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In fact, Turner is banking on the loyalty of cable operators as well as viewers, although such allegiance is by no means assured. Says Marc Nathanson, who represents 40 cable systems in California: "I'm wondering if our pocketbooks are going to outweigh our feelings toward the pioneers who took the risks. As for me, I'm supporting old Ted and sticking by his service." Playing on the traditional suspicion between broadcasters and cable people, Turner has launched a direct-mail campaign aimed at arousing cable operators; he enclosed copies of ABC memos counseling local affiliate stations to use every resource, including the stations' news and public affairs departments, to campaign for "free TV." At the National Cable Television Association convention in Las Vegas in May, Turner reminded cable-system owners of the Johnny-come-lately quality of his opposition with placards, buttons and a giant 3-D billboard of himself playing the guitar, all inscribed with a slogan paraphrased from a country music song title: I WAS CABLE WHEN CABLE WASN'T COOL.
Cable-system owners seem to warm to the message, and to Turner's style as a personal entrepreneur in a gray, corporate age.
Most of them talk freely of a hugely lucrative "communications revolution" in the decade to come, and they honor Turner as the most important supplier of basic cable service to advance that future. They thronged to his kickoff party at the NCTA gathering and were plainly pleased as the whippet-like (6 ft. 1 in., 175 lb.) Turner windmilled through the crowd greeting many by name, his raspy drawl audible from yards away despite the background music.
Turner is said to be congenitally unable to keep a secret. At Las Vegas he was supposed to announce at a press conference that he had signed a deal to distribute CNN in Japan. But a day before, he was blurting out the details to anyone close enough to listen. As a businessman he shows little suspicion and less patience. He sometimes makes deals to distribute CNN on the basis of 30 seconds of chat and a handshake, even with strangers.
Turner's whirlwind pace leaves most aides looking a little shellshocked. He is a kaleidoscope of ever shifting moods, interests, personalities: now the apoplectic boss, now the courtly charmer, now the scholar and Renaissance man, now the buccaneer business baron. If Turner were a character from Shakespeare, and he has that kind of incandescence, he would be in equal parts the nobly ambitious Prince Hal, the impulsively belligerent Hotspur and the comically self-indulgent Falstaff. Says Schonfeld: "If Ted Turner were a color, it would be red—the red of the surface of the sun." Adds another Turner aide, insisting that he not be named: "Do I like Ted? Do you like a volcano?" Turner's wife Jane says she is sure he must have been a hyperactive child: "He's hyperactive now."
He has a genuine love of risk and an abiding faith in the value of competition, win or lose. He trusts his own vision and scorns prudent measures like market research. He loves to cast himself as a hapless crusader or starry-eyed underdog, and revels in emerging as the triumphant idiot savant.
Some of his