Head Turner : Even as a Sports, TV and Budding Movie Mogul, the former ‘Captain Outrageous’ Finds Time to Take to High Seas Again in the Congressional Cup

The faintly Southern, faintly nasal voice barking orders from the helm is familiar, and if the hair beneath the cap is a little grayer, the cap itself is the clincher.

The trademark engineer’s cap can mean only that he is back, and if that’s the case, then the woman sitting on the back of the boat behind the dark glasses under the pulled-down visor must be. . . .

Is she having fun yet?

“I liked the part where we came in and sat around (the Long Beach Yacht Club),” she said.

Jane Fonda had just sailed for the first time with her husband, Ted Turner. He was tuning up for this week’s Congressional Cup Masters regatta, resurrecting 10 past winners of the event, in lieu of the world-class hotshots competing in the America’s Cup at San Diego.

“We’re kind of like the replacement players in baseball,” said Turner, who can relate to that too.

He and she were leading two other lives in 1977. He was “Captain Outrageous” or--the nickname he really hated--the “Mouth from the South.” After buying the Atlanta Braves a year earlier, he was winning the Congressional Cup and successfully defending the America’s Cup. She was working on “Coming Home,” which would win her a second Oscar in 1978.

Three years later Turner started CNN, earned grudging acclaim from his peers and left sailing behind.

“At first I missed it some, but I never look back very much,” Turner said.

The America’s Cup, a multi-media empire, honorary doctorates, memberships in halls of fame from Newport, R.I., to Dubuque, marriage to a movie star . . . aside from Fonda, which meant the most?

“Haven’t won it yet,” Turner said. “Want to win the World Series. And I don’t even get to play. That’s really big. A lot of people care about the America’s Cup, but a lot more care about the World Series.”

Turner, 56, also wouldn’t mind having an Oscar of his own. Most recently, besides running other people’s movies, he started making his own.

“I’d like to win the Academy Award for best picture, and we may do that (March 27),” he said. “We’re nominated for ‘The Shawshank Redemption.’ Wouldn’t it be something to win the Academy Award for best picture my first year in the movie business?”

Leaning forward over a bottle of beer in the upstairs lounge at LBYC, his thoughts come in chopped-off sentences.

“Did you see ‘Gettysburg?’ That was my movie. I’m really proud of it. We’ve gotta get a video on sale. Forty firing cannons . . . the biggest number of cannons. . . . I’m doing Horatio Nelson’s life now. We’re gonna have 50 ships out there (for) the battle of Trafalgar. We’re doing it with models, because nobody’s got (50 ships). The combined French and Spanish fleets against the British fleet.

“ ‘Gettysburg’ was the first epic since ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ . . . Twenty years. You have to call it an epic. . . . The largest cast ever in America: 5,000 people. It’s going to cost so much that I don’t even want to think about it.

“We just did ‘Andersonville’ (about) the Confederate prison camp. That’s got 5,000 people in it too.”

A reporter tells Turner he sounds like the second coming of Cecil B. DeMille.

“Right. That’s what I always wanted to do.”

But whoa, Ted--what about that World Series? Will there be one this year?

“I think there will be. I don’t know who’s gonna play in it.”

He didn’t mean which teams but which players.

“Amazingly, the quality of play, (according to) the people that have seen them play down there (in spring training), they’re not that bad.

“I’m really sorry for what’s happening. I like my players a lot. (But) the players are going to have to let the owners have a little slice of the action . . . maybe 15 or 20%.”

Would he be inclined to step into the negotiations?

“They’re doing a great job.”

A great job?

“Well, they haven’t caved in.”

*

Life was simpler when Turner was more a sailor than a media tycoon. In 1992 Bill Koch spent $68 million for the America’s Cup. In ‘77, Turner said, he spent about $1.4 million, and in 1980, when Dennis Conner beat him for the right to defend, he spent only $400,000. Clearly, his interest was waning.

“I thought ($400,000) was too much. I had a used boat, and all we had to do was buy a few new sails. We sanded the bottom ourselves. We didn’t stay in a mansion. We stayed in a dormitory . . . had hamburger every night. We did OK.

“I did it three times. How many times has Koch done it? He’s on his second. Three times is enough for me. Dennis Conner, he’s done it 50 times. But I’ve been there, done that.”

Turner has said, “The worst sin for me is to be bored.”

When he was at the top of his sailing game, there was no one better. He not only won the America’s Cup but the fiercest Fastnet race ever off England in 1979 when several boats and 15 lives were lost. He has won the Rolex (U.S.) Yachtsman of the Year award four times, once more than Conner and Buddy Melges. He had given up serious sailing by the time the Whitbread Round-the-World Race came along.

“If it had happened at the right time, I would have done anything,” he said. “But I’m glad I missed it. I don’t like being away from showers and women for two or three months at a time.”

Gary Jobson, the ESPN sailing commentator who was Turner’s tactician, said, “He was one of the best downwind helmsmen I ever saw. Some guys will sail conservatively and settle for third. He had this knack for taking the one-in-10 shot to win.

“He has this way of seeing the obvious that others don’t see and then to make things happen. He was a genius to conceive of satellite TV and to have the vision to start CNN.”

A risk-taker, a visionary--those are common descriptions of Turner far beyond sailing.

But somehow he has reached back to his Rosebud and found one of the engineer’s caps like he used to wear. For “photo ops,” such as the cover of Time or Sports Illustrated, he said he liked to wear a Greek fisherman’s cap, but he never wore it sailing because he was afraid of losing it.

“It cost five dollars, and these others cost like a buck and a quarter,” he said.

Alas, the buck-and-a-quarter cap blew away Monday--and the price has gone up.

“I hope somebody finds it and returns it,” Turner said. “It cost 10 bucks.”

The most recent Forbes 400 listed Turner’s worth at $1.6 billion.

All of this conversation seemed of little interest to Fonda, who spent the time curled up with a book about the prevention of adolescent pregnancy. Of the many causes she has found to fill her post-movie life, sailing will not be one.

“It was unbelievably tense,” she said after her one day on the boat as Turner sought to shake the rust off his skills. “Just awesome. I can’t believe I’m married to someone who was a champion.”

Turner said he came back because when he was sailing “I didn’t get a chance to sail much with my sons. They were too small.”

His crew includes sons Ted IV and Rhett, as in Butler. Turner will never forgive David O. Selznick for making “Gone With the Wind” before he had the chance.

The rest of his crew has boyhood friend and current aide Bunky Helfrich, L.J. Edgecomb, Tom Burnham and Richie Boyd. Helfrich, Boyd and Edgecomb were with him in ’77. Fonda has no desire to join up.

“Even if he did this again, I wouldn’t be crewing for him,” she said. “I want our marriage to last a long time.”