Cousteau
An Unauthorized Biography
Acknowledgments
I could not thank all the people who took time to help me prepare this story of the world’s 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, André Portelatine, Lucienne Quevastre, Raymond Vaissière, 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
Introduction Terra Amata
1. Société Zix
2. Willpower
3. Love and War
4. The Aqualung
5. Sanary
6. “Il Faut Aller Voir”
7. Work and Whales
8. Fame
9. The Great Depths
10. The Beginning of a Struggle
11. Homo Aquaticus
12. Showbiz
13. Consciousness
14. Defeats
15. Blue Planet
16. Fate
17. Wonderment
18. Serenity, Not Quite
Appendix
Books by Jacques-Yves Cousteau
National Geographic Articles by Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Films by Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Medals Awarded in France and Abroad
Titles and Scientific Distinctions
Bibliographical Notes
Bibliography
Index
WHY DR. JOHNSON, 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 coast—France’s other coast, the Côte d’Azur, 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 admiral’s 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 brother’s 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 world’s most famous—and most filmed—research vessel. His first underwater habitat was established off Pomegue Island, the first antique treasures lifted from the ocean floor at nearby Grand Congloué. It was off Villefranche and Nice that, to finance real expeditions, he dredged for geological samples, and it was from Monaco’s harbor that he sailed on his first open-ended voyage.
In preparing an apartment site on Nice’s Rue Carnot, bulldozers stumbled on an ancient habitat. Nice was founded by the Greeks of Marseilles. The Romans added Cimiez and modern-day Niçois named the excavated site Terra Amata, beloved land (in homage to the distant Greek colonizers, the name of the coast’s 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 Monaco’s Prince Rainier or Philippe Tailliez, the first companion of the distant beginnings who now runs a national marine park on the Hyères 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 dolphin’s 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 world’s 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 cause—forestalling 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 we’ve 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 nature’s 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 officer’s retirement pension, and years ago swapped his aqualung patent for an annuity. If it wasn’t 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 Simone’s 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 Calypso, helicoptering off to self-imposed assignments, and flying back for his close-ups with new interesting lifeforms.
There is a lot of Jules Verne in Cousteau—the view of the world not yet explored, the boy at heart, inspired, ingenious, quick to laugh—but there is also a practical, nuts-and-bolts side to him, a delight in wrestling with problems and solving them with new technology. And if there are women’s men, there are also men’s men, men who are comfortable among men and with whom men, in turn, are at ease. Cousteau is comfortable in the company of men who thrive on physical effort. Over the years, he has chosen companions who have not found happiness and peace in ordinary existence, men who have often been wounded by life on land and who instead have put their trust in the sea. He is tentacular, reaching out and sucking people and ideas to him.
He hates to analyze himself. People may dissect him, he may examine others, but he has no time for self-analysis. His own idol is the late Bertrand Russell, thinker, mathematician, writer, and, in Cousteau’s view, an exemplary man who loved women and life, and had the courage to go to prison for his convictions.
He has himself called JYC—pronounced “zheek”—by intimates and collaborators. The contraction of his name to its initials is a recent affectation, an homage to his late brother, Pierre-Antoine Cousteau. PAC was the much-admired older brother, the one Jacques thought had the brains in the family, the brilliant journalist who by predilection, arrogance, and an obsolete sense of honor chose the losing side in war and was condemned to death. The deep dark secret of Cousteau’s life is the risk he took to invalidate the biblical shrift that no one is his brother’s keeper.
Clockwork jet trails, bicontinental commuting, consumer exoticism. The world has never been more accessible; never have so many traveled so much. Yet what do we see, what do we learn? As the romantic specialist in playful natural history, as lead enthusiast of distant horizons, Jacques-Yves Cousteau has impressed upon us the need to cherish our little blue planet, taught us that Homo technicus befouls his nest at the risk and peril of all life. His mind tells him the future doesn’t look bright. He sees no way of changing people, our leaders, quickly enough to save what must be saved. His heart, however, gives him cause for optimism. Things are not always logical, implacable. A situation will arise that will provoke us, make us understand.
The message was not conceived in stone. It is the result of observed inadvertencies, and of a searching mind. The most remarkable thing about Jacques Cousteau is his evolution, his progression from navy officer to conscience of a fragile planet, from gee-whiz filmmaker to visionary of a global terra amata.
JYC is a man in whom are exceptionally joined intelligence and a number of other qualities, a sense of poetry, a sense of humor and a need to exalt and dignify, an abhorrence of what debases society and the planet, psychological as well as physical pollution. He is a man living close to his instincts.
He is a man of the Mediterranean, the first ocean he entered with his man-fish breathing apparatus. He is a man whose work as explorer, inventor, poet, and ringleader of the nascent planetary consciousness has become what the Odyssey must have been to successive generations of Greek youths—an awakening to life’s multiple promises and to the quickening pulse of discovery.
Cagnes-sur-Mer, Spring 1986
Chapter 1
Société Zix
Saint-André-de-Cubzac might have the handsomest bridge on the Dordogne and some of the Bordeaux region’s savviest wine tradesmen—the family had been wine merchants for generations—but for Daniel Cousteau it wasn’t the favored habitat of the men who quickened the pulse of the new century. Daniel’s heroes were the men of astounding creations—Edison and his incandescent light bulb, Roentgen and the X-ray tube. His heart was especially with France’s men of progress: Gustave Eiffel, who before his tower had built the bridge in Saint-André; Ferdinand de Lesseps and the Suez Canal; the Lumière brothers and their cinematograph; and Louis Blériot, who had just become the first person to cross the Channel in a flying machine. What these men had in common was that they had fled their provinces for the center of gravity of the heady and flamboyant era called La Belle Epoque.
Daniel had felt the irresistible attraction of Paris, and with way stations in Bordeaux, Rouen, and Marseilles, he, too, made it to the capital. Governments might succeed each other at a dizzy pace and the Boulanger and Dreyfus affairs make tempers flare, but life and opportunities coursed richly along the grand boulevards with their confident architecture, smart shops, celebrated fashions, cosmopolitan denizens, elegant women, and racy nightlife. The Third Republic was politically stable and economically sound. It was optimistic and expansionist, the character traits of Daniel Cousteau himself. Like most middle-class Frenchmen, he had his heart on the left and his pocketbook on the right. He was quick to spring to the defense of Jean Jaurès and his socialists and he was a firm believer in laissez-faire enterprise. Like most of his forty million countrymen, he lived happily with permanent political turmoil, a franc as solid as gold, and an unshakable faith in progress.
The handmaiden of progress was commerce, of course, but Saint-André’s trade lived on tradition. Lying just north of the Dordogne before it meets the Garonne, the market town had no wine of its own, but it was surrounded by the noble fields and hedgerows where the right soil, the correct amount of sun, the proper amount of rain, the soft angle of slope brought forth the choicest grapes. North and northwest of town were the Blaye and Côtes Bourg hills. A few minutes’ drive to the east came Fronsac and Pomerol, the smallest of the fine-wine districts, where Pétrus was grown and the Château d’Yquem produced the world’s most expensive wines, and behind Pomerol came St. Emilion, the town itself one of the loveliest medieval burgs in France. To the south there were the Entre Deux Mères whites, and to the west across the river, you saw the Haut Médoc hills and the village of Margaux.
Saint-André was, in essence and significance, far from the excitement of the grand boulevards. In kilometers, it was nearly a day’s train ride from Gare d’Austerlitz. As newlyweds, thirty-year-old Daniel and Elizabeth, his eighteen-year-old bride, had boarded the train for Paris, and Daniel, at least, had barely looked back. He was not one of those who made their way to Paris to live as painters or poets, often of tedious preciosity, or colorless folk with mere money. Daniel was a vivacious and outgoing notaire, and son of notaire, executor of deeds, real estate sales, successions, and marriage contracts, in Third Republic France more lawyer than notary and in a market town of 3,800 a man of substance. He had three brothers, but he alone had gone to law school and the paternal practice would be his if not for his decision to leave the backwater. He wanted to be a fish in a bigger pond.
Elizabeth was different. Also a native of Saint-André-de-Cubzac and one of five sisters, Elizabeth Duranthon was a daughter of Bordeaux’s haute bourgeoisie. There was some Irish blood in the family and the z in her Christian name was not a misspelled Elisabeth but homage to a distant Celtic grandmother. As much as Daniel was a character, Elizabeth was a reserved if not dutiful daughter of provincial rectitude and, when the chips were down, a pillar of strength.
A compact man with a winning smile and prematurely gray temples, Daniel was a director of ephemeral companies, a stock exchange habitué and a man who lighted up at the idea of ferociously complicated financial propositions. He was thirty-one, settled in Paris, and beginning a new career as adviser to an American millionaire in 1906 when Elizabeth had a son. They named him Pierre-Antoine. Elizabeth was soon off to Saint-André-de-Cubzac to show off Pierre—the Antoine was dropped while he was still an infant—to “Aunt Boulare,” “Aunt Yvonnes and Niquette,” and the rest of the families.
The American Cousteau worked for as legal adviser, business analyst, factotum, and traveling companion was James Hazen Hyde, the thirty-one-year-old son of the founder of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Hyde, a passionate Francophile, was first president of Le Cercle Français de l’Université Harvard and organizer of the Alliance Française. In 1905 he had been a director of some forty-eight corporations, including banks, trust companies, and railroads. As vice-president of the Equitable, he had given a ball at Sherry’s in New York that he boasted had cost him $200,000. The party had featured a re-creation of the gardens of Versailles and the French actress Réjane emoting in a playlet with the host, dressed in knee breeches, before the guests feasted on ortolans and champagne and danced the night away to several orchestras (there was a full breakfast for those who stayed the course). The extravaganza created suspicion that it had been paid for by Equitable stockholders. In anger, Hyde sold his shares in the huge insurance company at a third of their value to Thomas Fortune Ryan, an Irish immigrant born a penniless orphan who amassed an estate, when he died in 1928, valued at more than J. P. Morgan’s. Even with only a third of his former fortune, the much-married Hyde—his first wife was the widowed Countess Louise de Gontaut-Biron, née Martha Leishman—had retained the means of leading an exquisite life in Paris.
When Elizabeth was pregnant again, it was resolved that she should bear the child in Saint-André-de-Cubzac. And indeed, Jacques-Yves Cousteau was born June 11, 1910, in the ancestral home on the right bank of the Dordogne. Soon after, Elizabeth returned with him to Paris. The first baby pictures show him as a cheerful plump infant with a full head of hair and a happy smile. Over the next couple of years, Daniel Cousteau and his family followed the formidable Hyde on his peregrinations through European high society. The earliest memory of the future ocean explorer was of being tossed to sleep on a train.
The guns of August crimped the style of expatriate Americans. As young Frenchmen went off to war in blue hammertail coats and red trousers, and a plunging demand for costly gowns, perfumes, furs, jewels, and splendid motorcars threw many more out of work, Paris began to feel tired, drab, and neglected. Rich Americans contributed to Edith Wharton’s Relief but tended to see the war as a power game and not as a crusade. By the time Woodrow Wilson convinced his country that if the United States did its duty and came into the war the world would somehow be safe for democracy, Hyde and his private secretary had quarreled and Monsieur Cousteau had left his employ.
Peace brought a new generation of Americans to Paris, and Daniel found employment with an athletic middle-aged American bachelor. The Cousteaus spent the new jazz age at sporty resorts and aboard steam yachts. “My parents were moving a lot at a time when it was difficult to move a lot,” Jacques Cousteau recalled on his seventy-fifth birthday. He and his brother weren’t always along. For them, it was often boarding schools and a yearning to see the world of their parents’ travels. In the case of little Jacques—the family never called him Jacques-Yves—it led to an irrepressible curiosity about distant lands and people.
Perhaps as a excuse for not giving their boys a real home, Daniel and Elizabeth were indulgent parents. Pierre was a quickwitted fourteen-year-old strapling with slicked-back hair and Jacques a sickly boy of ten suffering from chronic enteritis and anemia but with an angelical Little Lord Fauntleroy face framed in curly locks when their father’s new employer had them all move to New York in 1920.
Eugene Higgins was not only the richest but also the handsomest New Yorker at the turn of the century, a devoted golfer, expert rider, a “good gun,” a skillful fisherman, and a yachtsman of no mean seamanship. Sartorially, swooning columnists said, “he is all that can be desired.” He owned a townhouse at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, which was the mecca of high society, and a country home in Morristown, New Jersey, but made the headlines with his steam yacht Varuna, the most up-to-date vessel of its kind, which went aground on the Madeira islands in 1908. The yacht was a total wreck, but Higgins and a party of his friends from the New York Yacht Club were saved.
Higgins was the only son of a carpet manufacturer whose secret was said to have been in patented laborsaving devices and who left a fortune of $50 million in 1890 dollars. He was engaged to be married a number of times, but to the comfort of society matrons with eligible daughters, all reports proved incorrect until in 1908 his name was linked with that of Emma Calvé, an opera star. The reason for his continued nonmarried state was given as an unhappy youthful love affair. Whatever it was, the same jinx continued to follow him, for he and Miss Calvé were never married.
Not that he was without feminine company. The Cousteau boys were taught to treat Madame Chapelle, his French mistress, with due deference. The sinking franc not only made living in Paris on overvalued dollars possible for American Left Bank literati, it allowed Higgins to acquire a superb townhouse on la Place d’Iéna and to maintain a yacht of imposing dimensions at Deauville for summer cruises. In his sixties, Higgins demanded that his financial adviser match him in tennis, golf, and swimming, which may explain why Cousteau père took up scuba diving when he was in his seventies. Once Higgins blithely entered Daniel in a chess match with a Polish champion.
The athletic Higgins had severe misgivings about doctors’ advice to the Cousteaus that their younger son refrain from strenuous physical activity, and during the summer at Deauville, Jacques not only had to exercise, he had to learn to swim.
“I was four or five years old when I became interested in water,” he said later. “I loved touching water. Physically. Sensually. Water fascinated me—first floating ships, then me floating and stones not floating. The touch of water fascinated me all the time.”
When the Cousteaus sailed to New York with Higgins and Pierre went to DeWitt High School on the upper West Side, he and Jacques were sent to summer camp at Lake Harvey, Vermont, near the old Scots settlement of Barnet, which in recent times has become noted for a Tibetan Buddhist meditation center. There are pictures of the two brothers in neckties and jackets leaning against a birch tree, and one of Jacques in bathing suit grinning toward the camera.
One of the instructors was named Mr. Boetz. Jacques would never quite tell if it was this German teacher who forced him to join the others in daily dives to remove fallen tree limbs from the lake, if the daily branch removal was a personal punishment for mischief, or if young “Jack” himself was the one who suggested the bottom cleaning under a pier so they could dive in every day. “Like all kids, I tried to see how long I could stay underwater,” he remembered. “Then at fourteen I tried to go under and breathe through a pipe held above the surface. I found I couldn’t, and wondered why.” Mr. Boetz would be responsible for the future explorer’s aversion to horses. “He forced me to ride horses, and I fell a lot; I still hate horses.”
In Manhattan, the brothers learned English, dangled from fire escapes, played stickball in the street, and gained local fame by introducing two-wheeled European roller skates. Pierre was to retain memories of the melting pot at DeWitt, especially the number of Jewish classmates and teachers. There was something comical, he thought, in teachers named Goldbloom and Solomon gravely explaining to boys named Goldberg, Aaron, Rosenbaum, and Oesterreicher that their forebears had given the world liberty in 1776 by revolting against the king of England. It was as absurd, he would write one day, as French classics being taught in colonial schools, and little Senegalese fiercely reciting poems about “our ancestors the Gauls.”
Jacques was proud of his big brother. He called him Pedro, thought him the smartest kid in the world, and easily imitated his smart-aleck swagger and too-clever-to-do-homework routines. When the Cousteaus returned to Paris with Higgins and Madame Chapelle in 1922, Pierre begged his father to let him quit school so he could go into business and make money. Daniel was no great disciplinarian, and the boy soon got his way. Later in life, Pierre would say his father should have forced him to continue his studies. “My father,” the future journalist wrote with a measure of sarcasm, “was of a deplorable liberalism.”
Jacques was no assiduous scholar, no teacher’s pet. In fact, he was a bored and listless student. Machines and engineering fascinated him, however. When he was eleven he got hold of the blueprints of a marine crane and built a scale model as tall as himself. Daniel showed the working model to an engineer friend, who after close inspection asked if Cousteau had helped his son. “No, why?” Daniel asked. “The boy has added a movement to this crane which is not on the blueprints, and it is a patentable improvement.” Two years later, Jacques built a battery-driven car and discovered the cinema. He secretly saved enough money from his allowance to buy one of the first home movie cameras to be sold in France and, typically, began by taking the Pathé apart to see how it worked. Surviving pieces of home movies show Daniel and Elizabeth at a wharfside—he smiling self-consciously, she holding on to her cloche hat, reaching Higgins’s yacht and walking up the gangplank—and the goateed master of the ship himself, posing with several people.
The France of Pierre’s military service, Jacques’s schooling, and Higgins’s grand style of living was a country where the postwar euphoria was giving way to apprehension and confusion. Politically, France was torn and weakened by waltzing governments succeeding each other in chaotic fashion, none lasting long enough, even if it had the capability, to come to grips with the deep economic difficulties. Since the end of the war, successive governments had shied away from facing the fact that unpopular measures were necessary to restore fiscal sanity. In mid-1926, when billions of short-term treasury loans had come due and the coffers of state were empty, the franc fell to fifty to the dollar and a mob formed outside the Chamber of Deputies, blaming elected officials for the latest crisis. Some of the rioters crossed the Seine to la Place de la Concorde and stoned buses with American tourists, held responsible for plotting the franc’s fall. To avoid public panic, the Left caved in to demands for a political truce and a call for a third return of the man it hated most—Raymond Poincaré. “We never see you except in times of trouble,” a Communist deputy shouted when Poincaré presented his cabinet to the National Assembly. It was meant as an insult but contained a large measure of truth.
The climate of 1926 was summed up in this “restoration.” Poincaré was a conservative with integrity and an ardent patriot. His government was seen by the Right as a victory for law and order, and after the Poincaré investiture the value of the franc rose. On the far Right, Charles Maurras’s Action Française made progress, especially in university and intellectual circles, repeating again and again that the Germans, the Jews, and the Communists were the enemies of France. A splinter group cast nostalgic eyes across the Alps at Benito Mussolini’s regime and created a French Fascist party.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Communist party, led by an adventurous steelworker, Jacques Doriot, tried to regain losses. Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Leon Trotsky had demanded heavy purges in the French party and dispatched hatchet men to Paris to enforce the party line. What Doriot’s Communists lacked in numbers they made up for in ingenuity and militancy. In 1926 they drew the surrealists and a great many of the intelligentsia into their ranks.
As much as politics left Daniel indifferent, bored Elizabeth, and was beyond the ken of Jacques and the other Lycée Stanislas teenagers, it was Pierre’s passion. He was a vicarious reader of newspapers and magazines, an argumentative debater, and a young man full of opinions. In the army he felt the clashing currents of the body politic, the yearning for both order and escape, the anti-Semitism and narrow chauvinism, the ardent support on the Left of Joseph Stalin’s brave new world in Russia, the envious glances cast across the Alps by the Right toward Benito Mussolini’s fascist experiment. Pierre found the army suffused with defeatism, with everybody looking for la planque, the easy commission, the cosy assignment. But Pierre was a man of the Left, somebody who argued for fundamental reforms. In no other Western country was the working class so alienated and labor legislation so far behind. Leftists loathed service in the army and agitated for pacifism—why should they die defending such a hostile society again?
Jacques was a movie fan who was fascinated by E. A. Dupont’s Varieties with its camera swaying from circus rafters to give the sensation of trapeze artists, Léon Perret’s opulent Madame Sans-Gêne with Gloria Swanson, and any and all the Max Linder, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton movies. He was growing into a lanky teenager and, unlike most sixteen-year-old film freaks, he made his own melodramas, shorts filmed with his father’s car in suburban streets or at Deauville’s waterfront. Like Erich von Stroheim, he put himself in front of the camera, always as the rakish villain. One surviving minifilm shows him, shifty-eyed and with painted-on mustache, take off in a convertible with a pretty lady, only to be pursured by the hero in another car. When the dark-suited villain stops to try and embrace the heroine, the good guy pulls up, drags him out from behind the wheel and over the rumble seat until he lands on the street, and the hero and the lady drive into an iris-out sunset. In another clip, the director-actor plays a swarthy pimp lecherously rolling his eyes at the ingenue; in yet another he begs forgiveness from a heroine but is scornfully pushed back until he splashes, fully clothed, into the harbor.
He couldn’t wait to be a grown-up and be taken seriously. He called his production company Société Zix, and never forgot to write out and film end credits: producer, director, and chief cameraman, J. Cousteau. He bought moveable type and printed his first book, Une adventure au Mexique, but preferred telling stories with the Pathé, even to make his diaries and logbooks in pictures. Documentary filmmaking intrigued him. He was especially impressed by Symphonie du monde, a German montage film on the religions of the world. In school, he remained lazy and a showoff. To punish him for low grades, his parents confiscated his most treasured possession, the Pathé camera, but there was worse to come.
There were to be several versions of why seventeen windows in the lycée stairwell were smashed. JYC was either trying to prove that a strongly thrown stone makes only a small hole in glass, or he merely repeated the screen experiment of cowboys shooting small round holes in saloon windows. “I was a misfit,” he said later, “like a lot of the men I later mustered for my expeditions.”
He was shipped to a rigorous boarding institution in Alsace. The change was instantaneous. Under challenge and discipline, he suddenly began to apply himself to schoolwork, often studying far into the night.
Pedro had gone to America, invited by three Fitzgerald brothers he had met at DeWitt and just escorted through a French summer vacation. He was working at 36 Broadway and writing flippant letters to his kid brother in the Alsatian boarding school about his bosses at Crédit Alliance Corporation and what you could do with $25 a week.
Jacques graduated in 1929. He could imagine himself becoming only one of three things—a naval officer so he could see the world, a radiologist, or a film director.
Chapter 2
Willpower
Navy pilots trained on old single-engine CAMS 37’s seaplanes. Midshipman Cousteau had already soloed and taken his camera aloft to film simulated dogfights. There were rumors they’d soon graduate to trimotor Breguet 521’s, which were supposed to be a match for the new Caproni Ca-114’s Mussolini was using in his campaign in Abyssinia, or Ethiopia, as Emperor Haile Selassie called his country. The Italians had some sharp planes. Jacques and his classmates were taught to identify the newest: the Breda 65’s, the Savoia Marchetti SM’s, the Fiat BR 120’s.
Cousteau had decided to go in for aviation after his return from a world tour. Three years after Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, French aviators made their mark. Jean Mermoz had linked France with South America by way of West Africa, and there were now regular crossings of the South Atlantic with Latécoère flying boats. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew pioneering night flights over the Andes and wrote books about the hidden treasures of experiences under the stars.
Cousteau had entered the Naval Academy at Brest, on the Britanny coast, in 1930 and, as he had hoped, got to see faraway places. Graduating second in his class, he circled the world aboard the training ship Jeanne d’Arc in 1932–33. He brought along the trusted Pathé and made a newsreel of the voyage. The footage included a shipboard visit by the Sultan of Oman and, in French Indochina, a procession in the streets of Hanoi. The feminine charms in exotic ports of call were captured, from the delicate grace of Cambodian dancers at Angkor Wat to Balinese women carrying ornate headgear, to the subtle geishas of Japan. In the South Seas, he leaned on the Jeanne d’Arc railing and watched pearl divers, wearing nothing but loincloths and awkward-looking goggles, dive for oysters.
Across the Pacific, the young sailors made landfall in Los Angeles, toured Hollywood studios, and met Claudette Colbert. At a visit to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’s fabled Bel Air home, JYC had a fellow officer do the cranking so he could have himself filmed accepting a cigarette and light from Fairbanks himself.
As a young gunnery officer, Jacques had been posted to Shanghai and participated in a mapmaking survey along the Indochina coast. In Port Dayot, local fishermen guided a navy launch. At noon, when the tropical waters are dead calm and the heat stifling, one of the Vietnamese fishermen slipped naked into the water. Without goggles or gear, the man disappeared without a ripple. He surfaced a minute later holding wriggling fish in both hands. With a mischievous grin, he explained that at this time of day the fish took naps.
When the tour of duty ended, Cousteau got permission to travel home on his own, and made it the long way through the Soviet Union, with a side trip by car through the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan. His camera captured Afghans dancing and lingered on the frail beauty of a dancing girl. He learned a little Russian aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, as he filmed everything he found interesting. Russia was only a short year away from Joseph Stalin’s purges and Soviet authorities confiscated most of the eager young cameraman’s film. It was when he reported back to active duty that he applied to enroll in the naval aviation school.
Pedro had returned also. After a translation job of an American dime-store novel, he had gravitated toward his natural element, journalism. His sharp tongue, wounding sarcasm, and cynical humor, which his kid brother always found glib and smart, made him an ideal talent for the overpoliticized Parisian press of the mid-1930’s. Shortening his full name to its initials, PAC started as a general reporter on the daily Le Journal, an experience he later said taught him all about the silliness of democracy. He soon drifted toward advocacy journalism, writing sharp little columns on current events. His low regard for democracy and his insidious anti-Semitism contracted, he stated, in New York and in the army, made him shift to the political right.
Rancorous and intolerant, French conservatives generally resented the antics in parliament and demanded a forceful leadership. The Right had at its disposal a vigorous, if overheated press. Its voices ranged from L’Action Française, the organ of diehard royalists who were roused daily by inflammatory articles by Charles Maurras, the poet who railed against Germans, Jews, and romanticism as the enemies of France, and by Léon Daudet, who wrote with the most vituperative pen in Paris, to the weeklies Candide and Gringoire, which inveighed against democracy, the “corruption” of the parliamentary system, and the British. Fascist Italy was the two magazines’ idol, and both journals were the favorite reading material of a large number of army and navy officers. Also popular with military brass was the weekly Je Suis Partout (literally, “I Am Everywhere”), founded in 1930 and bankrolled by the wealthy perfumer René Coty and publisher Arthème Fayard. Like the rest of the ultra-right press, Je Suis Partout was obsessed by decadence and driven toward authoritarian solutions. It was edited by Pierre Gaxotte, an erudite and adroit historian turned polemicist who once a week gave dinners at his favorite restaurant for young journalists. It was Gaxotte who spotted PAC’s talent, invited him to one of his dinners, and told him he absolutely must write something for Je Suis Partout. His first contribution was a piece on the Scottsboro case, seen in Europe as dramatic evidence of the oppression of American blacks.
On the theory that one way for a debutant journalist to be noticed is to interview a famous journalist, Pierre had seen the celebrated Tatiana. He didn’t quite have enough for a splashy piece and made an appointment with Tatiana’s secretary to get the details that made the difference. Fernande Semaille was a petite Parisienne with a caustic wit not unlike PAC’s own—her friends called her Paprika. The attraction was mutual; it was love at first sight. When Jacques was introduced he thought his brother’s girl was the cleverest female he had ever met.
The only inconvenience was that she was married. Her husband was Maurice Toesca, a novelist of PAC’s age, who wrote about happiness based on amorous harmony. At least the Toescas had no children. Pierre and Fernande became inseparable. Her divorce was quickly followed by their marriage.
The generals that Je Suis Partout openly courted included Jacques’s supreme commander. Admiral Jean Darlan, Chief of Naval Staff, was a magnetic figure from his chiseled handsome face and flattish bald head to his impeccably polished shoes, a man with the eye of an amused gambler and an able, ruthless personality. No great lover of France’s World War I ally, Great Britain, Darlan wasn’t sure that in a rematch of the Great War France would come out any worse if she sided with Nazi Germany. This sentiment did not prevent him from having developed a close personal relationship with Lord Chatfield, the chief of the British Admiralty.
Rightists considered Darlan too loyal to republican ideals and instead put their hopes in Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain. It was known in upper military circles that the hero of Verdun, a man in his seventies, was losing faith in the democratic process. As La Victoire asked in bold type on page one, January 10, 1934, “How can we get rid of this weak and rotten regime? Who is the leader who will emerge in France, as he emerged in Italy and Germany?” The intellectual revolt of the Right was spreading to large sections of the officer corps.
Pierre became a father that year when Fernande gave birth to a girl. They named her Françoise and moved into a lovely huge apartment at 48 Avenue de la Motte-Picquet at the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower. The apartment was really his parents’. Elizabeth enjoyed being a grandmother, but Daniel was usually off with Higgins. Now in his late seventies, Higgins maintained a yacht of battleship proportions in Deauville and, with his ever-faithful Madame Chapelle, sailed in season. He loved to cross the Channel and sail along the English coast to Torquay, the holiday resort in Devonshire which surpassed Deauville in the beauty of its bay setting and its mild, almost Mediterranean weather.
Paprika shared her husband’s passion for politics. She helped him any way she could and as a couple they mingled freely with the heavyweight intellectuals of the far Right. The stentorian voices of the Left, André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, and the International Brigades might be fighting for the Spanish Republic—Malraux cut a fashionable figure in Madrid as chief of his own air squadron—Je Suis Partout covered the civil war from the fascist side. The correspondent with General Franco’s armies was Robert Brasillach, a gifted novelist, commentator, and critic three years younger than PAC and a pallid, owlish caricature of the bookish egghead. With his brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche, he was writing a quick volume on the heroism of Franco’s forces. PAC, Brasillach, and Fernand de Brinon, a former newspaper editor and expert on Franco-German relations, attended the Nazi party meetings in Nuremberg in 1937 and 1938. Brasillach was especially overwhelmed by the hypnotic mass rallies and longed for a totalitarian regime in France. Lucien Rebatet was another writer seduced by muscular and racist solutions. Perhaps the most talented among them, he had written for Je Suis Partout since its inception and with his wife, Véronique, was a frequent dinner guest of Pierre and Paprika.
Hothouse politics was not the passion Jacques and his fellow ensigns lived for at the navy’s aviation school at Hourtin, an Atlantic coastal town west of Bordeaux (and twenty minutes’ flying time from Saint-André-de-Cubzac). Young career officers competing for their aviators “wings” lived in their own world. Cars, girls, practical jokes, and airplane performances were what they concentrated on. The cinema and tinkering with mechanical devices were what excited Jacques.
A few weeks before graduation, he borrowed his father’s Salmson car to go to a friend’s wedding in the Vosges mountains. Daniels’s S4C had a 1.5 liter twin cam engine, a three-bearing crank, gravity feed, and four speeds. Jacques loved to drive it. Salmson exported a lot of S4Cs to Britain. The English had an affection for small luxury machines.
Jacques was still climbing hairpin curves in the mountains when it got dark. He switched on the headlights and gunned the engine. As he rounded another uphill curve, the headlights suddenly went out. He slammed on the brakes too late. The car flew through the blackness and crashed.
“I will always remember the accident, when I was alone at night, bleeding, on a country road, with nobody coming,” he said later. “It was two o’clock in the morning, and I thought I was going to die. I was losing my blood. I was in a terrible state with twelve bones broken. Turning to the sky, trying to lie down on my back, which hurt a lot, looking at the sky and the stars, I said, my god, how lucky I was to have seen so many things in my life.”
When he came to in the hospital, a glance at the attending physician told him it was serious. His left arm was broken in five places; his right arm was paralyzed.
Drifting back from unconsciousness a couple of days later, he was told the right arm was infected and would have to be amputated. Shaking his fevered head, Ensign Cousteau refused. When he was told he would never recover use of both arms, he thought himself lucky again. At least he would be able to move around. Sitting in a wheelchair for the rest of his life would be infinitely worse.
The infection was eventually cured, but the right arm remained lame. A career in aviation was a dream gone into tailspin. He sulked in frustration and refused to see anybody. Pedro, his parents, his aunts from Saint-André-de-Cubzac came anyway. He knew he looked pitiful, hobbling around the ward in his oversized bathrobe, chest and arms in plaster. He had been slim before; he was positively haggard now.
Through sheer willpower and excruciating exercises, he would win. He knew that. The physical therapy was indeed agonizing, and achingly slow. It took eight months to move a single finger, another two months before he could bend two fingers and the wrist.
All he was interested in was his recovery, but the spring and summer of 1936 were eventful. Emperor Selassie fled Ethiopia and the Italians entered Addis Ababa, putting an end to the postwar era of the League of Nations. Naked aggression paid off. Mussolini was so resentful at France for having failed to back his aggression that he denounced French-Italian accords. French conservatives and Catholics, who in the name of “Latin civilization” were ready to condone Il Duce’s African land grab, blamed Great Britain for the fiascos of the League of Nations and for driving Italy into the arms of Adolf Hitler’s restless Germany. During the Ethiopian crisis, the French government of Pierre Laval had asked London for definite guarantees that England would come to France’s aid if Hitler moved into the demilitarized Rhine-land or tried to attack France. The British refused, and on March 7, Hitler had reoccupied the Rhineland. His excuse was the much-delayed French ratification of a French-Soviet pact negotiated by Laval and Stalin.
On April 26, France went to the polls in heavy rain and elected a leftist coalition. The advent of the Popular Front was welcomed by the masses as a thrilling victory promising overdue social and economic reforms. The head of the coalition government was socialist Leon Blum, a man prey to self-doubt and self-criticism, and given to airing his soul-searching in public. Blum and his party had spent their entire lives in the opposition. Now, just turned sixty-four and without cabinet experience, the socialist leader formed a government and the experiment of the Popular Front was launched.
But the great event of the summer of 1936 happened in none of the predictable hot spots, but in Spain. On July 18, a full-scale military rebellion took place. As in France, Spanish general elections had given power to a Popular Front, a coalition of radicals, socialists, and Communists. Its program was more anticlerical and democratic than socialist, but it was enough to provoke monarchists, fascists, the Church, and the armed forces. The rebels, under General Francisco Franco, as well as most observers, expected a quick victory. Instead, the republic rallied the workers of Madrid, beat off the military conspirators—of the armed forces’ 200 generals 195 joined the rebellion—and asserted its hold over most of the country.
The Spanish Civil War was instantly the dominating topic of international affairs and, in France and England, the theme of passionate domestic controversy. The great issue of democracy versus fascism seemed to be at stake in the elected Republican government’s attempt to fight back the armed forces’ coup.
Admiral Darlan, who had only contempt for Blum’s socialist “school-teachers,” nevertheless agreed with the new Prime Minister that a fascist Spain was not in the interest of France and Britain. Since Darlan was a friend of Lord Chatfield, Blum sent him to London to sound out the British naval chief. Darlan came back empty-handed. The British Admiralty thought Franco was a good Spanish patriot “who would know how to defend himself against the encroachments of Mussolini and Hitler” and Britain was certainly not going to do anything against him and his putsch. Blum felt himself boxed in. His personal desire to help the Spanish Republic was opposed by Britain, his own country was deeply divided, and there was a fear of a larger war. While Blum announced an embargo on arms shipments to Spain and the German embassy in London assured the British government that “no war materiel had been sent from Germany and none will,” the American consul in Seville was watching the arrival of pilots and Savoia bombers from Italy and Junkers and antiaircraft guns from Germany for Franco’s forces.
Jacques Cousteau had not been able to present himself for the pilot’s exams. His right arm remained slightly twisted, but the accident, as it was, probably saved his life. With one exception, all his classmates at the aviation school were killed in the opening weeks of the war that was only three short years away.