At that point, Douglas was a faded talent on the verge of quitting show business. He had reached some measure of fame performing with Kay Kyser, the bandleader and radio personality (it was Kyser who told him to change his last name from “Dowd” to “Douglas”), and even recorded the singing voice of Prince Charming in Disney’s Cinderella, but, far from hosting a game show, he was now buying and selling real estate in southern California to support his family and scraping together small gigs. Fraser’s invitation seemed to be his last shot. “A million to one,” Douglas told his wife, Genevieve.
Westinghouse signed him up for an initial three-month stint at $400 per week, and on December 11, 1961, The Mike Douglas Show had its debut. “His geniality, ready wit, personable appearance and pleasant singing voice all conspired to show him off as a nimble pro,” the Cleveland Press television critic wrote the next day. The show’s popularity grew steadily, and in a year’s time it had become a smash hit.
“You’re going to work on this show!” Launa Newman called out to Ailes as Collier led him down the hallway. “It’s the only job at the station. Write down ten ideas and give them to Woody. Please, please do it. We’ll have so much fun.”
Starting out on The Mike Douglas Show as a $68-a-week prop boy, Ailes was rarely at home—just as he had in college, he devoted almost all his waking hours to the job, even though he was just a dogsbody, fetching whatever the show’s senior producers needed. “He would usually be gone before I got up,” recalled Marjorie’s younger sister, Kay, who lived with them for a month in their apartment in Euclid-Green, nine miles northeast of downtown. “He was very intense. He was like a whirling dervish. He was always going. He was always talking,” Debbie Miller, an associate producer who joined the show in 1965, said. “I was very tight with Roger. He and I were the low men on the totem pole.” His disheveled appearance became a fixture of the studio. “I remember him having a pen leak in his pocket, and the whole front of his shirt was full of ink,” Miller said. “His hair was always uncombed. His shirt tails were always hanging out, and his sleeves were always rolled up. He always wore black pants and a white shirt.”
The hard work impressed his colleagues despite some initial mishaps. When Cleveland native Bob Hope first appeared on the show in 1963, Ailes held the cue cards, a job of significant responsibility. But when they were live on-air, Ailes dropped the cards. Hope had to ad-lib. After the cameras stopped rolling, Hope went over to talk to Ailes. Newman saw fear in the young producer’s eyes. Hope, however, was gracious. “He gave him a pep talk. He thought it was adorable,” she said. The mistake didn’t hold Ailes back. He quickly developed the unassailable, blustering confidence that became his hallmark. One time a singer who was booked to perform noticed a rip in her stockings, just before going on air. Panicked, she fled to the bathroom and refused to come out. Ailes went in and dragged her into the studio and held her there until the camera’s red light clicked on. She performed flawlessly.
For a young producer with limited experience, Ailes possessed formidable self-assurance. Not long after Ailes joined the staff in Cleveland, Douglas did a show with Sammy Davis Jr. Afterward, Douglas asked Ailes what he thought. “I didn’t say anything, but I have a terrible problem. I tell people what I think,” Ailes later said. “I’ve always had some natural tendency toward an aggressive posture.” So when Douglas kept asking, Ailes snapped. “Mike, I thought it was terrible,” he said. Ailes thought Douglas, who was in awe of Davis, had been dominated in the interview. “You’ve got to come back every day and be the star of the show, but you sat out there today and literally kissed his bottom. He took the whole show away from you. It’s nice to show you’re a nice guy, but you’re the one who has to control things when the show goes to a commercial. You’re the one who has to make it all happen.” His words landed like a sucker punch. “There were tears in his eyes,” Ailes recalled. But as Ailes remembered, his truth telling sealed their relationship.
Though Ailes, with his bluff bonhomie, was a popular figure backstage, his colleagues sensed that, inside, other wheels were turning. “You didn’t know what he was really thinking,” Newman said. An emblem of his secrecy was his illness. “He used to come into work and he’d have these blood clots on his face,” Larry Rosen, Woody Fraser’s deputy, recalled. When he asked him what he had done to himself, Ailes would say, “I’m not supposed to shave with a razor.” Another time, Ailes told Rosen that the only thing he was afraid of was surgery. “It would be the only time he wouldn’t be able to control the bleeding,” Rosen recalled.
Ailes’s marathon work habits caused tensions at home with Marge. He rarely invited colleagues over to his place, which was not set up for entertaining anyway. Marje did not otherwise get to know the Mike Douglas team (although Roger did cast her in one episode that featured finger painting). He was among the few staffers who were married. They were all young, most just out of college, and flush with ambition and ideas. Douglas, at the ripe old age of thirty-six when he joined the show, liked to call them “kids.”
The producers on the show all felt they were making history—if the old guard still thought of television as radio with pictures, they were fusing the words and images, supercharging the medium and connecting with the viewer on a visceral level. “I felt like I was one of those guys who are today part of Silicon Valley,” Rift Fournier, a producer on the show, recalled. “All of us were part of something that could be compared today to doing Facebook.”
After working grueling hours, they liked to blow off steam with pranks and antics, with Ailes often playing a central role. “He was always joking,” Miller recalled. One of the staff’s favorite activities was office chair basketball. As Ailes attempted to shoot the crumpled paper ball into the opposing team’s wastepaper basket, he did not hold back. “He’d come in the next day with bruises all over, his whole arm would be black,” Rosen recalled. One time, instead of playing basketball, the staff had a water balloon fight in the office. When they posed for a group photo, Ailes was soaked down to his white undershirt.
The Mike Douglas Show immersed Ailes in the world of professional entertainment. From Fraser, he learned that great TV had more to do with drama—conflict, surprise, spontaneity—than with expensive sets and cutting-edge broadcasting technology. Fraser created drama on the show by putting Douglas and his weekly co-host through what Douglas called “an intentional daily hurricane.” Fraser said, “The most important ingredient for a daily show was to keep it fresh, and one way was to keep people off balance, not knowing what would happen, sitting on the edge of their seats. It’s when people get bored that they switch channels.” Producers brainstormed ways to throw in mystery guests or surprise songs and gags. Fraser insisted that every one of the show’s segments had to end with a “payoff” for the viewer. “There were times when we would sit around the bullpen and think for thirty minutes, ‘what’s the payoff?’ ” recalled a former producer, Robert LaPorta.