The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Nothing in the court records indicates that Robert contested the restraining order or the divorce filing. Roger recalled that he did not hear about the divorce from his parents until right before he was scheduled to come home from college for the Christmas break. “I got a call from them saying that I had to make arrangements to stay at my friend Doug’s house,” he said. “And then they told me they’re getting a divorce.” It was devastating news. “It affected Roger,” his brother later recalled. “He had no place to go.… I sort of had a place to go more or less. Roger didn’t.”

  On April 27, 1960, the court granted Donna a divorce, finding Robert “guilty of extreme cruelty.” She was awarded custody of their daughter, Donna Jeanne, a senior in high school. Soon after the divorce was granted, Donna put the house up for sale. She had fallen in love with Joseph Urban, a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society and a former newspaper journalist, who lived in San Francisco. “He could speak German and French,” Robert Jr. recalled. “He was the exact opposite of my dad. He was very gentle. He never got angry.”

  The next time Roger came back to Warren, the house on Belmont Street had been sold, a development for which he blamed his mother. “I never found my stamp collection,” he said. “I never found anything. Everything was gone.… I learned from my grandmother, I guess, that my mother had gone to California. She gave me a phone number.… I’ve always been pissed off because I had great stuff in my closet. All your memorabilia from being a kid. I always missed that. I wondered, ‘Where’s my stuff?’ ”

  As his parents’ marriage was coming apart, Roger was beginning his own. As a freshman in college, he’d met Marjorie White, a pretty, brown-haired art major from Parkersburg, West Virginia—his mother’s birthplace—who was two years older than Roger and engaged to the popular WOUB station manager David Chase. “Dave was a big man around WOUB. He was the key guy who was highly regarded,” Chase’s friend Frank Youngwerth recalled. A talented broadcaster, Chase would later move to New York to become program director of the NBC flagship television station WNBC. But after graduating, Chase was called into military duty with the Air Force, and Ailes moved in, winning White over. “Roger stole her away and married her,” Hylkema said.

  At 11:30 a.m. on August 27, 1960—four months to the day after his parents’ divorce—Roger and Marjorie married at the Galbreath Chapel on campus. After the wedding, they moved into an apartment on Stewart Street, alongside a row of craftsman houses on the east side of campus. Marjorie taught art in Nelsonville, thirteen miles north of Athens, while Ailes stayed and finished his last two years. Their marriage sent a powerful signal to others. “Here’s a guy, who’s a freshman who steals a girl from a guy who’s a big timer at WOUB and then in a year he marries her,” Youngwerth said.

  Making a home for himself was also a way for Ailes to find stability. The divorce left scars on all the Ailes children. For Roger, ambition would be a salve for early wounds. “Maybe that’s why I kept going back to work,” he once said. After graduation, he had the opportunity to work in radio in Columbus. But television was the future. He had applied for an entry-level position at a Westinghouse-owned television station in Cleveland. So he and Marjorie packed up and drove north.

  TWO

  “YOU CAN TALK YOUR WAY OUT OF ANYTHING”

  WESTINGHOUSE’S CLEVELAND TV station, KYW, was a freewheeling enterprise, not exactly a start-up, but a node in a burgeoning new field. TV production was booming, and not only in New York and Los Angeles. After deciding to acquire the station from NBC in 1955, Westinghouse launched an ambitious slate of new programs in Cleveland, including Eyewitness, a one-and-a-half-hour local news block, and Barnaby, a popular children’s program about an elf, starring the comedian Linn Sheldon.

  Chet Collier, the program manager of KYW-TV, was walking with Ailes around the second-floor offices one day when a voice called out “Roger!” Ailes turned to see his high school friend Launa Newman sitting behind a desk in a room full of young producers. They had not seen each other since their performance in Night of January 16th. Newman was now a talent coordinator and producer for a new ninety-minute afternoon variety-talk program. Westinghouse was preparing to syndicate it in five metropolitan markets.

  Forrest “Woody” Fraser, an excitable young producer from Chicago, had come up with the concept. A pioneer of daytime television, Fraser helped launch the short-lived afternoon variety shows Hi, Ladies!, Club 60, and Adults Only. Newman was the first person Fraser hired for the new show, for which he had come up with a novel format: a genial host paired each week with a different celebrity co-host. The two would spend more time interacting with each other than interviewing guests. Together, Fraser and Newman auditioned a half dozen candidates. The challenge was to find a permanent host who did not mind sharing the stage each week with names more famous than his own. “All they came up with was run-of-the-mill singers, out-of-work disk jockeys and a guy who could play ‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird’ on the piano,” the eventual winner wrote in his memoir. Then, they found him.

  One afternoon, Fraser was back in Chicago sitting in Henrici’s bar at the Merchandise Mart Building, where NBC had a dozen studios. A small television monitor mounted on the wall played a game show on mute. “Mike Douglas!” Fraser shouted, pointing at the host on the screen. Douglas, an affable big band singer, had worked with Fraser on several shows and Fraser thought he’d be perfect for the job. “The bartender looked up, looked at the TV, then gently corrected him,” Douglas recalled. “It was Merv Griffin on Play Your Hunch. Didn’t matter. Woody didn’t know Merv, he knew Mike. And he didn’t have Merv’s address, he had Mike’s. A few days later, I was on my way to Cleveland.”

  At that point, Douglas was a faded talent on the verge of quitting show business. He had reached some measure of fame performing with Kay Kyser, the bandleader and radio personality (it was Kyser who told him to change his last name from “Dowd” to “Douglas”), and even recorded the singing voice of Prince Charming in Disney’s Cinderella, but, far from hosting a game show, he was now buying and selling real estate in southern California to support his family and scraping together small gigs. Fraser’s invitation seemed to be his last shot. “A million to one,” Douglas told his wife, Genevieve.

  Westinghouse signed him up for an initial three-month stint at $400 per week, and on December 11, 1961, The Mike Douglas Show had its debut. “His geniality, ready wit, personable appearance and pleasant singing voice all conspired to show him off as a nimble pro,” the Cleveland Press television critic wrote the next day. The show’s popularity grew steadily, and in a year’s time it had become a smash hit.

  “You’re going to work on this show!” Launa Newman called out to Ailes as Collier led him down the hallway. “It’s the only job at the station. Write down ten ideas and give them to Woody. Please, please do it. We’ll have so much fun.”

  Starting out on The Mike Douglas Show as a $68-a-week prop boy, Ailes was rarely at home—just as he had in college, he devoted almost all his waking hours to the job, even though he was just a dogsbody, fetching whatever the show’s senior producers needed. “He would usually be gone before I got up,” recalled Marjorie’s younger sister, Kay, who lived with them for a month in their apartment in Euclid-Green, nine miles northeast of downtown. “He was very intense. He was like a whirling dervish. He was always going. He was always talking,” Debbie Miller, an associate producer who joined the show in 1965, said. “I was very tight with Roger. He and I were the low men on the totem pole.” His disheveled appearance became a fixture of the studio. “I remember him having a pen leak in his pocket, and the whole front of his shirt was full of ink,” Miller said. “His hair was always uncombed. His shirt tails were always hanging out, and his sleeves were always rolled up. He always wore black pants and a white shirt.”

  The hard work impressed his colleagues despite some initial mishaps. When Cleveland native Bob Hope first appeared on the show in 1963, Ailes held the cue cards, a job of significant responsibility.
But when they were live on-air, Ailes dropped the cards. Hope had to ad-lib. After the cameras stopped rolling, Hope went over to talk to Ailes. Newman saw fear in the young producer’s eyes. Hope, however, was gracious. “He gave him a pep talk. He thought it was adorable,” she said. The mistake didn’t hold Ailes back. He quickly developed the unassailable, blustering confidence that became his hallmark. One time a singer who was booked to perform noticed a rip in her stockings, just before going on air. Panicked, she fled to the bathroom and refused to come out. Ailes went in and dragged her into the studio and held her there until the camera’s red light clicked on. She performed flawlessly.

  For a young producer with limited experience, Ailes possessed formidable self-assurance. Not long after Ailes joined the staff in Cleveland, Douglas did a show with Sammy Davis Jr. Afterward, Douglas asked Ailes what he thought. “I didn’t say anything, but I have a terrible problem. I tell people what I think,” Ailes later said. “I’ve always had some natural tendency toward an aggressive posture.” So when Douglas kept asking, Ailes snapped. “Mike, I thought it was terrible,” he said. Ailes thought Douglas, who was in awe of Davis, had been dominated in the interview. “You’ve got to come back every day and be the star of the show, but you sat out there today and literally kissed his bottom. He took the whole show away from you. It’s nice to show you’re a nice guy, but you’re the one who has to control things when the show goes to a commercial. You’re the one who has to make it all happen.” His words landed like a sucker punch. “There were tears in his eyes,” Ailes recalled. But as Ailes remembered, his truth telling sealed their relationship.

  Though Ailes, with his bluff bonhomie, was a popular figure backstage, his colleagues sensed that, inside, other wheels were turning. “You didn’t know what he was really thinking,” Newman said. An emblem of his secrecy was his illness. “He used to come into work and he’d have these blood clots on his face,” Larry Rosen, Woody Fraser’s deputy, recalled. When he asked him what he had done to himself, Ailes would say, “I’m not supposed to shave with a razor.” Another time, Ailes told Rosen that the only thing he was afraid of was surgery. “It would be the only time he wouldn’t be able to control the bleeding,” Rosen recalled.

  Ailes’s marathon work habits caused tensions at home with Marge. He rarely invited colleagues over to his place, which was not set up for entertaining anyway. Marje did not otherwise get to know the Mike Douglas team (although Roger did cast her in one episode that featured finger painting). He was among the few staffers who were married. They were all young, most just out of college, and flush with ambition and ideas. Douglas, at the ripe old age of thirty-six when he joined the show, liked to call them “kids.”

  The producers on the show all felt they were making history—if the old guard still thought of television as radio with pictures, they were fusing the words and images, supercharging the medium and connecting with the viewer on a visceral level. “I felt like I was one of those guys who are today part of Silicon Valley,” Rift Fournier, a producer on the show, recalled. “All of us were part of something that could be compared today to doing Facebook.”

  After working grueling hours, they liked to blow off steam with pranks and antics, with Ailes often playing a central role. “He was always joking,” Miller recalled. One of the staff’s favorite activities was office chair basketball. As Ailes attempted to shoot the crumpled paper ball into the opposing team’s wastepaper basket, he did not hold back. “He’d come in the next day with bruises all over, his whole arm would be black,” Rosen recalled. One time, instead of playing basketball, the staff had a water balloon fight in the office. When they posed for a group photo, Ailes was soaked down to his white undershirt.

  The Mike Douglas Show immersed Ailes in the world of professional entertainment. From Fraser, he learned that great TV had more to do with drama—conflict, surprise, spontaneity—than with expensive sets and cutting-edge broadcasting technology. Fraser created drama on the show by putting Douglas and his weekly co-host through what Douglas called “an intentional daily hurricane.” Fraser said, “The most important ingredient for a daily show was to keep it fresh, and one way was to keep people off balance, not knowing what would happen, sitting on the edge of their seats. It’s when people get bored that they switch channels.” Producers brainstormed ways to throw in mystery guests or surprise songs and gags. Fraser insisted that every one of the show’s segments had to end with a “payoff” for the viewer. “There were times when we would sit around the bullpen and think for thirty minutes, ‘what’s the payoff?’ ” recalled a former producer, Robert LaPorta.

  Fraser had a clear vision for Douglas’s television persona, conceiving him as the opposite of Jack Paar, Johnny Carson’s predecessor on The Tonight Show. Paar opened with a monologue. Douglas opened with a song. The Ellie Frankel trio, a local jazz group, accompanied him in renditions of American standards. Fraser wanted Douglas to engage his celebrity guests in the manner of a wide-eyed fan, just as viewers at home would if given the opportunity. Where Paar was urbane and knowing, Mike Douglas was unaffected and enthusiastic, a mirror of his audience. “You can’t ignore New York and Los Angeles,” Douglas once told an interviewer, “but it’s ridiculous not to realize there’s a lot of real estate out there between them.”

  The show’s promotional tone and loyal audience quickly made it a required stop for movie stars, singers, activists, and politicians. The occasional ambushes notwithstanding, it was a safe place. By giving his celebrity co-hosts five ninety-minute on-air appearances in a week, Douglas provided them far more exposure than they could receive on any other show on television. The show expanded to forty-seven markets by early 1965 and was on its way to becoming the number-one-ranked daytime program in America.

  Like his audience, Douglas was curious but wary about the emerging culture. A good-natured conservative Catholic guide, Douglas helped to define for his viewers the boundary lines between the new culture and the old, as he introduced millions of American housewives to iconic figures including the Rolling Stones, Bill Cosby, and Martin Luther King. The show channeled Douglas’s Eisenhower-era values. “We wrote him simple questions, not probing questions. They were everywoman’s questions,” Larry Rosen said.

  The show was becoming a profit center, a major Westinghouse asset. But success changed the vibe among the tight-knit staff. Ailes and Fraser began to clash over production issues and tensions got so bad that Collier briefly reassigned Ailes to another job at KYW. The staff’s relationship with Douglas also soured. According to Ailes, Douglas had “the attention span of a mosquito,” and was a man who “never disciplined himself. He gave the impression of having been the kind of kid who always thought he could get around the teacher not by studying his homework, but by being funny or cute.” “We had to write every damn thing for him,” Larry Rosen said. “Usually, he didn’t read the book and he didn’t see the movies.” For the first few years, Douglas sat in the bullpen with the producers, but with his rising star status, Douglas was granted his own office.

  The ill feeling temporarily subsided when Westinghouse announced that KYW and the show would be relocating to Philadelphia. The company was gaining control of the NBC-owned station there. The staff was elated. Collier smoothed over the issues between Ailes and Fraser and agreed to bring Ailes back onto the Douglas staff.

  In August 1965, The Mike Douglas Show began broadcasting from a 140-seat basement studio in a six-story building tucked between a furrier and a furniture store, two blocks east of Rittenhouse Square. The location made it easier for Douglas’s producers to lure boldface names from New York, which was now just a limo’s drive away. Within two years, the show was broadcast in 171 markets across the country, attracting six million viewers and generating $10.5 million in revenue—about $75 million in today’s dollars. Douglas’s agent soon negotiated a contract that made his client “the highest paid performer on television.”

  The longer the show dominated the ratings, the less incline
d Douglas was to take Fraser’s advice. Fraser was often an imperious producer, as volatile as he was visionary. “Mike was really controlled by Woody,” Debbie Miller recalled. “Woody had a clipboard and would write out the questions, and Mike would read them. Hardly anything came out of Mike’s mouth that was not read to him. That was Roger’s training.” After the move to Philadelphia, Douglas began to discuss more openly his unhappiness with Fraser’s meddling manner. “The reason was very simple. Mike had become a star, but Woody had really created the show. Mike didn’t like the fact that Fraser treated him the same way as when he first got there,” Newman said.

  In Douglas’s memoir, I’ll Be Right Back, he recounts an argument he had with Fraser when Don Ameche, the film actor, was on-set. Fraser had scripted a skit in which Douglas and Ameche would swap a series of funny hats. During the rehearsal, Ameche told Fraser he did not want to participate. Fraser kept walking them through the segment.

  “You’re not listening, Woody,” Ameche told him. “I don’t wear funny hats.”

  Fraser’s temper flared. He appealed to Douglas for backup. Instead, Douglas shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t wear funny hats either.” Undermining Fraser publicly satisfied Douglas. “Yeah, I double-crossed him,” he later recalled. “I had been waiting for that chance for years.”

  Douglas soon made an effort to have him sidelined—creating an opening for Ailes. One morning before a taping, Chet Collier called Larry Rosen into a meeting. “Give us the lowdown on what’s going on with Woody Fraser,” Rosen remembered Collier saying. Collier’s question presented an opportunity: Rosen was in line to replace Fraser in the event of a shakeup. But Rosen was loyal to Fraser, who had given him his first job out of college. “They were trying to dig up enough dirt to get rid of him. I refused to talk to him at all about Woody,” Rosen later said. It was a decision that would have consequences.