After the curtain came down on opening night, Ailes ran up to Cohen, gushing about the performance.
“What do you think?”
“What do I think about what?”
“Do you think we got a hit? I think we got a hit.”
Cohen was incredulous. Based on disappointing advance ticket sales, he had already announced to the cast that the show might close.
“Forget it, Roger. You’re opening with a closing notice up.”
The next morning, The New York Times delivered its verdict. John Bennett Perry got a call from Ailes’s office. “Don’t read the paper,” he was told. In a savage review, Clive Barnes called the music “at its worst characterless, and at its best—to use that chilling measure of air quality—acceptable.”
The cast did not dispute Barnes’s assessment. “The second night of the show, there were eight sailors and a doughnut,” Podell recalled.
Ailes initially hoped that word-of-mouth marketing could overcome the harsh reviews. But Ailes soon confronted the embarrassing failure of the show, something the cast respected. Within a week, Ailes was in Perry’s dressing room talking about the show’s future. “The question was to close it or not. I told him, ‘You might as well,’ ” Perry recalled. “He was resolved to do a good job even as it didn’t work.” After just a dozen performances, Mother Earth closed.
Ailes recognized he had overreached. “My eyes were too big for my stomach,” he remarked years later. Before bringing the show to New York, Ailes considered a smaller venue. “The main discussion was whether we do it Off-Off Broadway or Broadway, but Roger never does things in halves,” his assistant Paul Turnley recalled. Butcher’s investors lost everything and Ailes’s business suffered. “He had put a lot of his own money in,” Turnley said. “When Mother Earth closed, he called me in and said, ‘I’m sorry I have to let you go. I’ll keep you on until you find a job. I’ll write you a glowing reference, so don’t worry about that.’ ”
Failure taught Ailes valuable lessons. He had agreed with Bloomgarden’s directive at the outset to fire Golden, but was powerless to do so because Golden held the rights. It was confirmation that control was a precondition for success. Failure also taught Ailes not to listen to doubters. “Don’t ever chase critics, and don’t ever try to produce anything the critics are going to love,” Ailes recalled Bloomgarden telling him.
The box office disappointment of Mother Earth did not diminish Ailes’s appetite for the theater. In fact, in the months after Mother Earth closed, he pushed beyond the schmaltzy appeal of Broadway into the artistic swirl of New York’s vibrant Off-Off-Broadway scene. As he would later tell it, Ailes often ventured, sometimes alone, into small playhouses at night to scout new productions—though the truth was less romantic. He hired Robert Cohen on a freelance basis to read scripts and attend openings.
One day in February 1973, Cohen received a phone call from Bloomgarden, who excitedly told him about a new play he had just seen at the Circle Repertory Company in its early home on the Upper West Side. The play had been written by Lanford Wilson, a cofounder of the company, and depicted a group of drifters who make their home near the Baltimore railway station in a crumbling nineteenth-century hotel slated for demolition. It’s Memorial Day, but the characters are too far gone or strung-out to notice. The marquee identifies the hotel as Hot l Baltimore, the title of Wilson’s play, as no one had bothered to replace the missing letter.
In the sinking fortunes of the hotel and its sad inhabitants, Wilson presented a wry meditation on American decline. Cohen, who attended the production the night Bloomgarden called, was impressed. “I thought, My God, it’s like The Iceman Cometh. These are people on the margins of society. People you don’t want to look at. But they’re making you look at them. They’re making you see them. And they’re telling you truths about yourself and life and the society we live in.”
After the show, Cohen hustled out to a pay phone on Broadway and called Bloomgarden.
“Do you really like it?” Bloomgarden asked.
“Not only do I really like it, more important, I understand why you like it. Kermit, this is the kind of show you would have put on twenty years ago.”
“How much do you think it would cost to move the show to Broadway?”
“Don’t do it on Broadway,” Cohen said. “You’re not exactly going to sell theater tickets to the Hadassah of Great Neck.”
“Well, that’s true.”
“Do it big-time Off-Broadway.”
“Do you think we could get the money from Roger?”
“You just might.”
The next day at the office, Ailes reacted coolly to Cohen’s idea like the dozen other shows he had brought to him. “Roger, take my word for it,” Cohen said. “Kermit wants to do the play. He doesn’t have any money, but he knows what’s good. You want to do a play, you still want to juggle your other stuff, but you have the money. This is a marriage made in heaven, Roger. Take my word for it. If you don’t like this deal, I will quit right now and you’ll never see me again, I promise you.”
Ailes reluctantly agreed and Cohen got him a ticket for that night. During the show, Cohen waited for Ailes on the sidewalk.
“You got a deal,” Ailes declared when he saw Cohen on the street. Ailes called Bloomgarden from the pay phone and told him he would back the show.
Bloomgarden and Ailes soon secured the rights to stage the play at the Circle in the Square Theatre, a 299-seat venue in Greenwich Village. Ailes committed to raising $30,000 to finance the production. Once again he tapped Howard Butcher, who in turn leveraged his network of wealthy Pennsylvania investors. “Roger called me up and he said, ‘I have another one. This one is an Off-Broadway show.’ ” It was a bold pitch, as Mother Earth had vaporized the banker’s investments just months earlier. But Ailes was a persuasive salesman: Butcher agreed to vouch for Ailes and raise the funds. “I called up a lot of clients and friends. It was a hard sell,” Butcher remembered. “It was off the beaten track for all my clients.”
But the investors stood to gain financially if the show was a success: the equity in the show was divided between Ailes, Bloomgarden, and their investors. Lanford Wilson and Marshall Mason, the show’s director, were rebuffed. “We went to Kermit and we wanted to put in $5,000,” Mason later said, “that way we’d realize a profit for it. But Kermit said, ‘I can’t let you do that because I’ve sold out the entire investment.’ We said, ‘How could this be? And he said, ‘the money all came from Roger Ailes.’ ” Mason signed a paltry contract. “It was a slightly bitter point,” Mason remembered. “Roger Ailes put us on the map, but he was taking money out of our mouths because we weren’t invested in it.”
Opening night came on March 22, 1973, six weeks after the premiere on the Upper West Side. “Everything that went onto the stage was real,” recalled Conchata Ferrell, who played a foul-mouthed prostitute named April Green. “The champagne was real, the hot plate worked. It was Lanford’s vision.” Word spread across town about the new play. “The crazies are good to listen to! Wilson writes them with persuasive humor and dry accuracy,” Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Times. A parade of notables, including New York mayor John Lindsay and Francis Ford Coppola, soon attended.