Jacques Cousteau (32 page)

Once KCET agreed to host the series, Cousteau went looking
for sponsors to pay for it. The budget for each of the six half hours shot on location around the world was about $70,000, for a total of $420,000. The national foundation that funded original PBS programming agreed to come up with $125,000. Cousteau then worked his way through a list of corporate sponsors, many of whom had happily paid for episodes of
The Undersea World
. At dozens of meetings with executives around America, Cousteau asked for money to make televisions programs that would expose truths about environmental disasters. We still love you and
Calypso
, they all told him after he outlined his six programs, but what you are talking about would be very bad for business. They make all corporations look like insensitive exploiters of a fragile planet. What’s more, they agreed, not many people are going to want to watch such a dismal television show.

Cousteau ended up drawing $295,000 from the society treasury to meet budget, then watched as the corporations that had abandoned him were proved right. The first episode, “What Price Progress?,” opened with shots of a Canadian pulp mill dumping mercury-contaminated effluent into nearby salmon streams and images of horribly deformed victims of mercury poisoning in Japan. Despite its grim departure from the cheery deck of
Calypso
, the first episode of
Oasis in Space
won Cousteau another Emmy. Philippe was named for producer of the best television documentary.

Ratings for the series from then on, however, plummeted. Cousteau was more convinced than ever that delivering the message that humanity had to stop fouling its own nest was his mission, but he realized that he would have to deliver that message more subtly to reach mass audiences. PBS was accustomed to the lowest ratings among the four national networks, but said it would have to see a lot more of
Calypso
and her divers or its relationship with the Cousteaus was over.

Cousteau was running out of television networks and sponsors. By the spring of 1977, membership in the society had swollen to 250,000 people, but expenses had skyrocketed. Cousteau had just closed a deal to buy a retired U.S. Navy flying boat, and his helicopter was much more expensive to fly and maintain than he had thought it would be.
Calypso
was out of commission after her vintage World War II engines had finally turned their last revolutions. He was traveling constantly, trying to raise money for a new television series he was
calling
The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey
. He promised potential investors that each episode would be set aboard
Calypso
in the Mediterranean Sea, combining his proven formula for underwater adventure with his passion for protecting the health of the sea of his youth.

Cousteau was regarded as a national treasure in France, the recipient of every decoration his nation could give him, but he was most popular among the people of the United States. His television shows had been broadcast to audiences of millions in France, Germany, England, Japan, and a dozen other countries around the world, but only in America was the environmental movement shaking governments. Only in America did people seem willing to contribute millions of dollars to make that happen.

Using his network of society members, diving equipment stores, and fans around the United States, Cousteau organized environmental rallies called Involvement Days in sports arenas in six cities—Houston; Boston; Milwaukee; Anaheim, California; Lakeland, Florida; and Seattle. Every date was a sellout. Cousteau, Philippe, environmental luminaries including population theorist Paul R. Ehrlich and environmental theorist Amory Lovins, celebrities including actor Jack Lemmon and singers Don McLean and Malvina Reynolds, and a changing cast of national, state, and local politicians were irresistible during an era of gas lines and foul urban air. In each city, thousands of people joined the Cousteau Society, renewed their memberships, or simply wrote checks. Newspaper and television news coverage kept the campaign moving. At private receptions, Cousteau appealed to philanthropists for donations to continue the work of the society, which was doing nothing less than trying to save the world.

Cousteau was overwhelmed by the passionate hunger people had for forging a new relationship with the earth and its creatures. In Seattle, during the last Involvement Day, he and a crowd of fifteen thousand watched a group of elementary school students perform a primitive, powerful dance about the killing of whales. On the floor of the basketball arena, he watched the shadowy figures of about twenty children dressed in black move into position around what looked like a block of fabric. Two others stood outside the circle with a white sheet on a pole between them. When the kids settled, the rustling silence of the arena was broken by the distinctive
racketa-racketa
of a movie projector. The blurry black-and-white image of a ship’s bow
appeared on the sheet, then a pod of spouting whales just ahead of the ship, then a harpoon gun mounted on the bow. Horrifically, the harpoon lance flew through the air trailing a rope and buried its shaft in one of the whales. After a minute, the projector ground to a halt, the two children holding the screen left the floor, and spotlights illuminated the others kneeling in a circle around a parachute that had been tie-dyed in shades of blue and green.

In turn, the children stood up and shouted the names of species of cetaceans—blue, sei, orca, humpback, gray, bottlenose dolphin, and others—their voices cracking with earnestness and stage fright. On their knees in the circle again, they shook the parachute, which rippled and gave the impression of water as soaring orchestral music blossomed from a bank of rock-and-roll concert speakers. For five minutes, the dancers rose and swam over the fabric on the floor, moving their arms in distinctly whalelike rhythms, and lifting their chins as though to breathe and spout. Their cavorting was idyllic, but then the music changed into a grating, urgent, car-chase allegro. The children began to move randomly as though confused. From the shadows on the sideline, a dancer rushed forward to the center of the floor, arms outstretched, hands together to form a point, trailing a length of rope. She struck another dancer with her hands, passed off the end of the rope, and withdrew. As the music intensified, other whale-children swam to comfort the harpooned animal. A minute later, the victim collapsed to the floor as the music fell into a mournful adagio. The other dancers gathered around their fallen comrade, lifted her over their heads on outstretched arms, settled her back on the floor, and wrapped her in the billowing fabric.

The music stopped, the children froze. The cavern of the arena was dead silent until Cousteau and Paul Ehrlich rose clapping from their seats and the audience erupted in applause that went on for ten minutes. The dancers bowed, curtsied, and smiled. Finally, the children left the floor, gathering in a locker room that smelled of sweat and wintergreen liniment, accepting hugs and kisses from their parents, who swarmed backstage. Unannounced, Jacques Cousteau materialized among them. The friends and parents moved away from the children, who fell into a ragged line. Cousteau bent to them in turn to buss their cheeks, asking which whale each child represented in the dance. They recited: orca, humpback, sperm, bowhead, blue, gray,
fin…By the time he reached the end of the line, the children were grinning and crying at the same time. Cousteau tossed his head and laughed out loud, making a show of wiping the tears from his own eyes. He looked like one of the little dancers in black costume himself, at the center of the cluster of children, their arms reaching up to him like the tentacles of sea anemones.

As the locker room fell silent, Cousteau rose to his full height and said, “Children, you have the most important job in the world. Growing up.”

The sponsor Cousteau found for the
Odyssey
series surprised him. Robert Anderson, the chairman of Atlantic Richfield Petroleum Company (ARCO), was a rarity among oil barons, a casual, seemingly absentminded man who no one would have guessed was the last of the great wildcatters. He was the son of a Chicago banker, attended the University of Chicago, where he read in its Great Books curriculum, and graduated thinking he would become a philosophy professor. His father specialized in making loans to petroleum companies, and after a summer working in the bank, Anderson was much more interested in oilmen with their tales of exploration and bonanzas in exotic climes than in the academics he met on campus. A year later, he was running a gasoline refinery in Mexico, beginning his climb to the top of an industry that had no upper limits. When Anderson’s path crossed Cousteau’s, he was working at ARCO’s headquarters in Los Angeles, leading the assault on the North Slope oil reserves in Alaska. He was the largest single landowner in the United States. Cousteau was surprised to learn that Anderson was also attending rarefied conferences on technology, the environment, governance and social change, and Western thought. Anderson had known about Cousteau since
World Without Sun
, when every major player in the oil business was trying to figure out how to drill wells at the bottom of the sea. When Cousteau broadcast to the world the blurry black-and-white television pictures of two of his Conshelf divers replacing a valve on a wellhead at 400 feet, Anderson was one of the men watching them.

For Cousteau, there was no conflict or irony in approaching an oil business billionaire for money to produce a television series. He
believed it was the duty of those who profited from the extraction of the world’s resources to make sure that what they were doing to the earth did not destroy its ability to sustain life. Anderson agreed with Cousteau. Anderson also knew that in a world of soaring gasoline prices, long lines at filling stations, and year after year of record oil company profits, ARCO could use the good publicity. Attaching its name to that of an explorer and environmental crusader whose name appeared on lists of the most respected people in the world was good for business. He told Cousteau that he didn’t want to see another
Oasis in Space
, and Cousteau assured him that the new series would be much more like
The Undersea World
. Anderson wrote a check for $6 million to KCET for twelve one-hour Cousteau specials. The contract named Cousteau and Philippe as co-executive producers, and specifically excluded Robert Anderson and ARCO from any decisions about content.

Anderson’s check shored up the foundations of the Cousteau Society and its television production company. Cousteau turned to making sure that his always tenuous relationship with Philippe was intact. Jean-Michel continued to work on developing ocean exploration exhibits and was in demand as a speaker, but Cousteau desperately needed Philippe. With the money from ARCO and the KCET contract, Cousteau could send two separate teams to sea to produce the four finished hours of film he needed for each of the next three years. Philippe would lead one, Cousteau the other. Cousteau would fly in to both ships for his close-ups, but he was taking a giant step in the direction of an inevitable future in which his son would take his place.

At about the same time Cousteau was managing his negotiations with Robert Anderson and the whirlwind of the six Involvement Days, he was also starting a second family. Cousteau loved women. At sixty-seven he was handsome, funny, energetic, and tireless. Most irresistibly, he never concealed his passion for romance, whether for a long flirtation or a searing single night in a foreign port. He was a legend as a womanizer among his crew, who themselves enjoyed the sexual advantages of being handsome, adventurous men with charming accents. But Cousteau was famous.

During his Involvement Day swing through Houston, Texas, the local paper ran a story about Cousteau scuba diving with an unnamed woman. She had gotten into trouble in the water and had to be rescued
by other divers because Cousteau was busy dealing with a bad earache. The news reports glossed over the identity of the woman diving with Cousteau, granting discretion to the male celebrity that was typical of the times.

“We are not absolutely sure,” said Jean-Michel Cousteau later, “but the woman who got in trouble diving in Houston was almost certainly a woman years younger than my father who became his mistress for the rest of his life. Their life together had already begun at that point, and we know that their children together were born soon after. He kept it secret from everyone.”

If JYC’s natural habitat during the forties, fifties, and sixties had been the undersea world, in the seventies it was the first-class cabin of jet airliners, where he most likely met a beautiful flight attendant named Francine Triplet. Born in the landlocked Limousin region of central France, she had gravitated toward working for an international airline because of her talent for foreign languages, and was enjoying a successful career in the air. After Houston, Francine Triplet disappeared completely from public view for the next fourteen years.

ROBERT ANDERSON WAS TRUE to his word about staying out of the creation of the
Jacques Cousteau Odyssey
series, but the first two episodes pushed his patience. “Cradle or Coffin?” was a tedious report of
Calypso’s
five-month voyage to measure pollution and the impact of industrialization around the Mediterranean, cosponsored by the Cousteau Society, the Oceanographic Museum, and the International Commission for the Scientific Exploration of the Mediterranean Sea. Cousteau was aboard his ship for only a few hours during the voyage, spending most of his time negotiating with governments for the rights to enter their territorial waters. His crew, with
La Bergère
in de facto command, took water samples from 126 anchorages off the coasts of Monaco, France, Spain, Gibraltar, Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania, Turkey, Cyprus, and Egypt. Laboratory testing of the samples for radioactive sediments, PCBs, and other toxins showed that the Mediterranean was not in grave danger but clearly a different sea from the one Cousteau knew when he was young. In Los Angeles, Cousteau and Philippe juxtaposed repetitive scenes of
Calypso’s
crew lowering drogues and sampling tubes into the sea; underwater shots of dingy, barren reefs and seafloor; and footage he had shot thirty years before in which the sea teems with life. “Cradle or Coffin?” was not the undersea adventure promised to Anderson and KCET. With Cousteau’s melancholic narration, it was the most graphic depiction of the deterioration of the ocean that ordinary people had ever seen on television.