Fraser had a clear vision for Douglas’s television persona, conceiving him as the opposite of Jack Paar, Johnny Carson’s predecessor on The Tonight Show. Paar opened with a monologue. Douglas opened with a song. The Ellie Frankel trio, a local jazz group, accompanied him in renditions of American standards. Fraser wanted Douglas to engage his celebrity guests in the manner of a wide-eyed fan, just as viewers at home would if given the opportunity. Where Paar was urbane and knowing, Mike Douglas was unaffected and enthusiastic, a mirror of his audience. “You can’t ignore New York and Los Angeles,” Douglas once told an interviewer, “but it’s ridiculous not to realize there’s a lot of real estate out there between them.”
The show’s promotional tone and loyal audience quickly made it a required stop for movie stars, singers, activists, and politicians. The occasional ambushes notwithstanding, it was a safe place. By giving his celebrity co-hosts five ninety-minute on-air appearances in a week, Douglas provided them far more exposure than they could receive on any other show on television. The show expanded to forty-seven markets by early 1965 and was on its way to becoming the number-one-ranked daytime program in America.
Like his audience, Douglas was curious but wary about the emerging culture. A good-natured conservative Catholic guide, Douglas helped to define for his viewers the boundary lines between the new culture and the old, as he introduced millions of American housewives to iconic figures including the Rolling Stones, Bill Cosby, and Martin Luther King. The show channeled Douglas’s Eisenhower-era values. “We wrote him simple questions, not probing questions. They were everywoman’s questions,” Larry Rosen said.
The show was becoming a profit center, a major Westinghouse asset. But success changed the vibe among the tight-knit staff. Ailes and Fraser began to clash over production issues and tensions got so bad that Collier briefly reassigned Ailes to another job at KYW. The staff’s relationship with Douglas also soured. According to Ailes, Douglas had “the attention span of a mosquito,” and was a man who “never disciplined himself. He gave the impression of having been the kind of kid who always thought he could get around the teacher not by studying his homework, but by being funny or cute.” “We had to write every damn thing for him,” Larry Rosen said. “Usually, he didn’t read the book and he didn’t see the movies.” For the first few years, Douglas sat in the bullpen with the producers, but with his rising star status, Douglas was granted his own office.
The ill feeling temporarily subsided when Westinghouse announced that KYW and the show would be relocating to Philadelphia. The company was gaining control of the NBC-owned station there. The staff was elated. Collier smoothed over the issues between Ailes and Fraser and agreed to bring Ailes back onto the Douglas staff.
In August 1965, The Mike Douglas Show began broadcasting from a 140-seat basement studio in a six-story building tucked between a furrier and a furniture store, two blocks east of Rittenhouse Square. The location made it easier for Douglas’s producers to lure boldface names from New York, which was now just a limo’s drive away. Within two years, the show was broadcast in 171 markets across the country, attracting six million viewers and generating $10.5 million in revenue—about $75 million in today’s dollars. Douglas’s agent soon negotiated a contract that made his client “the highest paid performer on television.”
The longer the show dominated the ratings, the less inclined Douglas was to take Fraser’s advice. Fraser was often an imperious producer, as volatile as he was visionary. “Mike was really controlled by Woody,” Debbie Miller recalled. “Woody had a clipboard and would write out the questions, and Mike would read them. Hardly anything came out of Mike’s mouth that was not read to him. That was Roger’s training.” After the move to Philadelphia, Douglas began to discuss more openly his unhappiness with Fraser’s meddling manner. “The reason was very simple. Mike had become a star, but Woody had really created the show. Mike didn’t like the fact that Fraser treated him the same way as when he first got there,” Newman said.
In Douglas’s memoir, I’ll Be Right Back, he recounts an argument he had with Fraser when Don Ameche, the film actor, was on-set. Fraser had scripted a skit in which Douglas and Ameche would swap a series of funny hats. During the rehearsal, Ameche told Fraser he did not want to participate. Fraser kept walking them through the segment.
“You’re not listening, Woody,” Ameche told him. “I don’t wear funny hats.”
Fraser’s temper flared. He appealed to Douglas for backup. Instead, Douglas shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t wear funny hats either.” Undermining Fraser publicly satisfied Douglas. “Yeah, I double-crossed him,” he later recalled. “I had been waiting for that chance for years.”
Douglas soon made an effort to have him sidelined—creating an opening for Ailes. One morning before a taping, Chet Collier called Larry Rosen into a meeting. “Give us the lowdown on what’s going on with Woody Fraser,” Rosen remembered Collier saying. Collier’s question presented an opportunity: Rosen was in line to replace Fraser in the event of a shakeup. But Rosen was loyal to Fraser, who had given him his first job out of college. “They were trying to dig up enough dirt to get rid of him. I refused to talk to him at all about Woody,” Rosen later said. It was a decision that would have consequences.
Unlike Rosen, Ailes had a skill for managing up, and he cultivated close working relationships with Collier and Douglas. “He became friends with Mike behind the scenes,” Launa Newman said. “They had a simpatico relationship because they were at the core similar. They were Republicans. Roger kissed the Catholic ring of the show.” Ailes had a sophisticated understanding of the unique needs of a star like Douglas. In public situations, Ailes would run cover for him. “It was a kind of game,” Ailes recalled. “I’d say, ‘Mike, you have to go now,’ and he’d bawl me out—and go, as he wanted to do anyway.”
In June 1966, a month after his twenty-sixth birthday, Ailes seized his moment during one of the show’s regularly scheduled breaks. It had been a particularly cold spring in Philadelphia, so Debbie Miller and a friend hopped on a flight to Los Angeles for a last-minute vacation. They were joined shortly after by Launa Newman. Sitting one afternoon on the bed of their closet-sized room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Launa noticed a piece of paper being slipped under the door. She picked it up and gasped. Ailes had called the hotel and left a message for Miller. “The deal is done,” the note read. Fraser was leaving. Ailes was his replacement, not Larry Rosen.
Newman called Fraser to ask him what was going on. He confirmed that he had been ousted. Officially, Fraser had been moved into a corporate role overseeing “talent and program development” for WBC Productions in New York. But being kicked upstairs was Westinghouse’s way of doing business. In 1967, Fraser left for a job at ABC producing This Morning with Dick Cavett. “That was a real palace coup,” Newman recalled. “You would never have known it if you watched from the outside.”
Larry Rosen was at home with his wife when he got the call. “Are you sitting down now?” Fraser asked. “I’m gone, and Roger is the executive producer.”
Rosen was stunned. He was four years older than Ailes and had been on the show much longer.
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“No, that’s what they did.”
The next day, Rosen drove to Douglas’s home to confront him. “I was livid,” Rosen recalled. “I was humiliated. Roger had been there nowhere as long as I had.” Douglas told him it was his decision. “I hired Roger Ailes,” Douglas later said.
How exactly Ailes leapfrogged Rosen to get Fraser’s job remained a matter of debate. One producer heard that during the week off, Ailes had gone to Collier with an ultimatum: he was going to leave the show unless he got the job over Rosen. In his book, You Are the Message, Ailes casts himself as the triumphant victor who stood up to a senior producer’s bullying. Fraser isn’t named, but is clearly identified in other ways, and described as a “brutal, sadistic personality” who would “pick out a staff member and browbeat him or her all day long.” Ailes writes that when it was his turn to face the producer’s wrath, he snapped. “I went right up to him, looked him in the eyes, and said, ‘That’s it. Don’t do that to me anymore.’ ” Fraser didn’t stop. “So I took a swing at him. It turned into a regular brawl. We broke up some office equipment and finally two guys dragged me into the men’s room to end the fiasco. I’d figured I just ruined my career. But actually it had quite the opposite effect.” Ailes goes on to say that “the company president” (presumably Collier) promoted him because of the incident. According to Ailes’s account, the executive told him, “Two years ago you proved that you’re nobody’s boy. You’re the only one who fought back.” When asked about the story, a half dozen staff members on The Mike Douglas Show could not recall such a brawl ever occurring.