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

by Sherman, Gabriel

“You got a deal,” Ailes declared when he saw Cohen on the street. Ailes called Bloomgarden from the pay phone and told him he would back the show.

  Bloomgarden and Ailes soon secured the rights to stage the play at the Circle in the Square Theatre, a 299-seat venue in Greenwich Village. Ailes committed to raising $30,000 to finance the production. Once again he tapped Howard Butcher, who in turn leveraged his network of wealthy Pennsylvania investors. “Roger called me up and he said, ‘I have another one. This one is an Off-Broadway show.’ ” It was a bold pitch, as Mother Earth had vaporized the banker’s investments just months earlier. But Ailes was a persuasive salesman: Butcher agreed to vouch for Ailes and raise the funds. “I called up a lot of clients and friends. It was a hard sell,” Butcher remembered. “It was off the beaten track for all my clients.”

  But the investors stood to gain financially if the show was a success: the equity in the show was divided between Ailes, Bloomgarden, and their investors. Lanford Wilson and Marshall Mason, the show’s director, were rebuffed. “We went to Kermit and we wanted to put in $5,000,” Mason later said, “that way we’d realize a profit for it. But Kermit said, ‘I can’t let you do that because I’ve sold out the entire investment.’ We said, ‘How could this be? And he said, ‘the money all came from Roger Ailes.’ ” Mason signed a paltry contract. “It was a slightly bitter point,” Mason remembered. “Roger Ailes put us on the map, but he was taking money out of our mouths because we weren’t invested in it.”

  Opening night came on March 22, 1973, six weeks after the premiere on the Upper West Side. “Everything that went onto the stage was real,” recalled Conchata Ferrell, who played a foul-mouthed prostitute named April Green. “The champagne was real, the hot plate worked. It was Lanford’s vision.” Word spread across town about the new play. “The crazies are good to listen to! Wilson writes them with persuasive humor and dry accuracy,” Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Times. A parade of notables, including New York mayor John Lindsay and Francis Ford Coppola, soon attended.

  Ailes proved to be an imaginative marketer. He expressed keen interest in the design of the play’s poster. Robert Cohen lobbied to hire the downtown graphic artist David Byrd, who had drawn the original poster for Woodstock. Bloomgarden balked at the budget of $1,000, but Ailes pushed for it. Byrd did a graphic of a neon sign with the title in hot pink type. Ailes’s and Bloomgarden’s names were below those of Mason and Wilson. “They both complained to me their names weren’t big enough,” Cohen said.

  Ailes also struck deals with companies for product placement, including Benson & Hedges and Coca-Cola, long before the practice was publicly known. A few days after the play opened, Robert Cohen wrote to Malt-O-Meal in Minneapolis to sign up another deal. “We are the producers of the new off-Broadway play called The Hot l Baltimore which has just opened to marvelous reviews here in New York,” the pitch stated. “In the show two characters enjoy your product Soy Ahoy Barbequed Flavored Soybeans.” (While the hotel residents drink champagne, one character pulls two large jars of snacks from his bag. The prostitute April, expecting nuts, tastes a handful and exclaims, “Jesus Christ, they’re soybeans.” The character counters, “They’re great for you. And they’re good.”) The pitch continued: “Your jar and label are prominently displayed to a full house of 299 people every night of the week.” Cohen proposed a deal to credit Malt-O-Meal in the program and offered as an incentive to “make tickets available to you and your distributors in this area for their own use on pre-determined occasions.”

  Ailes’s behind-the-scenes role made him a mysterious and somewhat glamorous figure to the cast. “What a gorgeous looking guy he was,” recalled Mari Gorman, who played the jean-jacket-wearing lesbian Jackie. “We hardly saw Roger at the beginning, Kermit was much more involved,” the actress Stephanie Gordon said. Shortly after the show opened, Ailes summoned Gordon, who played the prostitute Suzy, to his Midtown office on a Sunday afternoon. He told her he wanted to photograph her in character wearing nothing but a towel. The promotional photo would highlight a pivotal scene at the end of Act One, in which Suzy appears on the stairs wearing only a towel and wails to everyone in the lobby that her client beat her and then locked her out of her room. When April starts laughing, Suzy slaps the towel at her and stands naked, while people laugh and stare.

  Gordon, who was dating cast mate Jonathan Hogan, was unsettled by the invitation. She had grown up in a conservative family and could barely pull off the scene on stage. Making her way up to Ailes’s office, Gordon started to panic. “It was dark. It wasn’t my usual milieu. I remember thinking, ‘What am I doing? Am I going to take off my clothes in front of Roger Ailes, whom I don’t even know? Why am I by myself in a deserted office building with this guy?’ ” But her fears were not realized. “I got undressed in another room,” she said. “He made me feel comfortable. He was lovely.” After Ailes snapped the pictures, he called Gordon a cab and sent her home. Later, he framed a print for her and signed it. “Don’t throw in the towel, you’re a great actress. Roger Ailes.”

  Hot l Baltimore was the rarest type of hit—both artistically and commercially successful with a wide, middlebrow audience. In 1973, Hot l Baltimore earned three Obies and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play. By the end of its run, the play generated a profit of nearly $400,000, a staggering sum for an Off-Broadway production. Agreements were signed to stage regional productions all over the country. ABC began developing the play into a sitcom starring James Cromwell. Hot l Baltimore’s success made the careers of Mason and Wilson, who in 1980 won the Pulitzer Prize for his comedy Talley’s Folly. It was also the high-water mark of the odd Bloomgarden-Ailes partnership.

  Mari Gorman recalled Roger Ailes fondly. Watching Fox News later on television, she said she “didn’t think it was the same person for a long time.” Stephanie Gordon struggled to reconcile the network’s more brutish qualities with the empathy of Lanford Wilson’s writing. “This play is about prostitutes, addicts, lesbians, and lost people, perennial losers, people who have given up on life. It’s the end of the American dream. These are the last people in the world Roger Ailes is interested in. Why would he produce this play?” Marshall Mason, who lives in Mexico and has served as vice chair of a local chapter of Democrats Abroad, was also dumbfounded. “When he became the Roger Ailes we know and hate now, I thought, ‘Oh my God, was this the same guy who was our producer?’ ” Conchata Ferrell, who went on to play the brassy housekeeper on the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, grasped for an answer. “Fundamentally, what the play is about is the American character. Even when they’re losing, they don’t lie down. It’s about the idea that we didn’t use to as a people just quit. I’m a liberal and I believe that. Roger is a conservative and he believes that. Everything Lanford wrote was deeply American.”

  Ailes was proud of The Hot l Baltimore. In his own telling, he was the one who discovered the play. He told a reporter in 2003 that he had been so taken with the show he ran backstage and paid the producers $500 on the spot to option the rights. At any rate, in the wake of the play’s success, he had the funds to hire back a deputy.

  His new employee, Stephen Rosenfield, had worked for Hubert Humphrey’s chief speechwriter during the 1968 campaign before completing an MFA degree in directing at Stanford. When Rosenfield showed up for his first day of work he saw what a bare-bones operation the company really was. “At that point it was just Roger and his secretary,” Rosenfield said. But Ailes presented a very different image in public. During one live television interview Ailes gave around this time, Rosenfield remembered him standing up and walking off the set before the segment was completed. “He said to the host, ‘Great to talk to you, I gotta run.’ He left. It looked like this guy had a schedule to keep. And he didn’t have anything going on! I thought, Man, what a great exit. He thought about how to control the atmosphere.”

  Rosenfield labored, as Cohen had, to steer his boss’s tastes in a modern direction. In December 1973, Ailes anno
unced that he had acquired the rights to a script titled Nice Girls. “The premise was that ‘nice girls’ didn’t talk about sexual things, and so the play was about nice girls who were sexually candid,” Rosenfield recalled. “I told Roger women do talk about sex, and everyone knows it! This isn’t going to be an oh-my-God thing.” A decade had already passed since Mary McCarthy’s bestselling novel The Group shattered the image of urban women as shy prudes.

  As Nice Girls stalled, Ailes shifted his attention to a play that Bloomgarden discovered downtown. The quirky production, Ionescopade, a pastiche of short vaudevillian sketches based on the writings of the French-Romanian absurdist Eugène Ionesco, had received a favorable review in The New York Times. Ailes leaned on his investor list, a diverse mix of characters from his time in Philadelphia, Washington, and Hollywood. Tatnall Lea Hillman, an heir from the Main Line, went in for $2,400; Jack Calkins, the executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, contributed $1,200. Kelly Garrett gave $600. Ailes’s company chipped in $400.

  He was going full cylinder. Riding high with hopes for Ionescopade and flush with success from Hot l Baltimore, Ailes found a path back to television paved in the most glamorous and profitable brand of American liberalism: Camelot.

  Robert Kennedy Jr. was in his sophomore year at Harvard in early 1974, when Lem Billings, Jack Kennedy’s prep school roommate and Kennedy family confidant, came to him with an unorthodox proposition: Roger Ailes, Richard Nixon’s former TV man, wanted to make him a television star. Ailes, he explained, had read an article by Bobby Jr. about the overthrow of Chile’s Marxist president Salvador Allende. Kennedy had traveled to South America to report the story. On account of his interest in international affairs, Ailes was proposing that Kennedy travel with him to Africa to produce a wildlife television documentary.

  The movie’s origins involved the kind of creative and logistical challenges that Ailes thrived on. A wealthy American businessman had money tied up in Kenya after investing in a failed Nairobi life insurance company. The Kenyan government blocked him from taking his remaining assets out of the country. The businessman asked Ailes for his advice. “Roger’s words were, ‘we can bring the money out in a can,’ ” Kennedy recalled, meaning that funds could be used to finance a film that they could then sell in the United States. The documentary was Ailes’s latest experiment intermingling celebrity and politics. Bobby Jr. represented America’s closest approximation of a young royal, a bankable personality to take the television viewer to an exotic, wild land.

  Naturally, Billings was wary about Bobby Jr.’s association with Ailes. “Lem Billings, I would say, vigorously disliked Richard Nixon,” Kennedy said. But a three-hour meeting in New York with Ailes put the young Kennedy at ease. “We joked about Nixon,” he recalled. After Kennedy signed on as a creative consultant and narrator for $1,500, Ailes promised him a spectacular summer vacation tracking wildebeest herds and hunting lions with spear-carrying Masai warriors. The pair traveled around the Rift Valley with a camera crew of Pakistani Muslims. “I had a lot of laughs with Roger,” Kennedy said. “He was sensitive to other cultures and to conservation and not at all an ideologue.”

  But Ailes had a few headaches in store before he and Kennedy flew off to Africa. On April 25, Ionescopade opened at Theater Four on West 55th Street and bombed. Bloomgarden made the mistake he had sought to avoid with The Hot l Baltimore: he took a low-budget production that was a hit and changed it. After fourteen performances, the show closed.

  Meanwhile, Ailes received what appeared like thrilling news. In April, Kelly Garrett got a call to read for the lead in David Merrick’s $850,000 production of Mack & Mabel, a musical about the fiery romance between Hollywood director Mack Sennett and the actress Mabel Normand. Gower Champion, the musical’s director, had cycled through two female leads, first Penny Fuller, then Marcia Rodd, and was looking for a replacement. After winning a Theatre World Award for her singing in Mother Earth, Garrett was performing in another musical revue, Words and Music, at the John Golden Theatre, which Champion saw and liked.

  Ailes pushed Garrett to go for the part. The role would require substantial acting, crucial experience for Garrett. Ailes asked Rosenfield to coach Garrett over the weekend. “I don’t think we should do this. Gower Champion isn’t the type of person who’s interested in nurturing some neophyte,” Rosenfield cautioned. Ailes refused to back down.

  “Are you seriously asking me to tell Kelly Garrett not to go to a callback to a David Merrick–Gower Champion musical?”

  To please his boss, Rosenfield swallowed his reservations. “It was the one time Roger and I really disagreed with each other,” he recalled. At the time, he was unaware that Ailes and Garrett were romantically involved. “I didn’t know anything, and it was just the two of us at the company. And I knew Kelly really well. And she kept it a secret. Roger felt it would not be in either of their best interests if it looked like he was promoting his girlfriend.”

  The next day, Garrett went to Rosenfield’s studio apartment to rehearse two scenes over and over. Rosenfield’s assistance paid off: Champion picked Garrett to star opposite Robert Preston at the Majestic Theatre. It was poised to be her breakout moment. Within days, however, Garrett was dismissed. “That one broke my heart,” Champion told a reporter. “That face, that voice. But this role takes a lot of deep acting.” The embarrassing public setback, as Rosenfield later put it, “ended her possibility as a Broadway star.” A young actress named Bernadette Peters replaced her. “As far as I’m concerned, it was their loss,” Ailes fired back. “I just don’t have any respect for the way they handled it, it was really tacky.”

  Ailes’s increasingly tough, angry public persona was accompanied by growing fears about his physical safety. He went to elaborate steps to protect himself. After he returned with Kennedy from Africa, Ailes was arrested in New York City for illegally possessing a handgun. When news of the arrest surfaced years later, colleagues of Ailes claimed that he had been using the weapon to protect a Kennedy. It felt like an excuse to Bobby Jr. “If I had known he was actually carrying a gun to protect me, I would have told him to get rid of it. It wasn’t plausible,” he recalled. (Ailes pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was given a conditional discharge.)

  In truth, Ailes had a gun long before his association with Kennedy. After Mother Earth, Ailes called a young acquaintance into his office. “I wanna show you something,” he said, flashing his gun. “I found him to be a scary guy,” the acquaintance recalled. When Ailes moved to New York, the city was in the grip of a precipitous downslide, as residents fled for the suburbs, and crime spiked. The blocks around Times Square, where Ailes spent much of his time, were populated by peep shows and prostitutes, which turned the city into a national symbol of dysfunction. In response to the city’s hostile environment, Ailes channeled the lessons of his father: Violence never solves anything, but the threat of violence can be very useful. It was advice he gave to his brother when he came to visit during this period. “I was walking across midtown when I see a pair of eyes staring out from behind an alley, the eyes are looking right at me,” Robert recalled. “Roger had told me that if you put your head down and pretend not to notice, that’s the victim’s posture and you’re in deep trouble.” Robert put his hand in his pocket as if he had a gun. “I looked straight at the eyeballs and kept walking like I was an undercover cop. The guy stayed in the alley and never moved.”

  Ailes kept others at a distance, spending many nights at his Central Park South apartment with Kelly Garrett and her lapdog, Squeaker. Joe McGinniss was a rare close friend, possibly because McGinniss was in a similar situation, having left, but not yet divorced, his wife, and living with a beautiful young book editor, Nancy Doherty, whom he had met at a party for The Selling of the President.

  At the time, Joe and Nancy made their home in a charming eighteenth-century house in rural Stockton, New Jersey. On weekends, Ailes and Garrett would often visit them. “We were people to whom he could bri
ng Kelly for the weekend, and it wasn’t going to be judgmental,” McGinniss speculated. “We weren’t going to say Roger Ailes is dating a client.” Doherty, who bonded with Garrett over their experience growing up in large families, remembered Garrett being very affectionate with Ailes. In press interviews, Garrett swooned over him. “Do I ever get nervous about performing?” she told a reporter. “I used to, but not so much now. Principally because I have such faith in my manager Roger Ailes, who makes all the right decisions for me—about everything.” Doherty found it telling that Marjorie never came up in conversation. McGinniss suspected that Ailes felt guilty about Marje. “Roger and I didn’t talk about shared guilt a lot but I think it was an ongoing bond between us,” he said. “With Roger and Kelly, the other complicating thing was, she was his big star-client, and he was her manager. And it wasn’t really working the way they were hoping that it would. That’s a complicated way to have a relationship.”

  Ailes’s brooding moods seemed to consume him. “Roger was very unhappy at that time. He was physically sick,” McGinniss said. Doherty recalled Ailes frequently coming down with strep throat. “After a visit from Roger, you’d count on getting sick, basically,” she said. His whole body underwent a change. He gained weight and grew a beard. “He was eating to ease his pain,” McGinniss said. It was hard for McGinniss to understand what, besides Kelly, was causing his friend so much agony. “He talked about his blue-collar father. He talked about hemophilia,” McGinniss said. “But he wasn’t telling terrible stories about being mistreated as a child or how he hated his father. He had a lot of respect for his father. His father had taught him these hard-core values.”

  McGinniss vividly recalled a conversation with Ailes around this time that would stay with him for years to come. “He told me he was worried about all this pent-up anger he had inside of him. He didn’t know what was going to happen.”