At curtain call, the actors knew the show was going to be a hit. “After we ended, it was dead silent. We were just standing there, and then all of a sudden, the audience erupted,” South Coast cofounder and cast member Jim dePriest recalled. “They ran onto the stage, and everyone was hugging each other. They were just raving about the show.” By the time Mother Earth closed five weeks later, bigger venues clamored to book the show. After successful runs in San Francisco and Los Angeles, veteran lyricist Ray Golden, a writer for the Marx Brothers whose credits included the Broadway revues Catch a Star! and Alive and Kicking, made a hard sell to Tennille and Thronson to sell him the rights to bring Mother Earth to Broadway’s Belasco Theatre, a one-thousand-seat playhouse on West 44th Street.
Ailes was in on the deal. He knew Golden through the Mike Douglas world, and saw Mother Earth, at his urging, during its West Coast run. “Roger came back and said, we oughta do it on Broadway,” Paul Turnley remembered. “I think he liked that it had that Hair quality.” Over lunch at Musso & Frank, the iconic Hollywood restaurant, Ailes and Golden worked the young songwriters. They assured Thronson and Tennille they would not meddle in the musical when they brought it—and the show’s cast—to Broadway. Thronson and Tennille agreed to sell the rights, but it soon became evident that Golden, who took over as director, in addition to being producer, had his own plans to modify the show for a mainstream audience.
A couple of months before the show was scheduled to open on October 19, 1972, Tennille refused to perform Golden’s version. “It turned into a borscht belt musical,” South Coast cofounder Martin Benson said. “We got bamboozled,” Tennille later told the press. With Tennille out, Golden needed a new female lead and a serious cash infusion. Ailes, with connections to wealthy investors and a client looking for her Broadway star turn, could provide both.
As the Broadway debut of Mother Earth approached, Ailes recognized his need for an experienced guide to steer him through the unique folkways of the New York theater world. A year earlier, at Golden’s suggestion, he met the Broadway producer Kermit Bloomgarden at a party in Bloomgarden’s apartment on Central Park West. A decade had passed since the faded power broker’s last hit, but Bloomgarden’s career had taken him to the pinnacle of American theater. In the 1940s and 1950s, he collaborated closely with friends Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman. His string of critical and commercial successes, in addition to Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Hellman’s The Little Foxes, included Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, the original Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank, Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, and Stephen Sondheim’s musical Anyone Can Whistle. By the early 1970s, however, Bloomgarden had fallen on hard times. His right leg had been amputated, a consequence of arteriosclerosis, and his bills were piling up. When Ailes and Ray Golden went to him for advice on Mother Earth, Bloomgarden agreed to sign on as a consulting producer. “Given the circumstance he was in, the opportunity to create some income advising someone on a show was appealing,” his son John Bloomgarden recalled.
Bloomgarden ushered Ailes into an entirely new artistic milieu. A first-generation Russian Jew, Bloomgarden produced plays in part as expressions of his deep belief in social justice. During the height of McCarthyism, Bloomgarden attended a meeting of the Freedom from Fear Committee to mobilize support for the blacklisted “Hollywood Ten.” Though Bloomgarden was never called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, his friends were. The experience left him with a conspiratorial view of politics and an acute suspicion of the American right.
“What the hell are you doing with people from Nixon?” Robert Cohen, Bloomgarden’s assistant, asked after learning of his association with Ailes.
“Forget about that. Look, I got a script,” Bloomgarden said.
Bloomgarden earned Ailes’s admiration from his very first suggestion. Dump Ray Golden, Bloomgarden said. “Roger knew he had found a soul mate when Kermit told him that,” Stephen Rosenfield, who worked for Ailes after Turnley, said. “His first suggestion is to fire the man who brought him in? That guy is only interested in success.”
But Ailes couldn’t dump Golden. He held the rights. What Ailes could contribute was money. To finance Mother Earth, Ailes reached out to Howard Butcher, the Philadelphia investment banker who had helped him launch REA Productions after the 1968 campaign. “The next thing I know, he calls me up and says, ‘I wanna do this show. It’s an ecology based show—a series of vignettes, put together by Kermit Bloomgarden,’ ” Butcher recalled. “I raised most of the money for the show. I should have known right there it wasn’t a Broadway show.”
Cast members struggled to muster enthusiasm for the production. The more Golden meddled, the worse the production became. Frank Coombs, a dancer who performed in the show, described Golden as an “old, bald and sporadic” director, who turned Mother Earth into something “pretty wretched.” Cast member John Bennett Perry, the TV actor and father of Friends star Matthew Perry, said, “It needed a different staging. Ray was out of his element.” The actors took their cues from Bloomgarden, who hobbled daily into the Belasco to observe the rehearsals. “He’d sit in the back room and look like he was looking at a big bottle of vinegar,” the actor Rick Podell said. Ailes was less visible. “I think he was pushed around a bit by Ray,” Podell said. “He didn’t know how to bully his way in. Roger wasn’t versed in how to do it. Kermit was, but, by that time, he was so fucking old, he’d just sit in the back and scowl at us.”
By this point, Kelly Garrett was in rehearsals, having assumed Toni Tennille’s starring role. “She was striking looking and a hell of a singer, but she had no Broadway experience that I knew of,” Perry recalled. The actors started to wonder. “Roger made sure she had some solos,” Podell said. “People go, ‘Wait a minute. Is the producer fucking the leading lady?’ ” Frank Coombs, who was asked to help Garrett learn the choreography, saw the show as a springboard for her ambitions: “It was horrifying to have to teach Kelly how to dance. I wasn’t allowed to touch her. The only reason the show existed was Roger was dating Kelly Garrett, and Kelly needed Broadway work.”
Ailes appeared to bask in playing the part of a big-shot producer. Inviting John Bennett Perry to his office one day, Ailes sat behind his expansive desk and doled out career advice. “What do you envision for yourself? If you get there, will you be happy?” Ailes asked him straight off. Looking back, Podell recognized “a lot of latent Donald Trump in Roger.” Robert Cohen thought Ailes could pass for a Mississippi river-boat gambler. He talked a mile a minute. “I’m Roger Ailes, how do you do?” he said in their first encounter at the Belasco. “You were in the Joe McGinniss book, I read about you,” Cohen replied. “Yeah, I sold The Trick to the American people,” Ailes said, referring to Nixon, “now I’m going to sell this, and it’s going to be great.”
Ailes worked his political and media connections to promote the show. By staging a photo shoot of cast members riding bicycles around Manhattan wearing gas masks instead of helmets, Ailes got their picture in the newspaper. Ailes made another plug to Joe McGinniss, when he called up from the ’72 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. On assignment for The New York Times Magazine, McGinniss was hoping for a pithy quote from Ailes about Nixon, but instead got a mouthful about Mother Earth. “It’s a great show. There’s at least three songs in it that will become classics,” Ailes boasted. “I don’t know anything about Broadway, but I’m learning. It’s much more exciting than politics. Nixon was O.K.—but all those state campaigns—wow! I mean, I finally got bored with South Dakota.” Ailes also reached out to his White House contacts, having Len Garment spread word around the West Wing.