Axel Madsen - Cousteau: An Unauthorized Biography

Cousteau

An Unauthorized Biography

Axel Madsen

Acknowledgments

I could not thank all the people who took time to help me prepare this story of the worlds most famous living explorer. Let me thank my editor, Susan Suffes, and, in television, Perry Miller Adato, Jacques Leduc, Arnold Orgolini, and Bud Rifkin. In Paris, Toulon, Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Monaco, I owe thanks to Dr. Jean-Pierre Cousteau, Brice Lalonde, Svante and Marie-Louise Loefgren, Dominique Martin, Andr Portelatine, Lucienne Quevastre, Raymond Vaissire, and Catherine Winter. In London, I am indebted to David Attenborough and Allen Pickhaver; in Los Angeles, to Isabelle Rodoganachi, Pierre Sauvage, and Henri Tusseau. In New York, there are Beth Myers and Susan Schiefelbein; in Washington, Gary Davis, Melvin Payne and the CNN news office; in Manila, William McCabe III; and in Carversville, Gina Smith.

CONTENTS

W HY D R . J OHNSON, THAT IS NOT SO EASY AS YOU THINK, FOR IF YOU WERE TO MAKE LITTLE FISHES TALK, THEY WOULD TALK LIKE WHALES .

Samuel Goldsmith

Introduction

Terra Amata

Jacques-Yves Cousteau is a man of the coastFrances other coast, the Cte dAzur, with its simmering bays, devotion to gratification, ancient civilization, and new attempts at Sunbelt relevance. Cousteau first opened his goggled eyes to the undersea order in Le Mourillon Bay in the shadow of the battleships that for twenty years were his career. It was in Toulon that he married an admirals daughter and saw his two sons born. He went to war from its naval base and, in peace, removed live torpedoes from the ravaged roadstead. It was in suburban Sanary-sur-Mer that he and his first companions fashioned masks from inner tubes and snorkels from garden hoses and went spear-fishing to feed an extended family that included his mother and his imprisoned brothers children. Fame came two hours drive across the red porphyry rocks of the Esterel Mountains at Cannes. It was in workaday Antibes across the Baie des Anges that the Calypso was turned into the worlds most famousand most filmedresearch vessel. His first underwater habitat was established off Pomegue Island, the first antique treasures lifted from the ocean floor at nearby Grand Conglou. It was off Villefranche and Nice that, to finance real expeditions, he dredged for geological samples, and it was from Monacos harbor that he sailed on his first open-ended voyage.

In preparing an apartment site on Nices Rue Carnot, bulldozers stumbled on an ancient habitat. Nice was founded by the Greeks of Marseilles. The Romans added Cimiez and modern-day Niois named the excavated site Terra Amata, beloved land (in homage to the distant Greek colonizers, the name of the coasts new scitech town in the pine woods below Grasse is Sophia-Antipolis). But the bones and artifacts now exhibited under the apartment complex were hundreds of thousands of years older than the Greek and Roman invaders. They belonged to an elephant-hunting people who lived by the azure bay 400,000 years ago.

It is to this beloved coast and fertile foothills of the Alps that Cousteau returns. Here old acquaintances are roused by sonorous phone calls to join yet another adventure or are invited to a festive meal. Cousteau may summon divers, crew members, scientists who have shared both the dangers and thrills of first encounters with strange lifeforms to a restaurant in Juan-les-Pins on the bay overlooking Cannes. Or he may bring Monacos Prince Rainier or Philippe Tailliez, the first companion of the distant beginnings who now runs a national marine park on the Hyres Islands, an ancient pirates haven, to a cliffside inn at Eze, all the way up on the Corniche above the Aleppo pines and high-rise Monaco. He is naturally at the head of the table, talking, gesticulating, laughing and lifting a glass of Bandol wine from the southern slopes of the Maures mountains, or a glass of Bellet as dry as the knotty uplands of Nice. Up close, Cousteau is surprisingly tall. His nose is beaked like a dolphins fin, his pale blue eyes behind the spectacles topped by thick semicircles of eyebrows.

Among friends he is a man with a sense of humor, someone who is alternately serious and sardonic. He loves to turn things upside down, to startle, to say exactly the opposite of what people expect. He is a man whose beliefs are very much a part of who he is, a man whose existence is both urgent and detached.

With nervous energy, the worlds most famous living explorer hurtles through a jet-set existence. In his late seventies, he seems at times to be merely hitting his stride. To charm and bully governments, foundations, and corporate entities into getting behind new efforts to safeguard global resources, he whizzes through world capitals sparking off TV series, schemes to help the Third World feed itself, new methods of propelling ships, and, his newest causeforestalling a superpower nuclear confrontation by exchanging millions of American and Soviet seven- and eight-year-olds who would live for one year in the other country. Children, he says, are members of the human family who have not yet arrived. As adults, we must make sure we pass along the best weve got to the future generations. Better still, it should be our duty to improve life for those who will follow us.

For half a century he has probed the teeming underwater world he virtually discovered. Legions of divers use the aqualung he invented, following his flippers into the sea. Hundreds of millions more owe their knowledge of the oceans and the sense of natures importance and beauty to his films and television programs.

His ability to inform and to alert, and his media celebrity, allows him to address people over the heads of their governments. His very modern message is that our collective existence has ecological consequences. Most of the time the human factor is harmful; on occasion it is protective of nature. His newest quest is to discover the present and future effects for all life if we ignore our interdependence with what surrounds us.

He has spent the better part of thirty years being what he believes, the rugged individualist who wants to both inspire and shake us up. Celebrity has made him effective, but he thinks of himself as a loner, and in his private moments misses the anonymity of the first heady years. He could be a millionaire, but maintains a lifestyle on the generosity of others. Money holds little fascination. With his wife, Simone, he owns apartments in Paris and Monaco; he is on salary to his nonprofit organization, has a French naval officers retirement pension, and years ago swapped his aqualung patent for an annuity. If it wasnt for Simone, he has said, he would own nothing and merely keep working and traveling. As it is, he rarely spends more than three days in one place at a time. He has found marriage archaic, a crutch we use to avoid facing our own solitude and decay, but has remained Simones spouse, if not her exemplary husband, for fifty years. The death in 1979 of their younger son, Philippe, was the tragedy of his life. It brought them closer and their elder son, Jean-Michel, back into their orbit. Simone has been on every voyage of the Calypso. She is a self-sufficient woman who has known how to make her own life important.

Possessed by a deep anger with age and its diminished capacities, Jacques Cousteau is a man in a hurry. He is such a public figure surrounded by such a halo that no one will tell him if he is wrong. A banker may tell him of a too large overdraft, but no one in the large polyglot entourage will say no to anything he proposes. Gone are the philosophical joustings with friends and family. He has decided that only the future counts, that the past is without interest. Writing his memoirs holds the terrors of a life coming to an end. He will not set aside the three months it might take even to dictate his life story. He is deliberately booked until 1990, sailing his beloved