Ted Turner tells story of his rise, decline in new book

It's sadly easy now to forget what a colossus Ted Turner was in 1991 and in the surrounding years. A newlywed to Jane Fonda, the very public owner of an astonishing "worst to first" baseball team and the blank-check funder of CNN's coverage of the Gulf War, when overnight the entire world realized that the "global village" had moved from theory to reality. No wonder he was Time magazine's Man of the Year.

You could walk into almost any foreign city or Third World village and mention you were from Atlanta and people would smile and say "CNN." The worldwide goodwill generated by Turner's news network played a big role in helping land Atlanta the 1996 Olympics.

And then it all came unraveled. Turner today owns no stock in the company he founded and has no more sway there than any other Atlantan, nor any formal connection to the baseball stadium that bears his name. He lives here and on multiple ranches (he's the biggest individual landowner in the country) and spends a lot of time on do-gooder causes and enjoying his family. Which is not a bad life, but probably not what he would have chosen.

How Turner founded a company that, through CNN, actually changed the world, and how he let it slip away, is the engine that drives his new autobiography, "Call Me Ted," which hits bookstores today.

Fonda, others weigh in

Turner does not appear to be a greatly reflective man, and his memoir can at times be more frustrating than enlightening. His recounting of his life up until he revved up in business is flat, clichéd and passionless, even when he is recounting the death of his young sister and the suicide of his difficult father.

But once he takes over his father's billboard business and starts to build it, you can feel that Ted energy start to flow, and the book starts to actually sound like him. (Unfortunately, sounding like Ted also means recounting a lot of long-ago sailing races in tedious detail, so feel free to skim.)

He's also made the wise, and brave, decision of inviting many who have known him — from his children to key business associates like Tom Johnson and Terry McGuirk — to contribute short reminiscences and perspectives, and this is where the real insight lies.

Here, for example, is ex-wife Fonda:

"As a result of his upbringing, for Ted there's a fear of abandonment that is deeper than with anyone I've ever known. As a result he needs constant companionship and constant activity — it's his nervous energy that almost crackles in the air. He can't sit still because if you sit still the demons catch up with you. ... That makes it harder for him to open up to other people or to get to know others as whole people."

You have to respect a man who has the cojones to allow his ex-wife to peel back his layers like that in public.

Spectacular fall

About the same time his marriage to Fonda finally dissolved, his connections to the company he founded were severed. First he merged his company with Time Warner, which had the potential to be a great long-term deal for everyone. But then the dot-com bubble spread its temporary insanity and Time Warner's board sold the company to AOL.

Turner seems to have known this was a spectacularly bad idea, but did nothing, as Time Warner's largest stockholder, to stop it. The result was tragic, as he found himself eventually on the outside looking in. Today AOL is barely a blip in the media-verse, while CNN, despite a lot of changes and competition, still matters. It just matters without Turner, which is sad.

At the end of "Call Me Ted," Turner even provides his own epitaph. He's made epitaph-writing a game throughout his life, usually to get a chuckle or make a point. But now, he writes, he's leaning toward "I Have Nothing Left to Say."