Robert Sr. demanded quiet around the house. If the boys roughhoused in front of him, he warned them to stop. If they ignored him, he pulled out his belt, whipping them not until they began to cry, although they did wail, but until they fell silent. “He didn’t scream, his voice never rose,” Robert Jr. recalled. “He did like to beat the shit out of you with that belt. He continued to beat you, and he continued to beat you.… It was a pretty routine fixture of childhood.” Over time, the boys learned to suppress their screams of pain. “If we stopped crying, he’d go away. He wanted it quiet,” Robert Jr. said. “Roger definitely bruised, where I didn’t. I got welts and things like that. He never hit us in the face. He always hit us in the leg or the butt.” The boys had no perspective on their father’s violence. “If this happened today, we’d be in a foster home, and he’d be in jail. In those days, we didn’t know any better,” Robert Jr. said. “I was terrified,” Roger recalled, “but I loved my dad.”
Years later the brothers learned that their father had had his own traumatic upbringing. Robert Sr. had always told the family that his father, Melville Darwin Ailes, had died in World War I, leaving his mother, Sadie, a schoolteacher, to raise him and his siblings alone. “There were two or three different stories,” Robert Jr. remembered. “A war story made for a good one.” Sadie kept up the fiction. On the 1930 census, she described herself as a “widow.”
When Robert Jr. was a senior in high school, he received a shirt box from Grandma Cunningham. It was stuffed with newspaper clippings from the Akron Beacon Journal. They revealed that Melville Ailes was not dead, but was a respected public health official with a Harvard degree living forty-five miles away in Akron. He had married another woman.
Robert Jr. did not tell Roger about his discovery. Their mother told him that Roger was “too young” to know the truth, but Roger found out about it anyway. Donna pleaded with the boys to keep their knowledge from their father. “He would not tolerate any such discussion,” Robert Jr. recalled. They never spoke of it to their father, and Roger would never meet his grandfather, who died, after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, in 1967.
Robert Sr.’s beatings stopped by the time his sons were teenagers, but high school brought different pressures. Donna was a competitive, overbearing mother who pushed her boys as hard as she had pushed herself. In high school, she had been a star on the basketball court. She never went to college, but she wanted her sons to experience the world beyond Warren. “She was willing to do anything,” Robert Jr. recalled. She enrolled the brothers in acting and music lessons and demanded perfection in the classroom. “She would want to know before she saw a test that I got an A,” Robert Jr. remembered. “She wanted to know if I got 100 percent. And if I didn’t get a 100, she’d want to know that I got the highest grade.” Donna was also sparing in her display of affection. Roger remembered her hugging him only “once in a while.” He speculated to a reporter that perhaps she was scared of his hemophilia.
Roger was proficient but uninspired in the classroom. There was not much use trying to compete academically with Robert Jr., who was class president at Warren G. Harding High before studying at Oberlin College on a scholarship and going on to medical school. “It was clear that my brother was sort of the favorite,” Roger recalled. Donna’s pressure worked for Robert, but backfired for Roger. “The more she’d hound him, the less he would do,” Robert recalled. Roger would say, “I got a ‘C,’ and that’s good enough!” To get through a Latin class, Roger cribbed the answers from his brother’s homework assignments and exams.
The television screen was Roger’s classroom. As a child, frequently homebound with bruises, he watched variety shows and westerns, lying on the living room couch for hours on end. “He analyzed it, and he figured it out,” his brother said. Roger grew up as the medium did. In 1940, the year Roger was born, Herbert Hoover appeared on television for the first time, in an interview at the Republican National Convention. Seven years later, President Harry Truman staged the first telecast at the White House. Between 1950 and 1951, the number of households with sets doubled, to ten million. In 1952, Richard Nixon saved his political career delivering what became known as the “Checkers Speech” on television. Like his father, whose favorite program was Gunsmoke, Roger liked shows with strong male leads and simple plotlines.
Roger also loved acting. “I liked to get out of class and I wasn’t a great athlete. That left the theater,” he said. He put on plays with neighborhood kids. One of those fellow actors was Austin Pendleton, who grew up to be a noted stage and film actor. Pendleton’s mother gave Roger acting lessons, and his father, the president of the Warren Tool Corporation, built a theater in the basement of their spacious home so that Pendleton and his friends could stage productions. Sometimes, Pendleton invited Roger to join them.
At Warren G. Harding High, Roger acted in several plays and MC’d The Frolics, the school’s annual variety show. “He sat down and played the piano and sang,” Kent Fusselman, a schoolmate, recalled. “He was very good. He was in his element.” Launa Newman developed an instant connection with Roger at an audition for Ayn Rand’s Night of January 16th, a courtroom drama of greed and moral decay. They had never spoken before reading a scene together. “It was a moment of kismet,” she said. “He picked me. I picked him. The thing that crossed my mind was—How did I miss this guy? He was so good-looking. He was so intelligent.” They won the parts of secretary and defense attorney. Before graduating, Roger also starred in a stage adaptation of A Man Called Peter, about the faith of a charismatic United States Senate chaplain.
Though Robert Sr. wanted his children to figure out a way to go to college, he had complicated feelings about academics. “Father did not encourage us,” Robert Jr. recalled. His own Ivy League–educated father had abandoned him, and the condescension of college-educated managers at the Packard plant got under his skin. But he recognized that his path, going to work right out of high school, brought hardship. Once, when Roger saw those “college boys” give his father “orders in an inappropriate manner,” he asked why he let them talk to him that way. “Son, because of you, your brother, and your sister,” he answered. “I need the job, and you kids have got to go to college so you don’t ever have to put up with this.”
During his prime earning years at Packard Electric, he was paid $650 a month, the equivalent of a $60,000 annual salary in today’s dollars. It was a decent wage, but after paying the bills for his wife, two boys, and younger daughter, Robert had little left over to spend on himself. To make some extra money, he took a second job painting houses in the evenings. Donna also worked outside the home, taking a clerical position at the local branch of the American Cancer Society, a further source of resentment for Robert Sr. “The poor guy never had a new suit. He had two pairs of shoes in the closet, one for Sunday and the other for the rest of the week,” Roger recalled. When it came time to buy the family’s 1957 Buick Special, Robert Sr. took out a home equity mortgage. For all his working-man bravado and his steady income, his life had the taint of failure. “He tried hard but never succeeded in anything,” Robert Jr. recalled. “He didn’t have the instinct to be a killer.”