Why Captain Outrageous was nothing like the gutless billionaires who submit to Trump |
Why Captain Outrageous was nothing like the gutless billionaires who submit to Trump
May 10, 2026 — 1:30pm
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A woman I knew dated Ted Turner. (Before Jane.) I was fascinated. Did that kinetic kingpin ever sleep? Did “the Mouth of the South” churn with bulletins 24 hours a day, like his amazing creation, CNN?
Ted rested sometimes, she assured me. But he was a character, she said, recounting the story of the first time she visited Turner at his home in Georgia.
As she got out of the car and walked toward the door, Turner swept out to greet her. He was dressed like Rhett Butler and was playing the music from Gone with the Wind. He scooped her up in his arms and carried her inside.
Turner was, as his third wife, Jane Fonda, said in a tribute when he died at 87 on Wednesday, a “deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate”.
His idol was the ultimate cinematic swashbuckler, Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler. (Turner named one of his sons Rhett.)
‘Mouth of the South’: Billionaire CNN founder Ted Turner dies
“Ted bought MGM so he could own Gone with the Wind,” Fonda told me in a 2020 interview. “I mean, Gone with the Wind — he lives by that. ‘The land is the only thing that matters, Scarlett. The land is the only thing that lasts!’ That’s why he owns 2 million acres, because of Scarlett O’Hara.”
When Turner created Turner Classic Movies in 1994 — I will always love him for that — he introduced it with his favourite movie, the same way he introduced the TNT network six years earlier.
“He recited lines from Gone with the Wind a lot,” Fonda recalled. “He was obsessed with Scarlett O’Hara. You know the painting from the movie, the great big painting with Scarlett? He........