New doc digs deeper into Cohn’s life

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‘A villain out of central casting’

Here are a few of the fun facts you learn from “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn.” Cohn, while wealthy, rarely paid his bills. A $1,500 laundry debt, a $10,500 tab he owed the 21 Club, a repossessed car – we see Cohn’s handwritten messages instructing his secretary not to pay anything, because that, quite simply, was his strategy: Don’t pay.  In Provincetown, the gay coastal resort-town hub where Cohn’s one-time landlord says she never saw him alone , he threw dinner parties with a bowl of cocaine next to each plate, and a capsule of the barbiturate Tuinal next to that, in case a guest got too high. Cohn won victory for his clients by settling 60 to 75 percent of his cases out of court, and he once spent an evening with an escort, who had been driven out to his Connecticut estate, doing nothing but talking about a Mabel Mercer record.

For any liberal who’s in a rage about the corrupt machinery of right-wing lies, Roy Cohn is the dastardly gift who keeps on giving. In “Bully. Coward. Victim.,” he’s a villain out of central casting – the beady-eyed weasel whispering in Joseph McCarthy’s ear, the attorney from hell who rose from the ashes of the Army-McCarthy hearings to become the ultimate New York power player, defending mobsters who became his pals, embedding himself in the rancid center of the city’s favor bank.

In “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner mythologized Cohn as a toxic closet case who succumbed (in secret) to AIDS but seemed, on some spiritual level, to have been poisoned by his own hypocrisy. While Kushner’s portrait is hard to top, the most recent act of the Roy Cohn saga has been the rediscovery of Cohn as the unacknowledged avatar of our time – for having mentored Donald Trump and having taught him, more or less, everything Trump knows about how to use threats and lies to flaunt the law by inventing your own reality.

The retro Cohn moment we’re in was kicked off by Frank Rich’s April 30, 2018, New York magazine cover story, and it has now culminated in the arrival of two documentaries: “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” a classically structured, archivally rich portrait by the ace documentarian Matt Tyrnauer (it’s currently in theaters), and “Bully. Coward. Victim.,” an HBO film that just premiered at the New York Film Festival. For moviegoers, and Roy Cohn addicts, this raises a crucial issue: Which Roy Cohn doc should you see? You’d think there would be a clear-cut answer, but both films have different strengths (and weaknesses), so they wind up complementing each other.

Full-scale

If you want a full-scale, soup-to-nuts primer of the Roy Cohn story – where he came from, how he rose, who he knew, how his business operated – then “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” is the movie to seek out. Yet when I saw it at the Sundance Film Festival in January, I didn’t love it; for all its fascination and craft, the film seemed to be missing a quality I couldn’t quite put my finger on. “Bully. Coward. Victim.” fills that in. The tales of Roy Cohn’s misdeeds are always compelling in a sinister way, yet inevitably they stoke our curiosity about who he was as a human being. These days, he gets stamped with the E-word (evil!) a bit too automatically, as if that explained everything. “Bully. Coward. Victim.” isn’t as authoritative a chronicle as “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” but in its loosely anecdotal way it may bring us a notch or two closer to who Roy Cohn was.

“Bully. Coward. Victim.” digs more deeply than “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” did into the central insanity of the Army-McCarthy hearings – not the fact that American freedom was teetering on the brink, but the fact that Cohn, the ultimate closeted homosexual, exploited his power to the degree that he inadvertently exposed the secret he would have done anything to hide. Cohn and G. David Schine, the handsome heir to a hotel fortune, had gone off together on a tour of US State Department libraries in Europe, rooting out such subversive Communist texts as “The Maltese Falcon.” When Cohn tried to pull strings to get special privileges for Schine, it became a headline scandal. As Tony Kushner puts it in the film, “Roy Cohn risked being exposed on national television as a ‘pixie.’ He went after the US armed forces because he wanted his boyfriend back, and he dragged poor drunk stupid McCarthy into this debacle for the two of them.”

The hearings ended in disgrace, yet moving forward without shame became the hallmark of Cohn’s method.  “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” makes an elaborate essayistic point of how the World According to Donald Trump was really the World According to Roy Cohn, but “Bully. Coward. Victim.” benefits, in a way, from confining that message to a single defining example: Cohn first teamed up with Trump when he battled the charges of racial discrimination that had been lodged against Trump’s father, countersuing the US for $100 million and comparing government officials to the Nazis and the KKK. It was exactly what Trump does now, and it worked.

That Roy Cohn had so many friends, from Trump to Barbara Walters to Ed Koch to Andy Warhol, was the driving aspect of his power. He was, somehow, a vulgar scavenger with world-class charm. Yet the film director John Waters talks in the movie about how he would see Cohn on Front Street in Provincetown in the ‘70s, surrounded by young blond men, and he would despise the fact that Cohn was there. It appeared to Waters that a lot of people at the time simply didn’t know who Cohn was. Then again, maybe they just didn’t care. (RTRS)

By Owen Gleiberman

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