Shaking Up the Networks

(9 of 11)

angry son did the only thing he could to upstage his father: he published the letter in the Brown University newspaper. But Ed Turner apparently won his battle. Soon afterward, Ted switched his major to economics. And he did indeed leave Brown; after having been suspended twice for infractions involving women, he headed down to Florida and lived like a bum, then returned to Georgia to join his father in the billboard business.

Through much of his teens, a turbulent time for anyone, Ted shared a special family grief; when he was T 15 and she was three years younger, his sister Mary Jane was stricken with a severe form of lupus erythematosus, a disease that causes the body to make antibodies against its own tissues. Even now Turner looks away when he speaks of her suffering, and his express-train speech slows to a flat few words. "She was sweet as a little button, she worshiped the ground I walked on, and I loved her. A horrible illness." To inti mates he has described nightmarish scenes that took place as pain and deterioration tormented her nervous system. Carpenters were brought in to pad her room. She screamed, "God, let me die, let me die!"

Her death after five years of suffering increased the pressure on Ted as the only surviving child. When he went to work for his father, the lessons in business were intense. Says Turner: "Driving in to work, he told me about the tax laws, amortization, depreciation, sales, management, construction. He told me how he got started, what happened in competitive situations, how he lost business and how he got it." Always Ed Turner instilled ambition, and the self-doubt that keeps driven men going. Says his son of that training: "All my life I have had this gnawing pain that I might not succeed. It is only in the past four or five years that I have put that ghost to rest."

By the time Ted was in his 20s, Ed Turner was long since a millionaire. He went on buying companies, ran up debts, prospered yet worried. Eventually he grew despondent: he decided his expansion had been a great mistake. He signed an agreement to sell his billboard firm's big, newly acquired Atlanta division. Then Ed Turner retreated to his plantation in South Carolina and on March 5, 1963, at age 53, shot himself.

Turner discussed the psychic impact of that suicide in a speech at Georgetown University this spring. Said he: "My father died when I was 24. That left me alone, because I had counted on him to make the judgment of whether or not I was a success." His father's erratic business behavior and sudden death put young Ted to what old friends still consider his toughest test as a businessman: he had to find a way to nullify the sale contract and win back the Atlanta billboard business.

Ted used all his father's lessons, all his own natural guile. While the deal was pending, he lured away employees (a key but unsalable asset) from the Atlanta unit to the Macon, Ga., division that he retained. He shifted lucrative contracts between companies. He threatened to destroy financial records, "to build billboards in front of theirs." And when at last he persuaded the buyers to rescind the deal in exchange for $200,000, money he did not have, he gambled that they would wait to be paid to avoid an income tax of 90% on a short-term gain. Thus was born the financing rule