Jacques Cousteau (38 page)

“One expects a Cousteau documentary to be beautifully photographed, despite the dangers and technical challenges of filming in primitive terrain,” wrote the television critic of the
Hollywood Reporter. “Journey to a Thousand Rivers
exceeds expectation. Almost every frame of this production is exquisite.”

Reviews of Jean-Michel’s less traditional approach to making a Cousteau documentary were generally good, though some writers thought his focus on social issues was misplaced and overdone.
People
magazine said “Snowstorm in the Jungle,” narrated by Orson Welles, had “the tone of
Reefer Madness
and
High School Confidential
, becoming almost more camp than compelling. Jacques Cousteau’s comment in the film that ‘the Western world may decline if the war on cocaine is not won’ seemed a bit much.”

When the shows on the Mississippi aired, scientists and environmentalists agreed that they were charming and entertaining but they didn’t address a single important issue about the health of the Mississippi or its prospects for the future.

“Cousteau is to oceanography what cancan is to
Swan Lake,”
a French oceanographer told the Paris newspaper
L’Express
.

“Jean-Michel seems like a nice man,” wrote another critic. “But he’ll never be his father.”

“Mississippi—Reluctant Ally and Friendly Foe” won Cousteau his first Emmy in a decade.

AFTER THE AMAZON, the Mississippi, and the seventy-fifth birthday shows on TBS, Cousteau went to Atlanta to ask Ted Turner to finance a new series. Though the audiences on the cable channel were nowhere near as large as those on ABC or even on PBS, Turner had proven himself to be a publicity genius who made the most of his relationship with the world’s most famous explorer. Cousteau, with Jean-Michel as his second, arrived early and waited in an empty conference room. A half hour later, Turner finally rushed in with an entourage of production executives, greeted the Cousteaus warmly, sat down at the head of the table, and closed his eyes. In a minute, he looked like he was asleep.

Cousteau glanced uneasily at Jean-Michel, shrugged, and started talking. On a five-year expedition,
Calypso
and
Alcyone
would retrace the routes of the great European ocean explorers, Balboa, Columbus, Cortés, Ponce de Leon, Magellan, and Vespucci. Cousteau would send his ships first to the Caribbean, then separately through the Panama Canal and around Cape Horn into the Pacific, across to New Zealand and Australia, and up into the great rivers that flow from the belly of Asia. His mission would be to document the changes in the pristine islands and continents that had been caused by human beings since the days of the great explorers. There would be plenty of adventurous underwater footage, but documenting the human interaction with the earth’s rivers and oceans was the most important work they could do. What was runoff from farming doing to the Caribbean Sea? What was the waste from Australian cattle ranches doing to the Great
Barrier Reef? What were the rivers of China, India, and Indochina carrying into the oceans? The list was endless. He called the series
Jacques Cousteau’s Rediscovery of the World
.

The windship
Alcyone (
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
)

“The
Rediscovery
series will have little to do with the behavior of animals,” Cousteau said. “It will have to do with the behavior of people with respect to the water system. We will take a fresh look at the planet man believes he already knows.”

Turner looked like he was still sleeping.

Cousteau went on, not sure what else to do. From the five-year voyages of
Calypso
and
Alcyone
, he would produce four finished hours of television each year beginning with the 1986 season. He would direct two of them, Jean-Michel would direct the other two. It was
going to be expensive, Cousteau said, not wanting to mislead Turner. He had a second ship and
Calypso
was probably going to need new engines before challenging the Pacific. He wanted to give his divers and crewmen an updated image with new technologies in underwater equipment, electronics, and cameras, a lesson he had learned from David Wolper. They would be fools to think that a new generation of television viewers was going to respond to the same thing their parents had when they watched
The Undersea World
and the
Odyssey
series. Each episode would cost $1 million.

For a long minute after Cousteau stopped talking, the room was silent. Then, as though startled, Turner leaned forward in his chair and said, “Let’s do it.”

When they worked out the details, Turner agreed to pay Cousteau $750,000 per episode in 1986, escalating to $950,000 for each of the four hours delivered in 1991. He paid an advance of $3 million for the first year right away, with similar advances to come after he got the fourth show of each season. Cousteau had complete control over the content of his documentaries. Turner had the rights to broadcast each new episode during a prime evening hour, and as many times as he liked as a rerun. Each hour was going to cost $1 million to $1.2 million to produce, so even with Turner’s backing, the Cousteau Society had to raise an additional $250,000 per episode.

Jean-Michel would begin to gradually replace his father as the star of the series, appearing more frequently aboard both ships and taking center stage in the narration. By the end of the five-year contract with Turner, Jean-Michel and his father wanted to be interchangeable in the minds of their audiences to ensure the future success of the Cousteau Society and its television production company. They were infinitely practical about the realities of Cousteau’s age and inevitable death and the costs of keeping their film crews at sea. Cousteau would spend most of his time raising money.

Though
Alcyone
had proved the fuel-saving concept of the Turbo-sail, the royalties Cousteau expected it to generate never materialized. Oil was cheap again, so shipping companies were no longer interested in spending money to refit their freighters and tankers with wind power. Cousteau continued to believe that the Turbosail would become irresistible as soon as the price of oil climbed, as it was bound to. For the time being, he needed a new idea to help finance his television shows.

As they prepared for the
Rediscovery of the World
expeditions, Cousteau and Jean-Michel launched a venture they hoped would provide a steady stream of cash for film production to take pressure off the society. After the success of the oceanographic exhibits in Monaco and aboard
Queen Mary
in Long Beach, California, Cousteau was convinced that people would come from hundreds of miles around to see the wonders of the deep in an oceanographic park similar to Disneyland. With Jean-Michel in charge of the project, the Cousteau Society loaned Parc Océanique Cousteau $1 million. It was enough to build the park, but it would have to break even or make a profit immediately to survive beyond its first year of life. Jean-Michel was optimistic about his chances for success because he believed the parc would become the main attraction of the renovated Les Halles district in a section of Paris that had been plagued by urban blight. The hope was that shiny stores, restaurants, and amusements would revitalize it. If the concept of introducing people to the wonders of the ocean in a downtown theme park worked, Cousteau ocean centers would follow in Los Angeles, Norfolk, Brazil, and Japan.

As
Flying Calypso
had been Cousteau’s paternal gesture to Philippe, the Parc Océanique affirmed his love for Jean-Michel. Cousteau had known instinctively that Philippe needed to succeed in some way apart from the glare of his own charisma if he were to continue as a member of his circle of intimates, on whom the future of his work depended. It was the same with Jean-Michel. Always a builder and a student of architecture, he had hungered to eclipse his famous father in at least one endeavor. Cousteau, like everyone else, could see that Jean-Michel was always going to be a less-than-stellar replacement when he died. Jean-Michel made documentaries simply because he had to and because his skill as a natural organizer transferred effectively to film production. Cousteau believed the Parc Océanique had a chance to make money, but if it succeeded, he also would have done his full duty as a father.

Under Jean-Michel’s direction, the exhibit designers who created the Pirate’s Cove exhibit at Disneyland began building Parc Océanique Cousteau using the most interactive, sensational technology ever developed for an amusement park. When it opened in the summer of 1988, visitors would plunge from a rocket in space into the ocean depths, where animals seen only from research submarines came to life in the strange light of the abyss. If people had questions, they could ask
them of a life-size replica of Jacques Cousteau, which would answer them in the familiar voice from their television sets. They would tour the inside of a full-size blue whale, touch its beating heart and other organs, and live to tell about it. On a jungle gym covered with carpeted sharks, children would overcome their fear of the ocean’s most frightening creatures. In a theater with a giant 45-foot screen, audiences would experience the films of Jacques Cousteau as never before.

At the end of August 1985,
Calypso
and
Alcyone
sailed from Norfolk to rediscover the world. Haiti was the first stop, chosen simply because Cousteau had never been there before. He found a country of six million people packed into a third of the tiny island of Hispaniola, also home to the Dominican Republic. More densely populated than India, Haiti was in the midst of a catastrophic environmental disaster, an example of what Cousteau feared would happen to the rest of the world if people did not wake from their slumber of complacence about the places where they live. He toured the island with his own handheld video camera, creating a sociological portrait of desperate people somehow living optimistically in the ruins of their fields, watersheds, and forests. Haitians suffered from raging epidemics of diseases caused by pollution and contamination of their resources. One in ten infants died at birth. Cousteau’s own crewmen fell ill from eating toxic fish. In his narration of the episode shot in Haiti, Cousteau celebrated the brave people of the crippled nation, “the spirit of the Haitians themselves, who, while facing a troubling future, endow the present with an inviolable human grace.” On the day before
Calypso
and
Alcyone
sailed away, Cousteau visited Haiti’s most inspiring shrine, a waterfall, where, according to legend, the Virgin Mary had appeared fifty years earlier. He joined pilgrims under the sacred waters, where, as one of his writers noted, “celebrity and celebrant were the same, as each was refreshed and renewed in a rite celebrating the source of life—water.” Cousteau promised to return to help Haitians revitalize their streams, bays, and shoreline with sea farms. His title for the Haiti episode was “Waters of Sorrow.”

Both ships then called at Havana, where Fidel Castro received Cousteau like a visiting head of state, listening attentively as Cousteau
lectured him about the desperate need for the end of human rights abuses and appealed for the release of Cuba’s political prisoners. In Cousteau’s honor and with no fanfare, Castro freed fifty prisoners shortly after
Calypso
and
Alcyone
sailed away. One of the prisoners, a former art professor named Lázaro Jordana, broke the news about Cousteau’s amnesty only after he had fled the country for a new life in Paris.

“Cousteau saved my life, and my father’s life, and the lives of all of the fifty people released,” Jordana said. “Then he didn’t say anything about it. No publicity. He’s the kind of man who does things—doesn’t talk about them—just does things.”

Three months later,
Alcyone
, under the command of her captain Bernard Deguy and with Jean-Michel aboard, sailed for Cape Horn while
Calypso
headed for a shipyard in Miami. Even after an overhaul three years earlier, her forty-five-year-old engines were shot. Their blocks, cylinders, and clattering bearings produced barely enough power to run at half speed. Cousteau didn’t want to risk beginning an extended cruise around the Pacific without replacing them. He wrote a letter to the members of the Cousteau Society explaining
Calypso’s
plight and asking for a special donation to pay for new engines. They cost about $
160,000,
including propellers, shafts, gearboxes, and spare parts. A month after he wrote the letter, checks totaling $260,000 had arrived at the society’s office in New York.

In July 1986,
Calypso
was ready for the sea. After another gala sendoff, with what Cousteau called “the courage of new engines,” she transited the Panama Canal and struck out across the Pacific for New Zealand and Australia.
Calypso
’s arrivals in Auckland, Melbourne, Sydney, and other major and minor ports were causes for celebration. The following summer,
Calypso
headed north via Papua New Guinea for a rendezvous with
Alcyone
. While
Calypso
was in the Miami shipyard,
Alcyone
had rounded Cape Horn in calm weather and worked her way up the coasts of South and North America, filming targets of opportunity on the way to Alaska and into the Bering Strait between Russia and North America. Every port call along the way was a chance to show off the Turbosail, make newspaper headlines and television broadcasts, and keep Cousteau and his adventures alive for millions of people.