Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets Read Free Book Online Page A

apartment on Eighth Avenue.” He started his own company, Ailes Production, later changed to Ailes Communications.
    Marjorie stayed in Philadelphia. They weren’t officially divorced for five more years, and they saw each other occasionally, but the marriage was over. “We just grew apart,” Ailes says. “She was into art and literature, and she had a lot of local interests. I was after a national career, and I was selfish. We had no kids, and it ended amicably. We shared a divorce lawyer and parted as friends.”
    In the meantime, Ailes Communications was building quite a multifaceted operation. Over the years, Ailes produced commercial television documentaries as well as off-Broadway plays. He consulted for local television stations around the country. He even tried his hand at talent management. His best-known clients were Kelly Garrett, a beautiful actress with whom Ailes had a close personal relationship, and satirist Mort Sahl, whose career was in decline when Ailes picked him up. “Mort was still brilliant but he was unreliable,” Ailes says. “One time he came to Buffalo for a gig and refused to leave the airport because the limo was the wrong color.” That experience inspired Ailes to leave the talent management game.
    Ailes Communications did a lot of corporate and commercial work for a list of clients that ranged from Polaroid and the Texas Energy Commission to the American Kennel Club. Ailes did issue ads for the American Bankers Association, consulted on messaging and positioning for Philip Morris, and provided executive training to American Express, General Electric, and others. His clients knew that he had Washington connections, which were bolstered by his growing reputation as a major factor in Republican politics.
    “Roger Ailes was the first independent political consultant,” says political consultant Dick Morris, now a commentator on Fox News. “Before him, candidates hired advertising agencies or executives to do their media, or turned it over to the party. Roger was the first guy to hang out his own shingle and take clients. It would be fair to say that he invented the modern profession of political consulting.” This isn’t strictly true: There have been professional campaign consultants going back at least to the early 1930s, when a pair of Californians, Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, founded Campaigns, Inc. But Ailes was among the first, and certainly the most successful, in the era of televised national politics. He was always a Republican, but from the start he approached his campaigns with a nonideological detachment. One of his early clients was Jim Holshouser Jr., a young attorney who, in 1972, was running to become the first Republican governor in the history of North Carolina. At the time, one of the hottest issues was school busing to achieve racial integration. It was extremely unpopular, not just in the South but in liberal bastions like Boston; in my hometown, Pontiac, a Democratic stronghold, crowds overturned and burned school buses. Holshouser’s Democratic opponent was opposed to busing, so it didn’t seem like a problem until the candidate told Ailes that it was. “We are going to support busing,” he told his consultant.
    “When a candidate begins saying ‘we’ it usually means that his wife is involved,” says Ailes. Sure enough, Mrs. Holshouser turned out to be a staunch supporter of school busing, and she convinced her husband that he should be, too.
    Ailes had a heart-to-heart with Holshouser. “I have no fucking idea if busing will work or not,” he said. “I haven’t seen any data on it, I don’t know the issue. I don’t know if it is a good thing, or a bad one. But here is what I
do
know. If you don’t do an antibusing spot on TV, you will lose the election. Now, if I were you I’d do the fucking spot, win the election, and then, once you’re in office, do whatever you think is right. Or, you can not do the fucking spot, make your wife feel