Jacques Cousteau (23 page)

Cousteau promoted Malle from head cameraman to codirector. They had spent hundreds of hours together planning their dives, repairing cameras, lights, and hydrophones for sound, and talking about their expectations for
The Silent World
. To Malle, Cousteau was a master technician who constantly strove to improve his equipment and technique for filming underwater. To Cousteau, Malle was the embodiment of the artistic sensibility he considered essential to great cinema. At twenty-three, Malle already believed that film—like dance, theater, and music—allowed him to marry beautiful images, great writing, interesting characters, and music into a story that happened, ended, but remained forever in the consciousness of the viewer. After fifteen years of underwater film, it was no longer enough, Cousteau and Malle agreed, to simply take people beneath the sea. Cousteau wanted a pure documentary, a movie that revealed not only the underwater world and the creatures that inhabited it but the divers responsible for making it. Malle wanted to portray the divers as dancing rather than laboring, making them not so much guides and masters underwater but strange humans weirdly adapted to the alien world. They agreed that
The Silent World
would be shot in color.

They compromised on the kind of film they would make together, trading scenes in a carefully edited dance of pictures and sound. Malle’s opening mesmerized its first audiences at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 1956. Five Aqua-Lung divers descend through aquamarine
water carrying underwater flares that stream pyrotechnic banners of bubbles, accompanied by the sounds of their breath through gurgling regulators and the roar of the burning flares.

“This is a motion-picture studio sixty-five feet under the sea,” Cousteau narrates, his voice conveying fascination in every word. “These divers wearing compressed-air Aqua-Lungs are true spacemen, swimming freely as fish.”

The descent seems to last forever. People in theaters find themselves holding their breath. A hundred feet down, the flares die out and the divers turn on floodlights that illuminate a riot of orange, yellow, and red bursting from a coral reef beneath them. They change course and continue to descend. Passing 200 feet, the ocean is a diffuse bluish haze that collapses into blackness below. The
Calypso
divers are now in the world of rapture, Cousteau continues, with a note of fear in his voice. Nitrogen in their flesh and blood will soon intoxicate them, robbing them of their sense of balance and their ability to make decisions. A minute later, the divers are at 247 feet, the deepest Aqua-Lung dive ever captured on film. In the weird white beams of the camera lights, the divers nod to each other, point to the surface, and begin their ascent.

The second scene is Cousteau’s, a distinct counterpoint to Malle’s lyrical overture. The divers are back on the surface, exhausted and struggling to board
Calypso
with the weight of their tanks and the awkwardness of walking in swim fins. Cousteau’s obvious point is that menfish swim free in the sea but are as clumsy as fish out of water on the surface. The first lines of wooden dialogue reveal that great divers are not necessarily great actors, but somehow they strike just the right note. One of the divers complains of a pain in his knee. It might be the bends. Cousteau orders the diver into
Calypso
’s recompression chamber, where he will have to stay while the rest of the crew eats dinner.

“Do I have to, Captain?” the diver protests, sounding like a scolded boy.

“Absolutely,” Cousteau says, pointing to the chamber as if banishing that child.

After a quick tour of the interior of the chamber and an explanation of the bends, laughing crewmen seal the pouting diver inside. Cousteau’s technical moment segues into the galley, where the crew,
crammed around the impossibly small table, feasts on lobsters and talks about diving. All of them are awkward on camera, but they are infinitely likable and unquestionably brave. Everyone in the theater is quite willing to dive with them again.

For the next eighty minutes, Cousteau, his divers, and a cast of sea creatures make good on the dramatic promises of the opening scenes. A 60-pound giant grouper named Jo Jo le Merou (after a famous Marseille gangster) dances a waltz with Dumas, who feeds him scraps of meat from his hands. Cousteau explains that the fish off Assumption Island have no fear of humans because they have never seen any before. He also says that he has banned spearfishing by anyone except the
Calypso’s
chef. Jo Jo is shown greeting the divers in the morning and following them to the boarding ladder in the evening. The big fish stuck so close to the divers that they had to lock it in the shark cage when they filmed other reef fish, lest it interrupt the scene by chasing the smaller fish.

Cousteau leads his divers and theater audiences to the wreck of a sunken freighter in the Red Sea with footage shot on his first and second expeditions. Sixty feet down, he films Dumas scrubbing rust and silt from the ship’s builder’s plate, revealing that it was from a Scottish shipyard, yard number 599. Back aboard
Calypso
, Cousteau scrapes barnacles and algae from a bell retrieved from the wreck, showing the camera that the ship’s name was
Thistlegorm
.

In another of Louis Malle’s scenes, hundreds of porpoises cavort in front of
Calypso
, easily able to outswim the ship but clearly slowing down to play, apparently happy to entertain Cousteau and his laughing crew standing on the ship’s bow. Not a single member of the audience at Cannes or in the thousands of theaters in which
The Silent World
was shown had ever seen anything like the dance of the dolphins.

Nor had they ever seen the brutal antithesis of the dolphins’ grace and beauty: the shark feeding frenzy on the baby sperm whale, shown while Cousteau matter-of-factly comments on the attack. “The sharks smell the blood in the water. Then comes the first bite. It is the signal for the orgy to begin.”
Calypso’s
crewmen, Cousteau explains, are outraged by what the sharks are doing. He calls the sharks the mortal enemies of divers. The crewmen bait hooks, catch the sharks, then join the orgy themselves by hacking them to pieces on deck. At the screening of
The Silent World
in Cannes, audiences moaned and gasped at the carnage on the screen. Many wept.

During the festival,
Calypso
was moored in the bay, its rigging strung with lights and pennants, its white hull an unmistakable nautical centerpiece. For the first time, the jury awarded its highest prize, the Palme d’Or, to a documentary. A week later, after making an initial approach to Daniel Cousteau, Columbia Pictures bought the rights to release
The Silent World
in the United States.

Four months later,
The Silent World
opened at the Paris Theater, across the street from the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The otherworldly divers in the opening scene had people holding their breath, Jo Jo le Merou (renamed Ulysses in James Dugan’s English narration) had them laughing, the dolphins were more beautiful than anything they had ever seen on the ocean, and audiences were similiarly caught up in the shark frenzy. Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
called it “the most beautiful and fascinating documentary of its sort ever filmed. The only trouble with the whole thing is that it makes you want to strap on an Aqua-Lung and go.”

The following spring, after playing to enthusiastic audiences in hundreds of theaters across America,
The Silent World
won the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oscar as the best documentary film of 1956. Crowther and other critics, however, wondered about the scientific value of running
Calypso
into a pod of whales, slaughtering sharks for revenge, or dynamiting a reef to collect fish. “Exactly what Captain Cousteau learned for the benefit of oceanographic science is not explained,” Crowther wrote. “However, his voyaging turned up a beautiful and absorbing nature film, and that is enough for anybody whose scientific interest does not range very far outside a theater.”

Among those who were enchanted by the exploits of Cousteau and the
Calypso
divers was Prince Rainier of Monaco. After seeing
The Silent World
, he offered Cousteau a job as the director of the world’s oldest undersea museum and research center, the Oceanographic Museum of Monte Carlo. The museum, which looks like a gigantic limestone castle hanging on the face of a 500-foot cliff outside the harbor, was built by Rainier’s grandfather, Prince Albert Grimaldi. Calling it the Temple of the Sea, he filled it with a collection of specimens and artifacts from his own ocean expeditions. The museum was equipped with laboratories, meeting rooms, and an extensive library, which, for the rest of Albert’s life, drew the cream of European ocean scientists to Monaco.

The harbor at Monaco
(
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
)

Monaco itself is less than a square mile of land, bordered on three sides by France and on the fourth by the Mediterranean. Until Louis Blanc, a gambler exiled from Germany, arrived in 1872, the principality was a few narrow streets winding over a precipitous rock cliff, a fishing fleet of a dozen small boats, and a population of eight hundred people who scratched out a wretched existence under the guard of a battalion of French troops With the roulette wheel he brought with him from Bad Homburg, Blanc transformed Monte Carlo into the gambling capital of the world in less than a decade. He ensured his welcome and the continuing health of Monaco by cutting in the Grimaldi family, heirs to the throne of the principality, for 10 percent of his action, which quickly amounted to millions of francs a year.

Albert’s heir, Prince Louis, inherited the throne in 1922. He had no interest in the sea or its creatures, so the museum went into a quarter century of decline. When Prince Rainier took over in 1949, he made the resurrection of his grandfather’s vision one of the priorities of his reign, spending the next eight years rebuilding the now decrepit fortress on the cliff. In 1957, the museum was just beginning to attract not only tourists but scientists again. Rainier decided that Jacques-Yves Cousteau would be the perfect man to raise it up the
next notch to its former glory as one of the world’s great centers of inquiry into the nature of the world’s oceans.

Rainier saw Cousteau as a celebrated explorer who also knew how to tell the world what he saw underwater in books and movies. He was a master fund-raiser and a great showman, traits that fit perfectly into Rainier’s dream that the museum would, like the casino at Monte Carlo, become a source of revenue for the tiny principality as well as contributing to scientific knowledge of the ocean. The prince envisioned it becoming a self-sustaining aquarium, featuring creatures from the Mediterranean, in particular the dolphins that had so moved him in
The Silent World
.

Cousteau told the prince that exhibiting live dolphins in an aquarium had been a dream of his since his first expeditions aboard
Calypso
. He found out that American marine parks captured dolphins by lassoing them, and put his research group to work figuring out how to do it. They mounted a platform on the front of one of their launches, where Falco stood with a rope and a long pole to place the noose over the animal riding the bow wave. It didn’t work. Falco killed a few dolphins before giving up. Cousteau then realized that the kind of dolphin the Americans captured with lassos was the bottle-nosed dolphin, a much more robust animal than the common dolphin in the Mediterranean, which was lighter and more delicate. Falco tried anesthetizing the dolphins with curare before lassoing them. More dolphins died.

Finally, Falco got a line on a small female, let her tire herself out pulling against a buoy on the surface, and sent divers into the water to corral her. They brought the exhausted dolphin to shore in Marseille, put her into a large concrete tank, and named her Kiki. She died three months later, but not before bonding with Falco, who was her primary keeper. Coincidentally, or maybe not, Kiki died a week after Falco went to sea aboard
Calypso
, leaving her with a new keeper. Cousteau insisted that she died of a broken heart when Falco left. Two more dolphins, a male and female, killed themselves by swimming full speed into the wall of the tank. With much better facilities and the help of scientists at the Oceanographic Museum, Cousteau hoped he would eventually succeed in holding dolphins in captivity and make their leaps and playful swimming a major attraction in Monaco.

Rainier’s offer was a dream come true for Cousteau, who constantly
was struggling to make financial ends meet, both for his expeditions and his family. It included a generous salary, an apartment on a hillside in Monaco, and a staff to handle the day-to-day operations of the museum. He was free to manage his movie production company,
Calypso
, the Office of Undersea Technology, and his role as the spokesman for Air Liquide’s scuba equipment venture. Like Bosley Crowther, almost everyone who saw
The Silent World
couldn’t wait to go see the world beneath the sea for themselves. Aqua-Lung sales were booming in the United States and Europe.