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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 withJoseph 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 powerfulsignal 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”
    W ESTINGHOUSE ’ S C LEVELAND 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