The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country (16 page)

Bloomgarden ushered Ailes into an entirely new artistic milieu. A first-generation Russian Jew, Bloomgarden produced plays in part as expressions of his deep belief in social justice.
During the height of McCarthyism, Bloomgarden attended a meeting of the Freedom from Fear Committee to mobilize support for the blacklisted “Hollywood Ten.”
Though Bloomgarden was never called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, his friends were. The experience left him with a conspiratorial view of politics and an acute suspicion of the American right.

“What the hell are you doing with people from Nixon?” Robert Cohen, Bloomgarden’s assistant, asked after learning of his association with Ailes.

“Forget about that. Look, I got a script,” Bloomgarden said.

Bloomgarden earned Ailes’s admiration from his very first suggestion. Dump Ray Golden, Bloomgarden said. “Roger knew he had found a soul mate when Kermit told him that,” Stephen Rosenfield, who worked for Ailes after Turnley, said. “His first suggestion is to fire the man who brought him in? That guy is only interested in success.”

B
ut Ailes couldn’t dump Golden. He held the rights. What Ailes could contribute was money.
To finance
Mother Earth
, Ailes reached out to Howard Butcher, the Philadelphia investment banker who had helped him launch REA Productions after the 1968 campaign. “The next thing I know, he calls me up and says, ‘I wanna do this show. It’s an ecology based show—a series of vignettes, put together by Kermit Bloomgarden,’ ” Butcher recalled. “I raised most of the money for the show. I should have known right there it wasn’t a Broadway show.”

Cast members struggled to muster enthusiasm for the production. The more Golden meddled, the worse the production became.
Frank Coombs, a dancer who performed in the show, described Golden as an “old, bald and sporadic” director, who turned
Mother Earth
into something “pretty wretched.”
Cast member John Bennett Perry, the TV actor and father of
Friends
star Matthew Perry, said, “It needed a different staging. Ray was out of his element.” The actors took their cues from Bloomgarden, who hobbled daily into the Belasco to observe the rehearsals.
“He’d sit in the back room and look like he was looking at a big bottle of vinegar,” the actor Rick Podell said. Ailes was less visible. “I think he was pushed around a bit by Ray,” Podell said. “He didn’t know how to bully his way in. Roger wasn’t versed in how to do it. Kermit was, but, by that time, he was so fucking old, he’d just sit in the back and scowl at us.”

By this point, Kelly Garrett was in rehearsals, having assumed Toni Tennille’s starring role.
“She was striking looking and a hell of a singer, but she had no Broadway experience that I knew of,” Perry recalled. The actors started to wonder.
“Roger made sure she had some solos,” Podell said. “People go,
‘Wait a minute. Is the producer fucking the leading lady?’
”
Frank Coombs, who was asked to help Garrett learn the choreography, saw the show as a springboard for her ambitions: “It was horrifying to have to teach Kelly how to dance. I wasn’t allowed to touch her. The only reason the show existed was Roger was dating Kelly Garrett, and Kelly needed Broadway work.”

Ailes appeared to bask in playing the part of a big-shot producer.
Inviting John Bennett Perry to his office one day, Ailes sat behind his expansive desk and doled out career advice. “What do you envision for yourself? If you get there, will you be happy?” Ailes asked him straight off.
Looking back, Podell recognized “a lot of latent Donald Trump in Roger.”
Robert Cohen thought Ailes could pass for a Mississippi river-boat gambler. He talked a mile a minute. “I’m Roger Ailes, how do you do?” he said in their first encounter at the Belasco. “You were in the Joe McGinniss book, I read about you,” Cohen replied. “Yeah, I sold The Trick to the American people,” Ailes said, referring to Nixon, “now I’m going to sell this, and it’s going to be
great
.”

Ailes worked his political and media connections to promote the show.
By staging a photo shoot of cast members riding bicycles around Manhattan wearing gas masks instead of helmets, Ailes got their picture in the newspaper.
Ailes made another plug to Joe McGinniss, when he called up from the ’72 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. On assignment for
The New York Times Magazine
, McGinniss was hoping for a pithy quote from Ailes about Nixon, but instead got a mouthful about
Mother Earth
. “It’s a great show. There’s at least three songs in it that will become classics,” Ailes boasted. “I don’t know anything about Broadway, but I’m learning. It’s much more exciting than politics. Nixon was O.K.—but all those state campaigns—wow! I mean, I finally got bored with South Dakota.”
Ailes also reached out to his White House contacts, having Len Garment spread word around the West Wing.

After the curtain came down on opening night, Ailes ran up to Cohen, gushing about the performance.

“What do you think?”

“What do I think about
what
?”

“Do you think we got a hit? I think we got a hit.”

Cohen was incredulous. Based on disappointing advance ticket sales, he had already announced to the cast that the show might close.

“Forget it, Roger. You’re opening with a closing notice up.”

The next morning,
The New York Times
delivered its verdict.
John Bennett Perry got a call from Ailes’s office. “Don’t read the paper,” he was told.
In a savage review, Clive Barnes called the music “at its worst characterless, and at its best—to use that chilling measure of air quality—acceptable.”

The cast did not dispute Barnes’s assessment.
“The second night of the show, there were eight sailors and a doughnut,” Podell recalled.

Ailes initially hoped that word-of-mouth marketing could overcome the harsh reviews. But Ailes soon confronted the embarrassing failure of the show, something the cast respected.
Within a week, Ailes was in Perry’s dressing room talking about the show’s future. “The question was to close it or not. I told him, ‘You might as well,’ ” Perry recalled. “He was resolved to do a good job even as it didn’t work.”
After just a dozen performances,
Mother Earth
closed.

Ailes recognized he had overreached.
“My eyes were too big for my stomach,” he remarked years later. Before bringing the show to New York, Ailes considered a smaller venue.
“The main discussion was whether we do it Off-Off Broadway or Broadway, but Roger never does things in halves,” his assistant Paul Turnley recalled. Butcher’s investors lost everything and Ailes’s business suffered. “He had put a lot of his own money in,” Turnley said. “When
Mother Earth
closed, he called me in and said, ‘I’m sorry I have to let you go. I’ll keep you on until you find a job. I’ll write you a glowing reference, so don’t worry about that.’ ”

Failure taught Ailes valuable lessons. He had agreed with Bloomgarden’s directive at the outset to fire Golden, but was powerless to do so because Golden held the rights. It was confirmation that control was a precondition for success. Failure also taught Ailes not to listen to doubters.
“Don’t ever chase critics, and don’t ever try to produce anything the critics are going to love,” Ailes recalled Bloomgarden telling him.

T
he box office disappointment of
Mother Earth
did not diminish Ailes’s appetite for the theater. In fact, in the months after
Mother Earth
closed, he pushed beyond the schmaltzy appeal of Broadway into the artistic swirl of New York’s vibrant Off-Off-Broadway scene.
As he would later tell it, Ailes often ventured, sometimes alone, into small playhouses at night to scout new productions—though the truth was less romantic.
He hired Robert Cohen on a freelance basis to read scripts and attend openings.

One day in February 1973, Cohen received a phone call from Bloomgarden, who excitedly told him about a new play he had just seen at the Circle Repertory Company in its early home on the Upper West Side. The play had been written by
Lanford Wilson, a cofounder of the company, and
depicted a group of drifters who make their home near the Baltimore railway station in a crumbling nineteenth-century hotel slated for demolition. It’s Memorial Day, but the characters are too far gone or strung-out
to notice. The marquee identifies the hotel as
Hot l Baltimore
, the title of Wilson’s play, as no one had bothered to replace the missing letter.

In the sinking fortunes of the hotel and its sad inhabitants, Wilson presented a wry meditation on American decline. Cohen, who attended the production the night Bloomgarden called, was impressed.
“I thought, My God, it’s like
The Iceman Cometh
. These are people on the margins of society. People you don’t want to look at. But they’re making you look at them. They’re making you see them. And they’re telling you truths about yourself and life and the society we live in.”

After the show, Cohen hustled out to a pay phone on Broadway and called Bloomgarden.

“Do you really like it?” Bloomgarden asked.

“Not only do I really like it, more important, I understand why
you
like it. Kermit, this is the kind of show you would have put on twenty years ago.”

“How much do you think it would cost to move the show to Broadway?”

“Don’t do it on Broadway,” Cohen said. “You’re not exactly going to sell theater tickets to the Hadassah of Great Neck.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“Do it big-time Off-Broadway.”

“Do you think we could get the money from Roger?”

“You just might.”

The next day at the office, Ailes reacted coolly to Cohen’s idea like the dozen other shows he had brought to him. “Roger, take my word for it,” Cohen said. “Kermit wants to do the play. He doesn’t have any money, but he knows what’s good. You want to do a play, you still want to juggle your other stuff, but you have the money. This is a marriage made in heaven, Roger. Take my word for it. If you don’t like this deal, I will quit right now and you’ll never see me again, I promise you.”

Ailes reluctantly agreed and Cohen got him a ticket for that night. During the show, Cohen waited for Ailes on the sidewalk.

“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.