Jacques Cousteau (31 page)

Cousteau waxed philosophical. “Cristobal’s need for freedom was something that he shared with us.” He then declared success. “Two marine mammals were our willing companions in the sea. It would be useless to continue our experiment. We had already proved what we set out to prove: that marine mammals are almost as capable of attachment to humans as land animals.”

“The Unexpected Voyage of Pepito and Cristobal,” the fifth show in the series, drew the highest audience rating since the first episode of
The Undersea World
. Tom Moore breathed easier. He still had a hit.

The critics who accused Cousteau of showmanship at the expense of real science stung him because he knew they would hound him as long as he was telling adventure stories to attract his audience. Most scientists, however, recognized that their own passions for the natural world had found a powerful voice at the same time that television
arrived to carry them to millions of people. It was a combination that could change the world.

“The captain was the key pioneer in nature filmmaking not just because he was among the first but because he recognized that productions had to be entertaining if they were to maintain the audience’s attention and loyalty,” said Christopher Palmer, the producer of the Audubon Society’s much more traditional television series on natural history. “Television gave him an audience beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.”

“One of the things that people forget about my father was that he was first and foremost a storyteller,” Jean-Michel Cousteau points out. “His ambition to tell stories was driven by curiosity. When he was a kid with his first movie camera the stories were about girls and himself. Later, about the ocean and its creatures because that’s what he was interested in.”

Cousteau’s audiences grew steadily through the next three episodes, “The Savage World of Jungle Corals,” “The Turtles of Europa,” and “Whales,” all of them shot during the first nine months of
Calypso’s
epic voyage. In the editing suite in Hollywood, David Wolper, Philippe, and JYC choreographed succeeding episodes with increasing confidence in the formula they had stumbled upon in the
National Geographic
special that aired in 1966. Cousteau’s charisma; his enviable bond to his similarly attractive son; exotic submarines and diving equipment; the members of
Calypso’s
crew, whose names also became household words; and the wonderful creatures of the sea were a magic blend unlike anything ever before seen on television.

Wolper sold his company to Metromedia after he finished producing the fourth episode in the fall of 1968, leaving Bud Rifkin and a squad of successor producers to carry on. The following year’s shows were even more popular than those of the inaugural season. “The Unexpected Voyage of Pepito and Cristobal” was a hilarious hour that added an unexpected dimension of sideshow humor to the series. “Sunken Treasure,” about Cousteau’s exploration of a Spanish galleon in the Caribbean; “The Legend of Lake Titicaca;” and “Whales of the Desert” left audiences hungry for more.

During the second half of
Calypso’s
four-year, 150,000-mile voyage that had begun in Monaco in February 1967, Cousteau’s crews shot two million feet of film, with which they produced twenty-eight
more episodes of
The Undersea World
. After the first season, ABC extended its production deal with Cousteau and Metromedia for $500,000 per episode, with an escalation clause depending upon audience shares. The ratings settled into a dependable pattern of ten to twelve million viewers per episode, far outrunning any other natural history series. Cousteau’s formula never changed. He posed questions, met challenges in his quest to answer them, declared success even when his experiments failed, continued to capture animals to help him charm his audiences, and never failed to be the paternal presence that made learning about the sea and its creatures not only fun but important.

On July 20, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon,
Calypso
was off Unalaska Island in the Bering Sea, farther from France than she had ever been. From there, the voyage would be homeward bound. The ship’s log notes that Raymond Coll took one of
Calypso
’s Sea Fleas to 500 feet, becoming the deepest man on earth while two men were the highest up there on the moon. For Cousteau, who was not aboard
Calypso
but in Los Angeles that day, the men on the lunar surface were a footnote to the miraculous photographs of the whole earth that had been sent from space by the Apollo moon ships. “Now we can see for ourselves that the earth is a water planet,” Cousteau said. “The earth is the only known planet to be washed with this vital liquid so necessary for life. The earth photograph can drive a second lesson home to us; it can finally make us recognize that the inhabitants of the earth must depend upon and support each other.”

Two months after the moon landing, Cousteau held a press conference at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco to plead with the United States Congress to control the pollution along its coasts he had seen from
Calypso
. With the success of
The Undersea World
, every word he said about the ocean was being quoted in hundreds of news reports.

“The oceans are in danger of dying,” he said, speaking each word in English as though it were punctuated by a period.

The thirty-six episodes of
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau
that aired between 1968 and 1977 changed the way millions of people thought about the sea, but the voyage that created them had also transformed Cousteau. He still wanted to entertain his audiences. He loved the adventure of his life as an international celebrity. But now he was certain that his message about the fragile condition of the world’s oceans was far more important than a pleasant hour in front of a television set.

COUSTEAU WAS STUNNED WHEN, in 1974, ABC didn’t pick up its option to broadcast
The Undersea World
beyond the spring of 1976. He had won Emmys every season and his audience still numbered in the millions for each episode. The network told him its programming philosophy had changed. The enormous success of after-dinner evenings of
Happy Days, Starsky and Hutch, Laverne and Shirley
, and the rest of the half-hour situation comedies had made ABC number one in the battle for ratings and advertising dollars. Its executives weren’t willing to preempt their hit shows to air documentaries about the ocean. The ratings for
The Undersea World
, they pointed out, had dropped steadily as the networks attracted younger people who were more interested in spending a mindless half hour with two amusing girlfriends in Milwaukee than in watching a parrot fish fight to control its territory on a coral reef.

When ABC canceled
The Undersea World
and cut off the money for future expeditions, Cousteau had plenty of footage on hand to deliver the final six episodes until the contract ended. After overhauling
Calypso
during most of 1972, he had sent his ship and film crews on a two-year voyage down the east coast of South America to the unexplored waters off the Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica.
Calypso
then headed back north into the endless archipelago off Tierra del Fuego, up the coast of Chile, Peru, and Ecuador, and through the Panama Canal for a full year’s exploration of the coasts, waterways, and islands of the Caribbean Sea. Cousteau had a helipad installed on the foredeck to shoot aerials and make it easier for him to get to
Calypso
for the brief scenes that gave the audience the impression he was always in charge.

Day to day, Cousteau was in constant motion. He had homes and
offices in Monaco, Sanary-sur-Mer, Paris, and Los Angeles, from which he ran the Oceanographic Museum, U.S. Divers, his undersea technology workshop, an exhibit design firm, a lecture bureau, and his most recent creation, the Cousteau Society. In 1973 he had approached a Connecticut business consultant, Frederick Hyman, about incorporating the Cousteau Group, which would own and control all his enterprises. Hyman and his corporate connections evaluated Cousteau’s business plan and saw one critical flaw: Cousteau. He insisted on being in charge, but the advisers quickly figured out that he simply did not have the skill or temperament to run a multimillion-dollar corporation with several divisions. Cousteau reluctantly agreed with them.

Jacques Cousteau, sixty-five years old
(©
WILD FILM HISTORY
)

Instead, Hyman suggested that Cousteau centralize under the umbrella of a nonprofit organization, which would limit his exposure to commercial risk while at the same time opening the way for accepting tax-free revenue and grants. They filed the corporate charter in Bridgeport, Connecticut, describing an organization whose mission was “the protection and improvement of life” and “the assumption of the role of a global representative of future generations.” Cousteau was its chairman, Fred Hyman was its president, and Jean-Michel and Philippe were vice presidents. Cousteau organized an advisory board
of scientists, friends, and fellow celebrities, including Papa Flash Harold Edgerton of MIT, biologist Andrew Benson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, political activist Dick Gregory, singer John Denver, and dozens of his other famous and influential fans.

When Jean-Michel learned that his father had named Fred Hyman president of the new Cousteau Society, he resigned. Hyman, Jean-Michel told his father, seemed like a good enough man, but he was an outsider who made sense only to the family as the business manager of a profit-making corporation. For an organization like the Cousteau Society, he was the wrong choice. He had no scientific background and no status in the environmental movement, and was part of the corporation only because a head hunter had found him when Cousteau was looking for a business manager. Cousteau was furious. He prized loyalty above all else, but as always, he let Jean-Michel know that he loved him and would always have something for him to do if he came back.

By the end of the Cousteau Society’s first year in 1974, 120,000 people had contributed an average of $20 each to become members. Many gave much more. Hundreds of people rewrote their wills to include bequests to the society or Cousteau himself. The popularity of
The Undersea World
was at its height, and every television hour was an unbeatable call for support. Cousteau made news constantly as he testified before Congress on a variety of hot topics, including energy, clear water, and clean air. He set up society offices in New York and Los Angeles. In Paris, he incorporated separately under French law as L’Équipe Cousteau. The staff of the society swelled to more than two hundred publicists, writers, policy analysts, artists, and clerical workers, who produced magazines, books, and brochures for a never-ending membership drive.

The Cousteau Society was a dramatic alteration of the power balance in the environmental movement that had taken hold in America and Europe in the early seventies. The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and dozens of other international, national, and local groups had created a landscape of advocacy in which they succeeded in fund-raising with single-issue campaigns such as the slaughter of baby seals for their fur,
overfishing, nuclear energy, destructive mining practices, and ocean pollution. The Cousteau Society weighed in on most of those issues but concentrated on its overarching mission of convincing the people of the world that they are dependent upon one another for survival. In the society’s first press release, Cousteau wrote: “We are communicators, using words and pictures to educate living and future generations about our biological home. We are advisers, representing a kind of international State Department for the quality of life, trying to educate the world’s most powerful decision makers about the ecological ramifications of their decisions.”

In Cousteau’s mind, all of his exploration and television enterprises served that mission, so he brought them under the umbrella of the nonprofit society. Expenses were offset by tax-free revenue from fund-raising, television production, the undersea technology workshop, book royalties, and lecture fees. Cousteau wasn’t worried at all about his personal finances. His salary from the Oceanographic Museum and Aqua-Lung royalties provided him with more than enough, since an open expense account covered all his expenses for the society.

Without the backing of a major television network, Cousteau and Philippe began developing a new series for the Public Broadcasting System. PBS had been created by Congress in 1967 to counteract the overwhelming influence of the three commercial networks that were broadcasting over publicly owned airwaves. Funded by federal and local taxes, PBS was a loose network of independent stations, first producing programs and broadcasting in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and a few years later in dozens of cities around the country. With producer Andrew Solt, another of David Wolper’s protégés, Philippe went to KCET-TV, the PBS station in Los Angeles, with a proposal for six half-hour programs, each of which would illuminate a single threat to the overall health of the planet. By attracting a television audience with the name of Jacques Cousteau,
Oasis in Space
would force millions of Americans to look at the population explosion, the pollution of the oceans, hunger, the devastation of chemical waste, and the dangers of nuclear power plants. The series would connect the dots for viewers with roundtable discussions among nationally known experts, interspersed with documentary footage.