Authors: Gabriel Sherman
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Corporate & Business History, #Political Science, #General, #Social Science, #Media Studies
A
fter TVN, Ailes had to regroup. Having wisely retained ownership of his consulting company, he glided back to the liberal world of the theater.
In the spring of 1975, he teamed up with Bloomgarden on the production of
Bledsoe
, a drama about a self-absorbed American novelist in Rome who falls in love with a nun while being treated for cancer. Considering that the play was written by
Arnaud d’Usseau, a blacklisted playwright and screenwriter who had moved to Europe after clashing with Joseph McCarthy, Ailes scooped up funding from an unlikely source: Joe Coors. In return for 18 percent of the net profits,
Ailes persuaded Coors to invest $81,000. Coors insisted that his investment remain a secret. When Ailes sent the check to Bloomgarden, he laid down the terms. Coors requested that he not be publicly acknowledged as a backer, and “would appreciate all efforts we make to avoid unnecessary vulgarities in the script,” Ailes wrote. “I’m sure you understand.” Coors’s investment came too late. The
production of
Bledsoe
, which had been plagued by problems and cast changes for two years, was abandoned.
Though
Bledsoe
was called off, Ailes had another premiere that fall to look forward to. On the morning of September 4, 1975,
a throng of reporters packed into Ailes’s office on Central Park South to view
The Last Frontier
, his TV special with Bobby Kennedy Jr. In the run-up to the film’s release, Ailes was a nervous wreck about Ethel Kennedy coming to the screening.
“I hope his mom likes the movie,” Rosenfield remembered Ailes saying. “What’s not to like?” It went well enough that Ailes pitched Kennedy on making additional wildlife programs together.
Though Kennedy lost interest in the project, enrolling in law school, he stayed in contact with Ailes.
In November 2005, Fox News aired
The Heat Is On
, Kennedy’s one-hour documentary about climate change. Accompanied by a Fox camera crew to Glacier National Park, Kennedy showed the precipitous retreat of the ice pack in recent years.
“Those guys were absolutely convinced,” he recalled.
A few months later, after Kennedy’s documentary was widely criticized on the right, Fox aired another documentary, titled
Global Warming: The Debate Continues
.
In his private conversations with Ailes, Kennedy struggled to find traces of the adventurous young man he had shared a tent with decades earlier.
“Roger believes that ends justify the means. Which was a Nixonian idea. It’s the idea that everybody does it, that the world is really a struggle for power. That justifies a lot of the things he’s done at Fox News,” Kennedy said. “His views are sincere. He thinks he’s preserving the American way of life. In his heart, he thinks America is probably better off being a white Christian nation. He’s driven by his own paranoia and he knows how to get in touch with his own paranoia. He makes Americans comfortable with their bigotry, their paranoia and their xenophobia.”
E
ven as he chased his show business dreams, Ailes never fully abandoned politics. In 1976, he took on
multiple campaigns. He worked for moderate Republican congressman Alphonzo Bell Jr. in California. And in Maine, Ailes advised a wealthy lawyer named Robert Monks, who was running a long-shot Senate campaign against the popular incumbent and 1972 presidential candidate, Ed Muskie. A product of St. Paul’s, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School, Monks was a conservative in
the mold of Joe Coors, espousing hard-line positions against the social safety net. Ailes, not yet the archconservative he would become, recoiled at Monks’s antigovernment fervor, which he saw as elitism of another stripe.
“This guy has got to learn some empathy,” Rosenfield remembered Ailes saying. “Roger said, ‘You can’t be against Social Security. If you want to run for public office in a position of responsibility, drop it!’ ” Ailes took it upon himself to teach his client a lesson.
When Monks was campaigning in Augusta, Maine, Ailes spotted some children playing on the lawn in front of the capitol. Because they appeared to be poor, he thought they would be useful for a commercial and he sent Rosenfield to go talk to them. “Roger said to me, ‘see if those kids will take you home with them and ask whoever the parents are if they would agree to have a conversation about our candidate,’ ” Rosenfield recalled. “So I went back, and they lived in a kind of tenement, and they were white, and it was just a woman, there was no man in the picture. I knew I’d found what it was that Roger was looking for.” The next day, Ailes brought Monks to the woman’s house to film him explaining his anti-welfare positions. Monks “freaked out,” Rosenfield remembered. “This woman explained her situation and she says she’s disabled and she’s alone and she has several children and she’s unable to work because she’s bedridden for six months of the year. And I’ll never forget, she said the worst time is Christmas because I don’t have enough money to buy them gifts. And Roger said to Monks, ‘Go ahead, explain your position, go ahead and tell her how you’re against any kind of help from the government.’ He couldn’t do it. I don’t think he’d ever met anyone like that in his life. He was speechless. That was the kind of education Roger would give a candidate.”
When crossed, Ailes was an unforgiving teacher.
During one town hall meeting, Monks said again, according to Rosenfield, that “there is too much government and people should be able to take care of themselves.” On the street afterward, Ailes had Monks by his lapels up against the wall. “He had him there saying,
‘if you ever fucking do that again,’
” Rosenfield, who witnessed the scene, recalled. Monks later did not recall any dispute with Ailes over Social Security and welfare, but called Ailes a “genius.” (
Monks lost to Ed Muskie by more than a 20 percent margin.)
In these moments, Ailes was honing a reputation that would endure throughout his career as a political operative. He was a ruthless competitor who would lay himself down for his clients. His ads became known
for incisively dissecting the opponent with biting wit.
“Roger liked thirty-second spots, because he would say, ‘are you for this or against this?’ ” Rosenfield said. “There’s no time to nuance your way out of it.”
In exchange for his determination to win, Ailes demanded that his clients give him ultimate control, reversing the client-consultant relationship. The candidates worked for
him
.
One time Monks brought a Harvard friend to review a campaign commercial Ailes had cut.
“To be honest, I don’t like it,” the friend told Monks. Ailes turned to face the men.
“One of us—him or me—is
gone
. You have 10 minutes to decide which one it is,” he said and walked out of the editing room.
“Is he kidding?” Monks asked Rosenfield, who was standing off to the side.
“No, he’s not kidding.”
Monks was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said turning to his friend, “but you have to leave.”
Ailes was also expanding his business into the emerging field of business communications. By the late 1970s, corporate America was shedding its fusty, paternalistic image. The greed-is-good ethos of the 1980s was just around the corner, and CEOs were beginning to become celebrities. Ailes said these businessmen needed a
“psychological adjustment” to life in the spotlight and he wanted to get a foothold in this new market.
He developed a $4,000 seminar that included twelve hours of coaching, or, for a $10,000 retainer, clients could get twenty-five to thirty hours of advice. In short order, his Central Park South studio became a boot camp for executives from companies such as
Polaroid, Philip Morris, and Sperry Rand.
In October 1983, he would incorporate Ailes Business Communications, Inc., which he merged two years later with his company.
Ailes’s adventures in the world of show business—and liberals—were winding down.
He traveled to Rome to produce a TV special on the Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, one of his last attempts at packaging highbrow culture.
When he came back, he told Rosenfield how he had to boss Fellini around on the set to get him to do what he wanted. “I remember thinking,
you told Fellini off?
You’d be the only person on the face of the earth who told Fellini off.”
On September 20, 1976, Bloomgarden died of a brain tumor at his Central Park West apartment.
About a year later, Rosenfield told Ailes he was leaving to make it as a director. Ailes took Rosenfield’s decision hard.
During an interview to promote their final collaboration,
Present Tense
, a musical Rosenfield had directed and co-written, Ailes refused to acknowledge him. “He never mentioned my name,” Rosenfield said. He only said “the director.”
Ailes and Kelly Garrett were no longer a couple. After the setback of
Mack & Mabel
,
Garrett experienced limited success singing that summer for a brief revival of
Your Hit Parade
, the 1950s television show, and performing the following year in the short-lived musical
The Night That Made America Famous
, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award. Garrett took her career swings hard.
“When she didn’t get a particular part, or when she hadn’t had a booking in a week, she would get
down
,” Paul Turnley, Ailes’s former assistant, recalled. “And when she had down times, he had down times.”
Garrett was devastated by her breakup with Ailes, according to a friend in whom she confided at the time. She eventually moved to Los Angeles and worked as a voice teacher, giving lessons from her home in North Hollywood.
Ailes tried to help her with bookings in the early 1990s, but she failed to revive her career.
In 2006, she moved back to New Mexico. She died of cancer in August 2013.
In 1977, Ailes began seeing a single mother of two named Norma Ferrer, whom he had met in Florida. His involvement was both romantic and professional.
He named Norma a producer on
Present Tense
.
“Roger made the people who worked with him his family,” Rosenfield said. “But there’s no question about it, he’s the head of his household.”
In 1976, eight years after Ailes had moved to New York, Marjorie filed for divorce. It was finalized on April 22, 1977.
She took possession of the Pennsylvania home, which she held on to for thirty years. She kept his last name and never remarried.
“I’ve spent my life protecting Roger’s privacy,” she said before she died on April 20, 2013. “Roger is always in my heart and in my mind.”
In 1981, Ailes married Ferrer.
She idolized her husband, once telling a reporter that even as an infant “he could see things in ways others couldn’t.”
Shortly before Rosenfield left Ailes’s firm, Ailes asked about Garrett. “At sort of our parting, he asked me if I thought he’d been a good manager for Kelly. I said I thought he had been,” Rosenfield recalled. “I was leaving, and he was looking for some substantiation.”
O
N
J
ANUARY
31, 1986, the Sidney Lumet film
Power
, a dark examination of the lives of political consultants, opened at the Gotham Theatre in Manhattan.
Richard Gere starred as Pete St. John, a hyperkinetic image maker, who represented clients of all stripes—from a right-wing Big Oil–backed Ohio Senate candidate to a Latin American president—so long as they paid his $25,000 a month retainer. Issues bored St. John. Profit fueled his ambition.
When one client earnestly tried selling him on his campaign platform, St. John replied, “My job is to get you in. Once you’re there, you do whatever your conscience tells you to do.”
To prepare for the role, Gere shadowed Roger Ailes for several months.
“Richard practically lived with him,” recalled Gere’s friend Joel McCleary, a Democratic media consultant who would face off against Ailes during the
1990 presidential election in Costa Rica. Ailes’s charismatic influence was evident on the screen. Like Ailes, St. John was domineering.
“You are paying me to give you a new life—politics,” he said in one scene. “And in order for me to do that, I’ve gotta be in charge of all the elements. It’s the only way I work.”
Power
hit theaters as Ailes was becoming the most successful political consultant of his generation. Between 1980 and 1986, Ailes propelled thirteen GOP senators and eight congressmen into office. During this period, he increasingly made use of wedge issues and marginal sideshow debates to bludgeon his clients’ opponents.
“He wasn’t trying to win awards from
Vogue
magazine,” recalled Republican pollster Lance Tarrance, who collaborated with Ailes on campaigns. “He just wanted to win elections.”
Ailes’s candidates—Senators Dan Quayle, Phil Gramm,
and Mitch McConnell, among them—would go on to play leading roles in shaping legislation for the next two decades.
Left on the sidelines of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, Ailes reemerged on the political stage that fall representing Alfonse D’Amato, the Republican town supervisor of a middle-class Long Island suburb, who was running for Senate from New York.
D’Amato had stunned the political establishment by defeating liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits in the GOP primary, but he faced a tough general election campaign. Ailes arrived at a crucial moment.
Javits was staying in the race on the Liberal Party ticket, and the Democrats were fielding a formidable candidate: Congresswoman
Elizabeth Holtzman, a Harvard-educated lawyer who was the youngest woman elected to the House eight years earlier. During their initial meeting, Ailes diagnosed D’Amato’s challenge.
“Jesus, nobody likes you,” Ailes said. “Your own mother wouldn’t vote for you. Do you even have a mother?”
Both a putdown and an insight, Ailes’s remark became the foundation for one of the most successful political ad campaigns of the 1980s.
In Ailes’s first commercial for the candidate, the star was his sixty-five-year-old mother. Ailes filmed Mama D’Amato walking home with a bag of groceries lamenting the middle-class bugbears of inflation and crime. At the end of the spot, she appealed to viewers to vote for her son.
Several weeks before the election, polls put Holtzman ahead by as much as fifteen points. (Javits had slipped into a distant third place.)
But on election day, D’Amato beat the unmarried Holtzman by one percent. Ailes’s shrewd messaging got the credit.
“In a less obvious way,”
The Washington Post
noted at the time, “Ailes mercilessly hammered away at Democrat Liz Holtzman for being single. Several of the D’Amato ads show pictures of the candidate in a variety of loving poses with his wife and kids, and end with a variant on the regular slogan: ‘He’s a
family man
fighting for the forgotten middle class.’ ”
The
Post
dubbed the race “the complete rehabilitation of Roger Ailes.”
D’Amato said Ailes’s ad starring Mama D’Amato “made my victory possible.”