Ted Turner Gets What He Wants Biography Focuses On The Fearless Ceo’s Hard-Earned Image

“Citizen Turner: The Wild Rise Of An American Tycoon” by Robert Goldberg and Gerald Jay Goldberg

Harcourt Brace (525 pages, $27).

The bet was made and the fifth of whiskey was in his hand. Ted Turner, a sophomore at Brown University, was poised to chug it, and to win he would have to down the bottle without stopping, falling over, passing out or dying. Much to the amazement of his Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers, Turner not only stood and delivered, he lived to do what he does so well: boast about it.

What the losers didn’t know and didn’t count on was that Turner had coated his stomach with nearly a pint of olive oil before the chug-a-lug, which enabled him to hold the booze long enough to win. Shortly afterward, he heaved into a nearby sink.

The lesson for the competition was as clear almost four decades ago as it is today: Never underestimate Robert Edward Turner III, the crude mouth from the South whose relentless ambition and almost fearless desire to compete led to the creation of the Cable News Network and the revolutionizing of television news.

“Citizen Turner” is biography at its best, a wildly entertaining story of corporate America’s most enduring 16-year-old. At 57, Ted Turner may not appear to be the same halfbrilliant, half-crazy and wholly unpredictable CEO he was in the 1970s and ‘80s. Lithium, a knucklecracking board of directors and Jane Fonda have stifled some of Turner’s impulsive urges, in part, to save Turner and his company from himself.

But he still is, along with Rupert Murdoch, a man to watch in the media marketplace, because there remains the right amount of smarts, vision and the gambler’s penchant for outrageous risk-taking.

Every writer should have entertaining material like Turner to work with; it’s almost like shooting fish. But while others have written about Turner, the strength of this book, by Robert Goldberg, television critic of The Wall Street Journal, and his father, Gerald Jay Goldberg, of UCLA, is that it pulls together the complex bundle of tragedy, personal contradictions and outrageous business savvy that mark the man.

The book begins with the suicide of Turner’s father, Ed, a sometimes cruelly domineering father who lost his nerve and his grip over a business deal. The event proved to be a seminal moment for Ted Turner, the rebellious youngster who could never seem to please his father. He would spend the next three decades trying to prove his worthiness to his late father.

Perhaps the most glaring contradiction in Turner’s life is his long and loud railing against the evils of the broadcast television networks and how they are undermining the morals of America. All the while, Turner was engaged in Olympic-caliber philandering and ignoring his family for weeks and months at a time. Turner is truly a narcissist, and his ex-wives and children are in the book to testify to the fact.

Like Murdoch, Turner had a brush with financial ruin. Turner was saved by a conglomerate of cable television interests led by TCI’s John Malone, who obtained seats on Turner’s board of directors and a veto authority over purchases valued at more than $2 million. But salvation came with a price: almost parental-like control that has held Turner in check.

Although Turner has been stymied now for more than 10 years in his effort to own a major broadcast network, his history, as this book shows, suggests he will get what he wants, with or without the aid of olive oil.