Roger Ailes: Off Camera Read Online Free PDF Page B

Douglas Show
. Both Fraser and Collier would play important roles in Ailes’s later career at Fox. But for now, he was twenty-five years old and in charge of the most successful afternoon show on television.
    In August 1965, the Douglas show moved to Philadelphia. Marjorie and Roger set up housekeeping. She took a job in a bookstore; he maintained his fearsome work schedule.
    “Roger Ailes was a legend at a very young age,” says Marvin Kalb, who was a reporter at CBS News at the time. “His success at the Douglas show struck a chord. He was talked about in the seventies in New York, in television circles.”
    Ailes came out of Ohio with Middle American taste in entertainment. He loved meeting and working with old-time stars like Judy Garland, Liberace, Jack Benny, and Pearl Bailey. But the Douglas show kept up with the times, which, in the sixties, meant flirting with the counterculture. Ailes wasn’t an immediate fan. “The Rolling Stones were on one time,” he recalls. “When I first saw them, I thought they were no-talent shitheads. But then I heard them rehearse, and I realized that they were pretty good. They really worked hard, and I admire that.” The Douglas show also became known as a place that welcomed black artists. Ailes produced shows with James Brown, Dick Gregory, Ray Charles, and Chuck Berry, to name a few. After the death of Dick Clark, Aretha Franklin said that
American Bandstand
had been important, but the place she really loved was
The Mike Douglas Show
.
    Barbra Streisand was just breaking out when she came to Ohio to do a week as a guest host on the show. The gig paid just $1,000. To sweeten the deal, Ailes booked her into a small nightclub on the west side of Cleveland, where she appeared with just a rhythm section. “There was a table to the right of the stage that was really noisy,” Ailes remembers. “One of the loudest was a priest in a clerical collar. At one point, Streisand stopped in midsong and said, ‘Shut the fuck up, Father,’ and then went back to the song.” Forty years later, the scene still makes Ailes laugh.
    Another, less profane guest was Martin Luther King Jr. “He came on three or four times,” Ailes says. “He’d sit in my office waiting to go on and we’d smoke cigarettes and chat about personal things or what was happening politically. I really don’t remember anything specific. I wish I could.”
    Bill Cosby was still an up-and-coming comic in 1964, when he appeared on the Douglas show. Ailes and Woody Fraser wanted him to do a weeklong stint as cohost, but Westinghouse balked. “I was told by a senior executive straight out, ‘You can’t put that nigger on the air. It will kill us in the South,’” says Ailes. Cosby went on anyway, and the show managed to survive almost twenty years. Ailes got a sense of satisfaction from winning the fight with Westinghouse, and a good anecdote to boot. “Back then I sometimes wrote comedy sketches for the show,” he recalls. “I wrote one about two guys playing chess and what they were really thinking as the game went on. A few years later I was watching
Hollywood Palace
and damn if Cosby wasn’t doing the bit. Not bad, getting a piece of comedy stolen by Bill Cosby.”
    Malcolm X was a little too far out of the mainstream for an afternoon variety show, especially after he applauded the assassination of John F. Kennedy as “chickens coming home to roost.” But Ailes produced several interviews with Malcolm for a public affairs series on KTW. “The first time he came to the studio, he wouldn’t even shake hands with me because I’m white,” says Ailes. But after Malcolm performed the
hajj
, and broke with the Nation of Islam, he became less militantly antiwhite. When he came into the studio, he was pleasant and had his picture taken with Ailes. Six weeks later, he was assassinated in New York by Nation of Islam gunmen.
    Forty years later, Ailes found himself at a banquet seated next to Congressman Elijah