Roger Ailes: Off Camera Read Online Free PDF Page A

promised to stay in touch. “I’ve missed you, old friend,” he said, and the two men embraced. A secretary showed Pendleton out. Ailes looked out his window at Sixth Avenue for a long moment. Eight senior news executives were waiting for him in a nearby meeting room to go over the daily news budget. Ailes walked into the room and took his place at the head of the table, a man who sure as hell didn’t plan to stop planting any goddamn tomatoes.

CHAPTER TWO
    THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW
    When Roger Ailes returned to the campus of Ohio University after Christmas break his freshman year, he was disoriented and demoralized. His life in Warren had been wiped away, his family dispersed or sunk in depression, his personal belongings carted away. And Athens, Ohio, didn’t offer much in the way of distractions or stimulation. The town was a third of the size of Warren. The university, whose eight thousand students were mostly drawn from eastern Ohio, were there for an affordable, attainable, no-frills education. The school was intentionally dull and conventional. A promotional film of the time assured parents of prospective students that OU was dedicated to change, but not the kind of change “that is the result of uncertainty or willful experimentation.”
    The university boasted 285,000 volumes in its main library, but there is no indication that Roger Ailes troubled them much. He decided to become a fighter pilot, like his best friend, Doug Webster, and enrolled in the Air Force ROTC, but he washed out because of his medical record. He decided to major in radio and television studies because of his theatrical background. He worked for two years as station manager of WOUB, the campus radio station, and got on-air experience doing play-by-play of Ohio University football. He also opened the station every morning and hosted
Yawn Patrol
in tandem with a blind fellow student, Don Matthews.
    Ailes had gotten his first job at the station after receiving a tip from the station manager’s girlfriend, Marjorie White, that a position had opened up. He and Marjorie met at a church event on campus—she was a senior majoring in art; he was still a freshman. At the time, he was feeling lonely and confused by his parents’ abrupt split-up and he was drinking too much. Marjorie may have looked to him like a solution. He was impressed by her kindness and maturity and struck by the fact that she had been born and raised in Parkersburg, West Virginia. “My mother was born in Parkersburg,” he told me. “She’s the only other person I ever met from there. Hell, I don’t want to get too psychological, but it was an interesting coincidence.”
    Marjorie White found Roger interesting, too. She broke up with her boyfriend, and they became a couple. By this time, the ex-boyfriend was also Ailes’s boss, which was, he recalls, “awkward,” but not a deal breaker. The couple were married in a small chapel near the campus during his junior year. She took a job teaching art while he finished his degree in fine arts.
    In 1961, KYW-TV in Cleveland launched a daytime variety show hosted by a little-known song-and-dance man, Mike Douglas. The idea for the show came from Woody Fraser, a young producer at NBC’s Chicago affiliate. “I watched a lot of daytime TV at the time, and it was very boring. I came up with the idea of an afternoon talk show with a regular host and, every week, a big-name cohost, a program that could be syndicated to stations around the country,” Fraser says. He sold the concept to Westinghouse Broadcasting, which sent him to Cleveland to get it started. One of his first jobs was to select a host, and he wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by big names who wanted a low-paying gig on an experimental show out of Cleveland. Some of the candidates showed up for auditions drunk. Others had prickly personalities that didn’t appeal to a daytime audience. Douglas was handsome in a conventional way, affable and keen, and he got the job of a