Read The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country for Free Online Page B

producers. They had not seen each other since their performance in
Night of January 16th
. Newman was now a talent coordinator and producer for a new ninety-minute afternoon variety-talk program.Westinghouse was preparing to syndicate it in five metropolitan markets.
    Forrest “Woody” Fraser, an excitable young producer from Chicago, had come up with the concept. A pioneer of daytime television, Fraser helped launch the short-lived afternoon variety shows
Hi, Ladies!
,
Club 60
, and
Adults Only
.Newman was the first person Fraser hired for the new show, for which he had come up with a novel format: a genial host paired each week with a different celebrity co-host. The two would spend more time interacting with each other than interviewing guests.Together, Fraser and Newman auditioned a half dozen candidates. The challenge was to find a permanent host who did not mind sharing the stage each week with names more famous than his own. “All they cameup with was run-of-the-mill singers, out-of-work disk jockeys and a guy who could play ‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird’ on the piano,” the eventual winner wrote in his memoir. Then, they found him.
    One afternoon, Fraser was back in Chicago sitting in Henrici’s bar at the Merchandise Mart Building, where NBC had a dozen studios. A small television monitor mounted on the wall played a game show on mute. “Mike Douglas!” Fraser shouted, pointing at the host on the screen. Douglas, an affable big band singer, had worked with Fraser on several shows and Fraser thought he’d be perfect for the job. “The bartender looked up, looked at the TV, then gently corrected him,” Douglas recalled. “It was Merv Griffin on
Play Your Hunch
. Didn’t matter. Woody didn’t know Merv, he knew Mike. And he didn’t have Merv’s address, he had Mike’s. A few days later, I was on my way to Cleveland.”
    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 nowbuying 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.”
    S tarting 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 withthem 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