Jacques Cousteau (29 page)

As soon as
Calypso
went back in the water at the end of December, Philippe left for Paris to marry Jan Sullivan in a small ceremony with only his brother, Jean-Michel, and his grandfather, Daniel, representing the family. As Philippe’s affair with Jan had deepened during the course of her several visits to France over the past nine months, Simone had made sure he knew that she and his father objected to
making their arrangement permanent. A Cousteau should not marry an American, she bluntly told him, especially an American whose sole achievement consisted of wearing clothes for photographers and fashion designers. Philippe’s defiance of their wishes sent shudders through the family,
Calypso’s
crew, and the rest of the Cousteau empire. The tension deepened when Simone and Jacques Cousteau refused to attend the wedding, sending as their gift a certificate enrolling Jan in an intensive French language course. After the ceremony, Philippe flew to Los Angeles to set up an office for Cousteau’s production company, Les Requins Associés (Sharks Associated), near David Wolper Productions in Hollywood. Philippe then returned to Monaco to work on the first episode of
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau
.

Cousteau asked his older son, Jean-Michel, and his wife, AnneMarie, to stay in Los Angeles to maintain a presence for the family while he, Simone, and Philippe were at sea. After his success at turning the institute in Monaco into a profitable oceanographic museum and aquarium, Cousteau believed such institutions had the potential not only to introduce people to the sea but to make a profit. Jean-Michel’s first assignment in California was to design an underwater exploration exhibit aboard the retired ocean liner
Queen Mary
, permanently moored at a dock in Long Beach. The promoters, who were turning the giant ship into a hotel, shopping mall, and shipping museum, were delighted to attach the Cousteau name to their enterprise, regardless of which Cousteau did the work.

At a press conference in Monaco on February 18, 1967, Cousteau told the world what he planned to do with the $4.2 million he was getting from ABC television. Aboard
Calypso
with Simone, Prince Rainier, and Princess Grace at his side, he began with a passionate statement about the deterioration of the oceans caused by overfishing and pollution, which he had witnessed during the relatively brief fifty-seven years of his own life.

“I am not optimistic that the destruction can be reversed, but I am embarking on a four-year expedition to film the oceans and their inhabitants so future generations can know them as I have known them.
Calypso
and its crew will become real residents of the sea,”
Cousteau said. “On every part of the voyage, scientists from the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco and other institutions will supervise the accuracy of their discoveries.”

Television, Cousteau emphasized, was the very best medium for informing the people of the world about the condition of the ocean and inspiring them with its beauty. “On a single evening in the comfort of their homes, millions of people will witness what we witness,” Cousteau said in closing. The first episode would be set on the now familiar coral reefs of the Red Sea, presenting sharks as no one had ever seen them before.

At the farewell reception after the press conference, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace presented Simone with a rare St. Hubert dog. It was as big as a St. Bernard and looked like a bloodhound; though Cousteau doubted it would take to shipboard life, the dog was aboard when
Calypso
left Monte Carlo. Simone named it Zoom in honor of their sailing off on an adventure as great as riding a rocket into space.

With
Calypso’s
crew waving from the rails, the bright white ship sailed off under a canopy of confetti and balloons released by hundreds of people lining the cliffs surrounding the narrow harbor. After a brief appearance on the bow, Cousteau left
Calypso
in command of Captain Roger Maritano and gratefully retired to his cabin, where he remained for the better part of three days. Two weeks earlier, with preparations for departure reaching a fever pitch, the car in which Cousteau was riding had swerved off the road on one of his endless commutes between Marseille and Monaco. He had badly wrenched his back but refused to put off the sailing date, telling Simone that all he needed was the soothing warm waters of the tropical ocean.

The days when life aboard
Calypso
was like a party on a yacht were over. The ninety-minute
Silent World
and
World Without Sun
had taken Cousteau and his divers two years each to shoot and edit. Producing four finished hours of television in a single year was going to be an endurance test, with contractual delivery dates carrying the added weight of enormous penalties for failure. Cousteau became a taskmaster, transformed by the fact that his reputation as a filmmaker was on the line every day of his life at sea. The equipment had to work perfectly every time, and most of it was new to them because it had just been invented by the Office of Undersea Technology. In the same way that Cousteau could charm people into doing what he
wanted them to do, his intensity brought anger and disgust down on anyone who failed to perform up to his expectations. The few divers remaining from the salad days of
The Silent World
and
World Without Sun
were immune from criticism, having proven themselves for a decade at sea with Cousteau. New men tiptoed around him, knowing that they could be fired in the next port if they didn’t please him. And everyone noticed that Cousteau was particularly hard on Philippe.

Cousteau sent Philippe, Falco, Laban, and a team of divers to the Red Sea ahead of
Calypso
aboard the cargo boat
Espadon
. Their mission was critical: to test the two Sea Fleas, reconditioned diving saucer, new diving suits, streamlined plastic tank fairings, full-face helmets equipped with lights and radios, Galeazzi decompression chamber, electric underwater scooters, inflatable outboard skiffs, lights, and cameras. When
Calypso
arrived, everything had to be working perfectly. Cousteau’s inventory of cameras, lights, tape recorders, cables, and the rest of the gear he needed to shoot high-quality motion pictures underwater sometimes made him long for the days when he, Dumas, and Tailliez had simply waddled into the sea with their Kinamo from the beach at Sanary-sur-Mer.

To film the first episode of his television series—“Sharks”—Cousteau and his crew had eighteen cameras. For topside work, they would use two 35 mm and two 16 mm Arriflex cameras, two 16 mm Eclairs, two dozen lenses, and three Perfectone synchronized sound recorders. Underwater, they would use four 35 mm and eight 16 mm Arriflexes in pressurized housings, and several Nikon still cameras in water-and pressure-proof housings. For lighting on the surface and in the water, they had sealed 1,000-, 750-, and 250-watt quartz flood-lamps that could be powered by rechargeable battery packs or the 110-volt electrical system aboard
Calypso
.

The first six months set the tone for what would become a six-year epic, during which Cousteau and the
Calypso
divers would shoot hundreds of thousands of feet of film that would be cut into thirty-six episodes of
The Undersea World. Calypso
was still a good-humored ship, but with twenty-six men,
La Bergère
, a 70-pound dog, and all the equipment aboard, its rhythms were transformed from those of a yacht packed with energetic friends to those of a military campaign. Under French maritime law,
Calypso
’s hired crew—Captain Maritano, two
mates, a boatswain, a cook, and all the divers—could remain aboard for only six months before being replaced by a second complete crew. As nominal owners, Cousteau, Simone, and Philippe were exempt, but it meant that the informal camaraderie of the early years was replaced by a much more rigid set of routines that produced thousands of feet of film every month. The plan, therefore, was to return to Marseille for crew changes and to resupply every six months.

The crew quickly learned that opportunities to film whales, sharks, turtles, and other creatures materialized suddenly and were just as suddenly gone. Like fighter pilots sitting runway alert, a camera team of divers was always ready to splash at a moment’s notice unless the weather was too bad. Divers spent countless hours dismantling, inspecting, and reassembling their cameras, lights, scooters, and the rest of their gear, sometimes grumbling like soldiers forced by their officers to clean their weapons over and over.

After testing the new equipment on the familiar reefs of the Red Sea, Cousteau set a southeast course for the Maldive Islands off the tip of India, where he knew from many reports by fishermen that they would find swarms of sharks. Nearing the islands, 1,800 miles from the nearest shipyard, the starboard propeller shaft snapped at two in the morning. In the pitch-black water, with sharks gliding ominously in and out of the beams from their helmet lights, Falco and two other divers managed to lash the shaft to the hull so it wouldn’t damage the rudder or fall away completely. Cousteau had a choice to make. He could head back to Djibouti or Port Sudan for repairs, or take his chances with one engine. He thought he had enough footage of feeding frenzies and menacing blue sharks from earlier voyages and recent dives in the Red Sea, but he wanted shots of the magnificent reefs and the exotic whale, tiger, and hammerhead sharks he knew he would find off the tip of India. After a raucous consultation in the wheelhouse with Dumas, Philippe, Simone, and Falco, Cousteau decided to keep going.

At 3 knots,
Calypso
limped across the Indian Ocean to the archipelago of more than a thousand coral islands. On the way, Philippe led crews in a pair of speeding Zodiac inflatable boats to film sperm whales by getting ahead of the swimming pod, stopping the engines, and keeping the cameras rolling as the giant mammals surged past them. In the calm water of the great lagoon at the center of the
northern Maldives,
Calypso
divers spent two weeks baiting sharks with dead barracudas from the safety of steel cages while cameramen captured the action. They tagged some of the sharks for Dr. Eugenie Clark, who had joined
Calypso
in Djibouti as the scientist in residence to study their migratory patterns. Known among marine biologists as the Shark Lady, Clark had just accepted a job as a professor at the University of Maryland and conducted most of her research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida. She met Cousteau through the National Geographic Society and had jumped at the chance to accompany him to the Indian Ocean.

In early April, still running on one engine,
Calypso
sailed for Mombasa, Kenya, where there was a shipyard that could handle the replacement of its propeller shaft. Two weeks later, with a new shaft and repairs to the frozen reduction gear that had caused it to break, Cousteau headed for the Red Sea to rendezvous with
Espadon
. He was sure he had enough footage to assemble the first episode on sharks and the second on coral reefs, but more footage would give him some insurance. He also wanted to inspect the diving saucer garage and the rest of the site of Conshelf II to find out how it had held up after five years. Most of all, he wanted to bring
Calypso
closer to the Suez Canal. For a month he had been hearing radio reports that war between Israel and Egypt was imminent. If it began before he could get back into the Mediterranean and the Red Sea ports collapsed into wartime shortages, he would be faced with long supply lines and a voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to get home.

On June 5, as Israeli planes struck Egyptian airfields and the Middle East detonated into open warfare, Cousteau talked his way onto one of the last planes out of Djibouti. Philippe, Simone, Dumas, and Falco had agreed that it would be absurd to risk their entire venture by allowing the one man on whom everything depended to be stuck for who knew how long in a war zone.
Calypso
and
Espadon
sailed north for Suez, anchored side by side on the Egyptian side of the ship channel, and waited. They immediately went on short food and water rations, since the Egyptians, who boarded for an inspection when they arrived, prohibited resupply. Caught in the middle of a crossfire, with exploding bombs and sizzling bullets all around them, Philippe and Dumas persuaded the Egyptians to let them bring some of their exposed film, cameras, and other vital gear ashore for shipment to
France. They shuttled as much as they could to the dock just before dawn on the morning of June 9, then watched from
Calypso
’s deck as Israeli F-4 Phantom jets bombed the waterfront, completely destroying the warehouse in which they had stowed the film and equipment. The next day, the warring nations declared a cease-fire. For another week and a half, Egyptian troops refused to allow
Calypso
’s crew to leave the ship. Finally, new crew members came aboard to replace the first crew, bringing with them the devastating news that the Egyptian air force had sunk dozens of tankers in the canal to deny passage to its enemies. No one could say how long it would take to clear a channel through the wreckage.

For two months,
Calypso
and its new crew stewed in the brutal desert heat. Simone reluctantly left her ship after Cousteau convinced her that she would be of greater value in Monaco, helping him come up with a new plan. Philippe went back to France, then to Los Angeles, where he and Jan, relieved to be away from his parents, put together a team of divers to film gray whales. Even though
Calypso
would eventually return to work, a second film crew on the Pacific seemed like a good idea. Cousteau and his son agreed that Philippe should be in Los Angeles when Wolper and his editors started cutting the first episode in early October for airing just after the new year. Though the tension between them was sometimes unbearable aboard ship, there was no question that they trusted each other’s judgment about the film they wanted to make on sharks. Before Philippe left Monaco, he and his father also agreed to coauthor a companion book, with the help of James Dugan, to be published when the show aired.