TURNER: DON'T FENCE HIM IN : MEDIA MOGUL EXPANDS HIS LAND HOLDINGS.

Byline: Geraldine Fabrikant The New York Times

Forget his company's $7.5 billion merger with Time Warner Inc. Forget his war of words with Rupert Murdoch over cable news in New York City. Forget even his Atlanta Braves' flameout in the World Series.

Ted Turner, the blunt-talking entrepreneur whose marriage to Jane Fonda and penchant for controversy have made him one of the nation's most talked about businesspeople, is carving out a new empire which obsesses him almost as much as his cable TV business did while he built it up over 30 years.

Turner, who turned 58 last month, is pouring a big chunk of his $2.7 billion fortune into that most ancient of all investments, land, and he is populating it with that mythic American beast, the buffalo.

Only this time, for a change, he is pursuing his dream out of the limelight.

Starting from scratch nine years ago, Turner has amassed nearly 1.3 million acres of ranch land, roughly enough to fill the state of Delaware, on eight ranches in Montana, New Mexico and Nebraska.

Already one of America's top 20 landowners, Turner shows no sign of slowing his acquisition frenzy. He is now negotiating the purchase of his first ranch outside the United States, a 9,000-acre spread in Argentina.

A self-described environmentalist, Turner vows he will never develop his ranch land. Instead, he is giving it the nation's biggest herd of buffalo, as American bison are commonly known - about 12,000 so far. While he won't be making anywhere near the money he would if he laid down roads and sold off plots, the land gives him the physical freedom he seems to crave and the excitement of creating a new business he seems to need.

On a recent Sunday, maneuvering his Land Rover over the muddy roads of the Flying D, his 107,000-acre ranch near Bozeman, chomping tobacco and greeting the occasional hunter he allows to pay $9,500 for five days of shooting on the property, Turner, dressed in boots, jeans and a knit sweater, fairly shouted over the din of the motor: ``I joke that this is my backup life. In case I don't like being vice chairman of Time Warner, I can always come here.''

As Time Warner's largest shareholder, with 11 percent of its stock, Turner says he has adapted to his new corporate role. ``So far, I like it fine,'' he said. ``Most entrepreneurs don't last very long in big companies. But I'm not normal. Like my psychiatrist said: `We are all different. We are all like snowflakes.' ''

But just in case he repeats a familiar pattern in American business - the self-made man revolting against being cast in the role of second in command - Turner certainly has somewhere to go.

He finds it less easy to explain his infatuation with land. True, there are tax benefits. In 1989, after paying $20 million, or $187 an acre, for Flying D, Turner agreed not to break up the land into more than four pieces or to sell it.

Like most entrepreneurs, Turner wants to be in control. But while other billionaires collect artworks or palatial homes or jet planes, he says: ``I'm a collector of land. I have eight ranches and three plantations. If you have an olive, you want an olive tree. You want a little more. You want the whole tree. Then you want a little this and then a little that.''

Total control means Turner never has to make compromises. ``You know, sometimes you have to compromise in television,'' he said. ``I've had to do stuff and put on programs or films that I didn't agree with and was not sympathetic to,'' and then he added, unable to resist a jab at his archrival, ``though they were never as violent as some of Rupert Murdoch's shows.''

Turner Broadcasting owns several movie divisions, including New Line Cinema, as well as the Cartoon Network which competes with the Fox Children's Television Network, a venture of Murdoch's.

The Flying D is Turner's flagship ranch and perhaps his favorite. He brought Fonda here the first weekend they went away together. (``I called her every day after that, but I didn't see her for a month,'' he recalled. ``I was traveling. That was probably a mistake. She fell in love for a while with a younger guy.'')

Since they married five years ago, the couple have built a log-cabin hideaway on a man-made lake with panoramic mountain views, and they have furnished it with oversized white-wool sofas, carved wooden chairs with bear-claw handles and animal-skin rugs. The stuffed heads of elk and other wild game shot by Turner and his children adorn the walls.

Fonda's two Oscars and other awards from her acting career are displayed in a cabinet. The bookcases contain titles like ``The Last Rain Forest'' and ``California Style.'' The coffee table holds arrowheads and other American Indian relics from Turner's ranches, as well as two thick, leather-bound books embossed with the words ``Home Sweet Homes'' that contain Fonda's photographs of their properties.

And yet the property is just a patch compared with his latest acquisition of a ranch in New Mexico called Vermejo Park. Stretching across 578,000 acres, it contains 22 lakes, 30 miles of fishing streams and some ramshackle buildings, including an old stagecoach station from the coal mining days at the turn of the century. Estimates of the purchase price range from $70 million to $90 million.

Turner's passion for pastoral pursuits began as diversion from his urban obsession: Turner Broadcasting, which he took over in 1963 after his father's suicide.

True, he has always been attracted to rugged pursuits like sailing and owning professional sports teams, including not just the Braves but also the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association. Indeed, his drive to become one of the nation's foremost ranchers continues that macho tradition.

He did buy three former rice plantations in the Southeast in the 1970s. But he did not get into Western ranching until 1987. Was it only a coincidence that he had just lost control of Turner Broadcasting System?

Under pressure to make payments on his $1.5 billion acquisition of the MGM Entertainment Co., Turner made the greatest compromise of his career that year, ceding a big interest of his company to a consortium of cable operators.

Or was it, rather than a chance event, a way to recapture the independence he was losing in his business venture? Turner himself votes for the latter interpretation. ``Yeah, it clearly was an offset,'' he said. Then he burst into song: ``Give me land, lots of land under starry skies above. Don't fence me in.''

His venture into bison breeding began as a sideline - on one of his Southern plantations, no less. ``I got three'' of the animals, he said. ``Then they had babies, and then I started dreaming about having 100. Then I said, `OK, I'll get 1,000 of them.' And then, I started thinking about 10,000.''

The North American Bison cooperative says sales of the meat have quadrupled since 1994.

Does this mean Turner's frantic land acquisition drive is over? For a man who once declared, ``If I want to save the West, I'll have to buy it,'' that seems unlikely.

But how much more of the West can he buy without unloading chunks of Time Warner stock? ``Well,'' he says, ``you can do that slower.''

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Photo

Photo: Time Warner Inc. Vice President Ted Turner has amassed nearly 1.3 million acres of land and is purchasing American buffalo to stock it.

The New York Times