Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Xernona Clayton knew something was off when her former boss Ted Turner showed up for their traditional downtown walk-and-talk without his security detail. As he was deciding to go public with his Lewy body dementia diagnosis, he had a favor to ask of his now-retired Turner vice-president of public affairs.
“Usually, we would walk down the street arm-in-arm with people shouting greetings to us,” remembers Clayton. “But this was different. He was so serious.” Turner asked his friend to keep a secret for him: “When I die, will you come to my funeral and say some nice things about me?” Recalled Clayton, “It shocked the daylights out of me.” But she agreed to Turner’s request and added one of her own. “Neither one of us were spring chickens so I asked if he would do the same for me. He nodded and told me, ‘Xernona, I would do anything for you.’”
Clayton is now preparing to keep her word to her old friend.
Ted Turner, Atlanta’s beloved, inimitable “Captain Outrageous” and “the Mouth from the South,” died on May 6. The visionary CNN founder, Atlanta Braves owner, environmentalist, philanthropist, yachtsman, humanitarian, restaurateur, 1977 America’s Cup winner and Time magazine’s 1991 Man of the Year was 87.
While Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati on November 19, 1938, his father, Ed Turner, a fledging outdoor billboard advertising salesman, moved his family to Georgia when his son was nine. Ed promptly enrolled Ted at a military school for boys. “They were so mean,” Turner later recalled of his schooling. “They used to yell, ‘Kill the Yankee!’ and would pile on me. So, I learned a Southern accent. It took a few years, but I finally got integrated.”
Of her nature-loving father’s boyhood, Laura Turner Seydel recalls in the 2024 HBO documentary Call Me Ted, “Dad was a handful. He would bring all kinds of wild animals home. He was doing taxidermy at nine years old, stuffing squirrels and bringing snakes and things home and putting alligators in the bathtub.” After his parents’ divorce, Ted would receive an education about women from Ed. “Real men aren’t faithful,” Turner recalled his father telling him. “Real men run around.”
Following his father’s suicide in 1963, Ted took over the family outdoor billboard business but was increasingly intrigued by broadcast media. “The idea of getting into the TV business was exciting,” Turner writes in his memoir Call Me Ted. “If my options came down to buying a lousy radio station or a lousy TV station, I wanted to bet on the medium that looked like it would grow.” In 1970, he bought WJRJ-TV, the Atlanta UHF Channel 17 and changed its call letters to WTCG (which stood for Turner Communications Group).
Driving by WTCG’s West Peachtree Street offices one day, WGST disc jockey Bill Tush decided to pop in and apply for an announcer position. He got the job. “I had no idea it was owned by this guy Ted Turner,” says Tush. “After all, Ted wasn’t anybody at the time except to other Atlanta businessmen. I was there about two weeks when I finally met him. From then on, it was a crazy ride for 30 years. Ted had a sign on his desk, ‘Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way.’ That really was his way of thinking. And I was happy to follow. I was having a ball. I had more fun at my first 20 years at that station than I had ever had in my life.”
Tush got his first glimpse of Turner’s vision for the future of cable television when he came up with the idea of making Channel 17 a 24-hour station. “Ted explained, People who work shift work and then get off at 3 in the morning, come home, and there’s nothing on television,” recalls Tush. “Gene Wright, our chief engineer at the time told Ted, We can’t do it, the transmitter can’t handle it. It was almost like Scotty from Star Trek telling Kirk, We don’t have the dilithium crystals! Gene would actually sleep in his office in order to keep the thing on the air 24 hours. Our transmitter was constantly going off the air in those days. But that was when I thought to myself, A 24-hour TV station? This guy’s got something going on here.”
One of Bill Tush’s early job duties at the station included ripping the latest headlines off the UPI wire service machine in the hall and making an audio recording of the news for broadcast at 3 A.M. while a “news” slide was put on the air. To fulfill the basic requirements of an FCC license, stations were required to air news and public affairs programming.
“I was the entire news department,” says Tush. “It wasn’t that Ted didn’t like news, it just cost too much to do. It cost local stations a fortune to run a news operation. One day, Ted came in and said, Is there anybody who could sit in front of the camera and [read the news]? I said, I’ll do it. That’s how my on-camera career started.”
Bored and believing no one was watching in the middle of the night, Tush and crew started doing comedy bits during the news segment, including a send-up of WXIA-TV’s 11 Alive “Pro News,” calling it “Dull News.” Turns out, the boss was awake. “Ted came in the next morning and said, Boy, what you did last night was pretty funny. I thought, Christ, if he likes it, we’ll do more of it. And it just got crazier and crazier.” Eventually, Tush was doing the news sitting next to a German shepherd or with a paper bag over his head as the “Unknown Newsman.” (In a 1979 Congressional hearing, Congressman Ed Markey grilled Turner about his station’s unorthodox news practices, asking him if it was true his newscasts aired at 3 a.m. Turner replied, “That’s accurate and we have 100 percent of the audience then!”)
• • •
In 1976, Turner had another brainstorm—by utilizing new satellite technology, he could beam his new SuperStation, (later rebranded as TBS Channel 17) across the United States. Around the same time, Turner acquired perennial National League East basement dwellers the Atlanta Braves for $10 million (given the team was losing a million dollars a year, Turner talked Braves president Dan Donahue into taking a million up front and allowing him to pay the rest over nine years). Turner inadvertently made baseball history when he promoted the team’s farm league manager Bill Lucas to Braves general manager, making him the first Black GM in baseball. He would later downplay the decision, explaining, “I was simply putting the best guy I knew in the position.” As Braves games were now being beamed out across the country, the club acquired a new nickname, “America’s Team.” In 1995, Turner’s decades-long faith finally paid off when the Atlanta Braves won the World Series.
Between acquisitions, Turner, a dedicated skipper since his college days at Brown University, competed in yacht-racing. In 1977, he sailed his boat Courageous to victory, winning the America’s Cup in 1977 and making the cover of the July 4 issue of Sports Illustrated.
There’s a line in one of Turner’s favorite movies, 1941’s Citizen Kane that always resonated with him. At one point in the film, newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, played by Orson Welles, proclaims to his beleaguered staff, “The news goes on 24 hours a day.” But for Turner, who often worked 12-to-14-hour days, all of the network newscasts were long over by the time he got home.
That gave the cable television innovator an idea. He would call the new channel the Cable News Network. On June 1, 1980, with a crowd gathered before him at CNN’s headquarters on Techwood Drive, Ted Turner launched the country’s first 24-hour cable news channel that would eventually be beamed around the world. As the band played the National Anthem, Turner took in the moment. “It was thrilling,” he recalls in Call Me Ted. “We still had a lot of work to do to make CNN a success, but we had already cleared substantial hurdles and defied skeptics simply by getting on the air.”
Photograph by Archive Photos/Getty Images
While he was becoming a global media mogul, privately, Ted was still the same old Ted. Xernona Clayton, the first Black woman to host a talk show in the country at Atlanta’s WAGA-TV in 1967, was now producing Emmy-winning documentaries for Turner Broadcasting. To avoid Atlanta’s notorious rush hour traffic, Clayton often got to her downtown office to start her workday at 5 a.m. She encountered her new boss before sunrise one morning when he knocked on her office door with an empty coffee cup wearing nothing but a towel, fresh from showering in his office. “I hear this voice say, I saw your light on and was wondering if maybe I could get a cup of coffee,” Clayton recalls. “I looked at him and asked, Aren’t you Ted Turner?! But that’s Ted. He would just walk around in a towel. He used to sleep there.” Clayton laughs and adds, “That became a regular routine for us. After that, the coffee klatch was on!”
As Ted Turner’s financial fortunes grew while he launched the Goodwill Games, TNT, Turner Classic Movies (after purchasing the MGM film library that included his favorites Citizen Kane and Gone With the Wind) and Cartoon Network, he felt his social obligations increase as well. As he told ABC News 20/20 correspondent Sam Donaldson in 1997, “I think it would be tragic to just be remembered for making a lot of money.” Consequently, Turner helped to create the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Turner Foundation nonprofits. And on September 18, 1997, Ted Turner made history by donating one billion dollars to start the United Nations Foundation. Among its other achievements, the foundation has successfully battled the spread of HIV and malaria around the globe.
Explained longtime Turner friend and fellow media mogul John Malone in the Call Me Ted documentary, “Ted is a believer. He believes he can stop nuclear proliferation. He believes he can do something to impact global warming. This is a guy who really believes he can make a difference. And he does it with integrity. That is so unusual in this world. That’s what makes him so unique.” In 1990, hoping to inspire the next generation of environmentalists, Turner came up with the concept for a new cartoon, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, that would be beamed to kids across the globe. Explained Laura Turner Seydel, who would become chair of the eventual Captain Planet Foundation nonprofit, in Call Me Ted, “This superhero worked with youth from all over the world. A big part of the show’s success was that youth who had never seen somebody that looked like themselves were playing starring roles.” Ted explained the need for the cartoon more succinctly: “The environment is everybody’s business.”
• • •
After a pair of failed marriages and seeing his five children, Laura, Teddy, Beau, Rhett, and Jennie, infrequently throughout their childhoods as he expanded his businesses, Turner had become smitten with two-time Oscar winner Jane Fonda, who was recently divorced. After rebuffing a series of invitations from Turner, the daughter of Hollywood legend Henry Fonda finally agreed to a dinner date. But she was hesitant to jump into a relationship with the CNN founder, especially after he unfolded a page from his desk calendar to plan their next date and Fonda got a gander at all of the days already occupied with the names of other women he was dating. She issued an edict—if he wanted to be with her, he had to drop the other women.
“Ted was known for all of his girlfriends,” recalls Clayton with a laugh. “But now, Jane Fonda was in the picture, a movie star. I told Ted, You can’t treat a movie star like a commoner. He was buying all this land in Montana and had all of these bison. I would give him these lectures: You can’t treat a lady like a herd of cattle, Ted! He used to laugh about how I was always trying to give him some ‘how-to-do’s.’”
Photograph by Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images
Turner listened to his old friend’s advice. While driving them around his properties in Montana, the media mogul would stop the vehicle to pick flowers for Fonda. Ted and Jane were married on December 21, 1991. She moved to Atlanta, shelving her acting career and becoming a dedicated stepmother to Ted’s five children. Fonda encouraged Turner to foster closer relationships with his now-adult children and his growing number of grandchildren. “Here was a man so grand who was saying, ‘When I’m not with you I feel diminished,” explained Fonda in Call Me Ted. In her autobiography My Life So Far, Fonda revealed that a month into their marriage, she discovered Turner had resumed an affair with one of his former girlfriends. After entering her Bel Air hotel room on his knees, Ted and Jane would eventually reconcile.
Turner would need the stability in his personal life as CNN merged with Time Warner in 1996, effectively dissolving Turner Broadcasting and making CNN’s founder Time Warner’s vice-chair and head of all the company’s cable networks. But following the company’s 2000 merger with America Online, Ted Turner was essentially squeezed out. And following the new company’s colossal $54 billion quarterly loss in 2002, Ted Turner’s personal fortune plunged. His ten-year relationship with Fonda was also over. “The marriage had run its course,” Turner writes in Call Me Ted. “I loved Jane very much and continue to love her to this day.”
Due to the AOL-Time Warner debacle, Turner’s personal wealth had diminished from an estimated eight billion dollars to two billion as he was fired from the companies he had founded. Cast adrift professionally for the first time in 40 years, Turner looked for a way to fuse his entrepreneurial spirit with his passion for protecting the American prairie and preserving the Native American bison population on the plains. He decided to partner with Atlantan Longhorn Steaks founder and CEO George McKerrow, Jr. to launch Ted’s Montana Grill in 2001. The dining chain would bring bison burgers, bison pot roast, salads and malted milkshakes to the American plate, served up in trailblazing environmentally sustainable restaurants.
As he explained to David Letterman on The Late Show, “We’re raising bison because I really like them but when I got up to 42,000, I had to do something with them because they keep breeding. So, we had to eat some of them.”
Turner’s sustainability efforts worked.
In 25 years, America’s bison herd population has doubled to approximately 600,000 and is no longer considered endangered. Ted’s Montana Grill is now a profitable, debt-free company operating 38 restaurants in 16 states.
“For 25 years, our partnership has existed on a single handshake,” reflects McKerrow. “Ted says our business venture basically saved his life. Ted’s Montana Grill gave Ted something to be proud of, something he could be involved with and something he could feel highly successful with.”
Despite their 2001 divorce, Jane Fonda remained close to Turner’s family and Ted, affectionately referring to him as “my favorite ex-husband.” Until Lewy body dementia rendered him unable to do so, Ted would steadfastly show up to Fonda’s annual benefits for G-CAPP, her Georgia-based teen pregnancy prevention nonprofit, donating not only cash but luxury trips to his Montana properties for live auctions.
Fonda reflected in the 2017 CNN special Ted Turner: The Maverick Man, “As he’s aging, he wants to know that he will go out with the love of his children and his grandchildren.” Her eyes brimming with tears, Fonda added, “That may not have always been the case, but it’s important to him now, and he’s doing what he needs to do.”
Photograph by Rick Diamond/Getty Images for GCAPP
At a Harvard University speaking engagement captured in Call Me Ted, Turner summed up his career, telling the young business students assembled before him “I’ve had a great life. In America, we’ve emphasized that how much money you have and how much you spend is what determines how happy you are. That’s not right. The thing that really determines your happiness is your relationships. With your family, with your friends. That’s what’s important.”
• • •
As a lifelong history buff who faced down countless business challenges over the decades and survived storms on the open sea as a competitive sailor, Ted Turner was fond of quoting the end of Horatius, writer Thomas Babington Macaulay’s epic poem of ancient Rome: “Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate: ‘To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than facing fearful odds. For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods. Now, who will stand on either hand, and keep the bridge with me?”
Reflects George McKerrow, Jr. of his friend and business partner: “Ted is the kindest, most loyal and generous friend and partner you could ever ask for. This disease is the worst of the worst. Ted has fought longer and harder than anybody. He has a real zeal for life. He fought with dignity and honor until the end. I’m just proud to have been by his side.”
While addressing a packed stadium at the inaugural Goodwill Games in 1986, Ted Turner summarized his goals for creating the global sporting event and perhaps his life’s mantra as well: “I love this world of ours. It’s a beautiful, wonderful place that deserves to be taken care of. And in order to take care of it, the first thing we have to do is learn to live in peace and harmony and cooperation. Thank you all for being a part of it. God bless you.”
Highlights from our previous coverage of Ted Turner
- Profile from our 50th Anniversary issue (May 2011)
- Flashback: That one time Ted Turner coached the Braves (May 2019)
