Robert Sr. and Donna’s marriage had been disintegrating throughout Roger’s childhood, and after Roger went to college, it broke apart. During the fall of his sophomore year, Donna filed for divorce. Her amended divorce petition was painfully graphic, a window into the dark environment Roger grew up in. “Over the entire period of their marriage,” her lawyer wrote, Robert Sr. “has screamed and yelled at her and inflicted physical abuse upon her all without valid provocation.” She felt unloved. “Over the years the Defendant has failed to pay the Plaintiff the proper respect owing by a husband to a wife: has failed to evidence outwordly [sic] any affection or love for her, has never complimented her for any good or favorable action or conduct by her and thereby lost the affection and respect of the Plaintiff.” She was lonely. “All during their marriage the Defendant has made his outside and social contacts largely with men and has not included the Plaintiff in any substantial amount of his social contacts.” When Donna expressed her unhappiness in the marriage, she said Robert blamed her—among other ways, by writing down his complaints on a blackboard in the kitchen. He had a paranoid streak, telling his friends that she was unfaithful. “He has become repulsive and offensive to her so that she can no longer endure his presence and submit to continued abuse from him,” read the complaint.
Donna worried that Robert might kill her. The original complaint, filed Wednesday, October 7, 1959, alleged, “he has threatened her life and to do her physical harm in the event an action similar to the one herein alleged is filed against him.” She asked the court to bar him from coming to the house, calling her, or interfering with her job. “She fears that unless he is enjoined from molesting her that he will do her bodily injury,” the document stated. Two days later, at 9:00 a.m., after the court granted her a temporary restraining order, Sheriff T. Herbert Thomas and his deputy Edwin James drove to the house on Belmont Street to serve Robert with court papers ordering him to leave the premises.
Nothing in the court records indicates that Robert contested the restraining order or the divorce filing. Roger recalled that he did not hear about the divorce from his parents until right before he was scheduled to come home from college for the Christmas break. “I got a call from them saying that I had to make arrangements to stay at my friend Doug’s house,” he said. “And then they told me they’re getting a divorce.” It was devastating news. “It affected Roger,” his brother later recalled. “He had no place to go.… I sort of had a place to go more or less. Roger didn’t.”
On April 27, 1960, the court granted Donna a divorce, finding Robert “guilty of extreme cruelty.” She was awarded custody of their daughter, Donna Jeanne, a senior in high school. Soon after the divorce was granted, Donna put the house up for sale. She had fallen in love with Joseph Urban, a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society and a former newspaper journalist, who lived in San Francisco. “He could speak German and French,” Robert Jr. recalled. “He was the exact opposite of my dad. He was very gentle. He never got angry.”
The next time Roger came back to Warren, the house on Belmont Street had been sold, a development for which he blamed his mother. “I never found my stamp collection,” he said. “I never found anything. Everything was gone.… I learned from my grandmother, I guess, that my mother had gone to California. She gave me a phone number.… I’ve always been pissed off because I had great stuff in my closet. All your memorabilia from being a kid. I always missed that. I wondered, ‘Where’s my stuff?’ ”
As his parents’ marriage was coming apart, Roger was beginning his own. As a freshman in college, he’d met Marjorie White, a pretty, brown-haired art major from Parkersburg, West Virginia—his mother’s birthplace—who was two years older than Roger and engaged to the popular WOUB station manager David Chase. “Dave was a big man around WOUB. He was the key guy who was highly regarded,” Chase’s friend Frank Youngwerth recalled. A talented broadcaster, Chase would later move to New York to become program director of the NBC flagship television station WNBC. But after graduating, Chase was called into military duty with the Air Force, and Ailes moved in, winning White over. “Roger stole her away and married her,” Hylkema said.
At 11:30 a.m. on August 27, 1960—four months to the day after his parents’ divorce—Roger and Marjorie married at the Galbreath Chapel on campus. After the wedding, they moved into an apartment on Stewart Street, alongside a row of craftsman houses on the east side of campus. Marjorie taught art in Nelsonville, thirteen miles north of Athens, while Ailes stayed and finished his last two years. Their marriage sent a powerful signal to others. “Here’s a guy, who’s a freshman who steals a girl from a guy who’s a big timer at WOUB and then in a year he marries her,” Youngwerth said.
Making a home for himself was also a way for Ailes to find stability. The divorce left scars on all the Ailes children. For Roger, ambition would be a salve for early wounds. “Maybe that’s why I kept going back to work,” he once said. After graduation, he had the opportunity to work in radio in Columbus. But television was the future. He had applied for an entry-level position at a Westinghouse-owned television station in Cleveland. So he and Marjorie packed up and drove north.
TWO
“YOU CAN TALK YOUR WAY OUT OF ANYTHING”
WESTINGHOUSE’S CLEVELAND TV station, KYW, was a freewheeling enterprise, not exactly a start-up, but a node in a burgeoning new field. TV production was booming, and not only in New York and Los Angeles. After deciding to acquire the station from NBC in 1955, Westinghouse launched an ambitious slate of new programs in Cleveland, including Eyewitness, a one-and-a-half-hour local news block, and Barnaby, a popular children’s program about an elf, starring the comedian Linn Sheldon.
Chet Collier, the program manager of KYW-TV, was walking with Ailes around the second-floor offices one day when a voice called out “Roger!” Ailes turned to see his high school friend Launa Newman sitting behind a desk in a room full of young producers. They had not seen each other since their performance in Night of January 16th. Newman was now a talent coordinator and producer for a new ninety-minute afternoon variety-talk program. Westinghouse was preparing to syndicate it in five metropolitan markets.
Forrest “Woody” Fraser, an excitable young producer from Chicago, had come up with the concept. A pioneer of daytime television, Fraser helped launch the short-lived afternoon variety shows Hi, Ladies!, Club 60, and Adults Only. Newman was the first person Fraser hired for the new show, for which he had come up with a novel format: a genial host paired each week with a different celebrity co-host. The two would spend more time interacting with each other than interviewing guests. Together, Fraser and Newman auditioned a half dozen candidates. The challenge was to find a permanent host who did not mind sharing the stage each week with names more famous than his own. “All they came up with was run-of-the-mill singers, out-of-work disk jockeys and a guy who could play ‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird’ on the piano,” the eventual winner wrote in his memoir. Then, they found him.
One afternoon, Fraser was back in Chicago sitting in Henrici’s bar at the Merchandise Mart Building, where NBC had a dozen studios. A small television monitor mounted on the wall played a game show on mute. “Mike Douglas!” Fraser shouted, pointing at the host on the screen. Douglas, an affable big band singer, had worked with Fraser on several shows and Fraser thought he’d be perfect for the job. “The bartender looked up, looked at the TV, then gently corrected him,” Douglas recalled. “It was Merv Griffin on Play Your Hunch. Didn’t matter. Woody didn’t know Merv, he knew Mike. And he didn’t have Merv’s address, he had Mike’s. A few days later, I was on my way to Cleveland.”