WASHINGTON — Ted Turner, the brash sportsman and entrepreneur whose ambition and instincts led to a media empire that included groundbreaking news network CNN, has died, CNN reported Wednesday citing a press release from Turner Enterprises. He was 87.
No cause of death was given.
In September 2018 Turner revealed that he had Lewy body dementia, a degenerative nerve disease.
One nickname was not enough for a personality as roguish and bold as Turner’s. He was known variously as the “Mouth of the South,” “Captain Outrageous” and “Terrible Ted.”
He became a billionaire by taking over his father’s billboard business, buying a television station in 1970 and parlaying that into what would become a vast ground-breaking television group.
Turner became one of the most powerful figures in U.S. media and entertainment, his networks specializing in news, sports, re-runs and old movies. But he did not stop there. He added the MGM/UA movie studio to his portfolio before making an even bigger move — merging his Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner in 1996.
Turner headed the new company’s cable networks division and was its leading shareholder, but he had trouble fitting into a corporate system after decades of free-wheeling as his own boss. He eventually lost control of his networks.
Turner also became one of the world’s leading environmentalists, one of the largest landowners in the United States, and a major philanthropist, giving $1 billion to the United Nations.
With a slender mustache, gap-toothed grin, dimpled chin and mischievous glint in his eye, Turner pursued a range of passions. In the 1970s he owned the Atlanta Braves baseball team and the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association and skippered his yacht the Courageous to the America’s Cup. The many women in his life included Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda.
In 1986 he started the Goodwill Games, an Olympic-like competition, and two years later bought a wrestling organization that provided more TV content. His concerns about nuclear war led him to co-found the Nuclear Threat Initiative in 2001.
Forbes estimates Turner’s fortune at $2.8 billion.
“If I only had a little humility, I’d be perfect,” he once said.
Rocky start in TV
Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati on Nov. 19, 1938, moving to the South with his family when he was 9. He was sent to military schools where he became a champion debater and yachtsman.
He enrolled at Brown University in Rhode Island and angered his father by studying the classics rather than business. Turner got in trouble for having a girlfriend in his room, among other offenses, and he never graduated.
He joined his family’s advertising company in Savannah, Georgia, selling space on billboards. At 24, he was left in charge after his father killed himself.
The business was sold to pay debts but after a family debate in which Turner was victorious, he repurchased the firm and made it successful. In 1970, against the counsel of advisers, he bought a failing Atlanta UHF television station, now called WTBS, for $2.5 million.
After a rocky start, Turner eventually made the station profitable with low-cost 24-hour programming. The station’s fortunes rose in 1976 after a federal ruling that cable television systems could use satellite signals for programming. By being a satellite pioneer, Turner helped WTBS become the first “superstation,” with programming picked up by local cable systems across the country.
In 1980, he started CNN in Atlanta, which he said would counter “sleazy” coverage by the major networks CBS, NBC and ABC. Offering low pay but the lure of adventure, Turner signed up journalists and technical crew who endured ridicule that the “Chicken Noodle Network” would fail. Instead, as the first 24-hour news outlet, it set a template for worldwide news coverage of wars, trials, revolutions, and manmade and natural disasters.
“Barring satellite problems, we won’t be signing off until the world ends,” Turner said in a 2013 CNN interview. In 2018, in the middle of President Donald Trump’s stormy first term, Turner said in an interview that he rarely watched the network he had founded any more, saying that it focused too much on politics.
As a “televisionary,” Turner was named Man of the Year in 1991 by Time magazine for “influencing the dynamic of events and turning viewers in 150 countries into instant witnesses of history.”
In 1996, Time Warner Inc. bought his Turner Broadcasting System for $7.5 billion, creating the world’s largest communications company, with properties such as HBO, Warner Bros. movie studio, Time magazine, CNN, Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies.
In 2001, Time Warner merged with online provider AOL, a $99 billion deal that Turner voted in favor of. But in the ensuing reorganization, he was stripped of his position overseeing the cable networks that he had created and ultimately lost billions as the value of the company’s stock fell. In 2003, he quit as vice chair and three years later stepped down as a Time Warner director.
He battled depression and often spoke of suicide, according to his biographer.
Blunt talker
In his early days Turner had a reputation as a raucous drinker who bluntly spoke whatever was on his mind.
“I don’t have any idea what I’m going to say,” he once told the New Yorker magazine. “I say what comes to my mind.”
He ticked off the Catholic Church when he called some of his employees “Jesus freaks” because of the Ash Wednesday marks on their foreheads and told a group of Germans that after being on the wrong side of two world wars, they could turn things around just as his losing Braves baseball team had done.
Turner had a long-running feud with fellow media mogul Rupert Murdoch that began in 1983 when a Murdoch-sponsored yacht collided with Turner’s boat in an Australian race, which led Turner to challenge Murdoch to a fist fight. Their ill will intensified in 1996 when Murdoch started Fox News as a conservative rival of CNN. Turner called him a warmonger and likened him to Adolf Hitler.
During his ownership of the Atlanta Braves baseball team, Turner appointed himself manager and directed the team for one game, a 2-1 loss to Pittsburgh, in 1977. Baseball officials then ordered him to relinquish the manager’s job.
But he was also a major philanthropist. In 1997 he made philanthropic history by announcing that he was donating $1 billion to fund United Nations operations. In 2017, after the last installment of the donation, Turner called it “the best investment I’ve ever made.”
His Turner Foundation also gave millions to environmental groups, while he promoted and invested in clean energy.
Turner became one of the largest private landowners in the United States with more than 1.9 million acres in six states, including Montana, where he spent much of his time. He owned a herd of some 50,000 bison, which he used to supply a restaurant chain he founded in 2002 called Ted’s Montana Grill. He also owned ranches in Argentina’s Patagonia.
Turner was married and divorced three times and had five children. His third marriage, to Fonda, which lasted 10 years, ended in 2001.
Story by Bill Trott.
