78The CULTURE PAGESSecrets
and Lies
Trump mentor. Joe McCarthy
protégé. AIDS victim. More than
three decades after his death,
Roy Cohn still haunts American life.
By Carl Swansonwhere’s my roy cohn? opens September 20;
bully. coward. victim. the story of roy cohn
premieres September 29.I
t wasn’t so long ago that the
once-fearsome lawyer Roy Cohn
and his infamous career seemed
destined to be no more than a
colorful footnote to history. Cohn
was a gaudy character, for sure—a hustler,
a fixer, and an amoral hypocrite of incred-
ible drive—whose life as a closeted man
ended in tragic comeuppance when he
died of aids in 1986, insisting to the last
that he couldn’t possibly be dying of that
gay disease. Tony Kushner wrote a vivid
version of him into Angels in America,
and that might have been the last word on
Cohn if not for the fact that, in midlife, he
had met and started giving legal and how-
to-get-away-with-it life advice to a then-
young Donald Trump, helping mold him
into the man who became president.
This year, two ambitious Roy Cohn docu-
mentaries seek to explain this troubling
figure. Matt Tyrnauer’s Where’s My Roy
Cohn? came about while the director was
making a documentary on Studio 54,
where Cohn not only spent his off-hours
hobnobbing amid its disco debauch but
also served as the legendary nightclub’s
preening attack lawyer. A week after the
release of Tyrnauer’s Cohn doc, Ivy Meero-
pol’s Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of
Roy Cohn has its world premiere at the
New York Film Festival (it will air on HBO
next year). Meeropol’s grandparents were
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whom a patri-
otically zealous young Cohn, right out of
law school, helped send to the electric chair
for spying for the Russians. But curiously,her film is somewhat more generous than
Tyrnauer’s in depicting Cohn’s transac-
tional humanity, including the brazen
orchestration of his gayness, especially later
in his life in Provincetown, where he was
the closest to being out that he had ever
been able to be (the movie features a series
of never-before-seen personal photos of
Cohn, one of which is on these pages).
Even Meeropol’s title is a bit poetically
humanizing: It is what was written on
Cohn’s panel of the aids Memorial Quilt,
unfurled in 1987 to eulogize those who’d
succumbed to the disease. But the direc-
tor admits that for much of her life, she
really didn’t know anything about Cohn
besides his helping to do great harm to
her family. When I met up with her at
Snack Taverna in the West Village, near
where she was finishing the final edits on
the film, she made it clear that her family’s
story wasn’t the lens through which she
wanted to show Cohn.Why didyoudecidetomakethisfilm?
Thisstoryhasbeenpercolatingwithme
since 1988,whenmyfatherandIstumbled
on RoyCohn’spanelontheaidsquilt.Nei-
ther ofusknewthathewasgayorthathe
had diedofaids.Ionlyknewhimasa
name, asanevilspecterfromthe[Rosen-
bergs’]trial.Hewasafascinatingfigure,
and formanyyearsthere’dbeennoreal
documentarytreatmentofhim.ButIactu-
ally thought,Somebodyelsecandothat.
I don’thavetobetheRosenbergs’grand-
daughterallthetimeinmywork. PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF PETER MANSOCohn in Provincetown in the early ’80s.