{"id":477886,"date":"2026-05-10T15:06:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T15:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/477886\/"},"modified":"2026-05-10T15:06:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T15:06:18","slug":"a-woman-i-knew-dated-ted-turner-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/477886\/","title":{"rendered":"A woman I knew dated Ted Turner \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A woman I knew dated Ted Turner<\/a>. (Before Jane<\/a>.) I was fascinated. Did that kinetic kingpin ever sleep? Did \u201cthe Mouth of the South\u201d churn with bulletins 24 hours a day, like his amazing creation, CNN<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Ted rested sometimes, she assured me. But he was a character, she said, recounting the story of the first time she visited Turner at his home in Georgia.<\/p>\n

As she got out of the car and walked toward the door, Turner swept out to greet her. He was dressed like Rhett Butler and was playing the music from Gone With the Wind. He scooped her up in his arms and carried her inside.<\/p>\n

Turner was, as his third wife, Jane Fonda, said in a tribute when he died at 87 on Wednesday, a \u201cdeeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate\u201d.<\/p>\n

His idol was the ultimate cinematic swashbuckler, Clark Gable<\/a>\u2019s Rhett Butler. (Turner named one of his sons Rhett.)<\/p>\n

\u201cTed bought MGM so he could own Gone With the Wind,\u201d Fonda told me in a 2020 interview. \u201cI mean, Gone With the Wind \u2013 he lives by that. \u2018The land is the only thing that matters, Scarlett. The land is the only thing that lasts!\u2019 That\u2019s why he owns two million acres, because of Scarlett O\u2019Hara.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ActressActress Jane Fonda and CNN founder Ted Turner at the United Nations Foundation Global Leadership dinner in New York in 2013. Photograph:Jason DeCrow\/AP <\/p>\n

When Turner created Turner Classic Movies in 1994 \u2013 I will always love him for that \u2013 he introduced it with his favourite movie, the same way he introduced the TNT network six years earlier.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe recited lines from Gone With the Wind a lot,\u201d Fonda recalled. \u201cHe was obsessed with Scarlett O\u2019Hara. You know the painting from the movie, the great big painting with Scarlett? He owned it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Fonda if he had ever cosplayed as Rhett with her, and she laughed.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d she said. \u201cHowever, one day when we were driving to one of his ranches in his jeep over the bumpy roads and my brother and his wife were with us, he suddenly stopped the car and got out and pulled me out and grabbed me in his arms and sang, Don\u2019t Fence Me In.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turner was a wild man. He was known for giving friends tours of his Flying D ranch in Montana, pointing out all the places that he had made love with Fonda over the years.<\/p>\n

He once told me how, during an earlier marriage, his doctor had advised him and his wife to cut back on drinking and confine themselves to one cocktail a day. \u201cI stopped on the way home and bought the biggest glasses I could find,\u201d he said, roaring with laughter.<\/p>\n

He had stumbles, of course, as he pursued his supercalifragilisticexpialidocious dreams. He roiled Hollywood<\/a> royalty when he colorised some of the old black-and-white classics, like Casablanca, 42nd Street and Frank Capra\u2019s It\u2019s a Wonderful Life. <\/p>\n

I covered a congressional hearing on the blasphemy in 1987 where Woody Allen<\/a> and Ginger Rogers showed up to vociferously object. Allen called the practice \u201csinful\u201d and Rogers read a statement from Jimmy Stewart charging that the colorisation of It\u2019s a Wonderful Life had turned the movie into \u201ca bath of Easter egg dye\u201d.<\/p>\n

Turner himself was so colourful that he probably couldn\u2019t imagine life, or art, confined to black and white. But he backed off. Turner created TCM, a cherished cable channel dedicated to film preservation, after acquiring the MGM film library. (By the way, Woody Allen and Ginger Rogers are ubiquitous on TCM in glorious black and white.)<\/p>\n

Despite his sins \u2013 including philandering, bigoted remarks and public misbehaviour \u2013 his flair, imagination and tenacity (he named one of his champion yachts Tenacious) were irresistible.<\/p>\n

I love the story about how, when he first conjured CNN, he often slept on the sofa in his office in Atlanta to get the unlikely enterprise going, wandering into the newsroom in his bathrobe and eating out of vending machines or in the cafeteria.<\/p>\n

The first all-news, round-the-clock channel began to click during the Gulf War of 1991. During the bombing of Baghdad, US president George HW Bush groused, \u201cI learn more from CNN than I do from the CIA.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike today\u2019s greedy and soulless tech billionaires, Turner had fun being rich. The lords of the cloud aren\u2019t swashbucklers; they just are buckling to president Donald Trump<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even though his father\u2019s crippling debts in his billboard business helped drive him to suicide, Turner never seemed to worry about skydiving into debt. He bought the Atlanta Braves, promoting the team with wet T-shirt contests, and later he taught Hanoi Jane how to do the tomahawk chop. (His right-wing politics had mellowed by then and so had he, once he began taking lithium.)<\/p>\n

He learned to sail and became \u201cCaptain Outrageous\u201d, the dashing winner of the America\u2019s Cup race in 1977 with his yacht Courageous. (The man was so competitive that when his first wife was beating him in a yacht race, he rammed his boat into hers. The marriage ended shortly thereafter.)<\/p>\n

\n

I could get off my lithium, do away with Rupert, plead not guilty by virtue of insanity, get acquitted, and then get back on my meds<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He was generous \u2013 another quality missing from many modern plutocrats. In 1996, at his friend Tom Brokaw\u2019s urging, I called Turner to write a column on a pet peeve of his: the parsimony of fellow billionaires like Bill Gates<\/a> and Warren Buffett<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Turner had, two years earlier, forked out more than $200 million to charity. He told me he empathised with the fear of giving away so much money that you would fall off the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans.<\/p>\n

But he challenged his peers \u2013 or \u201col\u2019 skinflints\u201d, as he called them \u2013 to shut down that fear and open up their purse strings.<\/p>\n

He suggested a list focused on who did the giving rather than the having, proposing an Ebenezer Scrooge Prize to embarrass stingy billionaires and a Heart of Gold Award to honour the biggest givers.<\/p>\n

\u201cScrooge felt a lot happier when he saved Tiny Tim and bought the turkey for the poor family, right?\u201d he said. The column I wrote spurred Michael Kinsley, then the editor of Slate, a pioneering online magazine, to start the Slate 60, a list of the most generous philanthropists. The following year, he donated $1 billion to the UN.<\/p>\n

I actually got to meet the voracious visionary once at a dinner at Brokaw\u2019s apartment in New York. He came with Fonda and brought everyone Braves caps.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Ted Turner, CNN founder and pioneer of 24-hour news, dies at 87Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He told us he had thought of a way to win his rivalry with Rupert Murdoch<\/a>. The two moguls both bought baseball teams \u2013 Murdoch\u2019s Fox Group acquired the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1998 \u2013 and forged powerhouse media empires.<\/p>\n

\u201cI could get off my lithium, do away with Rupert, plead not guilty by virtue of insanity, get acquitted, and then get back on my meds,\u201d he said with a big grin.<\/p>\n

A couple of decades later, they ended up settling their feud more peaceably, over lunch at Ted\u2019s Montana Grill in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

Turner died of Lewy body dementia<\/a>. My brother died of that, too, and it\u2019s a horrible way to go.<\/p>\n

But, oh, how Ted Turner lived!<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A woman I knew dated Ted Turner. (Before Jane.) I was fascinated. Did that kinetic kingpin ever sleep?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[3189,9,10,39088,868,356,13,14,6,11146,47672,11,12,15,16,5,37903,7,8,107,617,17377,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-477886","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-bill-gates","9":"tag-breaking-news","10":"tag-breakingnews","11":"tag-cnn","12":"tag-dementia","13":"tag-donald-trump","14":"tag-featured-news","15":"tag-featurednews","16":"tag-headlines","17":"tag-hollywood-la","18":"tag-jane-fonda","19":"tag-latest-news","20":"tag-latestnews","21":"tag-main-news","22":"tag-mainnews","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-rupert-murdoch","25":"tag-top-stories","26":"tag-topstories","27":"tag-us","28":"tag-warren-buffett","29":"tag-woody-allen","30":"tag-world","31":"tag-world-news","32":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116550905722962091","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}