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

by Sherman, Gabriel

  Unlike Rosen, Ailes had a skill for managing up, and he cultivated close working relationships with Collier and Douglas. “He became friends with Mike behind the scenes,” Launa Newman said. “They had a simpatico relationship because they were at the core similar. They were Republicans. Roger kissed the Catholic ring of the show.” Ailes had a sophisticated understanding of the unique needs of a star like Douglas. In public situations, Ailes would run cover for him. “It was a kind of game,” Ailes recalled. “I’d say, ‘Mike, you have to go now,’ and he’d bawl me out—and go, as he wanted to do anyway.”

  In June 1966, a month after his twenty-sixth birthday, Ailes seized his moment during one of the show’s regularly scheduled breaks. It had been a particularly cold spring in Philadelphia, so Debbie Miller and a friend hopped on a flight to Los Angeles for a last-minute vacation. They were joined shortly after by Launa Newman. Sitting one afternoon on the bed of their closet-sized room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Launa noticed a piece of paper being slipped under the door. She picked it up and gasped. Ailes had called the hotel and left a message for Miller. “The deal is done,” the note read. Fraser was leaving. Ailes was his replacement, not Larry Rosen.

  Newman called Fraser to ask him what was going on. He confirmed that he had been ousted. Officially, Fraser had been moved into a corporate role overseeing “talent and program development” for WBC Productions in New York. But being kicked upstairs was Westinghouse’s way of doing business. In 1967, Fraser left for a job at ABC producing This Morning with Dick Cavett. “That was a real palace coup,” Newman recalled. “You would never have known it if you watched from the outside.”

  Larry Rosen was at home with his wife when he got the call. “Are you sitting down now?” Fraser asked. “I’m gone, and Roger is the executive producer.”

  Rosen was stunned. He was four years older than Ailes and had been on the show much longer.

  “You gotta be kidding me.”

  “No, that’s what they did.”

  The next day, Rosen drove to Douglas’s home to confront him. “I was livid,” Rosen recalled. “I was humiliated. Roger had been there nowhere as long as I had.” Douglas told him it was his decision. “I hired Roger Ailes,” Douglas later said.

  How exactly Ailes leapfrogged Rosen to get Fraser’s job remained a matter of debate. One producer heard that during the week off, Ailes had gone to Collier with an ultimatum: he was going to leave the show unless he got the job over Rosen. In his book, You Are the Message, Ailes casts himself as the triumphant victor who stood up to a senior producer’s bullying. Fraser isn’t named, but is clearly identified in other ways, and described as a “brutal, sadistic personality” who would “pick out a staff member and browbeat him or her all day long.” Ailes writes that when it was his turn to face the producer’s wrath, he snapped. “I went right up to him, looked him in the eyes, and said, ‘That’s it. Don’t do that to me anymore.’ ” Fraser didn’t stop. “So I took a swing at him. It turned into a regular brawl. We broke up some office equipment and finally two guys dragged me into the men’s room to end the fiasco. I’d figured I just ruined my career. But actually it had quite the opposite effect.” Ailes goes on to say that “the company president” (presumably Collier) promoted him because of the incident. According to Ailes’s account, the executive told him, “Two years ago you proved that you’re nobody’s boy. You’re the only one who fought back.” When asked about the story, a half dozen staff members on The Mike Douglas Show could not recall such a brawl ever occurring.

  As executive producer, Ailes acted quickly to consolidate his control. Within days of Fraser’s ouster, Ailes moved into Fraser’s large office, a spacious expanse on the first floor. On the wall, he hung a framed quotation from Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech “Citizenship in a Republic,” one of his favorite sayings: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again; because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”

  On his first day in charge, Ailes fired Debbie Miller. He claimed she spread the story of his involvement in Fraser’s departure. Because of her, everyone on the staff believed that he had been promoted because of politics, not on the merits. “He was very blunt about it,” Miller recalled. “He said, ‘Somebody has to take the rap here.’ Someone had to save his own skin.” The experience stung, even years later after Miller had become a successful Hollywood agent. Larry Rosen and Launa Newman discussed quitting together in protest, but decided to delay a decision. “Roger always used to say to us, ‘You can justify anything. You can have your back against the wall and you can talk your way out of anything,’ ” producer Bob LaPorta recalled.

  In the hands of a less capable leader, the turmoil behind the camera could have derailed the show’s run. But Ailes was completely comfortable in his new role. “Roger weighed 160 pounds. He looked like Bobby Darin. He was a handsome young kid,” Bob LaPorta recalled. “He loved the sense of being an executive on the go.… During the show, he used to love to walk up the middle aisle and lean against the back wall and watch everything in front of him.” Ailes made sure key members of his team, like the affable director, Ernie Sherry, stayed put, but he demanded loyality in return. “You can come in anytime and yell and scream ‘Stupid!’ behind closed doors,” Ailes told Sherry. “But if you do it in front of the staff, I’ll kill you.” Unlike Fraser, he was not a micromanager. “He gave me a wide berth,” Launa Newman said. “Roger had two buttons, stop and go all out. He trusted you if you were on his team. You knew you had someone in your corner no one else had. On the other hand, if you weren’t, then God help you. You’d get the full measure of his wrath.”

  Ailes protected his staff. At one point, Mike Douglas’s wife, Genevieve, complained to Ailes in front of Mike that she wanted to fire Ernie Sherry because, as Ailes remembered, “he was grumpy and disruptive.”

  “Gen, if you’re going to run the show, try to make the meeting Monday at 8,” he said.

  Ailes impressed his staff with his resilience. During one production meeting in Ailes’s office, Johnson observed Ailes turning sickly as the producers went around the room pitching stories. “As we’re doing it I’m watching Roger get more and more pale,” Johnson recalled. When the meeting concluded, Johnson shut the door.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I might need a little help here,” Ailes said. His trousers from the waist down were soaked with blood.

  “Why didn’t you stop the meeting?” Johnson asked.

  Ailes shrugged his shoulders. “It was important to get through.”

  “So many people would have given in to it,” Johnson recalled. “It was clear that no way would he let himself be beaten by it.”

  Ailes dashed off memos to the staff like a seasoned boss. “I want everyone to be aware of the extra effort Larry Rosen put into the production,” he wrote in a memo on August 10, 1966. “I know it took at least 15 hours of work above and beyond the call of duty to produce a better segment than what the other networks have turned out with a staff of 15 to 20 people. This example of a thorough job is to be congratulated.”

  No issue seemed too small or too great to become a target of his increasingly outsized personality. As executive producer, Ailes contacted classical music buff Gregor Benko, who had cofounded a New York–based nonprofit that preserved rare recordings, seeking a copy of the organization’s newly released recording of Josef Hofmann performing a Chopin piano concerto. Benko wrote back explaining that he lacked the budget to send a free promotional copy, but could send one for $10. Ailes returned Benko’s letter, with his handwriting over it: “I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE A SMALL OUTFIT AND UNDERSTAND WHY YOU WILL REMAIN ONE.”

  The show had gone color eight months after Ailes’s promotion, but did not otherwise devia
te much from Fraser’s original formula. Once, when Barbara Walters appeared on the show, Ailes had her perform with acrobats. “When NBC found out about it they were very angry. They felt it lessened the seriousness of my reputation,” Walters recalled. “But the thing was, Roger was smart enough to know people are going to be interested.”

  In September 1967, producers planned a segment featuring Peyton Place star and Mike Douglas co-host Ryan O’Neal boxing with a famous fighter. They booked Joe Frazier, who would become heavyweight champion the next year, to spar with O’Neal in the ring. Floyd Patterson would referee and Muhammad Ali would do the announcing. But a day before the segment, Frazier canceled. “Roger got on the phone with him and just laid into him,” LaPorta recalled. Kenny Johnson, another producer, said, “He just reamed his ass.” Frazier relented, but he was angry. When he showed up at the set, he asked the producers “where’s this Ralph guy? I got a bone to pick with this guy named Ralph.” He had misheard Ailes’s name over the phone. A quick-thinking producer told Frazier that Ralph was out of the office that day. “We called Roger ‘Ralph’ after that,” LaPorta said.

  In the fall of 1967, Ailes and Marje paid $41,500 for a house on a wooded cul-de-sac in the aptly named suburb of Media, Pennsylvania. Around this time, Ailes was making $60,000 a year (more than six times what his father earned at his peak salary at Packard). He even began inviting the producers to the house for dinner, which offered them a glimpse of the tensions at home. Bob LaPorta was a guest one evening when Marje’s father was visiting. They were in the living room with the television on. Marje’s father told Roger to turn it off. “You’re not going to amount to anything,” LaPorta overheard him telling Ailes. LaPorta sensed Ailes wanted to prove him wrong. “It was an obsession for him to succeed, to pass everybody,” he said.

  During this period Ailes met a twenty-four-year-old journalist named Joe McGinniss. A columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, McGinniss was the youngest writer to have a regular column printed in a major American daily. McGinniss called Ailes about writing a piece on Mike Douglas. “Roger and I, we found out right away that we shared the same sense of humor,” he said. Ailes showed an instinct for how relationships with reporters could become valuable assets. He invited McGinniss and his wife, a quiet Catholic girl he’d met in Massachusetts at Holy Cross college, for dinner, and, not long afterward, they returned the invitation. “We always had a good time, my wife got along very well with Marje,” McGinniss recalled. When Ailes would visit, he liked to play with McGinniss’s two young children. “It was like Uncle Roger,” McGinniss said. Their domestic lives had another parallel. By 1967, both men, who had married young, knew their marriages were not working out. They would occasionally get dinner after work in Philadelphia and discuss their woes.

  Politically, Ailes seemed like a moderate to McGinniss, and on some issues, like civil rights, a progressive. “I would write columns that would get me called ‘nigger lover’ and Frank Rizzo, the police commissioner, would come after me,” McGinniss said. “Roger was always sending me a note or making a phone call sympathizing and congratulating me and saying we need more of this. He had some incipient commitment to civil rights in Philadelphia.” Ailes’s views on race may have been shaped by an experience he had working on a roadside construction crew one summer in high school. When a crew member came after Ailes with a shovel and “literally almost took his head off,” a friend recalled, “all of a sudden, this six-foot six-inch black dude stopped him in his tracks. Ailes and the guy had lunch together every day that summer. He said, ‘The guy saved my life.’ ”

  By 1968, Ailes and McGinniss saw each other less, as the frenzy of that year consumed them both. As if running the number one show in the country wasn’t enough, Ailes was accelerating his television career. A year after being named Douglas’s executive producer, he began pitching shows on the side. He formed two production companies called Bounty Enterprises and Project Five Productions with a group of Douglas producers. “I’m not sure Chet,” Ailes’s boss, “even knew about it,” LaPorta remembered. “He had so much ambition. You just went along with him.” Ailes filmed a couple of pilots—one with the mentalist the Amazing Kreskin in Camden, New Jersey, and another starring the singer Hal Frazier at the Hollywood Palace in Los Angeles. He also discussed doing a show with TV personality Dorothy Fuldheim, a onetime Douglas rival from Cleveland. LaPorta envisioned Fuldheim standing in the middle of a circular set in front of a large, glamorous photograph of the host in her twenties. He took as his inspiration the Man in the Arena quote, hanging in Ailes’s office. The show never got off the ground, but Ailes held on to LaPorta’s concept.

  Although Ailes had managed to quell rebellion after he was promoted into Fraser’s job, staff members eventually began to chafe at his imperiousness. For Larry Rosen, the trigger came in 1967 when the show was nominated for two Emmys in Program and Individual Achievements in Daytime Television. The nomination for programming achievement cited Rosen, but Ailes wanted the accolade. “Roger wanted only his name on the nomination. He appealed to the Academy to do so,” Rosen said. The citation did not change, but the day before the awards dinner in New York, Rosen found out that Ailes and Douglas would be the sole representatives of the show. Rosen took the train and showed up at the hotel where the dinner was taking place. “I walked right by the two of them,” he said. As it happened, Rosen did not win. After the ceremony, Douglas offered Rosen a ride back to Philadelphia with himself and Ailes. In the limo, Rosen vented his anger about his exclusion from the Emmys and the way Fraser had been dumped. “I’m convinced to this day it was all political. I think Woody was put on the block. I think it was Roger who did it,” Rosen recalled.

  A few weeks later, Rosen resigned to take a job in Los Angeles as a producer on The Outcasts, starring Don Murray and Otis Young. “When Roger took over, a lot of the warmth and camaraderie that existed with Woody disappeared,” Rosen told an interviewer after he left. “It was all politics and backstabbing. It became very uncomfortable.” Launa Newman upheld her pact to follow him out the door.

  THREE

  THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

  IT WAS ON The Mike Douglas Show that Ailes began to develop his ideas about politics as entertainment. Politicians were part of the show, a special subset of celebrity, and colleagues remembered Ailes closely observing the national figures who sat for interviews. During a 1968 segment with Bobby Kennedy in Washington, Ailes remarked that Kennedy, affable and confident off-camera, turned nervous and cold when the interview began. “Roger was just completely interested and intrigued by the mechanics of the ways these guys presented themselves and talked,” producer Kenny Johnson recalled. “They had a common ability to convince you that you were the most important person in their life.”

  Ailes already had an instinct for the wedge issue, and how a clever question could exploit it. During George Wallace’s appearance in 1967, Ailes prepped Douglas before the interview. He told Douglas to make sure to pin him down on the race issue. When the cameras started rolling, Ailes steered the conversation off camera. “I’d operate like a third base coach,” Ailes said. “Roger was really gunning for him,” Johnson recalled. “He really wanted to get Wallace on record in an interview saying he believed in segregation. I still remember Roger standing to one side with cue cards punching his fist and transmitting telepathically to Mike to have Wallace ‘answer the fucking question.’ At that moment in time, if you asked me what Roger’s politics were, I would have said he was a Democrat.”

  One morning in the summer of 1967, Ailes received an excited phone call from Launa Newman, shortly before she resigned. At the time, Newman was working out of an office in New York, and she had heard that Richard Nixon was going to be traveling to Philadelphia. After losing a run for U.S. president in 1960 and for California governor in 1962, he had moved to Manhattan and set up shop as a lawyer at Mudge, Rose. He was now laying the groundwork for a political comeback in the form of a presidential run, in the 1968 election.

/>   Newman thought Nixon would be a prize get, but as she disliked Nixon, she did not want to call his people herself.

  Newman urged Ailes to make the call. “Why don’t you book him?” she recalled asking.

  “I don’t do bookings.”

  “I don’t like him, you love him,” she teased. “You’re a Republican. I’m not. Why don’t you call him up and invite him on the show?”

  As it happened, Ailes had met Nixon briefly in Pittsburgh, but he didn’t want to call. “That’s your job.”

  “You know, one day you could work for him as his media adviser,” she said and hung up. “There was no such thing as a media adviser,” she later said. “I made it up because I didn’t want to call him.” Ailes took it from there.

  By this point, Ailes was soaking up multiple influences. Kenny Johnson recalled one conversation in Ailes’s office about the power of propaganda. Like Ailes, Johnson loved the theater. He had performed in high school plays and studied directing at Carnegie Tech, where he had become fascinated by the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, especially Triumph of the Will and Olympia. “I was blown away,” Johnson remembered. “I had an enormous hatred of Hitler, but when I saw Triumph of the Will, you find yourself thinking, ‘Wow, he’s pretty cool—no, wait, I hate these guys.’ ” Ailes told Johnson that he too was a big fan of Riefenstahl. “He thought her work was brilliant,” Johnson said. They talked about “how she made different versions of the films for different countries not only to aggrandize the Nazis but to throw a bone to the other folks.” Ailes was especially taken by Riefenstahl’s use of camera angles. “There’s so many subtle things you see in propaganda,” Johnson said. “If you put the camera below a subject’s eye height, it’s the ‘hero shot.’ It gives him dominance. We talked about the psychological impact of the placement of the camera.”