How Roger Ailes Commandeered A Save-The-Earth Hippie Musical And Inadvertently Birthed A Pop Juggernaut

You know musical theatre history, but what about herstory? Theatre historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper has a new book on the way, and Playbill has an exclusive first look.

Set to be released November 19, Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy That The History Books Left Out is the first book to tell the story of more than 300 inspiring women who wrote Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals. From the composers who pounded the pavement selling their music in Tin Pan Alley at the turn of the 20th century, to the lyricists who broke new ground writing shows during the Great Depression, to the book writers who penned protest musicals fighting for social justice during the 1970s, to those who are revitalizing the landscape of American theatre today, Tepper pulls no punches in elevating the women whose work has been overlooked for far too long.

The book also covers well-known Broadway writers like Betty Comden and Jeanine Tesori, women who have written musicals but gained fame elsewhere like Dolly Parton and Sara Bareilles, and dramatists you’ve likely never heard of (but definitely should have). 

The following excerpt explores how a pre-Fox News Roger Ailes stole creative control from composer Toni Tennille for the short-lived Broadway musical Mother Earth. This led to Tennille taking her talented contralto to the popular music sphere as one half of the vocal duo Captain and Tennille.

Mother Earth is a protest musical about saving our planet, a modern pop-rock performance piece presented on the heels of Hair that wanted to make audiences feel fired up about air pollution, species extinction, big business, and over-population. It played twelve performances at the Belasco in 1972.

The show played South Coast Rep and American Conservatory Theater out of town before coming to New York. It received nearly all rave reviews in California, with critics remarking that Mother Earth was fresh, exciting, and had something to say.

Mother Earth moved to Broadway, produced by Republican media consultant Roger Ailes; the man who would later become CEO and chairman of Fox News once produced a Broadway musical about the environment. His sole Broadway credit would always be Mother Earth, a show with anti-Vietnam sketches and jokes about fashionable gas masks and a song called “Save the World for Children.” Ailes, then thirty-two years old, even wrote additional lyrics for Mother Earth in addition to raising the money for it from Nixon supporters who were grateful he had helped Nixon get elected. Ailes’s Playbill bio was all about his previous work in television and politics and many critics pointed out that Mother Earth would be better off on public television than at the Belasco.

Mother Earth has music by Toni Shearer, later known as Toni Tennille. When the show was still in its out of-town phase, the keyboard player moved on to another gig, and a man named Daryl Dragon came in to sub on keys for Mother Earth in between Beach Boys gigs. That’s how the duo later on known as Captain and Tennille met.

“The keyboardist had been given a recording of me singing songs from the show and he liked it, so he agreed to fly up from L.A. and audition,” Tennille wrote in her memoir.

I first saw him in the lobby of the theater, a rail-thin, pale young man with large brown eyes and scruffy dark hair. He was dressed all in black and slumped on a bench, arms crossed in an aloof, bored manner. But when he sat down and began to play, I immediately knew he was perfect for the show. And there was something about him I found intriguing. His long, slender fingers would play the music perfectly note by note, and then suddenly switch to an entirely different tune right in the middle, improvising for a few bars before going back to the first song. It was like he was telling me jokes through the music, and it made me laugh.

When Mother Earth closed at the Belasco, Tennille went to join the Beach Boys on tour and the rest is music history. Within three years, Captain and Tennille had the Record of the Year for “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

While Mother Earth received only raves on the West Coast (Variety even said it was better than Hair), it received largely pans on the East Coast. The main complaint of every critic could be reduced to: Yes, but what’s your point? Who could possibly be against saving the environment?

Newspapers also said that Mother Earth was “too slick to be amateur and too amateur for professional theatre” (Martin Gottfried, Women’s Wear Daily) and bristled at the show being “a bit [too] collegiate” (Time). These young people with something to say about saving the planet just did not belong on Broadway!

In the New York Times, Clive Barnes said, “Humorless humor is a form of aural pollution” and then worried that his bad review of Mother Earth was like “stealing wheat germ lollipops from kids.”

Toni Tennille (Shearer) was very proud of the show, its message, its modern sound. Her regret was that she never had a lawyer look over her contract when Hollywood producer types came to see Mother Earth in California and bragged they could bring it to Broadway. She signed away creative control to Ailes and his two collaborators without realizing it. By the time the show opened on Broadway, she did not consider it her own anymore. The show had been cheapened and changed without her consent and it broke her heart. She would not return to Broadway.

The cast of Mother Earth included John Bennett Perry, Matthew Perry’s father. He was one of several cast members who went on record about how the men who took control of Mother Earth, producer Roger Ailes, director Ray Golden and consultant (Broadway’s legendary) Kermit Bloomgarden, didn’t understand it, and were turning something young and vibrant into an out-of-touch Borscht Belt musical. One of the first things they did was insist the show had to be sexier, and put all of the women in hot pants. Tennille was horrified by this.

When Tennille quit the show, she was replaced as a performer by Kelly Garrett, who would later win a Theatre World Award for her performance. “[Kelly] was striking looking and a hell of a singer, but she had no Broadway experience I knew of,” Perry remembered for Gabriel Sherman’s book on Roger Ailes. Rick Podell, another Mother Earth actor who would later originate a role in Sunset Boulevard, contributed, “Roger made sure she had some solos. People go: wait a minute, is the producer fucking the leading lady?” And Frank Coombs, another cast member was supposed to help Kelly catch up on learning the choreography without touching her. “The only reason the show existed was Roger was dating Kelly Garrett and Kelly needed Broadway work.”

But Ailes did care about Mother Earth for other reasons. One day at a Mother Earth rehearsal at the Belasco he bragged, “I sold The Trick to the American people, now I’m going to sell THIS and it’s going to be great.”

A publicity stunt staged by Roger Ailes found the cast of Mother Earth, outside the Belasco, wearing gas masks and riding their bicycles to the theater.

“It’s a great show,” Ailes said at the time. “I don’t know anything about Broadway, but I’m learning. It’s much more exciting than politics. Nixon was O.K.—but all those state campaigns—wow! I mean, I finally got bored with South Dakota.”