As media moguls go, they don’t come much bigger, and they certainly don’t come any brasher, than Ted Turner. The man who founded CNN and built an empire that transformed the television landscape once said that he wanted to be “the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover, all at the same time”. Today, at 70, he modestly says, “I had to settle for two out of the three. Number one businessman and number one sailor.” All the evidence suggests that he didn’t stint in his attempt to be the third.

Turner is no longer connected with the cable station that triumphed in the presidential election ratings. He has left the media business and has fewer billions than he did. But his retirement projects keep him busy. His two million acres make him the biggest private landowner in the United States, including numerous ranches that provide bison meat for his growing chain of restaurants. He is gradually releasing a $1 billion donation to the United Nations, and through his various foundations has focused on goals that are no less ambitious than saving the planet.

By his own standards he has slowed down, allowing himself time to produce an autobiography, Call Me Ted. He is naturally disinclined to look back and did not consider writing about himself before because he was too busy being himself. Driven on relentlessly by personal demons and colossal energy, he created, bought and sold businesses, won international sailing races, romanced countless women and held forth with opinions that earned him nicknames such as the World’s Greatest Maverick and the Mouth from the South. He is finally reflecting on all this, and for the first time giving his side of the story of his marriage to Jane Fonda.

Meeting him in his Atlanta office, it is clear that he has lost none of his eccentricity. I am barely across the threshold before he is explaining that he fills his own water bottle from the tap because bottled water is a crime against the environment. He throws back his head and lustily glugs, either unaware, or unconcerned, that he is spilling half a litre of water down his jacket.

He is tall, still lean, but walks stiffly. One moment his pale blues twinkle impishly, the next they are as cold as stones on a Montana riverbed as he scrutinises someone who has been granted an hour of his precious time. An Oscar statuette for Gone with the Wind – his favourite film – which was produced by MGM, a company he once briefly owned, sits on the coffee table. A replica of the America’s Cup, which he won, stands on a plinth. The walls are lined with photographs of him with presidents and world leaders. He introduces an attractive blonde woman in her forties called Elizabeth, who has a definite look of Jane Fonda, and says she is going to sit with us. She whispers something to him. “What?” he says. “I can’t hear you. I’m not zipped up? That's what happens when you are 70 years old. Thanks, honey.”

Turner is famously impatient, almost psychotically driven. But there is something boyish and charming, almost naive about his enthusiasm for his projects. He struggles to sit still, leaping up repeatedly to hunt down photographs and mementoes. The photographer asks for 15 minutes for pictures. Turner snaps: “No. Five,” and walks away after four. He wears slip-on shoes so he doesn’t waste time tying laces. His drive and restlessness can be traced to his childhood. There are two huge characters in his autobiography: Turner himself and his father. Ed Turner told his son to set his ambitions so high they could not be realised during a lifetime.

At the age of 4, Ted was sent to boarding school. He hated it and believes the experience led to the insecurities that have plagued him since. “My greatest fear growing up was that I would be in the position of the Count of Monte Cristo, that I would be put in a dungeon in the dark, in solitary confinement.” When he was 9, the family moved from Ohio to Georgia, where Ed Turner built a billboard advertising company. A strict disciplinarian, he would thrash his son, and on one occasion tried to make Ted thrash him (to demonstrate that handing out thrashings hurt him more than it did Ted). “I knew he loved me," says Turner. "He was trying to make me the best man that he possibly could. It was tough, but I always loved him.”

He describes Jimmy Brown, who was black and a sort of old family retainer, as his “second father. I grew up loving black people in a time and a place, the South in the Fifties, when there was segregation.” Later, Brown fulfilled a similar role in the lives of Turner’s own children. Ed Turner was a heavy drinker, smoker and philanderer, and his marriage to Turner’s mother, Florence, ended while their son was at college. They had struggled to cope with his sister Mary Jean’s autoimmune disease, which eventually led to her death, an event so painful that Turner has blocked out all memory of it.

He was suspended from Brown University for having a woman in his room, then left because his father stopped paying the fees in disgust over his son studying classics. He entered the family business, but working for a father who was now addicted to prescription pills and suffering depressive mood swings caused Turner to lose weight and develop nervous twitches. He vigorously opposed his father’s sudden decision to sell large chunks of the business, asking why he was breaking his rule about never quitting. A few days later, his father shot himself. Despite their fraught relationship, Turner says, “I had lost my best friend.” His father, who set such high standards for himself, had told friends that he was a failure.

The autobiography has contributions from family members, friends and colleagues, and “even my ex-wife got a chance to pipe up”. Jane Fonda writes: “For Ted, there’s a fear of abandonment that is deeper than with anyone I’ve ever known. As a result, he needs constant companionship and keeping up with him can be exhausting. He can’t sit still, because if you sit still the demons catch up with you. He has to keep moving.” Turner agrees that he fears being left alone. “You are a collection of all your experiences,” he says.

In the Eighties, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on lithium, but later another doctor changed that diagnosis and took him off the medication. “At least I know what I have now. I don’t have depression, thank God. A moderate case of anxiety. Primarily going back to my childhood, but exacerbated by losing my fortune, losing my job and breaking up with my wife all at the same time. And I lost a grandchild, too.” His granddaughter, Maddox, died of a rare enzyme deficiency in 2001. “That’s enough to put anyone in hospital. I didn’t go to hospital. I toughed it out and I rallied, and I’m capable of leading a productive life. I see a psychiatrist every month, mainly now just to kick things around.” He has a trademark tic of punctuating almost every sentence with a curious “haw” sound.

After his father’s death, he halted the sale of parts of the business and aggressively expanded it, fending off rivals “like Horatius at the bridge”. He recites a chunk of Macaulay’s poem and, for good measure, a lot of Richard II. “I was looking for battle and I found it. I wanted to get to the top.” He bought radio and TV stations, and early on saw the potential of getting into cable and satellite television. To say he was a hands-on proprietor is an understatement. When he owned the Atlanta Braves baseball team, he briefly made himself the manager, until the baseball authorities stepped in after one game. When one of his stations made a film about Gettysburg, he had a cameo as a Confederate general. During the war in Afghanistan in 2001, CNN executives politely declined his offer to become a correspondent.