Ailes and Kelly Garrett were no longer a couple. After the setback of Mack & Mabel, Garrett experienced limited success singing that summer for a brief revival of Your Hit Parade, the 1950s television show, and performing the following year in the short-lived musical The Night That Made America Famous, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award. Garrett took her career swings hard. “When she didn’t get a particular part, or when she hadn’t had a booking in a week, she would get down,” Paul Turnley, Ailes’s former assistant, recalled. “And when she had down times, he had down times.” Garrett was devastated by her breakup with Ailes, according to a friend in whom she confided at the time. She eventually moved to Los Angeles and worked as a voice teacher, giving lessons from her home in North Hollywood. Ailes tried to help her with bookings in the early 1990s, but she failed to revive her career. In 2006, she moved back to New Mexico. She died of cancer in August 2013.
In 1977, Ailes began seeing a single mother of two named Norma Ferrer, whom he had met in Florida. His involvement was both romantic and professional. He named Norma a producer on Present Tense. “Roger made the people who worked with him his family,” Rosenfield said. “But there’s no question about it, he’s the head of his household.” In 1976, eight years after Ailes had moved to New York, Marjorie filed for divorce. It was finalized on April 22, 1977. She took possession of the Pennsylvania home, which she held on to for thirty years. She kept his last name and never remarried. “I’ve spent my life protecting Roger’s privacy,” she said before she died on April 20, 2013. “Roger is always in my heart and in my mind.” In 1981, Ailes married Ferrer. She idolized her husband, once telling a reporter that even as an infant “he could see things in ways others couldn’t.”
Shortly before Rosenfield left Ailes’s firm, Ailes asked about Garrett. “At sort of our parting, he asked me if I thought he’d been a good manager for Kelly. I said I thought he had been,” Rosenfield recalled. “I was leaving, and he was looking for some substantiation.”
EIGHT
RISKY STRATEGY
ON JANUARY 31, 1986, the Sidney Lumet film Power, a dark examination of the lives of political consultants, opened at the Gotham Theatre in Manhattan. Richard Gere starred as Pete St. John, a hyperkinetic image maker, who represented clients of all stripes—from a right-wing Big Oil–backed Ohio Senate candidate to a Latin American president—so long as they paid his $25,000 a month retainer. Issues bored St. John. Profit fueled his ambition. When one client earnestly tried selling him on his campaign platform, St. John replied, “My job is to get you in. Once you’re there, you do whatever your conscience tells you to do.”
To prepare for the role, Gere shadowed Roger Ailes for several months. “Richard practically lived with him,” recalled Gere’s friend Joel McCleary, a Democratic media consultant who would face off against Ailes during the 1990 presidential election in Costa Rica. Ailes’s charismatic influence was evident on the screen. Like Ailes, St. John was domineering. “You are paying me to give you a new life—politics,” he said in one scene. “And in order for me to do that, I’ve gotta be in charge of all the elements. It’s the only way I work.”
Power hit theaters as Ailes was becoming the most successful political consultant of his generation. Between 1980 and 1986, Ailes propelled thirteen GOP senators and eight congressmen into office. During this period, he increasingly made use of wedge issues and marginal sideshow debates to bludgeon his clients’ opponents. “He wasn’t trying to win awards from Vogue magazine,” recalled Republican pollster Lance Tarrance, who collaborated with Ailes on campaigns. “He just wanted to win elections.” Ailes’s candidates—Senators Dan Quayle, Phil Gramm, and Mitch McConnell, among them—would go on to play leading roles in shaping legislation for the next two decades.
Left on the sidelines of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, Ailes reemerged on the political stage that fall representing Alfonse D’Amato, the Republican town supervisor of a middle-class Long Island suburb, who was running for Senate from New York. D’Amato had stunned the political establishment by defeating liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits in the GOP primary, but he faced a tough general election campaign. Ailes arrived at a crucial moment. Javits was staying in the race on the Liberal Party ticket, and the Democrats were fielding a formidable candidate: Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, a Harvard-educated lawyer who was the youngest woman elected to the House eight years earlier. During their initial meeting, Ailes diagnosed D’Amato’s challenge. “Jesus, nobody likes you,” Ailes said. “Your own mother wouldn’t vote for you. Do you even have a mother?”
Both a putdown and an insight, Ailes’s remark became the foundation for one of the most successful political ad campaigns of the 1980s. In Ailes’s first commercial for the candidate, the star was his sixty-five-year-old mother. Ailes filmed Mama D’Amato walking home with a bag of groceries lamenting the middle-class bugbears of inflation and crime. At the end of the spot, she appealed to viewers to vote for her son.
Several weeks before the election, polls put Holtzman ahead by as much as fifteen points. (Javits had slipped into a distant third place.) But on election day, D’Amato beat the unmarried Holtzman by one percent. Ailes’s shrewd messaging got the credit. “In a less obvious way,” The Washington Post noted at the time, “Ailes mercilessly hammered away at Democrat Liz Holtzman for being single. Several of the D’Amato ads show pictures of the candidate in a variety of loving poses with his wife and kids, and end with a variant on the regular slogan: ‘He’s a family man fighting for the forgotten middle class.’ ” The Post dubbed the race “the complete rehabilitation of Roger Ailes.” D’Amato said Ailes’s ad starring Mama D’Amato “made my victory possible.”
By the early 1980s, Ailes’s politics had become more crisply ideological. He populated his office, which he renamed Ailes Communications, Inc., in April 1982, with true believers. They included Larry McCarthy, a twenty-nine-year-old former press secretary for Pennsylvania Republican senator John Heinz; Jon Kraushar, a speech coach who handled corporate clients; and operatives Kathy Ardleigh and Ken LaCorte.
In his 1980s campaigns, Ailes was a swaggering tough guy with an angry, at times megalomaniacal, edge to his leadership style. His rhetoric was violent, and he sometimes actually scuffled with colleagues. “Whatever it takes” was one of his office catchphrases.
This philosophy prevailed outside the political realm. After the D’Amato campaign, Ailes was appointed executive producer of NBC’s struggling late-night talk show, Tomorrow, co-hosted by Tom Snyder and Rona Barrett, which aired after Johnny Carson. Because Snyder was barely on speaking terms with Barrett, NBC needed an aggressive producer to seize control—which is what NBC got. On one occasion, Ailes punched a hole through the wall of the control room. “If you have a reputation as a badass, you don’t need to fight,” he later said. But he did fight. During an office softball game, Ailes fought with Tomorrow producer John Huddy, whom Ailes met while working on the Fellini documentary. “He got into this screaming match,” an eyewitness recalled. “It was so heated that they got into a fistfight. Everybody knew Roger had this blood disorder, and his hands swelled. Afterwards, he had ice around his hands. It was just crazy. This was his friend, and it was about nothing.”