As executive producer, Ailes acted quickly to consolidate his control. Within days of Fraser’s ouster, Ailes moved into Fraser’s large office, a spacious expanse on the first floor. On the wall, he hung a framed quotation from Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech “Citizenship in a Republic,” one of his favorite sayings: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again; because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”
On his first day in charge, Ailes fired Debbie Miller. He claimed she spread the story of his involvement in Fraser’s departure. Because of her, everyone on the staff believed that he had been promoted because of politics, not on the merits. “He was very blunt about it,” Miller recalled. “He said, ‘Somebody has to take the rap here.’ Someone had to save his own skin.” The experience stung, even years later after Miller had become a successful Hollywood agent. Larry Rosen and Launa Newman discussed quitting together in protest, but decided to delay a decision. “Roger always used to say to us, ‘You can justify anything. You can have your back against the wall and you can talk your way out of anything,’ ” producer Bob LaPorta recalled.
In the hands of a less capable leader, the turmoil behind the camera could have derailed the show’s run. But Ailes was completely comfortable in his new role. “Roger weighed 160 pounds. He looked like Bobby Darin. He was a handsome young kid,” Bob LaPorta recalled. “He loved the sense of being an executive on the go.… During the show, he used to love to walk up the middle aisle and lean against the back wall and watch everything in front of him.” Ailes made sure key members of his team, like the affable director, Ernie Sherry, stayed put, but he demanded loyality in return. “You can come in anytime and yell and scream ‘Stupid!’ behind closed doors,” Ailes told Sherry. “But if you do it in front of the staff, I’ll kill you.” Unlike Fraser, he was not a micromanager. “He gave me a wide berth,” Launa Newman said. “Roger had two buttons, stop and go all out. He trusted you if you were on his team. You knew you had someone in your corner no one else had. On the other hand, if you weren’t, then God help you. You’d get the full measure of his wrath.”
Ailes protected his staff. At one point, Mike Douglas’s wife, Genevieve, complained to Ailes in front of Mike that she wanted to fire Ernie Sherry because, as Ailes remembered, “he was grumpy and disruptive.”
“Gen, if you’re going to run the show, try to make the meeting Monday at 8,” he said.
Ailes impressed his staff with his resilience. During one production meeting in Ailes’s office, Johnson observed Ailes turning sickly as the producers went around the room pitching stories. “As we’re doing it I’m watching Roger get more and more pale,” Johnson recalled. When the meeting concluded, Johnson shut the door.
“Are you okay?”
“I might need a little help here,” Ailes said. His trousers from the waist down were soaked with blood.
“Why didn’t you stop the meeting?” Johnson asked.
Ailes shrugged his shoulders. “It was important to get through.”
“So many people would have given in to it,” Johnson recalled. “It was clear that no way would he let himself be beaten by it.”
Ailes dashed off memos to the staff like a seasoned boss. “I want everyone to be aware of the extra effort Larry Rosen put into the production,” he wrote in a memo on August 10, 1966. “I know it took at least 15 hours of work above and beyond the call of duty to produce a better segment than what the other networks have turned out with a staff of 15 to 20 people. This example of a thorough job is to be congratulated.”
No issue seemed too small or too great to become a target of his increasingly outsized personality. As executive producer, Ailes contacted classical music buff Gregor Benko, who had cofounded a New York–based nonprofit that preserved rare recordings, seeking a copy of the organization’s newly released recording of Josef Hofmann performing a Chopin piano concerto. Benko wrote back explaining that he lacked the budget to send a free promotional copy, but could send one for $10. Ailes returned Benko’s letter, with his handwriting over it: “I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU ARE A SMALL OUTFIT AND UNDERSTAND WHY YOU WILL REMAIN ONE.”
The show had gone color eight months after Ailes’s promotion, but did not otherwise deviate much from Fraser’s original formula. Once, when Barbara Walters appeared on the show, Ailes had her perform with acrobats. “When NBC found out about it they were very angry. They felt it lessened the seriousness of my reputation,” Walters recalled. “But the thing was, Roger was smart enough to know people are going to be interested.”
In September 1967, producers planned a segment featuring Peyton Place star and Mike Douglas co-host Ryan O’Neal boxing with a famous fighter. They booked Joe Frazier, who would become heavyweight champion the next year, to spar with O’Neal in the ring. Floyd Patterson would referee and Muhammad Ali would do the announcing. But a day before the segment, Frazier canceled. “Roger got on the phone with him and just laid into him,” LaPorta recalled. Kenny Johnson, another producer, said, “He just reamed his ass.” Frazier relented, but he was angry. When he showed up at the set, he asked the producers “where’s this Ralph guy? I got a bone to pick with this guy named Ralph.” He had misheard Ailes’s name over the phone. A quick-thinking producer told Frazier that Ralph was out of the office that day. “We called Roger ‘Ralph’ after that,” LaPorta said.
In the fall of 1967, Ailes and Marje paid $41,500 for a house on a wooded cul-de-sac in the aptly named suburb of Media, Pennsylvania. Around this time, Ailes was making $60,000 a year (more than six times what his father earned at his peak salary at Packard). He even began inviting the producers to the house for dinner, which offered them a glimpse of the tensions at home. Bob LaPorta was a guest one evening when Marje’s father was visiting. They were in the living room with the television on. Marje’s father told Roger to turn it off. “You’re not going to amount to anything,” LaPorta overheard him telling Ailes. LaPorta sensed Ailes wanted to prove him wrong. “It was an obsession for him to succeed, to pass everybody,” he said.