While TNT was a major success, due in large part to cooperation from our cable operator partners, they did stop me from pursuing another cable channel that I really wanted. By 1988 the Financial News Network (FNN) had been on the air for a few years and was headed toward bankruptcy. FNN was an independent channel that delivered twenty-four-hour business news. They struggled to build an audience and were now threatened by NBC’s plans to launch a rival service named CNBC. Word got out that FNN could be purchased for as little as $100 million and I wanted it badly.
We already carried business news on CNN and extending that coverage on a twenty-four-hour channel would be easy. The cost efficiencies of such an acquisition were compelling and I thought that if we moved quickly to purchase FNN and strengthen the channel, CNBC would be dead on arrival. Unfortunately, the board did not agree, and for the first time since investing in Turner, they kept me from making a deal I really wanted to make. While they raised questions about the viability of the concept of twenty-four-hour business news and had concerns about the fact that NBC was planning a competitor, I think they worried that I was trying to do too much. This troubled them not only because it might cause us to become stretched too thin but also because we were growing too powerful. I was very disappointed. NBC wound up purchasing FNN in ’91, which, after changing its name to CNBC, has been a success ever since.
The final years of the eighties were exciting for our company and we enjoyed tremendous growth. With cable distribution expanding rapidly and the industry supporting subscription fees, our businesses were sailing along. And while my cable operator directors frustrated me on occasion, in general our arrangement worked well for everyone and their investment in Turner Broadcasting was paying off handsomely. From the time between the stock market crash of 1987 and the end of 1989, our stock price went up by more than 500 percent, and while I owned a smaller percentage of the company, the value of my holdings had skyrocketed. Heading into the nineties, my Turner Broadcasting stock was worth more than $1 billion.
While I had never been in business primarily for the money, when I became a billionaire, it did feel good. My pleasure came not only from a sense that this was a measure of achievement, but also because I’d reached this point while still young and feeling like there were plenty of opportunities ahead.
Meeting Jane Fonda
I
didn’t set out to become a billionaire. I wanted to be a success, but learning from my father—whose life reached its crisis point at the very height of his net worth—I didn’t set my goals in monetary terms. But many people do keep score this way and when you become well known for achievements in business, people often ask, “What’s the secret?”
In addition to luck, there were a number of different factors and personal behaviors that worked in my favor, but none of them is really a secret. For one thing, I’ve always had a lot of energy. Ever since I was little, my mind and body were active and I couldn’t stand sitting around. Even today, I’m constantly moving. Purgatory for me would be spending twenty-four hours with nothing to do but to be alone with my thoughts. I do a lot of thinking when I’m out walking, riding horses, or fishing, and at mealtime debating and discussing ideas with others. (This might explain why I used to have a problem with the popular view of heaven. Sitting around on a cloud playing the harp all day always seemed more like hell to me!)
I also keep my sights set on the future and don’t spend much time dwelling on the past. I’ve had some tough experiences as a child and have had my share of business and personal setbacks, but sitting around thinking about them isn’t going to change anything. Someone once said that I was a good winner but a better loser. When I have a setback, I put it behind me as fast as I can and keep moving. I don’t play golf but I compare the way I respond to disappointments to the way a golfer does after he hits his drive into the water. He doesn’t walk down to the pond, dive in, dig out his ball, examine the ball, and ponder what happened. Instead, he takes another ball out of his bag, tees it up, and keeps on playing. After a disappointment I always try to bounce back and I’ve no doubt that this has helped me tremendously. I also have a strong work ethic. From my earliest days pulling weeds in the yard to working for my dad out at the billboard company, nothing was handed to me; I always had to work for it.
There probably are some ways that I work and live that might be a little different from other people you come across. For one thing, I go to great lengths to be efficient with my time and try to make the most of every minute of every day. When I run meetings, they start on time. A lot of that came from my father and punctuality was stressed at McCallie and the Coast Guard. For much of my career, I didn’t even waste time getting to and from work. There were long stretches when I spent most of my weeknights sleeping in my office, and later, when I could afford to, I built an apartment on the top floor of CNN. So when millions of Atlanta drivers were wasting their time sitting in traffic, my commute was nothing more than walking up a flight of stairs, and I had that much more productive time to work every day.
My desire to use time wisely has even extended to what I wear on my feet. For most of my adult life, I’ve never worn lace-up shoes. Most of my shoes are slip-ons, so instead of spending time stooping over tying my shoes, I do something else that’s productive.
Another way I save time is by managing information efficiently. A lot of people become inundated with paper and e-mails, but I make a point to keep a clean desk. I never let things pile up. I couldn’t do this without a great executive assistant and for the last twenty years, it’s been Debbie Masterson. She is invaluable, and in addition to keeping me on track and on schedule, I’ve always counted on her to screen out correspondence that I don’t need to see. (Incidentally, Debbie handles all my electronic correspondence—I don’t use e-mail myself.) The volume of mail I receive is tremendous—from business reports, solicitations, and so forth—but over 90 percent never makes it to my desk. For most requests, Debbie knows how to respond. The 10 percent that makes it to my desk still amounts to a lot and I try to answer it all that day so that I don’t get bogged down with unanswered messages.
Some of my passion for efficiency comes from my experience in sailboat racing. Races are won and lost by picking up a second here and a second there, and I learned a lot about how small things matter. Racing also contributed to my skill at delegation, an ability that’s been of vital importance to my business success. Once you begin racing bigger boats, it becomes impossible for one person to do it all. Instead, you have to have good people, assign them responsibilities, and then let them do their jobs. As skipper, you steer the boat, plot strategy, and issue orders.
Basically, I ran my company the same way I ran my boat. I found the best people I could to run our businesses while I stepped back to keep an eye on our overall strategy and what our next move should be. A lot of entrepreneurs and company founders have trouble leading as their company grows. Part of the problem is that they become so used to having their hands in everything when the company is small that they find it difficult to delegate successfully once the business gets big. I stayed on top of key issues relating to our individual businesses, but I let my managers manage. This gave me time to focus on the big picture.
Another quality that worked to my advantage was my ability to create a fun, exciting environment. Everybody worked hard, often for less pay than they might have made elsewhere, but at Turner Broadcasting there was always a sense that we were the underdogs and we were motivated by the opportunity to prove the naysayers wrong. I certainly had a temper and there’s no doubt that I yelled at people on occasion, but I was good at putting those disputes behind me and the next time I saw the person I’d been angry with, we usually shared a laugh and a pat on the back.
Unfortunately, I was better in business and sailing than I was in marriage. With Judy Nye, we were impulsive people who barely knew each other when we were married. Still, we managed to stay together for three years and had two great children together—Laura and Teddy. My second marriage, to Jane Smith, lasted more than twenty years and was quite a bit more complicated. We had three children in four years—Rhett, Beau, and Jennie—and with Teddy and Laura joining us unexpectedly, home life was chaotic. In my mind, Janie never could treat my two older children as if they were her own and there’s no doubt that I was resentful of that. I was away racing and working a lot and that clearly didn’t make things any easier, and she probably took out on Teddy and Laura some of the frustrations that were really aimed at me.
I’ve tried to be the best person that I could be, both at work and in my personal life, but monogamy for me has always been a struggle. As noted earlier, from an early age my dad told me “real men run around,” but as I’ve reflected on his philosophies I no longer think he had it right. Maybe it’s too late for me to change my ways but as my children have grown I’ve encouraged them to follow my advice and not my example when it comes to being in committed relationships.
Janie and I both tried to make the marriage work but when our kids were little, we were both too exhausted to think about much else than being good parents. After our children grew older, Janie and I weren’t on the same wavelength when it came to thinking about the big picture and as I became more involved in working on global issues, we had less in common.
When I met J. J. Ebaugh, things were completely different. Not only was J. J. concerned about world problems, she also challenged me to think more about them myself. It was a better partnership than any I’d had before.
By the late 1980s, I’d been seeing J. J. on and off for about six years. Our relationship had become more serious—and more public—and with my children now grown, Janie and I separated. My wealth had increased a great deal during our marriage and my lawyers expressed concern that Janie may try to get a substantial sum in alimony. The way I looked at it, she deserved it. I never made things easy for her but she still hung in there with me through a lot of ups and downs. Divorce is always difficult but in this case the settlement negotiations were fair and went smoothly. We’d been drifting apart for the last few years so when our final arrangement was completed in October of 1988, it was a sad, but not completely sudden, end. Our marriage was never easy, but Janie and I had a lot of good times together and when we officially went our separate ways, our children were fine young adults. I’ll always be grateful to her.
An
Atlanta
magazine cover once described J. J. as “The Woman Who Tamed Ted Turner,” and many assumed that as soon as my divorce was final, she and I would be married. She certainly did have an impact on me and we’ve had some great times together. Among other things, she helped me understand the value of getting counseling during times of stress. I’d had some problems with mood swings when I was a kid—probably because of being sent away at such a young age and the anxiety that my life produced. I remember at the age of nine or ten just deciding on my own that I was going to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative—just like that song suggested—and that helped me a lot.
Still, in the 1980s a doctor diagnosed me with bipolar depression and put me on lithium. I took this medication for a couple of years but I couldn’t tell that it made much of a difference. When I switched psychiatrists, I had a thorough interview that led to a completely different diagnosis. My new doctor asked me questions like whether I ever went for long stretches without sleep (only when I was sailing, I told him), and whether I ever spent inordinate amounts of money. (We both got a chuckle out of that one. I’d been known for spending a lot of money at the company but he decided that this spending was never made out of the irrationally poor judgment that bipolar people often display.) He concluded that while I definitely had an uncommon drive and still do struggle with occasional bouts of anxiety, I don’t have depression, and he canceled the lithium.
J. J. was a supportive partner throughout and we did consider getting married. But the more intimate we were, the more difficult our relationship became. J. J. also discovered that she was wrestling with some of her own psychological issues, and while we still cared about each other (and remain friends to this day),we realized that a long-term relationship just was not in the cards.
After parting with J. J., I went back to dating and during this time I read in the paper that Jane Fonda was getting a divorce from her husband. Instantly, I thought to myself, “Jane Fonda is someone I’d like to go out with!” Jane and I had met briefly several years before at a screening in Los Angeles and I had come to admire her over the years. During the Vietnam War mine was still very much a “my country, right or wrong” mentality, and I disapproved of her stance against the war. Over time, however, I changed my views and felt that the people who spoke out against the Vietnam conflict were right and courageous. I also admired what she had accomplished, first with her movies and later with her exercise videos. When VCRs came along, she was one of the only people— outside of the porn industry—who could sell videocassettes in big numbers.
A TED STORY
“I Think I’m Going to Call That Woman Up”
—President Jimmy Carter
The first time I was really alone with Ted and had a chance to talk at length with him was one weekend when Rosalynn and I went down to visit him. We were out in a little boat fishing in his hundred-acre lake—one of the best bass lakes on earth—and Jane Fonda had just announced that she was going to divorce.
Ted said to me, “I think I’m going to call that woman up and ask her for a date.” (I didn’t have a very favorable opinion of Jane then but I’ve changed my mind dramatically in the years since I’ve come to know her—she’s one of the finest people I’ve ever met.) Anyway, I was there when he first had the thought.