Scene 2: Time Warner headquarters in New York, last week. Turner mugs for CNN’s cameras with his new boss, Gerald Levin. Yep, he joshes. After years of being a big-media chief executive, maybe it’s time to slow down and “take things a little easier.” Right, say friends and anyone else who knows him. More likely, Turner may one day turn his sword on Levin. Says one: “Ted Turner is not a natural number two.”

Few Americans have cut such a swath through life. He’s a bit grayer than he used to be, a bit more buttoned up. But there he is, oozing restlessness at 56, an age when most people are counting dollars in theft 401(k)s. The man’s a one-man epic. We cheered, in 1977, when he won the America’s Cup, yachting’s Super Bowl, then showed up drunk to claim the prize. Against all odds, he built a family billboard company into an entertainment colossus. Almost alone, he saw the potential of 24-hour satellite news – and called it CNN. Along the way he experienced more ups and downs than a Greek hero: bouts of alcoholism, depression, failed marriages. Yet once again, last week, he was in the limelight, worth more than $3 billion as the new vice chairman and single largest shareholder of the biggest media conglomerate in the world.

The tale of his rise is now business legend. He was born to a self-made and angry alcoholic father, who drove his son ruthlessly and later committed suicide. He dropped out of Brown University, divorced twice, chased countless women and, with luck and no end of pluck, turned the family’s billboard company into a mega-empire of TV stations, movie studios and sports teams. Turner has always been the freewheeling buccaneer, a modern-day Rhett Butler whose credo was do or die.

But he’s also paid dearly for his swashbuckling bravado. Eight years ago, in February 1987, he faced bankruptcy. Turner Broadcasting System was sinking under a mountain of debt he’d taken on to buy MGM, the fabled Hollywood movie studio. It desperately needed a bailout – and got one from a consortium of cabletelevision companies. The price was steep, however. Determined to rein in the wild man who always played by his own rules, they demanded (and more or less got) a veto over Turner’s every move.

Thus began the second, lesser-known chapter of Turner’s legend: his transformation from renegade maverick to responsible mogul, culminating in last week’s merger. For with the MGM bailout, Turner Broadcasting suddenly wasn’t his to run anymore. For the first time he had bosses, a board to answer to that included such savvy professionals as cable magnate John Malone and Time Warner’s Levin. They saved him from mistakes, forced him to calibrate risks more carefully. Most important, they put MGM’s movies on their fast-growing cable networks – making Turner Broadcasting the powerhouse it is today.

Turner has sometimes chafed under their tutelage. He screamed loudly for “divorce” earlier this year and last, and accused Malone and Levin of “holding him back” when they nixed his ambition to buy NBC or CBS. But then he made his peace. “There’s something most people don’t realize about Ted,” says longtime associate Robert Wussler, now at ABC. “He has learned how to get along.” Adds Robert Goldberg, coauthor of a recent Turner biography, “Citizen Turner”: “The man who began as Mr. Outside has become now the consummate Mr. Inside.”

Turner made that loud and clear last week. He may joke about retiring to the joys of trout fishing in Montana and life with Jane Fonda – but it’s only a joke. Turner is as driven as ever, says Wussler–“not by money but by conquest, power.” At Time Warner, these sources say, he won’t be shy in wielding it. The merger qualifies Turner as a bona fide media biggie; for the first time, he can throw his weight around the entertainment world without worrying about money. “You know, you only live once,” he said at last week’s press conference. “I’m looking forward to having some muscle on our bones for a change. I want to see what it’s like to be big!” For Turner, though, “big” has never been big enough.