CITIZEN COHN
Doc Looks At Trump Puppetmaster, Roy Cohn
The balcony at Studio 54 was dark, smoke-filled and when they weren’t partying in the fabled basement, VIPs would trudge up the stairs to do drugs, watch the dance floor below, cruise the crowd or canoodle. While passing through the mezzanine one night, I came face to face with a sinister-looking character who averted his soulless, amphibian eyes as soon as we made eye contact. I would find out later that man was Roy Cohn.
Studio 54 played a role in Roy Cohn’s storied career and vice versa. He defended the legendary nightclub’s owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, against corporate and personal income tax evasion, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice charges. The disco, or more specifically, director Matt Tyrnauer’s film about the historic nightspot, was the catalyst behind the filmmaker’s decision to make his new documentary, Where’s My Roy Cohn? It was while working on his documentary, Studio 54, that Mr. Tyrnauer first got the idea to do a film about Cohn.
“There was a press conference the day Studio 54 was raided and he (Cohn) gave this really pugnacious performance. While I was editing that film, I kept thinking this is some of the best archival footage I’ve ever seen and he’s leaping off the screen and I wondered where is the Roy Cohn documentary? Then I thought, the only reason to do a Roy Cohn movie and the only way to get it financed is if Donald Trump gets elected but then I thought, that’ll never happen so I put that notion aside. When the election turned out the horrifying way it did, I immediately revived the idea because Cohn went from being a bold footnote in history to being a modern Machiavelli overnight.”
A lot of people may know him best as the character portrayed by Al Pacino in HBO’s Angels In America, but Cohn’s career highlights include prosecuting and convicting Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who were sent to the electric chair for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union; serving as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy whose red scare systematically interrogated and purged alleged Communists from the federal government and Hollywood; and representing some of America’s most notorious mobsters. He was good friends with Nancy and Ronald Reagan, companion to Barbara Walters, lawyer for the Archdiocese of New York, advisor to political consultant and strategist, Roger Stone, and one of the heirs to Lionel Trains.
Having had mentors that included McCarthy, legendary columnist Walter Winchell and FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, Cohn developed his reputation as a killer-lawyer and powerbroker. Yet despite his ruthlessness, there were childlike dimensions to his personality. In his bedroom, which had a Disney plastic license plate stamped “Roy” on the door, he kept a menagerie of stuffed frogs. Tyrnauer isn’t quite sure what to make of it. “He obviously wanted to lean into the idea that there was some sort of man-child lurking beneath his reptilian façade. Whether it’s arrested development or the fact that he lived with Momma until she died is an open question.”
So how did a gay, Jewish Momma’s boy develop the chip on his shoulder that would make him one of the most vocal antigay, antisemitic voices of the 20th century? “I don’t know if I would call them chips,” says Mr. Tyrnauer, “they were probably psychological traumas. He was never comfortable revealing his homosexuality openly and while he didn’t hide his Judaism, he certainly behaved very strangely about it, especially for someone who comes from a prominent Jewish family. He was very involved in persecuting gay people during the McCarthy era for suspected disloyalty and that was really a heinous hypocrisy.” One of Tyrnauer’s favorite parts in the film is when Gore Vidal and Cohn appeared together on a 70s talk show and, citing Senator Flanders of Vermont, who had told him that Joseph McCarthy was “a full-time homosexual,” Vidal asked Cohn if McCarthy was gay. In that same clip, Vidal outs Roy Cohn more or less after Cohn tries to out him. Tyrnauer describes it as “A pretty special moment.”
One also has to wonder how two of the most anal, closeted homosexuals of the time (Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover) found each other. “He got to Hoover through a network of the right wing legal and political world. The irony that they were both gay and in the closet didn’t really come to the surface until many years later so it’s hard to speculate exactly what the nature of that relationship was although I do think Cohn was Hoover’s Sammy Glick who went around pollinating every poison tree with gossip.” Sammy Glick, the antagonist from Budd Schulberg’s novel, What Makes Sammy Run? is defined by the Urban Dictionary as “a heartless go-getter who will stop at nothing to pursue his ambitions”.
This leads us to Cohn’s relationship with the ultimate Sammy Glick, Donald Trump. The two met in 1973, shortly after the government filed a lawsuit charging the Trump family real estate business with discriminating against blacks. The Donald sought Cohn’s advice, which, according to Marie Brenner, who wrote the definitive Vanity Fair article about the Trump/Cohn relationship and produced this new documentary, was, “Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove you discriminated.”
Trump was an avid disciple of Cohn’s attack-and-destroy philosophy and with a savant skill, was soon incorporating “The Big Lie” into his rhetoric. The propaganda technique, originated by the Nazis, relies on the gross distortion or misrepresentation of facts, i.e. fake news. Sound familiar?
Director Tyrnauer witnessed Trump’s big lie first-hand. One of his very first assignments as a correspondent for Vanity Fair was to interview Trump who had just bought Mar a Lago and had recently celebrated the birth of his daughter, Tiffany, with wife #2, Marla Maples.
“It shows you what kind of value they put on the story to send the greenest, most junior person on the entire staff to interview him. We spent the day together and he claimed repeatedly, that he could hit a golf ball off a cement pad and hit it farther than any person living on earth, which he proceeded to demonstrate with various assistants standing around him confirming to him that he had hit the golf ball farther than any living person.”
When asked about the impact Cohn had on the future president, the documentarian says, “I think there’s a case to be made that Cohn was a bigger influence than his father. I will say that Roy Cohn did the impossible, which is more than what Fred Trump did, and that is to create a president from beyond the grave, the most unlikely president. I don’t think we can credit Fred Trump with that, but I think we can credit Roy Cohn.”
What does Tyrnauer think Cohn, who died of AIDS in 1986, would have thought of Trump as president? “Move over William Barr…like the best year ever!”
Where’s My Roy Cohn?, which opens in theatres on September 20th, is Mr. Tyrnauer’s fifth feature length documentary. His other films include Valentino: The Last Emperor, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, Scotty and the Secret Life of Hollywood, and Studio 54.
