Roy Cohn, Friend and American

My oh my, they really have it in for my old friend Roy Cohn, you’d think his real name was Adolf Hitler. The rogues’ gallery wall has been enlarged so every schmuck Roy ever took to the cleaners can state his case. Roy died of AIDS forty years ago, although, being Roy, he insisted he was suffering from pneumonia or something else just as banal. Roy was a homo, but in a closet so deep, it would accommodate every shoe and garment that Imelda Marcos ever purchased without paying. 

There’s a new hatchet-job out about Roy, one whose title I don’t even know, but I read a review of it and it wasn’t pretty. There’s never been anything nice printed about Roy, and when I say never, I mean never, ever.  What was it about Cohn that made every trendy liberal, most trendy gays, and definitely all left-wing phonies loathe the guy? That’s an easy one to answer. Roy was gay but in the closet, as gentlemen gays tended to be back then, and he was—horror of horrors—right-wing. The haters screamed hypocrisy about him being in the closet, but it was nothing of the kind. Roy came from a very Jewish background, and his mother would not have liked to see her only and extremely precious son galavanting down the village half-naked and sporting a trumpet up—well, never mind. 

Roy was a conservative, something the phonies on the left considered worse than murder. Roy was unapologetic about his politics, and flaunted his friendship with William Buckley and others on the right side of politics. Last but not least, Roy had been unapologetic about the Rosenbergs, the two traitor-spies for the Soviet Union who got the chair back in 1953 for giving atomic bomb secrets to that nice guy, Joseph Stalin. “If I could have pulled the switch, I would have,” said Roy, and so would this writer. 

My personal relations with Roy were friendly, if quite distant. I first met him in El Morocco, the number one nightclub of New York back in the ’50s and early ’60s. He came to my table and chatted with a gangster-gentleman friend of mine, Tom Corbally, the international adventurer and flier of the Second World War. He railed against Bobby Kennedy, the then–attorney general to his brother, President JFK. Roy made a lot of sense and I was delighted to meet him. 

Roy and Bobby Kennedy had been colleagues when trying to root out reds from the government and the army, not to mention Hollywood. Bobby switched and became the liberal to end all liberals, but not Roy. Many years later, when I was sued by the Italian wife of Henry Ford for something I had written about her background—she was not an aristocrat born, but had convinced an innocent American like Henry the Deuce, as we called him, that she was a Colonna, or something like that, nothing very serious, mind you, but plebs tend to anger about such matters—Roy was her lawyer. 

I ran into him at Studio 54, at the bar, and he said to me that he would try and lower the temperature because “in this country not being born an aristocrat is hardly libelous.” I thought what he said was great, and he kept his word. Instead of milking La Ford, he pointed out an obvious truth and convinced her to drop the suit against—I believe it was Esquire, or perhaps the Post. 

About four or five years ago, in Provincetown, Michael Mailer and I were in his father’s (Norman Mailer) house that was almost connected to another small dwelling rented every summer by Roy Cohn. A young woman approached us and announced she was making a documentary on Roy Cohn, and once Michael told her I knew him, asked me to take part. I did and then attended the premiere at Lincoln Center. As the pug said, I shoulda stayed in bed. 

I was the only one in the documentary who had a good word to say about Roy. People whistled and booed. It was a very lefty, Jewish New York crowd, and my only remark was thank God Roy was Jewish too, or they’d have really had it in for him. The documentary’s name is Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn. Basically Cohn was and is loathed because he was right-wing, no ifs or buts about it. He cut corners alright, but I’d like to have a dollar for every other Noo Yawk lawyer who does. He had an in with high-court New York judges because his old man was one, and he worked that to death. So what? He was never convicted of anything, but the left hates those who should be lefties, more than types like myself, who was born a righty.

Never mind that he’s been dead for 40 years, but still the lefties hate him as if he had betrayed socialism and Uncle Joe Stalin in the process. Recently I had the bad luck to be seated for dinner one away from a ghastly person by the name of Leon Black. He is the multibillionaire who gave hundreds of millions to Jeffrey Epstein supposedly for tax advice—a bit like saying I’m hanging out with Donald Trump in order to learn about humility. There’s a new book out on him called Money to Burn.  

The dinner was given by a very close friend, whose wife asked me not to insult her guest. I complied, but it was hard going. What annoys me is that 40 years after his death, lefties continue to insult Cohn on occasion of yet another hatchet job. In the meantime, a bum like Leon Black gives $158 million to Epstein and insults us by insisting it was for tax and estate planning advice. A new name for pimping, something Roy never did for anyone.

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