Jacques Cousteau (39 page)

The routine aboard both ships was a steady grind of production
deadlines and the uncertainties of life at sea. For the twenty-six men and Simone aboard
Calypso
, and the eleven men aboard
Alcyone
, the voyages from one shooting site to the next were scrambles to repair equipment and figure out what might or might not fit into a particular television hour.
Alcyone
was still a very hard ride in any weather, and
Calypso
still rolled when the wind blew. They shot without scripts, capturing whatever was interesting, both on land and in the water. They shipped videotape back to New York or Paris and picked up dispatches from editors about the progress of a particular story line with requests for footage to fill holes.

With a few exceptions, the crews were French, the cameramen mostly Parisians, the divers and seamen from Brittany and Marseille. When Cousteau or Jean-Michel were not aboard, Falco and
La Bergère
were in charge of
Calypso
. As had been the custom since Calypso’s first expedition to the Red Sea in 1951, everyone aboard each ship had more than one job except for the cook. Everyone stood wheel watches. At an underwater shooting location, diving took three hours of the day, preparation and repairs another four hours, leaving another seventeen hours for sleep and socializing. Getting along aboard small ships was crucial to success. If a man failed as a pleasant companion, he wasn’t asked to stay aboard for the next leg of the voyage. The decision was made by vote of the crew. Being asked to remain was an honor.

Once his ships were in the Pacific, Cousteau spent most of his time traveling to raise money and give speeches, or in Paris supervising his editing studio and tending to his second family with Francine. In 1988, he resigned as the director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. Though he continued to speak on its behalf at conferences and celebrations, he spent very little time on the Riviera. He was also far less interested in the daily grind of television production on location, much preferring the comforts of home or a good hotel. Cousteau was in constant demand as a lecturer. He sometimes appeared in cities on three continents in a single month to deliver his message, which had evolved from sounding the alarm about the deterioration of oceans and rivers into appeals for world unity, population control, and the abolition of nuclear weapons and power plants.

The key to balancing human needs with available energy resources, he said, was the abolition of waste and the development of solar power. “Look at the English,” Cousteau told an audience at an international
energy conference. “Its wealth was coal, but coal is finished. The United States has oil, and its reserves are running down. We’re drawing down everything on the planet. One day only solar energy will be seen as truly inexhaustible and sun-drenched, semi-tropical, and tropical countries will be rich.”

Cousteau spoke to the Association of Space Explorers, an elite club of astronauts and cosmonauts who had flown in space. “Space explorers and divers all seem to share the belief that disputes among nations are vestiges of a less enlightened time when humanity did not clearly understand that all people were dependent upon one another for survival,” he told them. “We must solve our conflicts once and for all so we can begin our new adventure of exploring the universe.”

Later, Cousteau proposed a way to remove the threat of nuclear war that he devised with futurist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Nations facing one another in a nuclear standoff, such as the United States and the Soviet Union, would simply agree to exchange all their children for at least a year. “Imagine a world where all the children from seven to eight, for example, would have to spend a year on the other side of the fence,” Cousteau said. “From an educational standpoint it would be a great opening of the mind. It is because of the hope that I have in the future of mankind that I want to join forces and forge a better world for future generations.”

From New York, Norfolk, and Paris, Jean-Michel orchestrated the production of four hours of television a year for five years, rarely spending more than two or three days in one place. His father spent perhaps a weekend a month aboard one of the ships, usually arriving late, disturbing the routine, walking through his close-ups, and leaving. Jean-Michel told his camera crews to use back shots and doubles for Cousteau if they absolutely had to have him in the frame and he wasn’t on location. Otherwise, he edited in sequences from other locations when his father had been aboard or on the scene of a similar shot on land. Because the demand for convincing doubles was high, the job of a crewman who from behind looked like Cousteau in a red knit watch cap was among the most secure on both ships.

When Jean-Michel wasn’t with his film crews on the Pacific, he was in Paris coaxing the Parc Océanique to life. Six months after it opened, however, it was obvious that the venture would fail. L’Équipe Cousteau and the promoters of the Forum des Halles development
launched it with a brief publicity campaign. Newspapers and television stations reported on the wonderful new way to learn about the ocean without an aquarium or any live animals at all. But after the grand opening, the crowds fell to a trickle. Some days only a few dozen visitors bought tickets. The critical mistake, the Cousteaus quickly figured out, was to have built the Parc Océanique in an underground mall that was part of a massive downtown development project. Not many people, it turned out, wanted to tour the ocean at a subterranean amusement park with no live animals. By the autumn of 1990, with the initial capital from the Cousteau Society running out and no chance of other investors, Jean-Michel and his father began an orderly retreat into bankruptcy. Parc Océanique was a separately incorporated venture, so the Cousteau Society could lose only its initial investment with the default on the million-dollar loan. For reasons Jean-Michel could not fathom at the time, his father’s generosity in encouraging him to build the Parc Océanique turned bitter, as Cousteau allowed the failure to rest squarely on his son’s shoulders.

With two ships, crews, and camera teams at sea all the time, Cousteau was barely paying the bills. There was no chance that the
Rediscovery
series was ever going to be worth any more than the society was already getting. Turner had been right about cable television revolutionizing the industry, but the unintended consequence of offering viewers hundreds of channels twenty-four hours a day was a watering down of audiences for all but the most sensational sporting events and other unique offerings.
Jacques Cousteau’s Rediscovery of the World
had a built-in following of society members who ritualistically tuned in once a quarter to see what their money was buying. Entire cable channels were dedicated to airing natural history and sociological documentaries, which competed with the adventures of the
Calypso
and
Alcyone
in the Pacific. Turner was known for unsentimental financial decisions, so even his closest advisers and executives were puzzled when he extended Cousteau’s contract for three more years, until 1992. Then, as though to contradict himself, he downgraded the importance of the Cousteau series by placing a junior producer in charge. Cousteau was furious, at first refusing to even acknowledge the presence of the young producer, Tom Beers, at
meetings. Beers quickly saw that Cousteau was not at all involved in the day-to-day details of production and that Jean-Michel, with whom he got along well, was really in charge, so he waited out the conflict and survived.

Cousteau was also less than fully engaged in the life and camaraderie of
Calypso
and its crew, which had sustained him for four decades, withdrawing most of the time to his apartment in Paris. He continued to make public appearances, accepting awards and honorary degrees, speaking on behalf of the society, and attending conferences, but he saw few people outside his immediate families. Dumas was dying. Tailliez was rarely in touch from his villa near Toulon, where he presided over the memory of
Les Mousquemers
and the beginnings of scuba diving. Laban, who had pulled away from Cousteau after the death of Philippe, spent most of his time painting at home on the Mediterranean coast. Cousteau knew thousands of people, millions claimed to know him, but intimate moments of friendship did not exist in the glare of celebrity, except in his secret life with his mistress.

Cousteau and Simone had led distinctly separate lives since Philippe died. They were friendly during their encounters aboard
Calypso
, at family gatherings in Paris or Monaco, or when they were together at award ceremonies or formal occasions. Otherwise, Cousteau’s life had flowed into that of Francine and their children. Simone rarely left
Calypso
. In early 1990, she went ashore to see a doctor for a checkup, found out that she had an aggressive cancer, and went back to her ship to die.

On December 3, 1990, Jean-Michel flew into Bangkok to rendezvous with
Calypso
and called his office in Paris from an airport pay phone. The day was already tinged with melancholy because the Mekong River expedition was going to be the last for
Calypso
. After fifty years at sea, she was constantly breaking down and the repair bills were endless. A week before, his father had ordered it to be tied up after the shooting in Southeast Asia until he decided how to bring it back to France for good. From then on, they would use
Alcyone
and begin planning for the construction of a new ship,
Calypso II
.

When Jean-Michel finally got through to Paris, there was only one message that mattered.
La Bergère
was gone. She had died after a mercifully brief encounter with her disease. His assistant in Paris told him that Cousteau had reached Simone’s bedside in time for a farewell.

Later that week, Cousteau and his first family gathered in Monaco. On a bright afternoon for December, they boarded a launch owned by the Oceanographic Museum and motored slowly from the harbor. On the headlands, dark clusters of people stood silently as the funeral passed beneath them. Two miles offshore, after the ceremony of military honors conducted by a detachment from the French navy, the ashes of Simone Melchior Cousteau became part of the winter-blue Mediterranean Sea.

JEAN-MICHEL STAYED IN FRANCE for a while after Simone died. He wanted to be near his father, even though Cousteau was keeping his distance from everyone, including his son. Shortly after the new year, Cousteau asked Jean-Michel to lunch. They had eaten countless meals together but never one for which his father had extended so stiff and formal an invitation. I have something important to tell you, Cousteau said. At the cafe, Cousteau wasted no time after the waiter left their table to turn the world upside down. Cousteau said that he and Simone had not lived as man and wife for a long time before her death. For fifteen years, he admitted, he had been with another woman, Francine Triplet, whom he intended now to marry. They had two children together, both of them, by then, teenagers. Jean-Michel’s stepsister was Diane, his stepbrother Pierre-Yves. Cousteau said he had kept his life with Francine secret out of respect for Simone, but it could no longer remain a secret.

Jean-Michel had known his father loved women. It was part of his charm, one of the reasons women loved him. He also knew that his mother’s separate life aboard
Calypso
was a practical solution for maintaining appearances and above all not damaging her husband’s reputation. She was, after all, a navy wife, the daughter and granddaughter of French admirals. Appearances mattered. Jean-Michel had no quarrel with his father’s insatiable appetite for women, but he never thought one of them would replace his mother. The news that Cousteau had a second family and a deeply concealed secret life was devastating to Jean-Michel for one reason alone: Did his mother know? Cousteau told him he wasn’t sure. Possibly.

After that day, Jean-Michel lost himself in his work. He had to get
Calypso
out of Southeast Asia. The Parc Océanique was collapsing,
and now he knew that it was probably Francine who had led his father to blame him for the failure. He had to deliver two episodes to Ted Turner right away. Then suddenly on June 28, 1991, none of it mattered. Just six months and a few days after Simone had died, his father and Francine Triplet were married in a quiet ceremony. Whether by design or coincidence, the day was the twelfth anniversary of Philippe’s death.

Jacques and Francine Cousteau
(
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
)

Since Cousteau revealed the truth about his second family, JeanMichel had been tormented by thoughts of his mother in her self-imposed exile aboard
Calypso
. Had she known that the man with whom she had opened up the undersea world, with whom she had raised two sons, and with whom she had mourned the death of one of them, had replaced her with a younger woman? That his father had the audacity or the ignorance to marry his mistress on the very day his brother had been killed twelve years earlier was unforgivable. As soon as Cousteau surfaced after his wedding, Jean-Michel told him he was through. He would see the last two episodes of the second
Rediscovery
series to completion. Then he wanted nothing more to do with Cousteau, his new family, the society, or anything else that was still
alive in the smoking embers of what had been a grand life. Cousteau embraced his son, said his affection for him would never diminish, but as he had with everyone who committed the ultimate act of betrayal by leaving him, he banished Jean-Michel into the unmentionable recesses of the past.