Jacques Cousteau Read online

  Cousteau monument, St.-André-de-Cubzac, France (courtesy of the author)

  Within weeks of the cancellation, Cousteau had proposed a new series to the fourth American television network, the Public Broadcasting System, a loose new conglomerate of viewer-supported stations across the United States. After endless presentations to corporate boards of directors, he had finally found a sponsor, the Atlantic Richfield Petroleum Company (ARCO). PBS audiences were minuscule compared with those of the major networks, but he knew he had no place else to go on television. Everything for which he had worked as a filmmaker and explorer for a half century was lost without it.

  Radio and television had fundamentally altered exploration, allowing listeners and viewers to share moments of discovery instantaneously with heroic men and women in faraway places. The live broadcast of exploration had begun in August 1932, when oceanographers Otis Barton and William Beebe had themselves sealed in a 4.5-foot steel ball and lowered three-quarters of a mile into the Atlantic to peer through 6-inch portholes into the inky darkness. They reported a full hour of their dangerous journey as it was happening on the new National Broadcasting Company radio network. More than fourteen million people had been riveted to their radios in England and the United States. Vicarious exploration had reached its zenith on July 20, 1969, when one-eighth of the three and a half billion human beings on earth witnessed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon.

  Like them, Cousteau had been catapulted to stardom by the astonishing new medium that sent information around the world on invisible electromagnetic waves. Now, for the first time, he was faced with adapting to its vicissitudes. Incredibly, lunar astronauts had also experienced the fickleness of television networks and audiences. Every person on earth with access to a television set had watched Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon. Very few of them could name the astronauts who made the last moon landing just three and a half years later (Gene Cernan, Ron Evans, and Harrison Schmitt).

  His new television series, The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey, consisted of a dozen episodes built around underwater archaeology, shipwrecks, and environmental disaster airing over three broadcasting seasons. The first show, on the discovery of the sunken ocean liner Britannic, drew favorable reviews and a solid audience, but the costs for filming the series were outrunning ARCO’s money. Cousteau needed more than $2 million a year to keep his two hundred employees, companies, expeditions, and institutes afloat. He didn’t particularly care about money as long as he had enough, and his chief financial tactic was simply going out and getting more cash when he ran out.

  The six-week fund-raising tour in the United States organized by the Cousteau Society, a nonprofit corporation he had launched four years earlier, would pay only some of the bills. In six cities, he and his son Philippe gave speeches to sellout crowds in sports arenas. At the finale in Seattle, more people packed a basketball coliseum than had come to the same place to see the Rolling Stones a few weeks earlier. Before his lecture, as he had in each city, Cousteau set aside time to listen and talk to schoolchildren. They gave him flowers and drawings of seals, dolphins, whales, and one in which Calypso was depicted with wings hovering over the sea surrounded by a silver aura. After the gifts, Cousteau told the children they could ask him anything they wanted to about his life.

  How old are you? Sixty-seven. How deep is the deepest you ever dived? Three hundred and seventy-two feet. Have you ever swum with a blue whale? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’ve never swum with a blue whale, because there are very few of them left anymore. What is it like underwater? It’s fantastic underwater because it is like floating in space. Are whales smarter than humans? Some whales have bigger brains than humans, but that doesn’t mean they are smarter. A girl raised her hand. Cousteau nodded to her. Without the slightest hint of humor, she said, “When I grow up, I want to marry a whale.” Another child told him that his school was changing its name to Orca Elementary to honor Cousteau and his work saving the whales. Cousteau beamed. “Wonderful,” he said. “That’s beautiful.”

  After the children, Cousteau sat down with two reporters from Seattle’s antiestablishment newspaper.

  “What does your work—the books, films, and the Cousteau Society—mean to you personally, as Jacques Cousteau?” one of them asked.

  “This is an introvert question and I am not introverted,” Cousteau replied. “I am extroverted. I do not find my pleasure in asking questions about myself. I find my satisfaction in dealing with questions that concern the community and the outside world. We are more and more induced by publicity and the media to turn toward our neighbor. I hate my neighbor.” (He laughed.) “I like to look to the outside world.”

  “You must have a sense of responsibility,” the other reporter said.

  “I hate responsibility,” Cousteau snapped. “I feel in gear with the life of the world and that is not the same thing. The sense of responsibility is introverted, it gives you an importance. None of us has any importance, but rather we are in a symphony. The man who plays the violin in the symphony, he does not have a sense of responsibility. He is cooperating …Life is a symphony and we are playing a tune in the symphony; there is no responsibility there.”

  “Do you believe in destiny?”

  “No.”

  “What about God?”

  “If there is anything like God, it is so complex that we have no idea of what it is like. The concept of God is separate from ourselves. We have no importance to a God if there is one.”

  “What do you rely on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t you have some sense of faith?”

  “No. I believe in the instant. I am going to give you a quote that has guided my life. I don’t like quotes, but this one enlightens me. It’s a Spanish proverb: ‘The road to paradise is paradise.’”

  Cousteau savored his celebrity and the freedom to roam the planet, but remaining on television was crucial because it was the most powerful medium on earth for sounding an alarm. While he was in the United States, Calypso and her crew were at sea, sampling the water and bottom sediment for pollution by heavy metals and other toxins that might account for the dramatic collapse of life in the shallows near shore. Not long ago, the Mediterranean basin had been the entire world to the civilizations that bloomed on its shores, a gift that had nourished the Samarians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians, Gauls, Romans, and the countless other tribes and bands that had been fed and cleansed by its waters. Now, even the most casual observer could see that the nearly landlocked ocean known to the Romans as Mare Nostrum was headed for disaster. The lush habitat for plants and animals was becoming a polluted soup spoiled by the refuse of tens of millions of people crowding its shores. Cousteau had become obsessed with sounding the alarm about the Mediterranean and the rest of the world’s oceans, which, thanks to him, had been revealed as fragile beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. As exploring and filming the underwater world had dominated the first half of his life, saving what he had seen would command his passion for the rest of it.

  “The Mediterranean will be the first to die,” he told a French magazine reporter, “and become a warning for the world.”

  Cousteau was the secretary general of the International Commission for Scientific Exploration of the Mediterranean, chairman of Eurocean, a joint venture of twenty-four European companies to explore and preserve the oceans, and director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. He had easily convinced all three to support the survey expedition, accomplishing several goals at once. The voyage to measure pollution would become an episode for the PBS series in which film footage of gorgeous coral and swarms of fish that he shot forty years earlier were contrasted with images of his divers descending into today’s bleak underwater wasteland. It would help make the recovery of the Mediterranean Sea a cause célèbre, and promote the work of the Cousteau Society. Because of television and Jacques Cousteau, millions of people would know the results of the Mediterranean pollution survey that just a decade earlier wou
ld have been shared only by a handful of scientists. Cousteau was outraged by the dismal state of the ocean of his youth. He had a dark sense of foreboding about the overall health of a planet that was supporting five times as many people as it had when he had been born in 1910. Increasingly, he was desperate to transmit that message to the world.

  Cousteau’s own children and grandchildren would inherit the misery of unimaginable privation and sadness if his dire predictions about the earth came true. Both of his sons and their families were living in Los Angeles, where, for a decade, the day-to-day work of producing and editing his television show made it as much a home as any of them ever had. His younger son and coproducer of the Odyssey series, Philippe, was at that time recovering from a broken leg suffered in the crash of his gyrocopter while filming on Easter Island. His other son, Jean-Michel, was an architect working on aquarium exhibits and lecturing. Both his sons were married, with children of their own, and Cousteau believed that their prospects for the future were grim unless humanity ceased to be the plague on the earth that it had become.

  In the autumn of 1977, while Cousteau was absorbed in the passions of his sacred present, events in the unknowable future were about to change his life forever. He could not have known, for instance, that he was about to become the patriarch of a second family. His affair with an Air France stewardess named Francine Triplet seemed to be more than just another of his endless liaisons with women. Within a year, they would have a child together, then another, beginning a secret life that would remain hidden for almost fifteen years. Cousteau also could not have known that soon he and his wife, Simone, would suffer their ultimate agony together, the death of a child. Afterward, Cousteau carried on while Simone retreated alone to Calypso, where she was known as La Bergère, The Shepherdess. Later, someone asked Cousteau if it had been difficult for him to be the commander of Calypso during her halcyon days.

  “Not if Simone was on board. She was the cook, the mother of thirty sailors, the one that advised, the one that ended the fights, the one that told us when to shave, the one that challenged us to do our best, the one that we counted on, our best critic, our first admirer, the one who saved the ship in a storm. She was the smile each morning and the warm good night. Calypso could have lived without me, but not without Simone.”

  1

  LA BERGÈRE

  Marriage is absolutely archaic. It is a device people use to avoid facing the fact that we are all solitary and perishable.

  Jacques Cousteau

  JACQUES COUSTEAU MET Simone Melchior at her family’s Paris apartment in the summer of 1936. She was seventeen, the daughter and granddaughter of French admirals, born on January 19, 1919, in Oran, Algeria. Until she was five years old, her family lived in Toulon, the home port of the Mediterranean fleet, then moved to Japan, where her father was a diplomatic attaché. By the time the Melchiors returned to France, Simone was a teenager fluent in Japanese and infected with wanderlust. Though her horizons were limited by her gender, she was a lycée student whose interests went far beyond keeping a house. She would later say that her dreams always included the sea.

  The soirée at which Cousteau met Simone was one of many hosted by Marguerite Melchior to introduce her daughter to eligible navy men. Cousteau was fixed on Simone from the moment he walked in the door. Feigning indifference, he registered a stunning, compact young woman with flaxen hair, high cheekbones, and a seductive mélange of amusement and confidence in her alert green eyes. For her part, Simone quickly picked out the animated, wiry young man holding a movie camera of all things, not something she expected at one of her mother’s parties. He was obviously navy, judging by his posture, but dressed in civilian clothes. She was instantly enchanted by his presence, a blend of curiosity, delight, and confidence, and she liked the way he brashly panned his camera around the roomful of people holding cocktail glasses and chattering. He had a long, rural face, deeply etched by lines in his forehead pointing down to a long, sharp nose. Another set of concentric arcs wrinkled each side of his mouth, emphasizing a dazzling smile that he seemed to measure out for effect. As he wound the camera with its little silver handle, he moved his arms as though they hurt him. Simone’s father easily noticed his daughter’s interest in the officer with the camera, led him across the room to her, and introduced Ensign Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Admiral Melchior added that Cousteau was an aviation cadet living in Paris with his family while recuperating from injuries suffered in an automobile accident.

  Cousteau took over the conversation, explaining the accident to Simone as though telling an adventure story in which he was simply a character swept along by events beyond his control. Five months earlier, he was just about to graduate from flight school when he borrowed his father’s Salmson sports car to go to a friend’s wedding in the hills west of Bordeaux, where he was based. The Salmson was fast and nimble, but when the headlights suddenly dimmed on a hairpin curve, he careered off the road into the darkness and blacked out. Only the luck of a passing farm truck on the otherwise deserted mountain road saved his life. Cousteau regained consciousness in the hospital with twelve broken bones and a paralyzed right arm. His doctor told him that his arm was numb because it was infected and probably should be amputated. Cousteau refused amputation. He would rather die than live as a one-armed man. A few days later, the infection resolved itself and his bones began to heal. After months of physical therapy, Cousteau was out of plaster and walking around, but he was in constant pain. He was finished as an aviator, and though he could not know it at the time he was again very lucky. Every man in his flying class would be killed during the first few weeks of the war with Germany, which was three years away.

  Simone Melchior Cousteau (PRIVATE COLLECTION)

  Cousteau, at twenty-six, was nine years older than Simone, and he had already sailed around the world—with his camera—on the training ship Jeanne d’Arc. Flying airplanes had been one of three possible life courses Cousteau had ceremoniously announced to his family as a boy. His other two choices were being a film director or becoming a medical doctor. Now, he was not at all sure of his future. Cousteau had been a curious but anxious boy who had become a man in love with impulse and driving fast cars on mountain roads. The rural face Simone had noticed right away was a true compass to his beginnings. He was born in St.-André-de-Cubzac, an ancient village at the confluence of the Dordogne and Garonne rivers, which form the Gironde Estuary, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean seventy miles to the northwest. The first traces of habitation of the fertile, temperate hillsides are shards and bone fragments more than ten thousand years old, evidence of seasonal encampments of nomadic bands foraging in the north after the last ice age. The Pax Romana had reached the Gironde two thousand years ago, creating the city now called Bordeaux with the profits from sugar, tobacco, indigo, cotton, ebony, cocoa, coffee, slaves, and oysters exported to the rest of the Roman Empire. When the wild oysters grew scarce, the Romans figured out how to raise them in sea farms from spat on discarded shells, a method still unchanged by time. Soon after they arrived, the Romans planted grapevines and made wine that would forever after define the place. The English took over Bordeaux in the twelfth century when Louis VII’s divorced wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, married the Plantagenet king Henry II. Their kin ruled the region for three hundred years, as the wines of the magnificent, fertile valleys—called Bordeaux by the French and claret by the English—flowed by the shipload from convenient docks along the Gironde to London and the rest of the British Empire.

  The vineyards nearest St.-André-de-Cubzac are known for wines made from common grapes that are perfectly drinkable and preferred by locals because they aren’t as expensive as the vintages of nearby St.-Emilion and Poulliac and the others that find their way into the cellars of oenophiles. Cousteau’s mother, Elizabeth Duranthon, was one of five daughters in St.-André-de-Cubzac’s wealthiest family, descended from generations of landholders and wine merchants who had tended those vineyards as though bound to them by inherited vows. Hi
s father, Daniel, was a lawyer, one of five sons of the village notaire who was responsible for witnessing deeds, marriage contracts, and other consequential transactions. Daniel was the brightest of the Cousteau sons, so the family had marshaled its merchant-class resources to send him through law school in Paris. He returned to his home village of 3,800 as a fully fledged notaire himself, but remained for only three years, executing documents in his father’s office and, not incidentally, courting Elizabeth. She agreed to marry him in the winter of 1905. The following spring, thirty-year-old Daniel and eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Cousteau boarded a train for the long day’s journey to Paris; thereafter they rarely went back to St.-André-de-Cubzac.

  In Paris, Daniel Cousteau had only one client, an American expatriate his own age named James Hazen Hyde who had inherited a fortune from his father, the founder of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Hyde had fled the United States under a cloud of controversy and allegations that he had cooked the books of the insurance company after he took control. He sold out, moved to France, and lived royally, which included hiring Daniel as a legal adviser, traveling companion, private secretary, and tennis partner. Daniel was essentially a servant, though he was part of Hyde’s inner social circle, and loved the life of leisure and pleasure. Daniel Cousteau and his wife were gilded vagabonds with no real home, but reckoned their life was a far better adventure than notarizing deeds in a quiet village or taking a minor position in her family’s wine business. He was a man of only average intelligence who possessed finely tuned primitive instincts for simply getting things done. He had realized early in life that his wits and careful decisions were his only sources of real wealth, and he took advantage of opportunity as naturally as a fox snatches a chicken. Daniel was well aware that the only estate he would likely leave to whatever children he and Elizabeth might have was his example as a skillful liver of life.