Robert Sr.’s lessons sometimes had a cruel edge. When Roger was recovering from the car accident, his father took him to a running track to help him practice walking again. One day, Roger fell into some manure that lay on the ground. “Don’t fall down and you won’t get that crap on you!” Robert snapped. The cruelest lesson Roger would speak of occurred in the bedroom Roger shared with his brother. Roger was standing on the top bunk. His father opened his arms wide and smiled.
“Jump Roger, jump,” he told him.
Roger leapt off the bed into the air toward his arms. But Robert took a step back. His son fell flat onto the floor. As he looked up, Robert leaned down and picked him up. “Don’t ever trust anybody,” he said.
Stephen Rosenfield, who worked for Roger’s consulting company in the 1970s, considered the episode “his Rosebud story,” a moment that defined and haunted his boss. Ailes told it to him on several occasions with pain in his voice. “He was upset by it, but also felt his father was teaching him an important lesson,” Rosenfield recalled. “Which is why I think you’re describing a guy who doesn’t have a lot of close friends. The people Roger works with become his close family. Roger feels way safer knowing he’s in control.”
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 pair
s 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.”
Roger learned enough about his father’s blue-collar struggles to know he wanted no part of them. “All I wanted to do was to make enough money, so I’d never have to live the life my father lived,” he once said. Roger also vowed never to let others dominate him. After landing a job on a highway crew digging ditches along Ohio Route 45 at the age of seventeen, Roger had his first try on the jackhammer. “He told me to put it against my belly and just pull the trigger,” he recalled of the foreman. The jackhammer lurched, catapulting him onto his back. He lay in the mud, dazed. He wanted to attack the man, but recognized that “he’d kill me if I tried anything.”
“Why’d you do that?” Roger yelled at him. He remembered the response for many years.
“I ain’t your mama, boy,” the man said.
One day, in the spring of Roger’s senior year of high school, his father pulled him aside. “Where are you going?” he asked. Roger thought it was a strange question. He was sitting in the living room, not going anywhere. “You can’t live here. You’re eighteen. You’re on your own. You have to make a life now.… If you get somebody pregnant, don’t bring them home. I’m not paying for it.”
Around this time, Roger had received an acceptance letter from Ohio University in Athens. He wanted to go, but there were no prospects for a scholarship, as his brother had to Oberlin. His father said he was not prepared to pay for his education. He suggested he join the military or get a job at Packard.
“I can put your name up at the shop, try to get you a job.”
Roger was furious and did not speak to his dad for two months, but, looking back, Roger called it “the best thing he ever did for me.”
Perhaps to spite his father, Roger enrolled in college. He may have been ambivalent about academics, but he would never allow himself to end up like his father.
Later that summer, Roger arrived in Athens, a small city tucked into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, for the beginning of his freshman year. The campus, with its stately redbrick buildings and manicured quads overlooking the Hocking River, a tributary of the Ohio, had the pastoral feel of an East Coast college. “It felt like a picture-perfect postcard of the Eisenhower years. You felt like there was a fort around the city,” Arthur Nolletti, a classmate, recalled. Students went for hayrides in the fall and caroled at Christmas.
The Cold War was a campus preoccupation, while civil rights were viewed skeptically. During Ailes’s sophomore year, the OU Post criticized a civil rights march down College Street, in which a mere eighty people participated. “If you are scared of the truth, don’t read this editorial!” it read. “Equality is not a one-way proposition. With equality goes responsibility and obligation. There are negroes who have shown that they are not ready to accept this obligation.… Just remember one thing White Man—you’re the minority in this here bigoted world of ours. And you’re becoming a smaller minority with the passing of each day.”
The handbook distributed to Roger’s class encouraged students to conform to social convention. “The ‘big man on campus’ will want a dark suit and sport coats,” the manual stated. “The co-ed will want sweaters and skirts, bobby sox and saddles, and Sunday ensembles.” The guiding principle was modesty. “Individualism is encouraged at OU, so long as it is within University rules,” it stated. “Put your best foot forward at OU. Leave your family skeletons in the closet.” A caption in the 1959 yearbook below a photo of a boy and girl standing in a bowling lane noted, “he instructs and she listens.” In December 1959, a group of three hundred students protested against the Beats.
When Ailes arrived on campus, he did not know what he wanted to study, but he was sure about one thing. He wanted to join the military, just as Doug Webster, his best friend from Warren, had done. Roger signed up for the Air Force ROTC and stayed with the program for two years, but his health was an issue. “What I really wanted to do was fly fighter planes.… But my eyesight and other physical problems made the government in their wisdom not allow me to have an expensive aircraft,” he later said. In a certain sense, the closest he came was playing the bossy Private Irwin Blanchard in the university’s stage production of No Time for Sergeants.
Just as in high school, Ailes had little interest in classes. “I was hammered all the time,” he recalled. “I skipped a lot of classes, finally got an F. The dean brought me in, said ‘We have to keep you because it’s a state school, but we only have to keep you one more semester.’ ” But he found new direction when, on a lark, he applied for an on-air position at WOUB, the college radio station, during his freshman year. At the time, Ohio University was a pioneer in college broadcasting, one of only a handful of colleges in the country with a student-run radio and television station. Ailes’s starting position was reading news headlines on a program called Radio Digest. He then hosted the Yawn Patrol, a morning variety show, with his friend Don Hylkema. Vincent Jukes, a stout, imperious man who ran the radio department, imposed rigid rules on his young broadcasters, insisting he approve all music played on air. Rock and roll records were expressly forbidden, but Ailes proved adept at skirting Jukes’s authority. One day, he concocted a plan with Hylkema to slip a Bobby Darin record by him. “We took the record to him to get it okayed,” Hylkema recalled. “The two of us talked and distracted him through the whole thing.”
With his acting experience, Ailes was a natural broadcaster. Archie Greer, the thirty-seven-year-old faculty adviser for the station, spotted his talent. Unlike Jukes, Greer had a friendly disposition and was an enthusiastic mentor. “Archie was probably the first person to have confidence in me and say, ‘You can do things,’ ” Ailes said. By the end of his sophomore year, Greer promoted Ailes to station manager, a position normally assigned to seniors. Ailes was soon selected to join the Alpha Epsilon Rho radio and television society for his performance in broadcasting. Even as an underclassman, Ailes seemed older and more imposing than the other students. “We were sort of afraid of him, because he was the boss,” Mike Adams, who entered OU in 1960, recalled.
The radio studio became Ailes’s home. To concentrate on broadcasting, Ailes decided to major in fine arts. When school was in session, he never seemed to leave the basement of the speech building, except to grab a bite to eat at Blackmore’s up the street. He was often the first person to arrive at 6:00 a.m. to turn on the transmitter. During one summer, instead of going home, he took a job earning $1.10 an hour at the Athens commercial station WATH.
Despite the hours he spent in the tight-knit radio community, Ailes was an elusive figure. Without telling his classmates, he moonlighted as a rock and roll DJ under the pseudonym Dick Summers at WMPO, a radio station twenty-five miles south in Middleport, Ohio. “He didn’t let anyone get close to him,” Don Hylkema recalled. “He never talked about himself as an individual or things he felt or thought about. It was strange.… Everyone knew Roger, but they didn’t know anything about him.” His political convictions, if he had them, were unclear, even as he led the station during the 1960 election cycle. “He did not display any sign of extreme right-wing politics,” Don Swaim, the WOUB special events director, recalled. Ailes refrained from discussing his hemophilia with most people. “I remember when he told me,” said classmate Bill Klokow. “We were pulling music in the library. He said it was serious. At that time, he didn’t know how long he was going to live.”
Ailes’s temper flared when he did not get what he wanted. “Control was extremely important to him,” Hylkema recalled. Robert Jr. linked this trait to his medical condition. “The thing is about hemophiliacs, they’re risk takers,” he said. “They tend to deny their illness. They don’t w
ant to be special. They fight against it, and here’s the thing: they become aggressive in their behavior.”
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.
The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country Page 3
