SIX
A NEW STAGE
AILES WAS UNMOORED, both professionally and ideologically. Confidants observed in their friend a palpable sense of dislocation. “He was trying to figure out who he’d be when he grew up,” his brother, Robert, recalled of that time. “He tried his hand at everything.” Television and Republican politics had been the lodestars of Ailes’s twenties. In an accelerated adulthood, Ailes approached them with single-minded determination, relishing the power and financial freedom of the grown-up world, even as he rebelled against the strictures of its institutions, such as marriage and corporate hierarchies. Now as his thirty-first birthday approached, Ailes, for the first time, began to pursue other paths.
Though far from a flower child, Roger Ailes was a product of the 1960s, who came of age in that era of cultural tumult. And after the Nixon administration severed ties with him, he began a four-year period of experimentation, one that in hindsight seems a quixotic professional detour. As he kept a toehold in politics, paying his bills by running media strategy for a few congressional and gubernatorial campaigns, Ailes ventured into the New York theater scene. In post-1960s New York, the counterculture itself had been institutionalized, made into a profit center. Reinventing himself as an all-purpose impresario and agent, Ailes befriended not merely Democrats, but activist members of the American left.
Paul Turnley, a liberal Democrat and civil rights activist from Detroit, Michigan, became an early assistant to Ailes. “Roger never let politics get in the way of good people,” Turnley recalled. On May 15, 1971, Ailes was giving a speech at Indiana University, where Turnley, who was training to become a Jesuit priest, was taking graduate courses in communications. He was so captivated by Ailes’s lecture that he changed his mind about the priesthood and wrote Ailes a series of letters asking for a job. After Ailes hired him, they rarely discussed politics or Nixon, except in typically Ailesian terms. “He basically said that ‘Man in the Arena’ was his idea. Then, he’d say, ‘I got Nixon to take his stupid ramrod out of his ass.’ ”
Politics in those days for Ailes was more about making money than ideology. He hinted that he would consider working for Democrats. “I don’t have this burning thing to elect all Republicans,” he told The Washington Post in the winter of 1972. And Ailes did discreetly advise Andrew Stein, a twenty-six-year-old Democratic candidate who was seeking reelection to the New York State Assembly. On one occasion, Ailes arranged for a barber to meet them in his office. “Andy called Roger aside and whispers to him, ‘I have a hairpiece. You can’t do this,’ ” Turnley recalled. “And Roger just says, ‘we’ll do a little bit around the sides.’ ”
Even when he worked for Republicans, Ailes did not kowtow to the party’s handpicked candidates. His only statewide campaign work in 1972 that Turnley remembered was for Jim Holshouser, a thirty-seven-year-old moderate state representative in North Carolina, who owned a motel in his hometown of Boone. While he was considering whether to challenge James Gardner, the front-runner, in the Republican primary for governor, Holshouser flew to New York to consult with Ailes. At their first meeting, Turnley recalled, “Roger sat him down and said in no uncertain terms, ‘You’re gonna have to spend millions of dollars. I believe I can get you elected. But the downside is: you don’t have the party’s backing, you have to find your own funding, you’re the underdog, and your name recognition is very poor. So we have a real uphill battle. Your opponent is going to find everything that you possibly ever did your entire life and drag it through the press. You have to realize all these things.’ ” Ailes’s speech roused the young Republican. Right there in Ailes’s office, Holshouser picked up the phone and instructed his real estate broker to sell the property to raise cash. After developing a set of devastatingly effective attack ads, Ailes propelled Holshouser into office, making him the first Republican governor elected in the state since 1901.
Despite the success, the political work seemed to be little more than a side project. “I don’t think Roger had settled on a particular future at that juncture,” Turnley recalled.
As he had done at earlier turning points in his career—at the college radio station, on the Douglas set, and during the Nixon campaign—Ailes reached out to more senior hands for help. On February 12, 1971, he wrote to Jack Rourke for help landing a new gig for Kelly Garrett. “Enclosed is a picture and biography of a gal that my company now manages. She is west coast based and a very talented gal,” Ailes wrote. “I thought you might like to use her in one of your telethons.” Ailes also asked Rourke to help book Garrett at the Hilton with the big band leader Horace Heidt Jr. In the black and white photograph, Garrett posed amid a stand of palm trees. Her wide movie star smile, plunging neckline, and long raven hair that spilled gently over her bare shoulders were striking.
Kelly Garrett, born Ellen Boulton, was four years younger than Ailes. One of ten children, she grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a house without a television. She started singing around town in small venues. At age twenty-two, she married an actor after running off with him to chase her show business dreams in California. As Garrett’s cabaret career took off, her marriage foundered. She got a divorce in October 1970.
Rourke responded, offering to do whatever he could to help Garrett. “I’ll put you in touch with Horace Heidt, Jr.,” he wrote. But something more promising than a gig with Heidt was beckoning Kelly: Broadway. In 1972, Ailes raised money to mount his first theatrical production. Tapping into the 1960s cultural outwash, Ailes chose Mother Earth, a trippy, environmental-themed rock musical revue created by a group of social workers, academics, and antiwar protesters who founded the South Coast Repertory company in Costa Mesa, California. They were liberal outcasts in the heart of Richard Nixon country.
Costa Mesa, located about forty miles south of Los Angeles in the center of Orange County, was not exactly friendly territory for a progressive theater to open its doors in the summer of 1964. But the conservative spirit of the region did not deter the South Coast Repertory Company from attempting their experiment in an out-of-business marine supply store a few miles from John Wayne’s home. Over several months in 1969, members of the company developed a rock revue about pollution and overpopulation. Toni Tennille, an aspiring Alabama-born pop singer, wrote the music, and Ron Thronson, a social worker with a master’s degree in theater, wrote the script and the lyrics. Thronson also served as director. The musical, he wrote in the preface of the script, “has an element of mysticism.” Many songs were written “to put humans into proper perspective with our universe.”
The show opened the night of January 8, 1971, in front of a 150-person crowd. On a sparsely decorated stage, the cast performed their numbers in front of a projection of 35-millimeter slides showcasing photos taken by the theater’s photographer, Ken Shearer. “I am one with the soil of my birth,” they sang. What followed were dystopian scenes of overpopulated hellscapes ruined by pollution. One sketch, set on New Year’s Eve in 1999, advocated unfettered access to birth control, abortion, and assisted suicides. Near the beginning of the first act, a woman, described by the stage directions as “the embodiment of all that is mediocre, middle-class, and narrow,” tries to sow doubt. “Hello America! Who says pollution is bad for you? Who says it kills? Have YOU seen it kill?” But by the end of the play, she returns onstage having undergone a kind of spiritual transformation. “Brothers and sisters,” she says, “these poisons in our environment are the omens of an angry God. Get down on your knees and beg forgiveness, that these things might be borne away on the wings of penance.”