He was going full cylinder. Riding high with hopes for Ionescopade and flush with success from Hot l Baltimore, Ailes found a path back to television paved in the most glamorous and profitable brand of American liberalism: Camelot.
Robert Kennedy Jr. was in his sophomore year at Harvard in early 1974, when Lem Billings, Jack Kennedy’s prep school roommate and Kennedy family confidant, came to him with an unorthodox proposition: Roger Ailes, Richard Nixon’s former TV man, wanted to make him a television star. Ailes, he explained, had read an article by Bobby Jr. about the overthrow of Chile’s Marxist president Salvador Allende. Kennedy had traveled to South America to report the story. On account of his interest in international affairs, Ailes was proposing that Kennedy travel with him to Africa to produce a wildlife television documentary.
The movie’s origins involved the kind of creative and logistical challenges that Ailes thrived on. A wealthy American businessman had money tied up in Kenya after investing in a failed Nairobi life insurance company. The Kenyan government blocked him from taking his remaining assets out of the country. The businessman asked Ailes for his advice. “Roger’s words were, ‘we can bring the money out in a can,’ ” Kennedy recalled, meaning that funds could be used to finance a film that they could then sell in the United States. The documentary was Ailes’s latest experiment intermingling celebrity and politics. Bobby Jr. represented America’s closest approximation of a young royal, a bankable personality to take the television viewer to an exotic, wild land.
Naturally, Billings was wary about Bobby Jr.’s association with Ailes. “Lem Billings, I would say, vigorously disliked Richard Nixon,” Kennedy said. But a three-hour meeting in New York with Ailes put the young Kennedy at ease. “We joked about Nixon,” he recalled. After Kennedy signed on as a creative consultant and narrator for $1,500, Ailes promised him a spectacular summer vacation tracking wildebeest herds and hunting lions with spear-carrying Masai warriors. The pair traveled around the Rift Valley with a camera crew of Pakistani Muslims. “I had a lot of laughs with Roger,” Kennedy said. “He was sensitive to other cultures and to conservation and not at all an ideologue.”
But Ailes had a few headaches in store before he and Kennedy flew off to Africa. On April 25, Ionescopade opened at Theater Four on West 55th Street and bombed. Bloomgarden made the mistake he had sought to avoid with The Hot l Baltimore: he took a low-budget production that was a hit and changed it. After fourteen performances, the show closed.
Meanwhile, Ailes received what appeared like thrilling news. In April, Kelly Garrett got a call to read for the lead in David Merrick’s $850,000 production of Mack & Mabel, a musical about the fiery romance between Hollywood director Mack Sennett and the actress Mabel Normand. Gower Champion, the musical’s director, had cycled through two female leads, first Penny Fuller, then Marcia Rodd, and was looking for a replacement. After winning a Theatre World Award for her singing in Mother Earth, Garrett was performing in another musical revue, Words and Music, at the John Golden Theatre, which Champion saw and liked.
Ailes pushed Garrett to go for the part. The role would require substantial acting, crucial experience for Garrett. Ailes asked Rosenfield to coach Garrett over the weekend. “I don’t think we should do this. Gower Champion isn’t the type of person who’s interested in nurturing some neophyte,” Rosenfield cautioned. Ailes refused to back down.
“Are you seriously asking me to tell Kelly Garrett not to go to a callback to a David Merrick–Gower Champion musical?”
To please his boss, Rosenfield swallowed his reservations. “It was the one time Roger and I really disagreed with each other,” he recalled. At the time, he was unaware that Ailes and Garrett were romantically involved. “I didn’t know anything, and it was just the two of us at the company. And I knew Kelly really well. And she kept it a secret. Roger felt it would not be in either of their best interests if it looked like he was promoting his girlfriend.”
The next day, Garrett went to Rosenfield’s studio apartment to rehearse two scenes over and over. Rosenfield’s assistance paid off: Champion picked Garrett to star opposite Robert Preston at the Majestic Theatre. It was poised to be her breakout moment. Within days, however, Garrett was dismissed. “That one broke my heart,” Champion told a reporter. “That face, that voice. But this role takes a lot of deep acting.” The embarrassing public setback, as Rosenfield later put it, “ended her possibility as a Broadway star.” A young actress named Bernadette Peters replaced her. “As far as I’m concerned, it was their loss,” Ailes fired back. “I just don’t have any respect for the way they handled it, it was really tacky.”
Ailes’s increasingly tough, angry public persona was accompanied by growing fears about his physical safety. He went to elaborate steps to protect himself. After he returned with Kennedy from Africa, Ailes was arrested in New York City for illegally possessing a handgun. When news of the arrest surfaced years later, colleagues of Ailes claimed that he had been using the weapon to protect a Kennedy. It felt like an excuse to Bobby Jr. “If I had known he was actually carrying a gun to protect me, I would have told him to get rid of it. It wasn’t plausible,” he recalled. (Ailes pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was given a conditional discharge.)
In truth, Ailes had a gun long before his association with Kennedy. After Mother Earth, Ailes called a young acquaintance into his office. “I wanna show you something,” he said, flashing his gun. “I found him to be a scary guy,” the acquaintance recalled. When Ailes moved to New York, the city was in the grip of a precipitous downslide, as residents fled for the suburbs, and crime spiked. The blocks around Times Square, where Ailes spent much of his time, were populated by peep shows and prostitutes, which turned the city into a national symbol of dysfunction. In response to the city’s hostile environment, Ailes channeled the lessons of his father: Violence never solves anything, but the threat of violence can be very useful. It was advice he gave to his brother when he came to visit during this period. “I was walking across midtown when I see a pair of eyes staring out from behind an alley, the eyes are looking right at me,” Robert recalled. “Roger had told me that if you put your head down and pretend not to notice, that’s the victim’s posture and you’re in deep trouble.” Robert put his hand in his pocket as if he had a gun. “I looked straight at the eyeballs and kept walking like I was an undercover cop. The guy stayed in the alley and never moved.”
Ailes kept others at a distance, spending many nights at his Central Park South apartment with Kelly Garrett and her lapdog, Squeaker. Joe McGinniss was a rare close friend, possibly because McGinniss was in a similar situation, having left, but not yet divorced, his wife, and living with a beautiful young book editor, Nancy Doherty, whom he had met at a party for The Selling of the President.
At the time, Joe and Nancy made their home in a charming eighteenth-century house in rural Stockton, New Jersey. On weekends, Ailes and Garrett would often visit them. “We were people to whom he could bring Kelly for the weekend, and it wasn’t going to be judgmental,” McGinniss speculated. “We weren’t going to say Roger Ailes is dating a client.” Doherty, who bonded with Garrett over their experience growing up in large families, remembered Garrett being very affectionate with Ailes. In press interviews, Garrett swooned over him. “Do I ever get nervous about performing?” she told a reporter. “I used to, but not so much now. Principally because I have such faith in my manager Roger Ailes, who makes all the right decisions for me—about everything.” Doherty found it telling that Marjorie never came up in conversation. McGinniss suspected that Ailes felt guilty about Marje. “Roger and I didn’t talk about shared guilt a lot but I think it was an ongoing bond between us,” he said. “With Roger and Kelly, the other complicating thing was, she was his big star-client, and he was her manager. And it wasn’t really working the way they were hoping that it would. That’s a complicated way to have a relationship.”