Roger Ailes: Off Camera (3 page)

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The first time I met Roger Ailes we talked about his childhood and he mentioned Doug Webster and what a blow it had been to lose him. And he talked about another old friend, still very much alive but, as far as Ailes knew, gone forever. Austin Pendleton was a scion of one of Warren’s wealthier families. His mother, Frances Manchester Pendleton, was an amateur actress who belonged to a local theatrical company. “Austin and I were very close friends,” Ailes recalled. “We used to play together in his backyard, which was on a stream, and we had sleepovers at one another’s houses.” In junior high school, Pendleton formed a theater company of his own, and Ailes sometimes appeared in the shows. “Austin was a natural talent,” Ailes told me. “He went to Yale and became a really great actor and director. I miss him.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“I hear he lives in New York, but I haven’t seen him in years,” Ailes said. “I imagine his friends think I’m the devil. I wouldn’t want to embarrass him by getting in touch.”

I went home and Googled “Austin Pendleton,” who was, indeed, alive and well and living in New York. He had appeared in more than thirty movies—in his first,
Skidoo
, he shared a memorable scene with Groucho Marx, in a rowboat on the Pacific Ocean smoking a joint—and dozens of plays on and off Broadway. He directed Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton in Lillian Hellman’s
Little Foxes
at the Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld) and taught acting at the HB Studio in New York and directing for a few years at the New School. Roger was right: his old playmate was at the heart of the progressive artistic community of Manhattan.

I sent Pendleton an e-mail, telling him I was working on a book about Ailes and asking if he would be willing to talk to me. He replied immediately. “I certainly will. Roger is a fascinating, wonderful character in my life.”

Ailes was surprised and pleased to hear that he was still in the good graces of his old pal. He invited Austin to come by Fox for lunch. I ran into Pendleton in the lobby, where he was being chatted up by an earnest young actor. Pendleton is small and very thin, with a crown of unkempt white hair, and was dressed in a plaid work shirt, faded jeans, and boots, one of which lacked a lace. Ailes was waiting for us in a private dining room on the third floor. They embraced warmly and began, as long-separated childhood friends do, by sizing up each other’s physical condition. They assured each other that they had never looked better. Ailes patted his stomach and explained that he could no longer exercise after once again having wrecked his leg, this time in a skydiving incident in California. “I had a hip replaced and I guess I should again, but I think I’ll just hang on to this one until I’m finished,” he said.

Pendleton nodded sympathetically, although he looked like he could run a marathon. A waiter appeared. Ailes often dines on tuna sandwiches and potato chips at working lunches, but this time he laid on a feast of butternut squash soup and a choice of entrees.

They felt each other out with a series of anecdotes about the lives they had led since Warren. Ailes recounted a dinner party he had recently attended with Shirley MacLaine and Al Pacino. “He just stared at me the whole time. Probably invited me to see what a real, live conservative looks like up close,” he said. It was an opening for Pendleton but he didn’t take it.

“He does that with everyone,” Pendleton assured him. “He just studies people. It can be disconcerting.”

“Very strange,” Ailes said. It seemed to me that Pendleton had left Ailes’s implicit question—if he was considered persona non grata in the actor’s world—unanswered. So I asked, “Are you embarrassed to tell your friends that you know Roger?”

“Not at all,” said Pendleton. “I’ve been dining out on it for years. Everyone is very curious.”

“I bet,” Ailes said, but he sounded pleased.

Pendleton asked what it had been like working for Nixon. “I actually felt sorry for him,” Ailes said. “His dad was brutal to him. He was ugly and awkward. By the time I met him, he had the 1960 election stolen from him by Kennedy, so he was a little bit paranoid, and somewhat weird. He once told me that the hardest part of being president was coming down to breakfast in the morning and explaining the horrendous cartoons Herblock did of him in the
Washington Post
to his daughters.”

Pendleton offered a recollection of his own, a raunchy backstage encounter at a Washington theater between Liz Taylor, Lillian Hellman, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and actress Maureen Stapleton that ended with the punch line “She fucked Max!” Ailes burst into laughter. Here they were, two guys from Warren, swapping tales about presidents and movie stars. But, more than a reunion of old friends, it seemed to me like a rare meeting between Ailes and the ghost of Roger past. He was hungry for memories of his own boyhood, and delighted when Pendleton recalled the mock election in a long-forgotten civics class.

“I was for Stevenson,” he said, “until I heard Roger’s speech for Eisenhower. I can still remember what you said. He was so informed and lucid, he knew so much, he made me want to switch to Ike.”

“I figured a guy who had organized the invasion of Europe was probably qualified to be president,” said Ailes. “I’m surprised it made an impression. You were mostly interested in putting on shows. I remember your mom used to pick the plays, but at a certain point you would just take over, tell everybody what to do and where to stand and how to act.”

“She was a good producer,” said Pendleton.

“Watching her cast those shows had a big influence on how I pick talent. And, you know, I produced some plays when I got to New York.”

“
The Hot l Baltimore
,” said Pendleton. “You won some awards for that one, right?”

Ailes nodded.
The Hot l Baltimore
won three Obies between 1973 and 1976, as well as a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play of 1973. “Long time ago,” he said. “You know what I miss, Austin? I miss those days back in Warren. Sometimes I can close my eyes and see my family after church, my grandfather saying a prayer before Sunday dinner. It’s like that Kris Kristofferson song,” Ailes said, “the one Janis Joplin recorded. ‘I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday.’ I still feel that way. . . .”

The door of the small private dining room flew open, and there stood Rupert Murdoch. He had been in the news lately, flying back and forth to London trying to put out the fires ignited by accusations of bribery and illegal hacking by his tabloid
News of the World
. It hadn’t gone well. Murdoch’s son James had just stepped down from control of the British newspaper operations, and Murdoch himself had been questioned by a public inquiry committee. He had looked old and a little confused in that appearance, but he seemed fresh now, trim and full of energy. He gave Pendleton and me a firm handshake, although he clearly had no idea who we were.

“Well, Roger, I just stopped in to say hello,” he said. “Saw a great-looking woman, by the way, when I came in this morning. Never saw her before. Wonder who she was?”

Ailes asked what time he had seen her. “About nine thirty, I should think. She left the building carrying a garment bag.”

“Must be the girl who reads the news on
Imus
,” said Ailes. “She was with him on the radio. She wanted to do television, too, so I decided to give her a shot.”

“Beautiful woman,” said Murdoch. “Well done.”

Ailes didn’t seem particularly interested; Fox is loaded with former beauty queens. “You going to be around?” he asked.

“Off to London again for a week and then on to the Far East,” Murdoch said. “You can reach me if something important comes up.” He nodded to Pendleton and me and closed the door.

“Rupert is a very interesting guy,” Ailes said. “He’s grateful to me because I don’t need anything. Sometimes he drops by and plops down on the couch and we make each other laugh. When this crap in London started, he asked me if we had anything like that going on here.”

A very good question, I thought. Pendleton looked like he thought so, too.

“I told him there’s nothing here that’s a problem,” Ailes said. “Nothing at all. We don’t do crooked things here—bug conversations and bribe police. That’s not part of our culture.”

“Of course not,” said Pendleton. “We’re from Warren, Ohio. We weren’t raised that way.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or not. He’s an actor, after all.

Talk circled back to the old days. Ailes was glad to know that the theater company founded by Pendleton’s mother is still putting on plays. He confessed that he doesn’t get back to Warren often; that speech to the Veterans Memorial had been his last visit. “I used to go back when my father was alive,” he said. “You know, he remarried.”

Pendleton didn’t know. Bob Ailes wasn’t part of his family’s social circle.

“We’d go out to dinner. My dad always ordered the same thing, a shrimp cocktail and a steak. He never had anything else. Then one time we went out to dinner at a place downtown, and when the waitress handed him a menu, he just looked at it blankly. He didn’t remember what he liked to eat. His wife had to order for him. And he always planted tomatoes in the yard, and that year he stopped.”

“How old was he?” asked Pendleton.

“Seventy-one,” said Ailes. The same age as Austin Pendleton. The same age as Ailes himself. “You know, my dad’s wife was a nice lady, but he never stopped loving my mother. When the Alzheimer’s really took over, the only name he would say was ‘Donna.’ The last time I came to see him I told him, ‘I love you, Dad,’ but he didn’t respond. I felt at the time that he would have wanted me to kill him and I considered it, but I couldn’t. When I left him the last time I said, ‘Don’t worry, Dad, Donna will be up in heaven. You’ll see her there.’”

We adjourned to Ailes’s office on the second floor, where he showed Pendleton photos of his wife and son and promised to stay in touch. “I’ve missed you, old friend,” he said, and the two men embraced. A secretary showed Pendleton out. Ailes looked out his window at Sixth Avenue for a long moment. Eight senior news executives were waiting for him in a nearby meeting room to go over the daily news budget. Ailes walked into the room and took his place at the head of the table, a man who sure as hell didn’t plan to stop planting any goddamn tomatoes.

THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW

When Roger Ailes returned to the campus of Ohio University after Christmas break his freshman year, he was disoriented and demoralized. His life in Warren had been wiped away, his family dispersed or sunk in depression, his personal belongings carted away. And Athens, Ohio, didn’t offer much in the way of distractions or stimulation. The town was a third of the size of Warren. The university, whose eight thousand students were mostly drawn from eastern Ohio, were there for an affordable, attainable, no-frills education. The school was intentionally dull and conventional. A promotional film of the time assured parents of prospective students that OU was dedicated to change, but not the kind of change “that is the result of uncertainty or willful experimentation.”

The university boasted 285,000 volumes in its main library, but there is no indication that Roger Ailes troubled them much. He decided to become a fighter pilot, like his best friend, Doug Webster, and enrolled in the Air Force ROTC, but he washed out because of his medical record. He decided to major in radio and television studies because of his theatrical background. He worked for two years as station manager of WOUB, the campus radio station, and got on-air experience doing play-by-play of Ohio University football. He also opened the station every morning and hosted
Yawn Patrol
in tandem with a blind fellow student, Don Matthews.

Ailes had gotten his first job at the station after receiving a tip from the station manager’s girlfriend, Marjorie White, that a position had opened up. He and Marjorie met at a church event on campus—she was a senior majoring in art; he was still a freshman. At the time, he was feeling lonely and confused by his parents’ abrupt split-up and he was drinking too much. Marjorie may have looked to him like a solution. He was impressed by her kindness and maturity and struck by the fact that she had been born and raised in Parkersburg, West Virginia. “My mother was born in Parkersburg,” he told me. “She’s the only other person I ever met from there. Hell, I don’t want to get too psychological, but it was an interesting coincidence.”

Marjorie White found Roger interesting, too. She broke up with her boyfriend, and they became a couple. By this time, the ex-boyfriend was also Ailes’s boss, which was, he recalls, “awkward,” but not a deal breaker. The couple were married in a small chapel near the campus during his junior year. She took a job teaching art while he finished his degree in fine arts.

In 1961, KYW-TV in Cleveland launched a daytime variety show hosted by a little-known song-and-dance man, Mike Douglas. The idea for the show came from Woody Fraser, a young producer at NBC’s Chicago affiliate. “I watched a lot of daytime TV at the time, and it was very boring. I came up with the idea of an afternoon talk show with a regular host and, every week, a big-name cohost, a program that could be syndicated to stations around the country,” Fraser says. He sold the concept to Westinghouse Broadcasting, which sent him to Cleveland to get it started. One of his first jobs was to select a host, and he wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by big names who wanted a low-paying gig on an experimental show out of Cleveland. Some of the candidates showed up for auditions drunk. Others had prickly personalities that didn’t appeal to a daytime audience. Douglas was handsome in a conventional way, affable and keen, and he got the job of a lifetime. The show ran in national syndication for more than twenty years.

The Mike Douglas Show
started out as a lean operation. It aired five times a week, ninety minutes each day, and it had an initial staff of six. One of them was Launa Newman, a graduate of Northwestern University, who had gone to high school with Roger. Newman knew that Ailes had majored in television and was looking for a job, and she recommended him to Fraser, who invited Ailes to come in for an interview. Newman told him to bring one hundred show ideas with him, which he did.

“The ideas were good and I told him, ‘You’re frigging hired,’” says Fraser. “He started as a segment producer. It was the best hire I’ve ever made.”

Fraser was a demanding and abrasive boss, and he was aware that the show’s pace was taking a toll on the personal lives of its personnel. Marjorie and Roger lived in Cleveland, but he spent almost all of his time at the station. At one point Marjorie Ailes came to see Fraser to complain. “You’re ruining my life with these crazy hours,” she said. Fraser was unsympathetic. “I liked Marjorie,” he says. “She was very attractive and smart; she looked like the actress Jeanne Crain. For that matter, Roger was handsome back then. Good-looking couple. And she was right: Roger didn’t have much time for her. We basically worked from nine in the morning until eleven at night. That was the job. We did eight segments in every show, and I didn’t let anybody go home until they were all finished.”

Ailes impressed Fraser—and Fraser’s boss Chet Collier—with his moxie and instinctive understanding of what made for good TV. “Look, it was easy to book Muhammad Ali back then [Ali, whose license was suspended, was out of boxing at the time], but it was a lot harder to do something interesting with him,” says Fraser. “We came up with the idea of getting him to stage a mock fight with Robert Goulet. Roger saw that it was a good idea, but he wanted to know the dynamic—what was the premise?
Why
would Ali fight a singer, what would the point be, where were the laughs. And he was able to put this together in a way that really worked.”

Bowling was hot in the early sixties, and a representative of Brunswick suggested a segment on how to do it. Ailes liked the idea, but Fraser thought it would work only if there was a regulation lane. The next morning he came to work and found a truck in front of the studio. “Roger came up to me and said, ‘I got you the goddamn bowling lane.’ That sounds nuts, but it is what you have to do if you want to interest viewers and keep them. Roger and I fought sometimes—he called me a slave driver and an asshole—but we kept adding stations.”

Not all of Ailes’s stunts worked. He booked a man who had twenty piranhas that devoured ham hocks. Fraser was skeptical, but Ailes promised that it would work as advertised. The day of the show, he began to worry, and decided to test it out with a trial run. The fish ate Ailes’s ham hocks. But they didn’t repeat the stunt when on the show. “Nothing happened,” Fraser recalls. “Roger had killed their damn appetite.”

Fraser was a hell-raiser, and he liked rowdy games. He often challenged the staff to office basketball, one-on-one. Ailes didn’t usually participate, but one day he agreed to play. He drove to the basket and Fraser, a towering man, hip-checked him into the corner of a desk. Suddenly Ailes stopped and sat down. “I’ve got this thing,” he said. “It’s a blood disease.” He pulled down his pants and displayed a purple thigh. No one on the show had any idea that he was a hemophiliac. “It must have hurt like hell but he just went back to work,” says Fraser. “He didn’t even go home early that day, and he never mentioned it again.”

In 1967, Woody Fraser received an offer to produce
The Dick Cavett Show
. Chet Collier, the head of Group W Productions, made Ailes executive producer of
The Mike Douglas Show
. Both Fraser and Collier would play important roles in Ailes’s later career at Fox. But for now, he was twenty-five years old and in charge of the most successful afternoon show on television.

In August 1965, the Douglas show moved to Philadelphia. Marjorie and Roger set up housekeeping. She took a job in a bookstore; he maintained his fearsome work schedule.

“Roger Ailes was a legend at a very young age,” says Marvin Kalb, who was a reporter at CBS News at the time. “His success at the Douglas show struck a chord. He was talked about in the seventies in New York, in television circles.”

Ailes came out of Ohio with Middle American taste in entertainment. He loved meeting and working with old-time stars like Judy Garland, Liberace, Jack Benny, and Pearl Bailey. But the Douglas show kept up with the times, which, in the sixties, meant flirting with the counterculture. Ailes wasn’t an immediate fan. “The Rolling Stones were on one time,” he recalls. “When I first saw them, I thought they were no-talent shitheads. But then I heard them rehearse, and I realized that they were pretty good. They really worked hard, and I admire that.” The Douglas show also became known as a place that welcomed black artists. Ailes produced shows with James Brown, Dick Gregory, Ray Charles, and Chuck Berry, to name a few. After the death of Dick Clark, Aretha Franklin said that
American Bandstand
had been important, but the place she really loved was
The Mike Douglas Show
.

Barbra Streisand was just breaking out when she came to Ohio to do a week as a guest host on the show. The gig paid just $1,000. To sweeten the deal, Ailes booked her into a small nightclub on the west side of Cleveland, where she appeared with just a rhythm section. “There was a table to the right of the stage that was really noisy,” Ailes remembers. “One of the loudest was a priest in a clerical collar. At one point, Streisand stopped in midsong and said, ‘Shut the fuck up, Father,’ and then went back to the song.” Forty years later, the scene still makes Ailes laugh.

Another, less profane guest was Martin Luther King Jr. “He came on three or four times,” Ailes says. “He’d sit in my office waiting to go on and we’d smoke cigarettes and chat about personal things or what was happening politically. I really don’t remember anything specific. I wish I could.”

Bill Cosby was still an up-and-coming comic in 1964, when he appeared on the Douglas show. Ailes and Woody Fraser wanted him to do a weeklong stint as cohost, but Westinghouse balked. “I was told by a senior executive straight out, ‘You can’t put that nigger on the air. It will kill us in the South,’” says Ailes. Cosby went on anyway, and the show managed to survive almost twenty years. Ailes got a sense of satisfaction from winning the fight with Westinghouse, and a good anecdote to boot. “Back then I sometimes wrote comedy sketches for the show,” he recalls. “I wrote one about two guys playing chess and what they were really thinking as the game went on. A few years later I was watching
Hollywood Palace
and damn if Cosby wasn’t doing the bit. Not bad, getting a piece of comedy stolen by Bill Cosby.”

Malcolm X was a little too far out of the mainstream for an afternoon variety show, especially after he applauded the assassination of John F. Kennedy as “chickens coming home to roost.” But Ailes produced several interviews with Malcolm for a public affairs series on KTW. “The first time he came to the studio, he wouldn’t even shake hands with me because I’m white,” says Ailes. But after Malcolm performed the
hajj
, and broke with the Nation of Islam, he became less militantly antiwhite. When he came into the studio, he was pleasant and had his picture taken with Ailes. Six weeks later, he was assassinated in New York by Nation of Islam gunmen.

Forty years later, Ailes found himself at a banquet seated next to Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland. Cummings asked how an organization like the Congressional Black Caucus could sponsor a televised primary debate. Ailes suggested that the CBC and Fox News cosponsor one. The idea didn’t go over well with many members of the Caucus, who viewed Fox as fundamentally hostile. Congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick of Detroit, the CBC chairwoman, was particularly skeptical about the wisdom of partnering with the enemy. Ailes met with her. She asked him to explain his sudden interest in civil rights. Ailes assured her that there was nothing sudden about it, and whipped out the picture with Malcolm. Kilpatrick was impressed, and the CBC and Fox jointly produced a Democratic primary debate in 2008, in Detroit.

As a producer, Ailes was constantly on the lookout for new guests. He spotted Dick Gregory at the hungry i club in San Francisco. Today Gregory is a sometimes contentious civil rights icon, but back then he was doing satire laced with borscht belt humor. “He was funny—‘I bought a suit with two pairs of pants and burned a hole in the jacket’—and we booked him.” He also worked with Richard Pryor, who walked off the set because he didn’t like his billing on the show. “I chased him down Walnut Street and convinced him to come back,” says Ailes. “He was temperamental, but he was a very talented guy.”

In the midsixties, NBC had a rising star on
The Today Show
, Barbara Walters. As one of the first women in network news, she caught Ailes’s eye. “Roger called the network and asked if I would be willing to go down to Philadelphia and do the Douglas show,” she told me. She was and she did. In keeping with his philosophy of adding showmanship to his interviews, Ailes convinced her to perform gymnastics on the program with a Swedish tumbling team, a stunt that upset Walters’s bosses in New York. “They thought it would hurt my reputation as a newswoman,” she says. Luckily, she managed to survive and prosper, and the appearance was the beginning of a fifty-year friendship.

“Roger is a huge name and everybody knows who he is, but he doesn’t strive for fame,” she says. “He lives a quiet life. I was very happy when he finally married”—a reference to his latest marriage.

The Walters-Ailes friendship has been a matter of Manhattan gossip for years. “I dated Barbara a couple times, or took her out as an escort, but we never had an affair,” Ailes told me. “We probably could have at some point, but we were always married or between marriages or talking about marrying someone. We never got beyond that point. But we trusted one another, and we still do.”

•   •   •

In 1994, Roger Ailes established a scholarship program at Ohio University for broadcasting and journalism students. After his success at Fox News, he donated half a million dollars to establish the Roger E. Ailes Newsroom at the school. In an interview with the campus radio station he was typically self-deprecating, wondering if they left his name on the place when he wasn’t in Athens. A university press release quoted Ailes in less caustic terms: “Ohio University ignited my interest in broadcasting, which became my lifetime career,” he said.

But it was
The Mike Douglas Show
that was Ailes’s real alma mater. Woody Fraser taught him how to put on a show. From Douglas himself he learned “likability” and how to use it. And some of the lessons were provided by visiting guests.