Fresh from losing several billion dollars and his job at AOL Time Warner, Ted Turner returns to his entrepreneurial roots: "Leave your gun at the cash register and line up for work!"
Bowed and more than a little bloodied, his trademark Clark Gable mustache graying now but his body still lean and fit, Ted Turner is on the prowl, looking for one last, good fight before packing it in.
Yesterday he was in Chicago. Today he's back home in Atlanta. The restlessness, the energy, the old, irreplaceable joie de vivre have found a new focus. No, it's not CNN, not Time Warner, certainly not AOL, nor even world peace and nuclear disarmament, dear though those two causes are to his heart. It's not even the Atlanta Braves baseball team, which he used to own "and misses like hell." No, it's something meatier than that.
Bison burgers, anyone?
Plucking at his mustache, his eyes glancing this way then that, the old lion slips inside the door of a faceless meeting room in an upscale downtown Atlanta hotel, the better to reconnoiter his latest field of battle. The chandelier-lit room brims with young people, male, female, black, white, and brown--almost all of them too young to remember what television news was like before Ted Turner and CNN arrived on the scene more than two decades ago.
On one wall is a large hand-lettered chart that purports to help entrepreneurs climb the "Continuous Improvement Ladder," and on every table there's a spiral notebook labeled "Labor Management Guide, To Help You Manage Your Labor Costs." With such reading material at hand, you might think these folks--Ted's Montana Grills restaurant managers-in-training--would be bored out of their minds. But they're not. Not when Ted Turner strides purposefully down the aisle. Heads snap. Eyes pop. Ted's fans--his troops, his legions--applaud and even whistle. Their numbers are not large--fewer than 40--but their enthusiasm is, and it comes unforced.
Turner brings with him his latest prize--a replica of the Maltese falcon, awarded him the night before by a trade publication for his exploits as co-founder of the restaurant chain. Chipped and dented--Turner dropped it at the airport this morning--the falcon could be a metaphor for its slightly worse for the wear owner. "Looks better this way, don't you think?" co-founder George McKerrow had said, laughing at Turner's bumbling. Now, as Turner holds the falcon up, the crowd goes wild. "Got me the Maltese falcon," Turner hollers. "Used to own that movie, you know. Used to own my own movie studio, too. But now I got the falcon--for being in the restaurant business. Can you beat that?
"Now, you ask: Why am I in the restaurant business?" He answers his own question: "I got outmaneuvered at a big company."
He doesn't have to utter the name of that big, bad company. Everyone, it seems, knows the answer.
"I got fired," he declares. There's pride in his voice. Pride and defiance, and the words ring bells with his audience. He doesn't ask: "How many of you have ever been laid off?" He doesn't have to. There are heads bobbing everywhere. Part prizefighter, part Holy Roller, he's on a tear: "I was over 60, and it's hard to get a job when you're over 60. People don't want to give you insurance." (He doesn't mention it, but one of the perks that makes Ted's Montana Grills all but unique in the restaurant business is that all full-time employees--from the lowliest kitchen hand to the greeters at the door--get health coverage.)
"I thought: I better get a job! Hell, I lost $8 billion!"
Never you mind that Ted Turner, even without a job, is still worth more than a billion dollars, and most of the people in this room aren't particularly wealthy. ("Proprietors," Ted's term for general managers, are paid up to $75,000, with bonus.) The troops are eating it up.
"What I wanted to do was make a comeback. I wanted to put some points up on the board one last time. I coulda bought Outback..."--his voice trails, the laughter builds--"...before my stock went down." The crowd hoots.
"We're put'n people to work! Homeless people say to me, 'Mr. Ted, could you spare me a dime, or a dollar, or 10 dollars--or 20 dollars!" Hoots, hollers, laughter. "I tell 'em, 'That's Ted's Montana Grill," Turner says, jabbing with a pointed finger. "'We're hir'n! Leave your gun at the cash register and line up for work!"
When Turner asks if anyone has any questions, a burly man raises his hand. "Ted," he says--everyone calls Turner "Ted"--"I wanta thank you for putting the World Wrestling Federation on TV." The crowd breaks up.
A force of nature, even at 65, Turner knows when to make his exit and on what note: "Alright, brothers and sisters. Good to see you here! Just remember: Only two kinds of people in the restaurant business." He pauses--a big grin suffusing his face--and delivers the punch line, "The quick and the dead! And I ain't dead!"
Heavenly days no, Ted ain't dead. Though some on the former AOL Time Warner board might wish him...gone. (He's still a director of the company--the now-disgraced AOL having been dropped from its corporate name--though no longer its vice chairman.) Mary Puissegur, Ted's Montana Grills' New Orleans-bred publicist--and a cousin of James Carville--had warned me not to ask Turner about AOL Time Warner. But I didn't have to: Turner's lengthier discourses inevitably turn to the subject of his having met his downfall at the hands of various underhanded corporate villains--who do not go unnamed. Like unrequited love, AOL Time Warner is an idé e fixe that just won't go away.
And the more you're around Turner the more you understand "how devastating the whup'n I took" was--and how it defines what he is doing today. "When we," Turner says of his old company, Turner Broadcasting, "merged with Time Warner, I said I wanted to find out what it was like to be in a big company. I found out!" The merger of Turner with Time Warner, he adds, "saved 'em. The merger with AOL sank 'em." He cups his hands around his mouth, makes a megaphone of the famous "Mouth of the South" and does his best cheerleader imitation: "Push 'em back, push 'em back. Waaaaaaay back!"
