Roger Ailes: Off Camera Read online

  Bob Ailes grew up poor and working class, a displaced person in the social order of his small town. He found work at the Packard plant and became a foreman—a step up from the line, but far from the expectations of the son of a doctor. At twenty-nine he married Donna Cunningham, a local beauty queen ten years his junior. They had three children—Robert Jr. (known as “Rob”), Roger, and Donna Jean (called “Jeannie”)—at three-year intervals. Bob was thirty-three when Roger was born.

  Bob Ailes was a gregarious man. He called everyone “son” because he had trouble remembering names, but he was well liked and, within his own social realm, clubbable. He became a 32nd degree Mason, served as past Master of the Ali Baba Grotto of the Shriner’s lodge, and was a freelance ward heeler for local politicians. He was also a hard worker who supplemented his income painting houses and expected his sons to pitch in. Outwardly he seemed like a guy who took life as it came, says Rob Ailes, Roger’s older brother, but inwardly he seethed with resentment.

  “One time I visited my father at work and saw him getting dressed down by some college boy executive at work,” Roger recalls. “I asked him why he was taking that kind of shit. I remember exactly what he said. He said, ‘I’m taking the guff so that someday you will be one of the guys giving the orders.’” Bob Ailes was young Roger’s hero, and the humiliation made a deep impression. It is one of life’s satisfactions that, as head of Fox News, he has some six thousand people reporting to him, including quite of lot of college boys.

  Roger remembers his father with admiration as a man’s man with an explosive temper. “One time we were in the car and a guy in a truck cut us off and gave my mother the finger,” he told me. “My dad caught up with him at a stoplight, got over to the car, dragged the guy through the open window, and kicked his ass.” But often the anger was directed at his children. “When he got mad, he beat me,” says Ailes in a matter-of-fact tone. “He used an electric cord, a belt, whatever was handy.”

  “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was standard parenting back then, but Roger Ailes was not a standard child. He suffered from hemophilia. It made life precarious. Even minor injuries could set off unstoppable bleeding. When Roger was still a preschooler, he bit his tongue and almost died. “Blood was dripping out of his mouth like an icicle,” recalls his brother. There was nothing that could be done in Warren, so Bob Ailes put him in the family car and raced to the Cleveland Clinic, sixty miles northwest, where doctors managed to stanch the bleeding and save Roger’s life. Bob Ailes’s coworkers from Packard came to the clinic to donate blood. “Always remember,” Bob Ailes told his son, “you’ve got blue collar in your veins.”

  “Roger was always hurting himself,” says his brother. “One time he fell off the fence and his arm swelled to about four times its usual size. Another time he was riding his bike, plowed through an intersection, and wound up in the hospital with internal bleeding. This was before immunization, so between the usual childhood contagious diseases and the hemophilia, he missed a lot of school.” Their grandmother kept a diary, and in it she noted that Roger had received eighty-five injections in one three-week stint in the hospital. His body turned purple. “That’s a lot of shots for a little kid,” Ailes says.

  Many men would have treated a boy like Roger with extreme caution. Bob Ailes didn’t do that. He wanted his son to live a normal life, and in a place like Warren, Ohio, that meant being tough. “Dad never cut Roger any slack because of his illness,” says Rob Ailes. “Maybe he felt guilty about the bruises and the welts when he was done beating us, maybe it worried him later on that he had done it, I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it. It seemed natural. Today he would go to jail for something like that, and we would have wound up in foster care.”

  In second grade, Roger was hit by a car. He didn’t bleed out, but his legs were badly injured. Bob Ailes did not intend to have a cripple for a son. He took Roger out to the Warren G. Harding High School track and told him to start running. “They had been using the track as a fairgrounds and it was covered with horseshit,” says Ailes. “I pointed that out to my father and he said, ‘Don’t fall down and you won’t get any on you.’”

  Bob Ailes was a hard man, no doubt, but he was also capable of unexpected kindness. As a teenager Roger took out the family car—a very considerable privilege—and crashed it. “I came home scared to tell my old man,” he recalls. “He was sitting in the living room reading the newspaper when I walked in, and I had to just spit it out.”

  “Are you hurt?” Bob Ailes asked without putting down the paper.

  “No.”

  “Is anyone hurt?”

  “No.”

  “A car is just a thing. We can fix it,” said Bob Ailes. That was the end of the matter. More than fifty years later, Ailes tells the story with a mixture of relief and amazement.

  “I think Roger was in denial about his disease,” says Rob Ailes, who is a doctor. “It’s very well known in the medical literature that hemophiliacs tend to be daredevils, the kind of guys who wind up jumping over canyons on motorcycles. Roger fit that bill. He was like a child diabetic who didn’t want to take his medicine. He challenged life.”

  As a young kid, Roger got into a lot of fights, and he didn’t mind taking on bigger kids. In junior high school he went out for football. His mother thought it was crazy, but Bob Ailes gave his son permission to play. By that time, Roger and he had an extremely close relationship. “He let Roger make his own restrictions,” says Rob. “As he got older, Roger realized himself what he could and couldn’t do.” He quit football when he saw how dangerous it was, but he didn’t stop taking chances. On a Boy Scout trek through Canada, he and some friends jumped into a river and saved a couple whose canoe had capsized.

  These exploits didn’t make Donna Cunningham Ailes happy. She didn’t want her sons to grow up to be roughnecks. Her father, a pious Pentecostal Christian, migrated to Warren from West Virginia. Her parents never even made it to high school, and she had social and cultural aspirations for her children. Bob Ailes, no matter his current place, was a doctor’s son. When her father died, Donna left the Pentecostal church for the more socially established First Presbyterian Church, an impressive structure located on Warren’s “Millionaires’ Row.” She saw to it that the Ailes children had elocution and piano lessons, and the boys sometimes played duets in church. When Roger injured his legs, her idea of rehab was forcing him to take ballet and tap dance classes with his sister, an indignity for which he has yet to forgive her. To finance all this self-improvement, Donna made lace doilies and embroidered hankies that the Ailes children sold door-to-door, much to their chagrin.

  Bob Ailes was indifferent to his sons’ school performance; Donna was a different story. She demanded good grades. Rob, the dutiful son, obliged with straight A’s and an acceptance to Oberlin College. Roger wasn’t interested. “He wouldn’t play her game,” says Rob. “He was the creative type, and they didn’t give grades for that. Kids like him were considered lazy or stupid. But he didn’t care. His attitude was, the hell with it, I don’t need these classes and I don’t give a damn about grades. He wouldn’t budge and eventually he forced our mother to compromise.”

  When Roger finished high school, his father took him aside and told him that he would have to leave. “Go out and get a job. Join the service. Or if you want to go to college, for every dollar you put up, I’ll try to match it with a dollar,” he said. Roger was shocked and hurt. He thought he was being cast out as a further lesson in Bob Ailes’s tough love. But he was mistaken. This was part of a larger family drama he didn’t fully grasp.

  Roger decided to go to college at Ohio University. It was cheap, it had a reputation as a party school, and he could get in with less than stellar grades. His parents drove up to Athens and dropped him off. When he came home for Christmas break, he found his house sold and his belongings discarded. His mother had gone west with Joe Urban, a New York reporter turned fund-
raiser for the American Cancer Society whom she met at a convention. “My mother was what you could call self-absorbed,” says Rob. “She did what suited her.”

  Bob Ailes fell into a deep depression and moved in with his own mother. Seeing him that way was shocking, but Roger tried not to take sides. “They both had a case,” he says. “My dad was ten years older, a factory guy, and she was very smart and very stylish. And he had a temper. Joe was a sweet man. I didn’t blame anyone for anything.” In 1989, Ailes wrote his only book, a how-to communication guide titled You Are the Message, and dedicated it to his wife, his mother, and Joe Urban.

  Ailes, homeless, spent his freshman winter break at the home of his best friend, Doug Webster, who was on his way to becoming a naval aviator and who died a few years later, during the Vietnam War, in the Sea of Japan. When Roger left Warren, after the New Year, it was for good.

  • • •

  The first time I met Roger Ailes we talked about his childhood and he mentioned Doug Webster and what a blow it had been to lose him. And he talked about another old friend, still very much alive but, as far as Ailes knew, gone forever. Austin Pendleton was a scion of one of Warren’s wealthier families. His mother, Frances Manchester Pendleton, was an amateur actress who belonged to a local theatrical company. “Austin and I were very close friends,” Ailes recalled. “We used to play together in his backyard, which was on a stream, and we had sleepovers at one another’s houses.” In junior high school, Pendleton formed a theater company of his own, and Ailes sometimes appeared in the shows. “Austin was a natural talent,” Ailes told me. “He went to Yale and became a really great actor and director. I miss him.”

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “I hear he lives in New York, but I haven’t seen him in years,” Ailes said. “I imagine his friends think I’m the devil. I wouldn’t want to embarrass him by getting in touch.”

  I went home and Googled “Austin Pendleton,” who was, indeed, alive and well and living in New York. He had appeared in more than thirty movies—in his first, Skidoo, he shared a memorable scene with Groucho Marx, in a rowboat on the Pacific Ocean smoking a joint—and dozens of plays on and off Broadway. He directed Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton in Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes at the Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld) and taught acting at the HB Studio in New York and directing for a few years at the New School. Roger was right: his old playmate was at the heart of the progressive artistic community of Manhattan.

  I sent Pendleton an e-mail, telling him I was working on a book about Ailes and asking if he would be willing to talk to me. He replied immediately. “I certainly will. Roger is a fascinating, wonderful character in my life.”

  Ailes was surprised and pleased to hear that he was still in the good graces of his old pal. He invited Austin to come by Fox for lunch. I ran into Pendleton in the lobby, where he was being chatted up by an earnest young actor. Pendleton is small and very thin, with a crown of unkempt white hair, and was dressed in a plaid work shirt, faded jeans, and boots, one of which lacked a lace. Ailes was waiting for us in a private dining room on the third floor. They embraced warmly and began, as long-separated childhood friends do, by sizing up each other’s physical condition. They assured each other that they had never looked better. Ailes patted his stomach and explained that he could no longer exercise after once again having wrecked his leg, this time in a skydiving incident in California. “I had a hip replaced and I guess I should again, but I think I’ll just hang on to this one until I’m finished,” he said.

  Pendleton nodded sympathetically, although he looked like he could run a marathon. A waiter appeared. Ailes often dines on tuna sandwiches and potato chips at working lunches, but this time he laid on a feast of butternut squash soup and a choice of entrees.

  They felt each other out with a series of anecdotes about the lives they had led since Warren. Ailes recounted a dinner party he had recently attended with Shirley MacLaine and Al Pacino. “He just stared at me the whole time. Probably invited me to see what a real, live conservative looks like up close,” he said. It was an opening for Pendleton but he didn’t take it.

  “He does that with everyone,” Pendleton assured him. “He just studies people. It can be disconcerting.”

  “Very strange,” Ailes said. It seemed to me that Pendleton had left Ailes’s implicit question—if he was considered persona non grata in the actor’s world—unanswered. So I asked, “Are you embarrassed to tell your friends that you know Roger?”

  “Not at all,” said Pendleton. “I’ve been dining out on it for years. Everyone is very curious.”

  “I bet,” Ailes said, but he sounded pleased.

  Pendleton asked what it had been like working for Nixon. “I actually felt sorry for him,” Ailes said. “His dad was brutal to him. He was ugly and awkward. By the time I met him, he had the 1960 election stolen from him by Kennedy, so he was a little bit paranoid, and somewhat weird. He once told me that the hardest part of being president was coming down to breakfast in the morning and explaining the horrendous cartoons Herblock did of him in the Washington Post to his daughters.”

  Pendleton offered a recollection of his own, a raunchy backstage encounter at a Washington theater between Liz Taylor, Lillian Hellman, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and actress Maureen Stapleton that ended with the punch line “She fucked Max!” Ailes burst into laughter. Here they were, two guys from Warren, swapping tales about presidents and movie stars. But, more than a reunion of old friends, it seemed to me like a rare meeting between Ailes and the ghost of Roger past. He was hungry for memories of his own boyhood, and delighted when Pendleton recalled the mock election in a long-forgotten civics class.

  “I was for Stevenson,” he said, “until I heard Roger’s speech for Eisenhower. I can still remember what you said. He was so informed and lucid, he knew so much, he made me want to switch to Ike.”

  “I figured a guy who had organized the invasion of Europe was probably qualified to be president,” said Ailes. “I’m surprised it made an impression. You were mostly interested in putting on shows. I remember your mom used to pick the plays, but at a certain point you would just take over, tell everybody what to do and where to stand and how to act.”

  “She was a good producer,” said Pendleton.

  “Watching her cast those shows had a big influence on how I pick talent. And, you know, I produced some plays when I got to New York.”

  “The Hot l Baltimore,” said Pendleton. “You won some awards for that one, right?”

  Ailes nodded. The Hot l Baltimore won three Obies between 1973 and 1976, as well as a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play of 1973. “Long time ago,” he said. “You know what I miss, Austin? I miss those days back in Warren. Sometimes I can close my eyes and see my family after church, my grandfather saying a prayer before Sunday dinner. It’s like that Kris Kristofferson song,” Ailes said, “the one Janis Joplin recorded. ‘I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday.’ I still feel that way. . . .”

  The door of the small private dining room flew open, and there stood Rupert Murdoch. He had been in the news lately, flying back and forth to London trying to put out the fires ignited by accusations of bribery and illegal hacking by his tabloid News of the World. It hadn’t gone well. Murdoch’s son James had just stepped down from control of the British newspaper operations, and Murdoch himself had been questioned by a public inquiry committee. He had looked old and a little confused in that appearance, but he seemed fresh now, trim and full of energy. He gave Pendleton and me a firm handshake, although he clearly had no idea who we were.

  “Well, Roger, I just stopped in to say hello,” he said. “Saw a great-looking woman, by the way, when I came in this morning. Never saw her before. Wonder who she was?”

  Ailes asked what time he had seen her. “About nine thirty, I should think. She left the building carrying a
garment bag.”

  “Must be the girl who reads the news on Imus,” said Ailes. “She was with him on the radio. She wanted to do television, too, so I decided to give her a shot.”

  “Beautiful woman,” said Murdoch. “Well done.”

  Ailes didn’t seem particularly interested; Fox is loaded with former beauty queens. “You going to be around?” he asked.

  “Off to London again for a week and then on to the Far East,” Murdoch said. “You can reach me if something important comes up.” He nodded to Pendleton and me and closed the door.

  “Rupert is a very interesting guy,” Ailes said. “He’s grateful to me because I don’t need anything. Sometimes he drops by and plops down on the couch and we make each other laugh. When this crap in London started, he asked me if we had anything like that going on here.”

  A very good question, I thought. Pendleton looked like he thought so, too.

  “I told him there’s nothing here that’s a problem,” Ailes said. “Nothing at all. We don’t do crooked things here—bug conversations and bribe police. That’s not part of our culture.”

  “Of course not,” said Pendleton. “We’re from Warren, Ohio. We weren’t raised that way.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or not. He’s an actor, after all.

  Talk circled back to the old days. Ailes was glad to know that the theater company founded by Pendleton’s mother is still putting on plays. He confessed that he doesn’t get back to Warren often; that speech to the Veterans Memorial had been his last visit. “I used to go back when my father was alive,” he said. “You know, he remarried.”

  Pendleton didn’t know. Bob Ailes wasn’t part of his family’s social circle.