Turner Taps Former Executive to Put His Life Down on Paper
Ted Turner, left, with Bill Burke, authors of the new book, “Call Me Ted.”
When Bill Burke was still in his 30s, he set aside his career in the media business and decamped to Maine to raise his family and perhaps indulge vague ideas he had about teaching and writing.
Then Ted Turner came calling.
Mr. Turner, the brash media mogul, cable television pioneer and founder of CNN and Turner Broadcasting, wanted to write an autobiography. Mr. Turner had been Mr. Burke’s boss, and Mr. Burke had written a 20-page article called “Leadership Lessons I Learned From Ted Turner,” that he was considering submitting to a business publication.
Instead, three years ago Mr. Burke, a former president of TBS, e-mailed a copy to Mr. Turner’s assistant in Atlanta, who printed it out for Mr. Turner to read. Mr. Turner, conforming to his reputation for impulsiveness, was on the phone with Mr. Burke within an hour.
Mr. Burke recalled, “He says, ‘You still in Maine? You get a job yet? I didn’t know you could write. I want you to write my biography.’ ”
So for the next three years, Mr. Burke skipped between Mr. Turner’s ranches, three in Montana and one in the Patagonia region of Argentina, recording Mr. Turner’s story.
“The good thing for me is that Ted likes to spend his free time on the incredibly beautiful properties he owns,” he said. “We would have breakfast together, then he would go fishing and I would go fishing. Then he’d come back and he’d say, ‘O.K. Burke, let’s work.’ ”
The resulting autobiography, “Call Me Ted,” with Mr. Burke as the collaborator, will be released on Monday. Mr. Burke had never written a book, much less one in which the publisher, Grand Central Publishing, a unit of Hachette, had paid an advance of more than $5 million to Mr. Turner.
At first, Mr. Turner and his agent, Morton Janklow, of Janklow & Nesbit Associates, considered a big-time author who had worked on collaborations — someone in the mold, Mr. Janklow said, of William Novak, who had written Lee Iacocca’s best-selling autobiography.
“The issue became, as I got to know Ted, the more I began to worry about whether he would be open emotionally and psychologically to a stranger,” Mr. Janklow said. The biggest disadvantage of Mr. Burke was “he had never written a book or a collaboration,” Mr. Janklow said. “But I felt intimacy was more important than literary credentials.”
And that seems to have paid off, according to Mr. Burke, who noted the death of Mr. Turner’s sister from lupus at age 17, which is chronicled in the book. “A lot has been written about his father’s suicide, but the passage of his sister was as important, or more so, than his father’s death.”
Mr. Burke also interviewed many of Mr. Turner’s friends and business associates, like Bill Gates and Hank Aaron, and even an ex-wife, Jane Fonda. These interviews, called Ted Stories, are interspersed throughout the book.
Mr. Turner’s much publicized emotional troubles are also included. “He now believes, and his doctors now believe, that he is not bipolar,” said Mr. Burke. “He does not take lithium anymore. That was a bad diagnosis.”
For Mr. Burke, the project was an unlikely detour from a media career that seemed predestined by his bloodlines: his father, Daniel B. Burke, was president and chief executive of Capital Cities/ABC before it was sold to the Walt Disney Company in 1996; his older brother, Stephen B. Burke, is president of Comcast. (An uncle, James E. Burke, was chief executive of Johnson & Johnson).
“I grew up reading the TV trades and I learned a lot about the business through osmosis,” he said. “I remember this dinner conversation when my dad was talking about this wire that would go in the back of your TV.” He was speaking, of course, about cable television.
And Mr. Burke, 42, went in that direction at first. After Harvard Business School he was hired by the Turner Entertainment Group, where he developed the cable network Turner Classic Movies — which propelled him, at age 29, to the position of president of TBS. A high-level digital job at Time Warner followed after Mr. Turner sold his company to Time Warner in 1996. He left Time Warner just before its ill-fated deal with America Online, and after a stint running the Weather Channel, Mr. Burke moved to Maine.
But Mr. Turner’s influence was constantly on his mind. “I realized there were a bunch of things, that almost every day I would think of Ted in some way,” he said.
The book process began at a delicate time for Mr. Turner — he had largely been shuffled aside at Time Warner but had not yet left the company’s board. The long decline in value of Time Warner stock in the wake of the merger with AOL had eviscerated his wealth.
“There was a fair amount of bitterness,” Mr. Burke recalled. “My sense was that this process of reliving his accomplishments, I think, was almost therapeutic for him. It was a good process for him.”
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