This year, two ambitious Roy Cohn documentaries 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 Meeropol’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 patriotically 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 transactional 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).
This story is from the September 16-29, 2019 edition of New York magazine.
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This story is from the September 16-29, 2019 edition of New York magazine.
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