Ailes proved to be an imaginative marketer. He expressed keen interest in the design of the play’s poster. Robert Cohen lobbied to hire the downtown graphic artist David Byrd, who had drawn the original poster for Woodstock. Bloomgarden balked at the budget of $1,000, but Ailes pushed for it. Byrd did a graphic of a neon sign with the title in hot pink type. Ailes’s and Bloomgarden’s names were below those of Mason and Wilson. “They both complained to me their names weren’t big enough,” Cohen said.
Ailes also struck deals with companies for product placement, including Benson & Hedges and Coca-Cola, long before the practice was publicly known. A few days after the play opened, Robert Cohen wrote to Malt-O-Meal in Minneapolis to sign up another deal. “We are the producers of the new off-Broadway play called The Hot l Baltimore which has just opened to marvelous reviews here in New York,” the pitch stated. “In the show two characters enjoy your product Soy Ahoy Barbequed Flavored Soybeans.” (While the hotel residents drink champagne, one character pulls two large jars of snacks from his bag. The prostitute April, expecting nuts, tastes a handful and exclaims, “Jesus Christ, they’re soybeans.” The character counters, “They’re great for you. And they’re good.”) The pitch continued: “Your jar and label are prominently displayed to a full house of 299 people every night of the week.” Cohen proposed a deal to credit Malt-O-Meal in the program and offered as an incentive to “make tickets available to you and your distributors in this area for their own use on pre-determined occasions.”
Ailes’s behind-the-scenes role made him a mysterious and somewhat glamorous figure to the cast. “What a gorgeous looking guy he was,” recalled Mari Gorman, who played the jean-jacket-wearing lesbian Jackie. “We hardly saw Roger at the beginning, Kermit was much more involved,” the actress Stephanie Gordon said. Shortly after the show opened, Ailes summoned Gordon, who played the prostitute Suzy, to his Midtown office on a Sunday afternoon. He told her he wanted to photograph her in character wearing nothing but a towel. The promotional photo would highlight a pivotal scene at the end of Act One, in which Suzy appears on the stairs wearing only a towel and wails to everyone in the lobby that her client beat her and then locked her out of her room. When April starts laughing, Suzy slaps the towel at her and stands naked, while people laugh and stare.
Gordon, who was dating cast mate Jonathan Hogan, was unsettled by the invitation. She had grown up in a conservative family and could barely pull off the scene on stage. Making her way up to Ailes’s office, Gordon started to panic. “It was dark. It wasn’t my usual milieu. I remember thinking, ‘What am I doing? Am I going to take off my clothes in front of Roger Ailes, whom I don’t even know? Why am I by myself in a deserted office building with this guy?’ ” But her fears were not realized. “I got undressed in another room,” she said. “He made me feel comfortable. He was lovely.” After Ailes snapped the pictures, he called Gordon a cab and sent her home. Later, he framed a print for her and signed it. “Don’t throw in the towel, you’re a great actress. Roger Ailes.”
Hot l Baltimore was the rarest type of hit—both artistically and commercially successful with a wide, middlebrow audience. In 1973, Hot l Baltimore earned three Obies and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play. By the end of its run, the play generated a profit of nearly $400,000, a staggering sum for an Off-Broadway production. Agreements were signed to stage regional productions all over the country. ABC began developing the play into a sitcom starring James Cromwell. Hot l Baltimore’s success made the careers of Mason and Wilson, who in 1980 won the Pulitzer Prize for his comedy Talley’s Folly. It was also the high-water mark of the odd Bloomgarden-Ailes partnership.
Mari Gorman recalled Roger Ailes fondly. Watching Fox News later on television, she said she “didn’t think it was the same person for a long time.” Stephanie Gordon struggled to reconcile the network’s more brutish qualities with the empathy of Lanford Wilson’s writing. “This play is about prostitutes, addicts, lesbians, and lost people, perennial losers, people who have given up on life. It’s the end of the American dream. These are the last people in the world Roger Ailes is interested in. Why would he produce this play?” Marshall Mason, who lives in Mexico and has served as vice chair of a local chapter of Democrats Abroad, was also dumbfounded. “When he became the Roger Ailes we know and hate now, I thought, ‘Oh my God, was this the same guy who was our producer?’ ” Conchata Ferrell, who went on to play the brassy housekeeper on the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, grasped for an answer. “Fundamentally, what the play is about is the American character. Even when they’re losing, they don’t lie down. It’s about the idea that we didn’t use to as a people just quit. I’m a liberal and I believe that. Roger is a conservative and he believes that. Everything Lanford wrote was deeply American.”
Ailes was proud of The Hot l Baltimore. In his own telling, he was the one who discovered the play. He told a reporter in 2003 that he had been so taken with the show he ran backstage and paid the producers $500 on the spot to option the rights. At any rate, in the wake of the play’s success, he had the funds to hire back a deputy.
His new employee, Stephen Rosenfield, had worked for Hubert Humphrey’s chief speechwriter during the 1968 campaign before completing an MFA degree in directing at Stanford. When Rosenfield showed up for his first day of work he saw what a bare-bones operation the company really was. “At that point it was just Roger and his secretary,” Rosenfield said. But Ailes presented a very different image in public. During one live television interview Ailes gave around this time, Rosenfield remembered him standing up and walking off the set before the segment was completed. “He said to the host, ‘Great to talk to you, I gotta run.’ He left. It looked like this guy had a schedule to keep. And he didn’t have anything going on! I thought, Man, what a great exit. He thought about how to control the atmosphere.”
Rosenfield labored, as Cohen had, to steer his boss’s tastes in a modern direction. In December 1973, Ailes announced that he had acquired the rights to a script titled Nice Girls. “The premise was that ‘nice girls’ didn’t talk about sexual things, and so the play was about nice girls who were sexually candid,” Rosenfield recalled. “I told Roger women do talk about sex, and everyone knows it! This isn’t going to be an oh-my-God thing.” A decade had already passed since Mary McCarthy’s bestselling novel The Group shattered the image of urban women as shy prudes.
As Nice Girls stalled, Ailes shifted his attention to a play that Bloomgarden discovered downtown. The quirky production, Ionescopade, a pastiche of short vaudevillian sketches based on the writings of the French-Romanian absurdist Eugène Ionesco, had received a favorable review in The New York Times. Ailes leaned on his investor list, a diverse mix of characters from his time in Philadelphia, Washington, and Hollywood. Tatnall Lea Hillman, an heir from the Main Line, went in for $2,400; Jack Calkins, the executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, contributed $1,200. Kelly Garrett gave $600. Ailes’s company chipped in $400.