| Celine Cousteau |
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Page 1 of 2 From maritime to mountain time, Céline Cousteau is carrying her family’s name above water 
At a glance, Céline Simone Cousteau, granddaughter of legendary ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, is just what you’d expect: sophisticated, slender as an eel, well spoken, and deeply tanned—in other words, the model heiress to her family’s marine legacy. Among other pursuits, she works as a diver and associate producer for the Ocean Futures Society, an organization started by her father, Jean-Michel, to preserve the earth’s waters. When she presents her business card bearing that title, she titters, still slightly bedazzled that she earns her living by helping organize Cousteau family expeditions and, in the process, witnessing rare sea creatures and the wonders of the deep.However, judging Cousteau by her incongruous home life—happily installed in a cozy two-bedroom adobe bungalow in the high-desert plains of Santa Fe—bears her out as a woman of intriguing complexities, a Gallic fish out of water. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the prickly heat and rolling brown hills of New Mexico seem about as suitable for a Cousteau as a tepid pool in Mexico City was for Keiko the killer whale. On a recent cloudless day in her adopted Southwest hometown, after a morning on the phone making arrangements for an upcoming trip to Europe, Cousteau, 35, paused for a leisurely lunch at a sidewalk café. In person Cousteau is sprightly and animated, always moving on to the next thing. That she lives 7,000 feet above and more than 500 miles from the sea, she says, is simply chance—she followed a man. But as the afternoon warms and the Côtes du Rhône opens up, likewise does Cousteau. “My father always loved the U.S., so we didn’t live much in France as children,” she remembers, referring to herself and her brother, Fabien, four and a half years her senior. “I went to school in Virginia, and I was mortified by my mother’s accent. I never wanted friends to come home with me, and if they did, I cringed when my mother spoke.” A similar reluctance seems to have trailed her through her college years at the School for International Training, in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she earned her master’s degree in international management, and into adulthood. “With the Society,” she says, referring to Ocean Futures, “my father always left the door open. But there was never any pressure.” Instead, she struck out on her own on a sustainable-development program in Costa Rica with the Earth Council, an affiliate of the United Nations University for Peace. The position could have developed, but Cousteau was already looking ahead to a job as a guide for high-end bike-tour operator Butterfield & Robinson in France, where her gregarious nature and language skills (she speaks three) quickly earned her a promotion to regional director in Costa Rica and then Spain. But Céline is a Cousteau, so she could never stay completely high and dry. She talks about Calypso, Jacques Cousteau’s floating research station and one of the most famous boats of the 20th century, with the same casual affection most people express when remembering the family dog. And she occasionally reminisces about visits to her grandparents’ seaside home, perched on a bluff in Sanary-sur-Mer, just east of Marseille, France. On one such trip, when Céline was perhaps nine years old, her grandfather paddled her out in a dinghy off the coast of Monaco, put her in scuba equipment, and, without any fuss, guided her on her first dive. “It was the same way most families would take their children to the park,” she says. “Diving was just part of life.”  Indeed the entire Cousteau clan has plunged wholeheartedly into the life aquatic. Both of Jacques’s sons, Jean-Michel and Philippe, worked closely with their father on his expeditions aboard the Calypso to produce his award-winning documentaries. And in spite of a scandal—the family patriarch’s marriage to his longtime mistress after the death of his first wife, a union that eventually led to a struggle for control of the Cousteau name—the maritime dynasty continues. Ultimately, Jean-Michel founded Ocean Futures on his own, now joined by Fabien and Céline. And though Philippe died in a seaplane crash in 1979, his wife, Jan, and children, Alexandra and Philippe Jr., continue his work through their own foundation, EarthEcho International, as well as Philippe Jr.’s Discovery Channel/BBC series. The Cousteau Society is still around as well, spearheaded by Jacques’s second wife.With so much saltwater in the blood, it was inevitable, then, that Céline’s interest in Ocean Futures would eventually surface. Three years ago, Jean-Michel was filming a documentary for public television off the coast of Oregon about the migration habits of humpback whales. In between assignments in Costa Rica and Spain, Céline called her father and asked if she could tag along. After only a few days helping out with odd jobs on the shoot, and occasionally finning with these mammoth creatures, she was hooked. “Being down there with the whales was just incredible,” she recalls. “And then it occurred to me: Not everyone gets that experience.” She returned home to Santa Fe, but when Jean-Michel called to see if she wanted to come help film the next segment in Barrow, Alaska, she rang up Butterfield & Robinson and let them know she’d be saying goodbye. |
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