Roger Ailes: Off Camera Read Online Free PDF

lifetime. The show ran in national syndication for more than twenty years.
    The Mike Douglas Show
started out as a lean operation. It aired five times a week, ninety minutes each day, and it had an initial staff of six. One of them was Launa Newman, a graduate of Northwestern University, who had gone to high school with Roger. Newman knew that Ailes had majored in television and was looking for a job, and she recommended him to Fraser, who invited Ailes to come in for an interview. Newman told him to bring one hundred show ideas with him, which he did.
    “The ideas were good and I told him, ‘You’re frigging hired,’” says Fraser. “He started as a segment producer. It was the best hire I’ve ever made.”
    Fraser was a demanding and abrasive boss, and he was aware that the show’s pace was taking a toll on the personal lives of its personnel. Marjorie and Roger lived in Cleveland, but he spent almost all of his time at the station. At one point Marjorie Ailes came to see Fraser to complain. “You’re ruining my life with these crazy hours,” she said. Fraser was unsympathetic. “I liked Marjorie,” he says. “She was very attractive and smart; she looked like the actress Jeanne Crain. For that matter, Roger was handsome back then. Good-looking couple. And she was right: Roger didn’t have much time for her. We basically worked from nine in the morning until eleven at night. That was the job. We did eight segments in every show, and I didn’t let anybody go home until they were all finished.”
    Ailes impressed Fraser—and Fraser’s boss Chet Collier—with his moxie and instinctive understanding of what made for good TV. “Look, it was easy to book Muhammad Ali back then [Ali, whose license was suspended, was out of boxing at the time], but it was a lot harder to do something interesting with him,” says Fraser. “We came up with the idea of getting him to stage a mock fight with Robert Goulet. Roger saw that it was a good idea, but he wanted to know the dynamic—what was the premise?
Why
would Ali fight a singer, what would the point be, where were the laughs. And he was able to put this together in a way that really worked.”
    Bowling was hot in the early sixties, and a representative of Brunswick suggested a segment on how to do it. Ailes liked the idea, but Fraser thought it would work only if there was a regulation lane. The next morning he came to work and found a truck in front of the studio. “Roger came up to me and said, ‘I got you the goddamn bowling lane.’ That sounds nuts, but it is what you have to do if you want to interest viewers and keep them. Roger and I fought sometimes—he called me a slave driver and an asshole—but we kept adding stations.”
    Not all of Ailes’s stunts worked. He booked a man who had twenty piranhas that devoured ham hocks. Fraser was skeptical, but Ailes promised that it would work as advertised. The day of the show, he began to worry, and decided to test it out with a trial run. The fish ate Ailes’s ham hocks. But they didn’t repeat the stunt when on the show. “Nothing happened,” Fraser recalls. “Roger had killed their damn appetite.”
    Fraser was a hell-raiser, and he liked rowdy games. He often challenged the staff to office basketball, one-on-one. Ailes didn’t usually participate, but one day he agreed to play. He drove to the basket and Fraser, a towering man, hip-checked him into the corner of a desk. Suddenly Ailes stopped and sat down. “I’ve got this thing,” he said. “It’s a blood disease.” He pulled down his pants and displayed a purple thigh. No one on the show had any idea that he was a hemophiliac. “It must have hurt like hell but he just went back to work,” says Fraser. “He didn’t even go home early that day, and he never mentioned it again.”
    In 1967, Woody Fraser received an offer to produce
The Dick Cavett Show
. Chet Collier, the head of Group W Productions, made Ailes executive producer of
The Mike