Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
A few weeks later, Ailes sent Haldeman a confidential letter bragging about his performance advising campaigns in the 1970 midterms. He attached glowing notes from eight GOP politicians and operatives praising his performance. The White House clearly wasn’t interested.
“No need for H. to see FYI,” an aide wrote to Haldeman’s assistant, Larry Higby.
Ailes needed to retool his image.
“I have been getting a lot of calls in the business about my being out at the White House,” he wrote to Larry Higby in February 1971. “If I can say that I am working with the National Committee and am still with the White House, it will be very helpful to me professionally.” Ailes’s television career was sputtering, too.
The Real Tom Kennedy Show
had been canceled. In March, Ailes issued a press release announcing he was changing the name of his company from REA Productions to Roger Ailes & Associates, Incorporated.
An article in
Backstage
headlined “Ailes Business Is Not Ailing” helped to quiet the rumors of his professional struggles. Ailes announced that his renamed company was launching “an expansion program” and would focus on “radio and TV production; TV counseling services to business and industry; and a division to handle personal management for talent.”
On June 8, 1971, Ailes delivered
a speech before Los Angeles business and civic leaders at the Town Hall of California. Ailes used the opportunity to offer a full-throated rebuttal to the criticisms that had dogged him
since the publication of McGinniss’s book. Principally, Ailes sought to put to rest the charge that shady media manipulators were distorting politics through television. “Like many technological advances, the impact of political television has preceded the understanding of its meaning or its uses,” he wrote. “The natural human reaction to this lack of understanding is fear, and this single emotion—fear—overrides much of American life today and has brought about a national negativism which has wrapped around us like a shroud!”
Much of the speech, however, sounded like a sales pitch: “The biggest problem today, I believe, is communication on all levels,” Ailes declared. It was corporate America’s fault, Ailes said, for not marshaling a response to consumer advocates like Ralph Nader who spread the notion that “all large companies are greedy monolithic monsters determined to squash the little man.” To the businessmen sitting in the crowd, who controlled their companies’ marketing budgets, it would have been an incredibly seductive message. Ailes was declaring that slick public relations, the very kind he was selling, could reset the relationship of business to the American people. “America has a cancer. Cancer is usually fatal, but it doesn’t have to be if it is discovered and treated in time,” he wrote. “Our national life depends on our ability to use our technical knowledge to cure the ills in our country and upon our refusal to be caught up in this negative attitude about our system.” His formulation was not unlike the words of his father about the struggle for survival. “We must exhibit and communicate an unbending will to live,” Ailes stated. Unless the country changed its attitude, it might not make it out of the next thirty years. “Without these things,” he asserted, “America will be nothing more than a history lesson in a student-run college of the twenty-first century.”
That month, Ailes planned to move into a new office on Seventh Avenue, a few blocks south of Central Park.
He told White House photographer Oliver Atkins that his interior designers were working up plans for the space, which he wanted to decorate with eleven-by-fourteen photographs of his memorable work for Nixon and other clients. “I would love to have a shot of that split screen to the moon,” Ailes wrote to Atkins in mid-May 1971. Even as he projected the image of a rapidly expanding concern, the well-hidden truth was that Ailes was largely on his own. Cast out of the White House, Ailes would have to come up with a new act.
“Roger got caught up in the politics he didn’t yet understand,” his brother later said. “In retrospect, he learned some lessons and he got out before the rest went to shit.”
A
ILES WAS UNMOORED
, both professionally and ideologically. Confidants observed in their friend a palpable sense of dislocation.
“He was trying to figure out who he’d be when he grew up,” his brother, Robert, recalled of that time. “He tried his hand at everything.” Television and Republican politics had been the lodestars of Ailes’s twenties. In an accelerated adulthood, Ailes approached them with single-minded determination, relishing the power and financial freedom of the grown-up world, even as he rebelled against the strictures of its institutions, such as marriage and corporate hierarchies. Now as his thirty-first birthday approached, Ailes, for the first time, began to pursue other paths.
Though far from a flower child, Roger Ailes was a product of the 1960s, who came of age in that era of cultural tumult. And after the Nixon administration severed ties with him, he began a four-year period of experimentation, one that in hindsight seems a quixotic professional detour. As he kept a toehold in politics, paying his bills by running media strategy for a few congressional and gubernatorial campaigns, Ailes ventured into the New York theater scene. In post-1960s New York, the counterculture itself had been institutionalized, made into a profit center. Reinventing himself as an all-purpose impresario and agent, Ailes befriended not merely Democrats, but activist members of the American left.
Paul Turnley, a liberal Democrat and civil rights activist from Detroit, Michigan, became an early assistant to Ailes. “Roger never let politics get in the way of good people,” Turnley recalled.
On May 15, 1971, Ailes was giving a speech at Indiana University, where Turnley, who was training to become a Jesuit priest, was taking graduate courses in communications.
He was so captivated by Ailes’s lecture that he changed his mind about the priesthood and wrote Ailes a series of letters asking for a job. After Ailes hired him, they rarely discussed politics or Nixon, except in typically Ailesian terms. “He basically said that ‘Man in the Arena’ was his idea. Then, he’d say, ‘I got Nixon to take his stupid ramrod out of his ass.’ ”
Politics in those days for Ailes was more about making money than ideology. He hinted that he would consider working for Democrats.
“I don’t have this burning thing to elect all Republicans,” he told
The Washington Post
in the winter of 1972. And Ailes did discreetly advise Andrew Stein, a twenty-six-year-old Democratic candidate who was seeking reelection to the New York State Assembly. On one occasion,
Ailes arranged for a barber to meet them in his office. “Andy called Roger aside and whispers to him, ‘I have a hairpiece. You can’t do this,’ ” Turnley recalled. “And Roger just says, ‘we’ll do a little bit around the sides.’ ”
Even when he worked for Republicans, Ailes did not kowtow to the party’s handpicked candidates. His only statewide campaign work in 1972 that Turnley remembered was for
Jim Holshouser, a thirty-seven-year-old moderate state representative in North Carolina, who owned a motel in his hometown of Boone. While he was considering whether to challenge James Gardner, the front-runner, in the Republican primary for governor,
Holshouser flew to New York to consult with Ailes. At their first meeting, Turnley recalled, “Roger sat him down and said in no uncertain terms, ‘You’re gonna have to spend millions of dollars. I believe I can get you elected. But the downside is: you don’t have the party’s backing, you have to find your own funding, you’re the underdog, and your name recognition is very poor. So we have a real uphill battle. Your opponent is going to find everything that you possibly ever did your entire life and drag it through the press. You have to realize all these things.’ ” Ailes’s speech roused the young Republican. Right there in Ailes’s office, Holshouser picked up the phone and instructed his real estate broker to sell the property to raise cash. After developing a set of devastatingly effective attack ads, Ailes propelled Holshouser into office, making him the first Republican governor elected in the state since 1901.
Despite the success, the political work seemed to be little more than a side project.
“I don’t think Roger had settled on a particular future at that juncture,” Turnley recalled.
As he had done at earlier turning points in his career—at the college radio station, on the Douglas set, and during the Nixon campaign—Ailes
reached out to more senior hands for help.
On February 12, 1971, he wrote to Jack Rourke for help landing a new gig for Kelly Garrett. “Enclosed is a picture and biography of a gal that my company now manages. She is west coast based and a very talented gal,” Ailes wrote. “I thought you might like to use her in one of your telethons.” Ailes also asked Rourke to help book Garrett at the Hilton with the big band leader Horace Heidt Jr. In the black and white photograph, Garrett posed amid a stand of palm trees. Her wide movie star smile, plunging neckline, and long raven hair that spilled gently over her bare shoulders were striking.
Kelly Garrett,
born Ellen Boulton, was
four years younger than Ailes. One of ten children,
she grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a house without a television. She started singing around town in small venues.
At age twenty-two, she married an actor after running off with him to chase her show business dreams in California. As Garrett’s cabaret career took off, her marriage foundered.
She got a divorce in October 1970.
Rourke responded, offering to do whatever he could to help Garrett. “I’ll put you in touch with Horace Heidt, Jr.,” he wrote. But something more promising than a gig with Heidt was beckoning Kelly: Broadway. In 1972, Ailes raised money to mount his first theatrical production. Tapping into the 1960s cultural outwash,
Ailes chose
Mother Earth
, a trippy, environmental-themed rock musical revue created by a group of social workers, academics, and antiwar protesters who founded the South Coast Repertory company in Costa Mesa, California. They were liberal outcasts in the heart of Richard Nixon country.
C
osta Mesa, located about forty miles south of Los Angeles in the center of Orange County, was not exactly friendly territory for a progressive theater to open its doors in the summer of 1964.
But the conservative spirit of the region did not deter the South Coast Repertory Company from attempting their experiment in an out-of-business marine supply store a few miles from John Wayne’s home. Over several months in 1969, members of the company developed a rock revue about pollution and overpopulation.
Toni Tennille, an aspiring Alabama-born pop singer, wrote the music, and Ron Thronson, a social worker with a master’s degree in theater, wrote the script and the lyrics. Thronson also served as director.
The musical, he wrote in the preface of the script, “has an element of mysticism.” Many songs were written “to put humans into proper perspective with our universe.”
The show opened the night of January 8, 1971, in front of a 150-person crowd. On a sparsely decorated stage, the cast performed their numbers in front of a projection of 35-millimeter slides showcasing photos taken by the theater’s photographer, Ken Shearer.
“I am one with the soil of my birth,” they sang. What followed were dystopian scenes of overpopulated hellscapes ruined by pollution. One sketch, set on New Year’s Eve in 1999, advocated unfettered access to birth control, abortion, and assisted suicides. Near the beginning of the first act, a woman, described by the stage directions as “the embodiment of all that is mediocre, middle-class, and narrow,” tries to sow doubt. “Hello America! Who says pollution is bad for you? Who says it kills? Have YOU seen it kill?” But by the end of the play, she returns onstage having undergone a kind of spiritual transformation. “Brothers and sisters,” she says, “these poisons in our environment are the omens of an angry God. Get down on your knees and beg forgiveness, that these things might be borne away on the wings of penance.”
At curtain call, the actors knew the show was going to be a hit.
“After we ended, it was dead silent. We were just standing there, and then all of a sudden, the audience erupted,” South Coast cofounder and cast member Jim dePriest recalled. “They ran onto the stage, and everyone was hugging each other. They were just raving about the show.” By the time
Mother Earth
closed five weeks later, bigger venues clamored to book the show.
After successful runs in San Francisco and Los Angeles, veteran lyricist
Ray Golden, a writer for the Marx Brothers whose credits included the Broadway revues
Catch a Star!
and
Alive and Kicking
, made a hard sell to Tennille and Thronson to sell him the rights to bring
Mother Earth
to Broadway’s Belasco Theatre, a one-thousand-seat playhouse on West 44th Street.
Ailes was in on the deal. He knew Golden through the
Mike Douglas
world, and saw
Mother Earth
, at his urging, during its West Coast run.
“Roger came back and said, we oughta do it on Broadway,” Paul Turnley remembered. “I think he liked that it had that
Hair
quality.”
Over lunch at Musso & Frank, the iconic Hollywood restaurant, Ailes and Golden worked the young songwriters. They assured Thronson and Tennille they would not meddle in the musical when they brought it—and the show’s cast—to Broadway. Thronson and Tennille agreed to sell the rights, but it soon became evident that Golden, who took over as director, in addition to being producer, had his own plans to modify the show for a mainstream audience.
A couple of months before the show was scheduled to open on October
19, 1972, Tennille refused to perform Golden’s version.
“It turned into a borscht belt musical,” South Coast cofounder Martin Benson said.
“We got bamboozled,” Tennille later told the press. With Tennille out, Golden needed a new female lead and a serious cash infusion. Ailes, with connections to wealthy investors and a client looking for her Broadway star turn, could provide both.
A
s the Broadway debut of
Mother Earth
approached, Ailes recognized his need for an experienced guide to steer him through the unique folkways of the New York theater world. A year earlier, at Golden’s suggestion,
he met the Broadway producer Kermit Bloomgarden at a party in Bloomgarden’s apartment on Central Park West. A decade had passed since the faded power broker’s last hit, but Bloomgarden’s career had taken him to the pinnacle of American theater. In the 1940s and 1950s, he collaborated closely with friends Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman.
His string of critical and commercial successes, in addition to Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
and Hellman’s
The Little Foxes
, included Meredith Willson’s
The Music Man
, the original Broadway production of
The Diary of Anne Frank
, Frank Loesser’s
The Most Happy Fella
, and Stephen Sondheim’s musical
Anyone Can Whistle
. By the early 1970s, however, Bloomgarden had fallen on hard times. His right leg had been amputated, a consequence of arteriosclerosis, and his bills were piling up. When Ailes and Ray Golden went to him for advice on
Mother Earth
, Bloomgarden agreed to sign on as a consulting producer.
“Given the circumstance he was in, the opportunity to create some income advising someone on a show was appealing,” his son John Bloomgarden recalled.