The many love lives of Ted Turner

Mr Ted Turner, who died on May 6 at 87, was known for creating CNN and transforming the media landscape with the 24-hour news cycle.

But he was also a playboy, even through his three marriages and well into his 70s. His paramours had countless stories and grudges about his brazen infidelity, but he somehow still managed to remain friends with many of them – perhaps a testament to his famed charm.

Mr Turner may have been polyamorous before polyamory hit the mainstream.

Known for travelling between his dozens of homes in different places, Mr Turner met girlfriends out and about, everywhere from the CNN headquarters to sailing adventures on his boat. A tall, powerful and charismatic man, he was unabashed about pursuing women and loved the thrill of chase.

“Ted loved women, loved romancing them and was very attracted to beauty,” said Mr Ken Auletta, a long-time media reporter who spent about four months with Mr Turner for a 2001 profile published in The New Yorker. “There was a lot of vanity there.”

When Mr Auletta visited Mr Turner’s apartment above the CNN headquarters at CNN Center in Atlanta, he said he noticed in the small bedroom a large bed under a completely mirrored ceiling – presumably so that he could watch himself.

Mr Turner’s three marriages were often rocked by his infidelity and drinking.

He met his first wife, Ms Julia Nye, with whom he had two children, at a college sailing regatta. Their tumultuous marriage ended in the 1960s, after she believed him to be unfaithful, according to Mr Auletta.

During his second marriage with Ms Jane Smith, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant with whom he had two sons and a daughter, Mr Turner, who owned the Atlanta Braves, publicly dated other women and could be seen taking his girlfriends to the baseball team’s games.

Those girlfriends included former Playboy magazine cover model Liz Wickersham, whom he tried – unsuccessfully – to turn into an anchor for a CNN programme. In the late 1980s, Mr Turner and Ms Smith divorced.

And then there was his last marriage, in 1991 and lasting 10 years, to Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda, a movie star he chased and fell in love with. He won her over, and she was dazzled by him.

But despite their intense love, he could not stay loyal to her, either. A month after they were married, Fonda found out that Mr Turner cheated on her while she was waiting for him in the motor lobby of the CNN Center, she wrote in her 2005 memoir, My Life So Far.

“Life had taught me that men, at least those I tended to go for, operate by the Fornicato, ergo sum (I fxxx, therefore I exist) principle,” Fonda wrote.

When he entered their car, she began hitting him with the car phone and dumping water on him, she recalled. She asked him why he had sex with another woman.

His response, according to her book: “Yes. Yes. I love you madly and our sex is great. I don’t know. I guess it’s... it’s like a tic – something I’ve gotten used to doing. I’ve always needed a back-up in case something happens between us.”

Nevertheless, they remained together for 10 years, until she was fed up with his insatiable need for other women. Her own deepening spirituality, including an embrace of Christianity, was another underlying cause. They maintained a friendship afterward.

In an Instagram post on May 6, the day he died, Fonda wrote, “He swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I’ve never been the same.” She also shared that he’d boast about “how many countries he’d made love to his prior lover in and could I match that”.

Mr Turner suffered profoundly after their split, and though he continued to chase women, “the great love of his life was Jane Fonda”, Mr Auletta said.

After the split with Fonda, Mr Auletta recalled Mr Turner taking up with Ms Frederique D’Arragon, a Frenchwoman he met while married to his second wife in the 1970s.

Mr Turner was returning from a long sail, swigging from a bottle of vodka, as a crowd came to applaud his boat’s arrival to shore, according to Mr Auletta. Mr Turner pointed to a woman in the crowd, who ended up being Ms D’Arragon, telling her in colourful language to remove her top. Mr Turner also once told her to jump naked into the water.

In a 2012 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Mr Turner famously revealed he had four girlfriends, and that he would alternate between them, spending one week at a time with each one. They included Ms Elizabeth Dewberry, a novelist, who was with him in New York during that interview for UN Week.

“I’ve been flooded with memories,” Ms Dewberry said in a phone interview on May 7, referring to Mr Turner as “an incredible man”.

“Grief is so weird, and you’re not necessarily remembering the most meaningful or important things, but the memories just surface randomly, you know?” she said.

She has been remembering one moment in particular: Before Mr Turner’s 2008 autobiography, Call Me Ted, was published, he was worried the book would flop, as he compared projected sale numbers with the television viewership numbers he was used to seeing.

Ms Dewberry, an author, explained that the number of books would likely put him on the bestseller list.

In interviews after his divorce from Fonda, Mr Turner said he missed intimacy.

In 2012, Piers Morgan told him: “You replaced Jane, for all intents and purposes, with a new system, which is, you have four girlfriends at any one time.”

Mr Turner responded: “Hopefully they won’t all leave me at once.”

Morgan asked: “How do you get away with that?”, to which Mr Turner responded: “With great difficulty.” NYTIMES