caught on to Turner’s schemes and began demanding that he accelerate his payments. Not one to be trifled with, Turner always had a solemn response at the ready. “Keep pressing me,” he would threaten, “and I’ll just kill myself, and then you won’t get anything.” Associates said that Turner frequently referred to suicide as the ultimate trump card, the final solution if the house of cards were ever to come crashing down.

Turner’s brave move

Despite his curious high-profile approach to broadcasting, few outside the Atlanta business community knew who Ted Turner was. All that changed in 1976 when he shelled out $12 million to purchase the woeful Atlanta Braves baseball franchise. WTCG had been carrying Braves games since 1973 and utilizing microwave land lines to spread the station’s signal throughout the south to regional cable television operators.

Adding the Braves to his growing empire fit into Turner’s overall scheme to own all of WTCG’s programming, so he jumped at the opportunity, following his father’s credo: “If you really have to have something, it’s worth whatever you pay for it.”

Typical protocol dictated that owners watch games from lofty private boxes, but Turner opted for a front-row seat. At games he would doff his shirt, drink beer and bask in the sun like any other fan. During his first game as owner the exuberant Turner even ran out onto the field to congratulate a Braves player who had hit a home run.

Braves attendance for 1976 nearly doubled the previous year’s draw. Later that year he added the Hawks, Atlanta’s pro basketball franchise, to his ownership portfolio. And while the city of Atlanta seemed taken with their unconventional new impresario, the league brass were far less amused by Turner’s antics.

When the Braves pursued San Francisco Giants outfielder Gary Matthews in clear violation of league rules, commissioner Bowie Kuhn decided to make an example of Turner. Two weeks after the end of the World Series, Kuhn sent Turner a curt notice, suspending him for the entire 1977 season.

Turner cast himself in the role of martyr and rallied Atlanta’s citizenry to his defense. Ignoring an agreement he and the other 25 owners had signed binding them to any decision by the commissioner, Turner took his case to federal court. He knew he had little chance of overturning the suspension, but he really didn’t care. He loved the publicity and besides, he had already planned to spend the summer in Newport, Rhode Island, sailing for the America’s Cup trophy.

The Kuhn suspension also revealed another key Ted Turner strategy he would repeatedly use to elevate his power and stature. As Goldberg reported, Turner told Braves publicist Bob Hope: “If you want to get to the top, you’ve got to argue with the top. If there’s a big guy and a little guy in an argument, if the big guy will argue with him, the big guy doesn’t come down to his level. The little guy rises up to his level. Now I’m in a fight with Bowie Kuhn. He’s big and he’s important and he’s commissioner. I’m gonna fight him for all he’s worth as long as he’ll fight back, so I can rise up to his level.”

The newsman cometh

Throughout the 1970s Ted Turner’s personal stock had steadily risen in the world of cable television operators and station owners. As cable television’s most vocal and high-profile advocate Turner spoke to anyone who would listen to him fulminate against the big three networks and tout cable’s offerings. In 1976 he testified in front of the House Subcommittee on Communication that the networks had a “virtual stranglehold on what Americans see and think” and that they “do not operate in the public good, showing overemphasis on murder and violence.”

At the same time openly envious of the networks’ reach and influence, Turner was always on the lookout for ways to muscle one or two of his fingers into their “stranglehold” on the American public. In 1978 Turner decided he was ready to make his assault on the networks. His weapon of choice? An all-news cable channel called CNN.

For friends and foes alike Turner’s announcement on May 21, 1979, that in little more than a year he would go on the air with an all-news format was nothing short of astonishing. This, after all, was the man who openly admitted that in his lifetime he had watched fewer than 100 hours of TV news and who had been heard to remark: “I hate the news. It makes people feel bad. I don’t want anything to do with the news.”

Turner knew he would need credible news professionals on board, however, to make CNN work. His first two hires, Reese Schonfeld, who had previously been running his own not-for-profit news syndication company, and veteran correspondent Daniel Schorr, sent the message that Turner was serious about the project.

Turner left the nuts and bolts work to Schonfeld and directed his attention to raising the station’s estimated $30 million start-up costs. With a personal fortune estimated at $100 million and glad to put many of his personal assets up as collateral, Turner had little difficulty obtaining a $20 million line of credit from the First National Bank of Chicago. For additional funds he sold the Charlotte television station to Westinghouse for $20 million, netting a healthy profit on the less than $1 million he had personally put up to buy the station 10 years previously. Time Inc., Scripps-Howard and the Washington Post Company had all considered, then shelved plans for an all-news channel, but Turner considered his venture a sound risk.

“There is risk in everything you do,” he told Newsweek in 1980. “The sky could fall, the roof cave in; who knows what’s going to happen? I’m going to do news like the world has never seen news done before.”

As usual, he was right. On June 1, 1980, Cable News Network went on the air and, despite numerous fits and starts, has been on ever since. Although criticized in those early days as the “Chicken Noodle Network,” CNN immediately established itself as a player, frequently upstaging the networks with its ability to go live, almost anywhere in the world, at any time. It has been frequently noted that CNN changed news from something that had happened into something that was happening.

On the down side CNN failed to generate advertisers the way Turner had hoped and began operations bleeding at a rate of $1-2 million a month. Operating on a nickel-and-dime budget using inexperienced, non-union staff, CNN more than once filled its 24-hour-day schedule with on-air flubs and blunders. The exploding light bulb that lit Schorr’s clothes on fire and weatherman Stu Siroka’s life-and-death struggle with the revolving panels of a weather map were just two of the forehead-smacking gaffes that embarrassed the station’s production staff.

Off-camera Turner felt compelled to sue President Ronald Reagan, Chief of Staff James Baker and all three networks over CNN’s exclusion from the official White House press pool.

Paradoxically, exclusion from the press pool indicated just how threatening the big three found the upstart CNN. By late 1981, CBS had opened covert channels to Turner expressing interest in buying CNN from him. While always willing to listen to others tell him what his company was worth, Turner refused the CBS offer. Of greater concern was ABC’s response to CNN. In conjunction with Westinghouse Broadcasting, ABC Video announced plans to launch Satellite News Channel, a 24-hour “headline” news channel to compete directly with CNN.

TV news wars

Westinghouse’s deep pockets and existing news-gathering apparatus presented a serious challenge. Never happier than when faced with a crisis, Turner prepared for the fight of his life. Brandishing a favorite Confederate Army saber, he announced to the CNN troops his plans to launch a preemptive first strike, beating Westinghouse to the air with his own headline news service, CNN II. As usual the business press gave Turner little hope of holding off the network challenge. Forbes magazine predicted that Turner would likely crash in flames against two such formidable opponents. Turner, however, had other plans.

Understanding the risk-averse nature of most big corporations operating alone, not to mention two working together, Turner planned to hold out to the bitter end, hoping to make the other side blink first.

“After all,” he told the media at the time, “we can never lose if we never give up.”

At midnight on January 1, 1982 – right on schedule – CNN Headline News went on the air and Ted Turner feted friends to the wee hours at CNN headquarters. Response from both cable operators and local network affiliates, who were interested in obtaining syndication rights from Headline News, was overwhelmingly positive.

Meanwhile the cable operators offered ABC a cool reception, noting that the networks had always aggressively opposed the cable industry’s growth. After two aborted start-up dates, an abbreviated version of Satellite News Channel went on the air on June 21, 1982, a full 11 weeks after the planned launch date.

Turner was still locked in a life-and-death struggle with the corporate big boys, however, and he worked every angle he could to keep his company afloat. His corporate electric bill fell into such a state of arrears that the electric company threatened to pull the plug on WTBS and CNN. According to then-WTBS advertising executive Gerry Hogan, the entire operation was being sustained by the direct advertising campaign. “If not for the Ginzu knife and the bamboo steamer,” he recalled to biographer Robert Goldberg, “for Elvis Presley and Boxcar Willie, we would have been out of business.”

Eventually, having spent more than $60 million in start-up costs – twice what they had originally anticipated – to offer a decidedly inferior product, executives at Westinghouse pulled the plug on SNC after only 12 months on the air. Maverick Ted Turner had once again faced the enemy head-on and emerged the winner. Turner Broadcasting acquired SNC for a paltry $25 million and watched its stock soar more than 40 percent.

CNN’s coverage of such events as the U.S. invasion of Panama, the Tiananmen Square massacre and the Persian Gulf War cemented CNN as the primary source of late-breaking news for viewers from Peoria to Paris. By the network’s 10th anniversary, CNN and Headline News were valued at more than $1.5 billion while CNN alone was generating $150 million in annual operating profit. Superstation WTBS had come into its own as well, becoming the single most-watched basic cable channel in the country.

Takeover Ted

In April 1985 Turner officially launched his bid for what was then the biggest network prize of them all: CBS. Predictably, few observers gave the cable tycoon’s hostile takeover much chance for success. After all, the TBS guppy, with revenues totaling just $282 million, was attempting to swallow a $4.9 billion CBS whale.

Publicly CBS responded with contempt at the impudent outsider’s offer, dismissing him out of pocket. Internally, however, the broadcasting giant scrambled to take on whatever debt necessary – nearly $1 billion – to buy back 21 percent of its own stock, making it prohibitively expensive for Turner to go ahead with his plans.

In a meeting with the TBS board of directors Turner confessed that even he gave the bid only about a 10 percent chance of success. But then Turner revealed his true objectives. He told them that if they failed, the ancillary benefits would outweigh any financial costs. By taking on another much larger foe, Turner Broadcasting would gain greater prestige with advertisers, making it easier to sell advertising on the company’s existing stations.

Besides, Turner had no time to lick his wounds; within days of the CBS buyback he had another giant deal in the offing. Turner had always longed for the opportunity to add a movie studio, and its accompanying film library, to the Turner stable.

When financier Kirk Kerkorian came calling with the MGM studio in tow, Turner could hardly conceal his enthusiasm. It took virtually no haggling for Turner to accept Kerkorian’s offer of the MGM studio, Culver City movie lot and MGM’s library of 3,650 films for $1.5 billion. While industry analysts instantly surmised that Turner had been taken for a ride by the wily Kerkorian, Turner remained enthusiastic about the deal.

“The game I’m in is building assets,” he told the Atlanta Constitution, “and I’ve never minded overpaying if I know the values are there.”

Three months later, however, just to finance the deal, Turner was forced to sell everything but the library – including the MGM studio and lot and even the MGM lion logo – back to Kerkorian for considerably less than he had paid. In the final reckoning Turner paid about $1.2 billion just for the MGM library, $200-300 million more than it was worth, according to industry estimates. Worse yet, TBS was still saddled with $1.4 billion in debt.

To extricate himself from this burden without having to sacrifice the precious film library or risk losing control of TBS, Turner went to his powerful colleagues in the cable industry. Preferring the known quantity of Ted Turner to a potential outside interloper taking over TBS, 14 cable companies, including TCI, United Artists and Continental Cablevision, bailed Turner out to the tune of $560 million. The cable barons also leveraged Turner into a shrewd deal. He would retain 51 percent of the company’s equity, but he would grant the cable operators seven of 15 seats on the TBS board and give them veto power over any decisions requiring an outlay larger than $2 million.

The kinder, gentler Turner

With significantly diminished control of the company’s future direction Turner felt justifiably stung by his ventures into the world of high finance and mergers and acquisitions. From that point on Turner’s ambitions would be checked by the sober heads on his board of directors. Many outside observers have attributed Turner’s more cautious approach to empire building solely to the influence of the board, but other factors have contributed as well.

During the 1980s when Turner and his wife sought professional help for their marital troubles, a psychiatrist convinced Ted to go on lithium for what the doctor diagnosed as a classic bipolar disorder.

Another change in Turner’s outlook resulted from his intimate involvement with CNN. As the network’s titular head Turner became a bona fide international figure, hobnobbing at various times with luminaries like Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev and Jacques Cousteau, to name a few.

Turner was disappointed by the Olympic boycotts of the early 1980s so he convinced the Soviets to hold the first Goodwill Games, which have grown to become an international athletic showcase, despite ever-present ridicule from his critics. Sparked by time spent with Cousteau, Turner became deeply interested in issues of population control, nuclear disarmament and, most recently, the global environmental movement. To prove he’s serious about his advocacy Turner even raises 12,000 head of bison on six ranches as an alternative to beef production.

This year Turner aims to expand the Turner Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to green causes, to include a $500 million endowment. He also continues to promote programming and documentaries aimed at increasing awareness about developing global environmental crises.

Recent years have witnessed such successful launches as Turner Network Television (TNT), Turner Classic Movies (TCM), the Cartoon Network, CNN/si, a 24-hour sports news channel, and a host of international channels. Recovering from the disappointment he felt upon selling the MGM studio back to Kerkorian, Turner now owns his own movie studio, New Line Cinema, as well as a film production company, Castle Rock Entertainment.

Future imperfect

Today, as vice chairman of Time Warner, Turner continues to add to his empire’s cable television offerings. Eager as Turner may be to cling to the underdog mantle, the facts betray him. After 30 years spent bucking the conventional wisdom and fending off critics Turner finds himself nestled comfortably in the executive suite of the world’s largest media conglomerate.

“You fight the establishment for so long,” he concedes, “and one day you wake up and you’re part of it.” It’s enough to make a rebel cry.

But Ted Turner’s too busy to cry. Off the record, colleagues claim that he will soon tire of playing second man on the totem pole to Gerald Levin at Time Warner. Assuming he extricates himself from under Levin’s thumb, Turner will likely continue his crusade to someday run one of the big three networks. He acknowledged as much recently to a group of TV critics.

“If I died tomorrow,” he said, “you know what my tombstone’s going to say… ‘He never got a major network.’ “

Lately Turner has again appeared in the press – this time reincarnated as the great cost cutter of the notoriously high-flying Time Warner. Turner, as the largest stockholder in the media behemoth, has reportedly been selling off corporate jets and other holdings in an effort to pare the corporation down to profitable mass.

Many have written Turner’s obituary prematurely over the last 30 years – and learned too late that it only encourages him. The Time Warner era proves that he just continues to doggedly pursue his childhood goal to discover what one man can accomplish if he tries hard enough.

Resources for more information on Ted Turner: It Ain’t As Easy As It Looks, Porter Bibb, Crown Publishers, New York, 1993. Citizen Turner: The Wild Rise of an American Tycoon, Robert Goldberg & Gerald Jay Goldberg, Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1995