Roger Ailes: Off Camera by Zev Chafets

Representative Chuck Schumer. Without Ailes, D’Amato ran a tasteless campaign whose low point came when he called Schumer a putz-head. Today, he says he should have listened to Ailes. “The thing about Roger is, he doesn’t tell you something he doesn’t believe. If he tells you something, take it to the bank. But he tells you and that’s that. He doesn’t insist that you agree with him.”
    Ailes’s early successes with D’Amato secured him a place as a New York Republican power broker. He became one of the de facto leaders of the GOP in the Empire State. Tim Carey, a longtime Republican operative, worked on New York campaigns for Javits, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and George Pataki, and served as a consultant to the Republican National Committee. Carey also worked for Lew Lehrman, the drugstore magnate who ran against Mario Cuomo in the 1982 New York gubernatorial race. “Lehrman was stiff,” recalls Carey. “I took him to Roger to learn how to communicate.” Lehrman improved, but not enough to defeat Cuomo, who didn’t need lessons to connect with the public.
    That same year, the job of Westchester county executive became vacant. Tony Colavita, the outgoing incumbent, needed to pick a successor from a roster of aspiring candidates, including future governor George Pataki, who was then mayor of Peekskill. Colavita brought his potential successors down to Ailes Communications one at a time and Ailes checked them out, taping and assessing speeches. He settled on Andy O’Rourke of Yonkers. “Let’s just say Andy was the kind of guy who would wear two different plaids,” says Carey. “But Ailes saw past that. To him, O’Rourke was like a guy from
GQ
, a winner. And Roger was right about him—he was reelected three times and then went on to be a state judge.” Pataki didn’t get the job, but there were no hard feelings. “Roger thought he was too young,” says Carey.
    Carey worked with Ailes on numerous campaigns and came away with an education. “Roger taught me to always be honest with candidates, and firm. In political consulting you have a lot of clients who mistakenly think they know more than they do. And every candidate meets people who have ideas. Roger could say no. He fought for his candidates, but he didn’t empathize with them.”
    “He also taught me that there is no cookie cutter. A lot of consultants work with a one-size-fits-all pattern, and they lose. But for Roger, it was always a matter of sizing up the opponent, finding his weaknesses, or turning his strengths against him.”
    For years, Ailes had lived a peripatetic single life. He met lots of women at shoots and on the trail and he dated from time to time, but he was more interested, he says, in work. But as time went on, he began to yearn for family life. In 1981, he married Norma Ferrer, a divorced mother of two, whom he met in Florida, where she worked at an ad agency at whose facilities Ailes was editing the documentary on Fellini. Ferrer had two children: a son, who was living on the West Coast with his father, and a daughter, Shawn. “I didn’t adopt Shawn,” Ailes says. “She called me Roger, not Dad, but I did everything for her that a dad would do and I stayed married to her mother until she was in college.” Ailes and Norma were divorced after eleven years. After the divorce, Norma went to work for Mission Broadcasting, an evangelical television production company. Shawn majored in journalism at the University of Georgia, moved to New York, and is now an executive at HGTV.
    •   •   •
    Ailes sat out the seventies in presidential politics, but he was active in the 1980 Reagan-Carter contest as a member of the Tuesday Group, a weekly gathering of senior image makers.
    He played a more dramatic role in 1984, when he was called in to coach Ronald Reagan in his second debate with Walter Mondale. It was emergency surgery. Reagan, who was seventy-four, had appeared old and befuddled in the first debate,