Roger Ailes: Off Camera (2 page)

ZAC’S GAME

In mid-January, Roger Ailes skipped out on his duties at Fox News to attend a basketball game. The contest featured his twelve-year-old son, Zac, who plays for his Upper East Side Catholic boys’ school. On weekends, the Ailes family is in Cold Spring, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River, but Ailes doesn’t like the education on tap in the local school, so they have taken a place in the city not far from Zac’s school.

The gym was too small for bleachers, and the crowd too sparse to be a crowd. Just before game time, the only fans were Ailes, in a folding chair along the sideline and, at a discreet distance, his bodyguard, Jimmy Gildea, a retired New York City detective. A few more parents trickled in during the warm-ups. They nodded to Ailes in a friendly way, but didn’t stop to chat. If they were surprised to find themselves sharing a moment with the head of Fox News, they didn’t show it.

Ailes was dressed in his work clothes—black suit, starched white shirt, gold tie clip, and matching cuff links. His hair was slicked back and a pair of bifocals perched on his nose. The overall effect was that of a small-town banker in a Frank Capra movie. Ailes is past seventy and looks it, especially when he tries to walk on his bum leg. The other parents were young enough to be his children. But Zac is his only child, and perhaps the only person who could lure Ailes away from his office on a Wednesday afternoon. This was the third game of the season, and he had been there every time.

As we waited for the tip-off, Ailes ran down the roster. “Our guys,” he called them. Zac was easily the tallest kid on the team, and when the action commenced, his father encouraged him to take advantage of it. “Don’t get boxed out,” he hollered. “Use your height. Hands up on defense!” He waved his own hands to demonstrate. Zac looked over at his father and nodded. He had heard this mantra often. When Ailes was around Zac’s age, basketball was his game. He played at the Warren, Ohio, YMCA, where he compensated for his own lack of height with a competitive spirit and, thanks to his mother’s insistence on lessons, a trained dancer’s grace. He had been a decent point guard, but like any father he wanted his son to surpass him.

Zac hit the first shot of the game, and Ailes clapped loudly and shouted his approval. But Zac’s team, wearing red, was no match for the other school. As they fell behind, Ailes grew tense, barking instructions at his son and the rest of the team, but the advice wasn’t helping. Zac came out of the game and took a seat at the end of a bench, away from the coach. Ailes caught his attention and motioned for him to move over and get closer. The boy dutifully complied. That was better. Ailes relaxed and resumed cheering. He made a point of calling encouragement to all the players, not just his son. When the other team scored, he maintained a stoic silence or called out, “Never mind. Go get ’em, boys!”

Ailes’s old-fashioned clothes and pugnacious attitude reminded me of Red Auerbach, the great Celtics coach whose teams won nine championships. But not even Auerbach ever dominated his game the way that Ailes does. The redhead won nine championships, but it took him thirty years; Ailes, who founded Fox News in 1996, was already on his tenth straight year as number one and he was well on his way to an eleventh. During a time-out he extracted his BlackBerry for a quick peek at the standings. “Let’s see if Fox News is still on the air,” he said. “He studied the screen for a moment and smiled. “Yeah, looks like we’re okay. We beat CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC combined, in prime time and the twenty-four-hour cume.”

Back on the court, Zac caught a stray elbow to the eye. “Shake it off,” Ailes hollered. “Rub it out! Back on defense! Get all over them! Come on, fellas, show some heart!” But sometimes heart isn’t enough. At the final buzzer the score was 29–10. The boys headed for the locker room, but Ailes motioned for Zac, who loped over. “You made a couple of mistakes out there,” he told the boy. “You threw that one ball away. And you missed an open shot underneath.” Zac nodded. “But,” Ailes said more gently, “you did a lot of things right. You played hard. You hustled. You scored 20 percent of your team’s points. And when you got hit you didn’t whine.” The boy smiled; meeting his father’s standard of toughness is even more important than winning.

Ailes put his arm on Zac’s shoulder. “I’m proud of you, son,” he said. “Now, let’s get you home. You have schoolwork to do.” They walked out of the gym, Ailes’s arm still around his son’s shoulders. A black Lincoln was idling at the curb, waiting to drop Zac at home and take Roger Ailes back to the world where he can control the score.

WARREN

In 2008, Roger Ailes, the most illustrious son of Warren, Ohio, was invited to speak at the dedication of the Trumbull County Veterans Memorial near Courthouse Square. Fifteen hundred people—some of them carrying signs reading Come Back, Roger, and Bring Jobs—turned up to hear his nostalgic, patriotic speech.

Warren, Ohio, is a once great town, at least in the fond childhood memories of Roger Ailes. I have similar feelings about my own hometown, Pontiac, Michigan, another bustling industrial hub in the days of Ike and JFK, before the belt began to rust. Warren was an important town, the county seat, a place where every four years presidential candidates rolled through town in open touring cars, waving at the crowd. It had a grand courthouse, a thriving downtown full of movie palaces, self-important local banks, and even a fine restaurant, the Saratoga.

During the Civil War, Warren was a Yankee hamlet of less than three thousand. But at the start of the twentieth century, things changed. Steel mills sprang up. Packard opened an automobile factory. There were jobs, and a flood of workers—Italian immigrants, white and black Southerners—to fill them. By the time Ailes was growing up there, in the forties and fifties, Warren’s population was climbing toward sixty thousand. Today, it is closer to forty thousand.

Warren was more than manufacturing. It sits about halfway between Chicago and New York, which made it a stopping point on the booze highway during Prohibition—people sometimes called it “Little Chicago”—and it retained its raffish character after repeal. The Mafia became firmly established in the entire Mahoning Valley. Warren’s politics were rough-and-ready. Perhaps the region’s most famous statesman was Congressman Jim Traficant, who represented the valley for twenty years before getting busted on a bribery charge. He got a seven-year sentence, ran for reelection from his federal prison cell, and won 15 percent of the vote.

The Mafia was an irritant in Warren, but during World War II the Nazis posed what appeared to be a greater threat. The Mahoning Valley, with its steel mills, mines, and factories, saw itself as the American Ruhr, which the Allies were bombing into uselessness, and there was widespread concern that the Germans would try to retaliate. The first years of Roger Ailes’s life were spent under blackout and curfew, enforced by air-raid wardens including Roger’s father, Bob. National security concerns didn’t dissipate after the fall of the Third Reich. During the Cold War, American kids everywhere were drilled on ducking under their desks in the event of an atomic attack, and the threat was taken with special seriousness in places like Warren (and in Pontiac). “People figured that as soon as the Russian missiles headed south across the Canadian border they would be aimed right at us,” Ailes recalls.

Paranoia and civic pride coexisted in Warren, Ohio, during the Eisenhower years. The factories were hiring and at peak production. A Chamber of Commerce report, issued in 1955, declared Warren “well balanced industrially, with a great diversification of products from basic steel to finished consumer items. Endowed with a great deal of natural resources and strategically located between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, the future of Warren is assured.”

Young Roger Ailes was exposed to the typical diet of midwestern media. As a boy he delivered the
Youngstown Vindicator
, a morning newspaper. “I used to go out at 5:00 a.m.,” he recalls. “It was dark as hell, and freezing in the winter. On the way out of the house, my dad would give me a chocolate bar and I’d stop halfway through the route, duck into a storefront to get out of the wind, eat that candy, and then do the rest of the route.” There was also a 5,000-watt AM radio station that featured local news and sports, and, due to the town’s fortuitous location, six TV stations out of Youngstown, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, all of which offered the same homogenized network “news from nowhere.”

The main entertainment in Warren was downtown, at theaters like the Robbins—old-fashioned movie houses where the owner and his wife would personally greet the patrons with a handshake on Friday nights. Ailes was a movie buff who especially loved John Wayne westerns, army movies like
From Here to Eternity
, and patriotic fare such as
Yankee Doodle Dandy,
starring Jimmy Cagney. He was close to his maternal grandmother, and they would often take in a movie, save half their popcorn, and then, after the show, feed it to the squirrels near the courthouse fountain.

•   •   •

Roger Ailes was the middle child of Bob and Donna Ailes, an ill-matched couple with strong personalities and very different ideas about child rearing. Bob grew up in Warren, raised by a single mother. His father, Roger’s grandfather, was a medical doctor with an additional degree in public health and a law school diploma to boot. Young Dr. Ailes went off to World War I and was killed in combat. That, at least, was the story his son grew up on. In fact, the story was less heroic. Dr. Ailes met a nurse in the army and never came home. He moved to Akron, fifty miles away, where he became a prominent physician. His abandoned wife was so bitter that she kept his existence a secret from everyone, including his son.

Bob Ailes grew up poor and working class, a displaced person in the social order of his small town. He found work at the Packard plant and became a foreman—a step up from the line, but far from the expectations of the son of a doctor. At twenty-nine he married Donna Cunningham, a local beauty queen ten years his junior. They had three children—Robert Jr. (known as “Rob”), Roger, and Donna Jean (called “Jeannie”)—at three-year intervals. Bob was thirty-three when Roger was born.

Bob Ailes was a gregarious man. He called everyone “son” because he had trouble remembering names, but he was well liked and, within his own social realm, clubbable. He became a 32nd degree Mason, served as past Master of the Ali Baba Grotto of the Shriner’s lodge, and was a freelance ward heeler for local politicians. He was also a hard worker who supplemented his income painting houses and expected his sons to pitch in. Outwardly he seemed like a guy who took life as it came, says Rob Ailes, Roger’s older brother, but inwardly he seethed with resentment.

“One time I visited my father at work and saw him getting dressed down by some college boy executive at work,” Roger recalls. “I asked him why he was taking that kind of shit. I remember exactly what he said. He said, ‘I’m taking the guff so that someday you will be one of the guys giving the orders.’” Bob Ailes was young Roger’s hero, and the humiliation made a deep impression. It is one of life’s satisfactions that, as head of Fox News, he has some six thousand people reporting to him, including quite of lot of college boys.

Roger remembers his father with admiration as a man’s man with an explosive temper. “One time we were in the car and a guy in a truck cut us off and gave my mother the finger,” he told me. “My dad caught up with him at a stoplight, got over to the car, dragged the guy through the open window, and kicked his ass.” But often the anger was directed at his children. “When he got mad, he beat me,” says Ailes in a matter-of-fact tone. “He used an electric cord, a belt, whatever was handy.”

“Spare the rod and spoil the child” was standard parenting back then, but Roger Ailes was not a standard child. He suffered from hemophilia. It made life precarious. Even minor injuries could set off unstoppable bleeding. When Roger was still a preschooler, he bit his tongue and almost died. “Blood was dripping out of his mouth like an icicle,” recalls his brother. There was nothing that could be done in Warren, so Bob Ailes put him in the family car and raced to the Cleveland Clinic, sixty miles northwest, where doctors managed to stanch the bleeding and save Roger’s life. Bob Ailes’s coworkers from Packard came to the clinic to donate blood. “Always remember,” Bob Ailes told his son, “you’ve got blue collar in your veins.”

“Roger was always hurting himself,” says his brother. “One time he fell off the fence and his arm swelled to about four times its usual size. Another time he was riding his bike, plowed through an intersection, and wound up in the hospital with internal bleeding. This was before immunization, so between the usual childhood contagious diseases and the hemophilia, he missed a lot of school.” Their grandmother kept a diary, and in it she noted that Roger had received eighty-five injections in one three-week stint in the hospital. His body turned purple. “That’s a lot of shots for a little kid,” Ailes says.

Many men would have treated a boy like Roger with extreme caution. Bob Ailes didn’t do that. He wanted his son to live a normal life, and in a place like Warren, Ohio, that meant being tough. “Dad never cut Roger any slack because of his illness,” says Rob Ailes. “Maybe he felt guilty about the bruises and the welts when he was done beating us, maybe it worried him later on that he had done it, I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it. It seemed natural. Today he would go to jail for something like that, and we would have wound up in foster care.”

In second grade, Roger was hit by a car. He didn’t bleed out, but his legs were badly injured. Bob Ailes did not intend to have a cripple for a son. He took Roger out to the Warren G. Harding High School track and told him to start running. “They had been using the track as a fairgrounds and it was covered with horseshit,” says Ailes. “I pointed that out to my father and he said, ‘Don’t fall down and you won’t get any on you.’”

Bob Ailes was a hard man, no doubt, but he was also capable of unexpected kindness. As a teenager Roger took out the family car—a very considerable privilege—and crashed it. “I came home scared to tell my old man,” he recalls. “He was sitting in the living room reading the newspaper when I walked in, and I had to just spit it out.”

“Are you hurt?” Bob Ailes asked without putting down the paper.

“No.”

“Is anyone hurt?”

“No.”

“A car is just a thing. We can fix it,” said Bob Ailes. That was the end of the matter. More than fifty years later, Ailes tells the story with a mixture of relief and amazement.

“I think Roger was in denial about his disease,” says Rob Ailes, who is a doctor. “It’s very well known in the medical literature that hemophiliacs tend to be daredevils, the kind of guys who wind up jumping over canyons on motorcycles. Roger fit that bill. He was like a child diabetic who didn’t want to take his medicine. He challenged life.”

As a young kid, Roger got into a lot of fights, and he didn’t mind taking on bigger kids. In junior high school he went out for football. His mother thought it was crazy, but Bob Ailes gave his son permission to play. By that time, Roger and he had an extremely close relationship. “He let Roger make his own restrictions,” says Rob. “As he got older, Roger realized himself what he could and couldn’t do.” He quit football when he saw how dangerous it was, but he didn’t stop taking chances. On a Boy Scout trek through Canada, he and some friends jumped into a river and saved a couple whose canoe had capsized.

These exploits didn’t make Donna Cunningham Ailes happy. She didn’t want her sons to grow up to be roughnecks. Her father, a pious Pentecostal Christian, migrated to Warren from West Virginia. Her parents never even made it to high school, and she had social and cultural aspirations for her children. Bob Ailes, no matter his current place, was a doctor’s son. When her father died, Donna left the Pentecostal church for the more socially established First Presbyterian Church, an impressive structure located on Warren’s “Millionaires’ Row.” She saw to it that the Ailes children had elocution and piano lessons, and the boys sometimes played duets in church. When Roger injured his legs, her idea of rehab was forcing him to take ballet and tap dance classes with his sister, an indignity for which he has yet to forgive her. To finance all this self-improvement, Donna made lace doilies and embroidered hankies that the Ailes children sold door-to-door, much to their chagrin.

Bob Ailes was indifferent to his sons’ school performance; Donna was a different story. She demanded good grades. Rob, the dutiful son, obliged with straight A’s and an acceptance to Oberlin College. Roger wasn’t interested. “He wouldn’t play her game,” says Rob. “He was the creative type, and they didn’t give grades for that. Kids like him were considered lazy or stupid. But he didn’t care. His attitude was, the hell with it, I don’t need these classes and I don’t give a damn about grades. He wouldn’t budge and eventually he forced our mother to compromise.”

When Roger finished high school, his father took him aside and told him that he would have to leave. “Go out and get a job. Join the service. Or if you want to go to college, for every dollar you put up, I’ll try to match it with a dollar,” he said. Roger was shocked and hurt. He thought he was being cast out as a further lesson in Bob Ailes’s tough love. But he was mistaken. This was part of a larger family drama he didn’t fully grasp.

Roger decided to go to college at Ohio University. It was cheap, it had a reputation as a party school, and he could get in with less than stellar grades. His parents drove up to Athens and dropped him off. When he came home for Christmas break, he found his house sold and his belongings discarded. His mother had gone west with Joe Urban, a New York reporter turned fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society whom she met at a convention. “My mother was what you could call self-absorbed,” says Rob. “She did what suited her.”

Bob Ailes fell into a deep depression and moved in with his own mother. Seeing him that way was shocking, but Roger tried not to take sides. “They both had a case,” he says. “My dad was ten years older, a factory guy, and she was very smart and very stylish. And he had a temper. Joe was a sweet man. I didn’t blame anyone for anything.” In 1989, Ailes wrote his only book, a how-to communication guide titled
You Are the Message
, and dedicated it to his wife, his mother, and Joe Urban.

Ailes, homeless, spent his freshman winter break at the home of his best friend, Doug Webster, who was on his way to becoming a naval aviator and who died a few years later, during the Vietnam War, in the Sea of Japan. When Roger left Warren, after the New Year, it was for good.