My Remarkable Journey (16 page)

“
Ouuuuuuur
, kemosabe?” Ted said. “See the door? Say goodbye.”

That’s how I got started at CNN.

There’s nobody like Ted Turner. Nobody. Ted is a madcap guy. He’s an instinctive businessman, yet completely childlike. When
he’s up, he’s one of the nuttiest, most adventuresome and fun people you’ll ever meet. When he’s down, he can get terribly
depressed. He can’t stay focused on any one topic for too long, yet he can be completely at one with the moment. We saw a
golden eagle in Montana once and I thought he’d go crazy. It was as if nothing else in the world existed and time was suspended.
But he was never late.

He is notoriously cheap and outrageously generous. He’d drive a Toyota to work. And when he did use a limo, he’d have his
driver stop a block away from the hotel just so he could get out and not have to tip the doorman when he arrived. But he’d
pay anything to keep a baseball player he liked when he was owner of the Atlanta Braves. He was loyal, sometimes to a fault.
He started as a novice sailor and advanced to win the world’s most prestigious yacht race, the America’s Cup. A guy caught
in a storm with him in the middle of the Atlantic for three days once told me the only reason he knew he’d survive was that
Ted was at the helm. Yet Ted would almost quiver at the sound of bad news. His voice would actually tremble like a cartoon
character. “Please, don’t tell me it’s bad…”

He could be the most considerate friend. Knowing that I’d never ridden a horse, he once rode next to me holding the reins
so I wouldn’t be afraid. He didn’t make fun of me. Didn’t put me down. But if he didn’t like you, he might trip you on a muddy
street. When Rupert Murdoch set his sights on buying the Los Angeles Dodgers, Ted called other owners around the league and
tried to convince them to bar the door.

He could exercise the wisdom of Solomon. Two CNN employees in a heated dispute could walk into his office in the morning,
have the problem resolved one way or another, and leave without either one of them feeling slighted or taking it personally.
Yet on the same afternoon Ted could offend a huge audience without a thought. Once, when he was speaking before a women’s
group, I heard him say, “I like women. I like women romantically. I like to work with women. I’m not like these countries
that clitorize their women. I don’t clitorize women. I hire them. I promote them. I don’t clitorize.” You should have heard
the collective gasp from that crowd. The media dubbed him the Mouth of the South. But the commencement speech that he gave
at Brown—the school that threw him out when he was a student—couldn’t have lasted more than a minute and a half. He stood
up and said something like, “I have to leave.” Then he pointed to his face. “See this? That’s a growth. I’m going to a dermatologist
now because it’s gotta be removed. You know how I got that? Staying in the sun. I’m gonna leave you with one thought. Stay
out of the sun.” Then he left the stage. I guarantee you that no graduate on that day will ever forget those words.

Ted couldn’t think ahead twenty seconds. Yet he could see ahead twenty years. He was completely honest. He could be so childlike
that sometimes he actually looked goofy. As individual traits, all these might have been damaging in one area or another.
But when they were combined, they were revolutionary. There was nothing genius about Ted Turner, except that he was a genius.
He was so far ahead of his time. He saw the potential of satellites in a way that nobody else did.

A psychologist once told me that the biggest event of the twentieth century for Americans, the most startling event, was not
the landing on the moon. It was
Sputnik
—the first spacecraft to orbit the earth. It may not seem that big now, especially when you consider that the Soviet satellite
was about the size of a beach ball. But, believe me, in 1957, in the middle of the Cold War, there was nothing bigger.

The Soviets were looking down on us. They were doing exactly what we were supposed to do first. That scared us. That changed
us. That’s what spurred us into going to the moon. The mood was: somebody else is up there, looking down on us, and that somebody
else is not our friend. That’s how we saw the satellite—as a spy and a threat.

But Ted Turner came to see the satellite as a way to bring people together. When Ted ran CNN, there were very few rules. One
of them was that we couldn’t say the word
foreign.
To Ted Turner, there was no foreign country. He probably didn’t realize how far-reaching this approach was. Nobody else even
talked about globalization back then. It was just simple to Ted. He said to me once, “When I look at Atlanta, I don’t think
of it as part of the United States. I think of where it is on the globe.”

The story of how he came to think this way is amazing. He didn’t start out as an open-minded liberal who wanted to give a
billion dollars to the United Nations. Ted’s father was a right-wing conservative who owned a billboard company in the South.
There’s no doubt that Ted’s father had a huge impact on his life. I once said to Ted, “Your father left you one million dollars.
You grew that into billions. What would he say if he could look at you today?”

Ted said, “I’ll tell you exactly what he would say. ‘Inflation…’”

Ted could never please his father, and when his father committed suicide he forever lost the chance. Instead, he built a communications
empire. Let me give you an idea of how Ted’s mind looked at the world. One day, not long after his father died, Ted was driving
by one of his company’s billboards in Atlanta when he noticed an advertisement for Channel 17. Ted didn’t watch much television
as a kid in boarding school, and he wasn’t watching much at the time, either. This was the late ’60s. But that billboard must
have struck Ted just like that golden eagle. Ted bought Channel 17, then used his company’s unleased billboards to advertise
it. Soon, he discovered a way to really expand its audience.

He got the Federal Communications Commission to allow Channel 17 to broadcast by satellite. Now he had the bird. Channel 17
became known as a superstation, and Ted figured out ways to put on old movies and reruns of sitcoms for cable subscribers.
Cable was just getting started. Ted scratched out business deals on napkins. He bought the Atlanta Braves baseball team and
the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. Think about it. He put the Braves on the bird, and that was three hours of programming
a day. The idea for CNN came, Ted told me, when he tuned in to a radio station in Atlanta called WGST. The announcer said
something like, “All the news all the time.” Ted thought,
A twenty-four-hour news station. Why couldn’t that work on television?
He started CNN in 1980.

Ted thought he’d have anonymous hosts. One of the few things he figured wrong, he told me, was that he never thought the hosts
would become famous. He never thought he’d have to pay a lot of money to keep them.

I was probably the first major personality brought in from the outside to go on the air for Ted. At the time, people called
CNN the Chicken Noodle News. You couldn’t even watch my first show across the street from the studio where it was filmed because
there was no cable connection in Washington. I had no idea if CNN would be successful. But I liked Ted and figured it would
be fun to go along for the ride. Maybe it was our collective good timing that brought us together. Maybe it was that Ted and
I were born on the same day. November 19. Whatever it was, it was right. I’ve never worked for anybody better than Ted Turner.

The first show was set up at a rinky-dink place in Georgetown. I had to do makeup in one area, then walk across an alley to
get to the studio to go on the air. I never pay attention to what goes on in the control room. But Tammy Haddad, who helped
produce that first show, remembers that everyone but me was sweating and nervous. The set had been constructed to look like
a radio show. You see that a lot now. Imus uses the concept. But back then, it was new. I wore a suit that night. Soon afterward
I moved to V-neck sleeveless sweaters. Tammy was afraid that I’d grown accustomed to hunching over the microphone during all
my years in radio, and she thought the V-neck would make me look vertical. Later on, the suspenders would do the trick. My
first guest was Mario Cuomo.

Mario had given one of the great political speeches of all time at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. I was standing
next to the Oklahoma delegation as he gave it. I’ll never forget. This guy from Oklahoma said, “I never heard of that guy.
But I now know why I’m a Democrat.” Edward Bennett Williams told me that Mario had given an even better speech at a college
commencement where students were seated in front and the parents in the back. Mario said to the students, “You’re not going
to remember anything I say here today. I know, you can’t wait until you get out of here. So, just give me a couple of minutes.
I’m going to talk to your parents.” In seconds, he had all the students turning their seats around to look at their parents.
It’s great to have an eloquent guest. More than that, Mario was a friend.

My memory of that show is not of a particular question or answer. It’s the feeling. The whole thing just felt right. Mario
sensed it, too. Afterward, he said, “This suits you.” I had no idea that I’d just embarked on the longest run in television
history—one host, at the same hour, for twenty-four years and counting. But I knew the platform was perfect. The global backdrop
you see on my set today? It’s the same one we used on the first night. It just wasn’t colored back then.

I was going on fifty-two years old. CNN was only five. My voice was recognized around the country. CNN was just about to be
hooked up in living rooms across America and the world. The timing would lift us both. I was able to give CNN a boost from
my all-night radio show. I’d go on Mutual Broadcasting, mention my CNN show, and bring over my listeners. The next day I’d
go on the television show and promote the radio show. It was really no different from what I’d done in Miami with my early-morning
radio show and my live hour at Pumpernik’s. Only this time, the overall audience added up to millions, and I was positioned
in the heart of prime-time television. All I had to do was everything I’d been doing since I was a kid.

My friend Herbie used to say, “You want to know the key to your success? The key to your success is you’re dumb.” He didn’t
mean it disparagingly. “Everybody else on TV is a know-it-all—but not you. You’re dumb. So you say to your guest, ‘I don’t
know. Explain this to me. Help me.’ You create a vacuum and then you fill it.”

It goes back to what Arthur Godfrey once told me. The secret is there’s no secret. What you do is what you do. I’m a kid off
the streets. I’ve never been to war. I’ve never been a plumber. I’ve never written a brief. I’ve never tried a case in court.
I’ve never cured a disease. All I do is ask questions. Short, simple questions.

Once, I had a specialist on for a show about diabetes. I asked him what the word
diabetes
meant. He said, “I learned it my third day of medical school and no one has asked me since.”

Why do you want to hunt animals?

Why do you take pictures?

What happened in the war today?

Simple questions can get surprising answers. But you really have to listen when you interview like that. Because your next
question always depends on the last answer. When I was interviewed by Barbara Walters for my anniversary show, she had every
question mapped out. It works for her. But I couldn’t work that way in a million years. I’ve never in my life planned a question.
When I say, “Good evening, my guest is…” I have no idea what I’m going to ask. You may see me with those blue cards—but the
notes on them are really just an adjunct, not a road map. When I go on, I’m back at Pumpernik’s. I’m in the moment.

The key is the element of surprise. It’s the opposite of being a criminal defense lawyer. A criminal defense lawyer doesn’t
like to be surprised. In fact, many lawyers have told me that if you’re surprised in court you haven’t done your job. Nothing
said by anybody on either side of the courtroom should surprise you. If you’re surprised, it means you’ve been caught. The
only time a trial lawyer wants to be surprised is at four o’clock in the morning in a law library. Me? I’m seventy-five years
old and I still want to be surprised every night. When I’m surprised, that’s when I know I’m doing my job right.

I guess I have a natural ability to draw people out. I don’t know if that has evolved over time. But I do know it has allowed
me to check my ego at the door. I try not to use the word
I
at all. In an interview, “I” is totally irrelevant. I’m there for the guest. I may have an opinion. But my opinion isn’t
important during the show. I’m open. There was once a poll in Miami asking people to guess whether I was a Republican or a
Democrat. The response was split fifty-fifty.

Most broadcasters these days would find it impossible to do a show without using the word
I
. You have the O’Reillys, the Limbaughs, and other pompous windbags who are there to satisfy themselves. They have an agenda
and it’s all about them. Their guest is nothing more than a prop. They’ve got the gift of gab, and that makes them, in a sense,
entertaining. But I’ve never come away from their shows knowing any more than I knew before. When they ask a question, it’s
like that old joke about a Howard Cosell interview. “Enough about me. What about you? What do you think of me?”

There are many broadcasters who’ll recite three minutes of facts before they ask a question. As if to say:
Let me show you how much I know
. I think the guest should be the expert. Anytime you hear a three-minute question, it’s a good bet the interviewer is just
showing off. You see it a lot during presidential press conferences. I’ve found that good, short questions can make an interviewer
look a lot smarter than a recitation of facts does.

I remember doing an interview with Dr. Edward Teller—the inventor of the hydrogen bomb. A friend of mine helped set it up.
Teller was a firebrand sort of guy. He came into the studio and said to me, “What do you know about physics?”