Jacques Cousteau (35 page)

Despite Cousteau’s heroic attempts to soldier on, his subconscious betrayed him in “Clipperton.” He and Jean-Michel edited Philippe’s underwater shots into scenes that echoed and amplified the human tragedy that had taken place on the island. Sardines fleeing upward from a shark attack below are finished off near the surface by tens of thousands of blue-footed boobies. Swarms of crabs scuttle to the tide line in a frenzy to grab the sardines dropped by the birds. Moray eels wriggle ashore to eat the crabs. Even the water itself is deadly. A freshwater lagoon is filled with decaying plants, poisoning the water with chemicals that eat through the divers’ suits and masks, burning their eyes and skin. In the narration, Cousteau says, “My skin was attacked as if immersed in acid. It became intolerable. When we surfaced from the inferno and took our masks off, the bad smell we had carried with us was suffocating. Our yellow tanks were bleached by hydrogen sulfide, the metal parts of our Aqua-Lungs were black as coal, and our red eyes leaked tears for the rest of the day.”

The
Los Angeles Times
television critic pointed out that the underwater scenes were, if anything, more melodramatic than those of the survivor of a night of murder arriving back on a remote island and kissing the ground as he stepped ashore. Other critics were far less kind. The
New York Times
ignored all three of the last episodes of
The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey
. The
Washington Post
pointed out that Cousteau was among the most celebrated explorers and most famous entertainers of all time, and had suffered an unimaginable tragedy with the loss of his son. He was entitled to a rest. PBS programming executives agreed with the
Post
.

A month after Cousteau finished the last episode for PBS, he moved his editing studio from Los Angeles to Paris as part of another major change in the way he produced television shows. Until then, he had steadfastly clung to shooting film because of the higher resolution, better color, and his familiarity with it after sixty years of using movie cameras. The technology of video recording had improved so much, however, that he could no longer justify the intermediary step of physically assembling film before transfer for electronic presentation
on television. Cousteau told anyone who asked him that he was moving his production studio to Paris so he could use the European Phase Alternating Line (PAL) video system, which operated on 50-cycle current. It produced crisper images than the American National Television System Committee (NTSC) format used in the United States, which operated on 60-cycle current. Leaving Los Angeles also meant leaving memories of Philippe, who had firmly set his anchor on the California coast.

With his studio in Paris, Cousteau was, not coincidentally, in the same city as Francine Triplet. Though their life together was a secret, they had two children by this time. Simone was always aboard
Calypso
, saddened beyond redemption by Philippe’s death, so Cousteau’s second family had become his home. His parents were dead. His son Philippe was dead, his wife estranged though cordial. Only Jean-Michel was part of his daily life.

Jean-Michel’s arrival at the Cousteau Society was not cause for celebration among the staff. He went through the books and discovered that he had inherited responsibility for a swollen, inefficient bureaucracy with dramatically declining revenue after the cancellation of the PBS contract. Even with its membership at almost three hundred thousand, the Cousteau Society had somehow fallen more than $5 million in debt. His father and Philippe had shared a similar philosophy about money: spend what you have; get more when you run out. To a methodical thinker like Jean-Michel, the society was facing a financial crisis that could force it into bankruptcy. Within months, he had trimmed 20 percent of the staff and shaved hundreds of thousands of dollars off the operating budgets of the several dozen separate enterprises under the wing of the society. While he attempted to bring order to the ledgers, he shipped millions of feet of movie film from Los Angeles to Paris, and moved expedition equipment from Marseille to Norfolk along with the society’s membership and publication offices, which had been in New York.

Jean-Michel was above all else a builder. He relished the idea of creating a grand headquarters for the Cousteau Society in Norfolk, envisioning offices, warehouses for supporting
Calypso
, and a museum celebrating his father’s adventures. The politicians and business communities of Norfolk were similarly enthusiastic. Several cities on the Atlantic coast had competed for the privilege of becoming Jacques
Cousteau’s home port, and Norfolk outbid the others with an offer of $75,000 to cover moving expenses, free office space, and a free dock for
Calypso
. That much of the deal was done, but the far more ambitious redevelopment of the waterfront, for which Cousteau wanted an additional $5 million to build his Ocean Center and Museum, was still not settled.

After Jean-Michel and Cousteau consolidated in Norfolk and brought the society budget under control, they still faced a cash shortage.
Calypso
, back from Venezuela, was docked in her new home port through the spring of 1980. During the city’s annual harbor festival in April, thousands of visitors streamed aboard to tour the famous ship, some of them wondering why it had been at the dock all winter and not off on a fabulous new adventure.

The adventure, when it materialized a month later, was launched by a million-dollar grant from the Canadian Film Board to produce two hours on the St. Lawrence Waterway for broadcast on PBS in Canada and the United States. Cousteau arrived from Paris to lead the expedition from Norfolk harbor in early June.
Calypso
’s departure made network news along the eastern seaboard with film shot by a society camera crew of Cousteau, Jean-Michel, Albert Falco, and a new generation of
Calypso
divers waving from the rails. Under the customary canopy of green and white balloons, with all flags flying and an escort of whistling tugs and launches,
Calypso
sailed into the North Atlantic and turned north for Halifax and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Four hours later, Cousteau left his ship by helicopter to connect with a Concorde flight back to France.

Even with his mother to smooth the way aboard
Calypso
, Jean-Michel had trouble assuming command. Falco was the expedition leader, Alaine Traounouil was the captain in charge of running the ship, and everybody else aboard seemed to know more about what was happening and how to do it than Jean-Michel. The Canadian film crew that joined the underwater cameramen for the voyage were stunned when they witnessed the first day of shooting one of Cousteau’s flyins for his close-ups. The camaraderie of the crew during the scenes seemed forced for the sake of the cameras, and Cousteau’s fondness for his own celebrity was unmistakable. It was as though Hollywood had come aboard, and nothing about that day in Halifax resembled anything they had seen on television.

From Halifax,
Calypso
sailed east, stopping at Sable Island, 95 miles offshore, to film shipwrecks, and off the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, the lone remnants of the French colonization of North America. While circling Newfoundland they came across a baby humpback whale tangled in a fishing net with its mother circling nearby. Neither Cousteau nor Jean-Michel was aboard, but old hands Bernard Delemotte and Raymond Coll led a team of divers into the water to cut the little whale free. It took them a half hour longer than it should have because neither Delemotte nor Coll wanted to report the incident to Cousteau without film in the can. The scene was touching and ripe with tension. Delemotte stroked the young whale and wondered aloud if he could cut away the net without injuring the whale. Once free, the baby whale swam on the surface for a mile with Delemotte on its back holding on to the dorsal fin. Then the mother and child followed
Calypso
until nightfall in a poignant ending to the encounter that fit perfectly into Cousteau’s view of marine mammals and humans sharing the natural world.

After skirting the east and north coasts of Newfoundland, dipping into fjords and bays to explore and film bird colonies, shipwrecks, and marine life,
Calypso
entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the easternmost of the chain of waterways that connects the Atlantic to the Great Lakes at the center of the North American continent. Well into the winter of 1981, with rare visits from Cousteau,
Calypso
roamed the Great Lakes. In September, he arrived for a welcoming celebration in Detroit when a flotilla of four hundred boats escorted
Calypso
to the city on the American side of the border. That visit was bittersweet because just a week earlier, thirty-year-old diver Remy Galliano had died of an air embolism on a routine descent to a shipwreck in Lake Ontario. Cousteau came back to his ship again in early November after a bitter cold spell had crippled
Calypso
in an ice storm, filming scenes in which he chipped ice from the rails and rigging with the rest of the crew.

Jean-Michel spent much more time aboard
Calypso
than his father. He led an overland expedition to explore beaver dams; dives to several shipwrecks, including that of the
Edmund Fitzgerald
in Lake Superior; and a snowmobile excursion up the glaciated face of a hydroelectric dam in Hudson Bay. He left the ship in Montreal in late November, while a shortened crew, including Simone, made the monthlong trip
back through the St. Lawrence Waterway, down the coast of New England, and into Norfolk to repair ice damage to
Calypso’s
hull and engines.

The film of the voyage that Cousteau and his editors in Paris cut for broadcast in the fall of 1982 was more of an inventory of
Calypso’s
equipment and technology than the natural history of the St. Lawrence expected by the Film Board. The whales, beavers, birds, and shipwrecks were strung together without any real links at all except for endless shots of the helicopter,
La Souscoupe
, Land Rovers, Zodiacs, and a hovercraft performing for the cameras. The crew no longer seemed to be the lucky-and-we-know-it band of adventurers, but rather a military unit weary from too much work and no days off. Critics panned the two episodes of
St. Lawrence—Stairway to the Sea
when they aired. The audience ratings for the shows on the Canadian Broadcasting Company and the few PBS stations in the United States were among the lowest ever for a Cousteau production. It was as though, one critic said, the Cousteaus came to Canada to be congratulated on being the Cousteaus rather than to reveal what they found in a meaningful way. One Canadian on the camera crew said he thought Cousteau had been content to use his famous name to get the Film Board’s million dollars.

While
Calypso
was on the Venezuela and St. Lawrence expeditions, Cousteau spent much of his time ashore on a venture on which he and Philippe had been working since the oil shortages of the mid-1970s. If the world was running out of oil or if oil was going to become prohibitively expensive, he reasoned, why not return to wind power to propel ships? Cousteau decided that his replacement for the aging
Calypso
should be a test platform for an improved version of a rotor sail system pioneered in the 1920s but never perfected. The Magnus rotor, invented by German engineer Anton Flettner, could theoretically propel a ship with a vertical wind-driven drum turning at a speed of 200 miles per hour. The rotation created a partial vacuum on the front side of the drum, sucking in air and moving the ship by using the same principles of lift as those of an airplane wing. The problem was that at 200 rotations per minute, the drum was as deadly as a giant meat slicer. Flettner had given up.

Cousteau approached aeronautics professor Lucien Malavard, who
had helped design the Concorde, and asked him to lead a team in preparing a request for a grant from the French government to develop a practical rotor sail. In September 1980, with the panic of expensive, scarce oil lingering like a haze over international commerce, France again went into business with Cousteau. He and Malavard received a million-dollar grant to perfect the Turbosail. Cousteau leveraged the grant into backing from Pechiney, a French metals conglomerate, with assurances that the prototype Turbosail ship would be built of aluminum, as would the Turbosails themselves. After demonstrating the concept, Cousteau told them, he could retrofit existing freighters of the class from 3,000 to 80,000 tons with Turbosails, run them in tandem with standard diesels, and save 35 to 40 percent on fuel costs. Propulsion control systems had already advanced far enough to manage both forms of energy by computer. Pechiney liked the idea but wanted to own the patents. In exchange for a portion of the royalties payable to the Cousteau Society, Cousteau agreed.

A year later, in a wind tunnel near Toulouse, Malavard demonstrated a working Turbosail for Cousteau and Pechiney executives. It was a 44-foot-high hollow aluminum column with a parabolic leading edge and a semicircular trailing edge, aerodynamically similar to an airplane wing. It generated forward force by directing air through the cylinder and producing a drop in air pressure on one side and an increase on the other. Malavard and his engineers had also figured out a way to link the Turbosail and the main engines of a ship to maintain a constant speed regardless of wind.

Cousteau bought a 65-foot catamaran, renamed it
Moulin à Vent (Windmill)
, and had Malavard install his nonrotating Turbosail on its foredeck. In October 1983,
Moulin à Vent
was ready to sail from Tangier after testing in the Mediterranean, during which it had reached speeds of up to 10 knots under Turbosail alone. Cousteau instructed the Cousteau Society staff to prepare a gala welcoming ceremony in New York for mid-November, specifically requesting fireboats and fireworks for his entrance.

With Cousteau, Jean-Michel, and a crew of five, including a cameraman and gaffer,
Moulin à Vent
sailed for America.
Calypso
—and Simone—sailed north from Norfolk to make the entrance into New York Harbor together. For ten days, the voyage across the Atlantic was unremarkable except for the boredom and cramped conditions
aboard the little ship. Then, 400 miles southeast of Bermuda, they sailed into a gale. In 50-knot winds and 20-foot seas, the Turbosail began to tear loose from the deck. Cousteau shut down the rotor, reinforced the stays and guy wires, and diverted to Bermuda for repairs. A week later, a day out of New York again in rough seas, the Turbosail broke completely free of the deck and tumbled into the sea, barely missing the cabin. Cousteau canceled the welcoming ceremony and took his crippled windship to Norfolk, where he held an impromptu press conference on the dock.