Citizen Turner

About this book

Citizen Turner is the sprawling saga of Ted Turner and his pell-mell rush to create a global communications empire. Business magnate, crusading environmentalist, founder of the internationally known Cable News Network, triumphant defender of the America's Cup, Time magazine's 1991 Man of the Year, Turner has collected a warehouse full of trophies. Recognition of this sort has been especially important to him since his father's death. Gerald Jay Goldberg and Robert Goldberg - themselves father and son - show how Turner's life has been crucially influenced by the shadow of his alcoholic father. As a boy, Ted, with missionary zeal, went about saving wounded animals; the relentlessly overachieving adult Turner leaps to the rescue of wounded companies and longs to save the world. No stranger to crises - often of his own making - he seems to function best in hurricane winds. In such a context, his efforts to improve the planet's environment and his recent marriage to cinema goddess Jane Fonda take on a new meaning. Employing hundreds of interviews with Turner's friends, relatives, associates, and employees past and present, the Goldbergs tell of his troubled marriages and nonmarriages, his creation of CNN, his purchase of the Atlanta Braves and Hawks, his encounters with Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev, his establishment of the Goodwill Games, and his play to acquire CBS and MGM.