Roy Cohn was back in the news last week thanks to the media’s obsession with the current President of the United States. The story that went around attributed Donald Trump’s automatic counterattack reaction syndrome, against any and all accusations, be they grand or implied, to Roy Cohn’s mentorship. Cohn was one of The Donald’s key attorneys for a chunk of time in the rollicking 80s until the germ-phobic realtor dumped him without a second thought upon learning the lawyer was suffering from AIDS. It was this illness, still lethally fatal back then, that made of Cohn such a powerful presence in Tony Kushner’s play ‘Angels in America.’
For those too young to remember or to ever have heard of this man, suffice it to say he was part of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s legal team accusing U.S. citizens of un-American Activities, ruining lives and friendships, who helped send the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, and who gave many years of scummy, kick-ass legal counsel to one scoundrel after another.
This resurrection of Cohn in the press has had a particular effect on me. Well into my sixties and finally a published author of fiction I have been working when I can on a memoir. People whose opinions I respect, have encouraged me to do so for years based on a general assessment that I have had, to date, an interesting life. When I look at it with some objectivity the unsurprising, most obvious conclusion reached is that the most intense and formative period of that life was during its first two decades.
Born into a tribe of Irish immigrants in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, immigrants canny enough to chose careers in law and politics, and thanks to a subsequent friendship between my maternal grandfather and the Murray-McDonnell clan, and then my father’s not un-related election to Congress, genes forged near the damp, unlucky dunes of County Clare took on a new shine. By the time I was born we were already summering near the Murray-McDonnell compound in Water Mill. By the summer after my mother’s death we were members of the Southampton Beach Club thanks to the Murray family’s intervention. My subsequent Bronx winters and Southampton summers endowed me with a cultural dyad rich and complex. From a very young age until my early twenties I was exposed to a unique spectrum of American society. I was granted brief encounters with people who each left a mark. Senator John F. Kennedy played with me and my toy soldiers on the beach in front of our house at Fair Lea. Lugged by my father to Toots Shors many a night when a baby sitter was unavailable, Gary Cooper gave me my first sip of Gin. When Ernest Hemingway, standing next to him, asked what I wanted to be when I grew up and I answered ‘a priest,’ he advised me to visit Spain before doing so. I fell asleep there one night on a leather banquette between Mickey Mantle and Floyd Patterson. Joe DiMaggio’s tails hung in my closet in our Bronx apartment. Jimmy Durante sang me to sleep one night. When my father had Carmine DeSapio as a guest at the Beach Club one summer, somehow avoiding our membership being revoked, DeSapio, dressed a la Sinatra, asked me, ‘Where can a guy get a real drink around here?’ Sitting on Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s knee at his office in Harlem I was initiated into the art of clipping cigars. At the Delano Hotel in Miami the blond and busty ventriloquist and mesmerizer Joan Brandon, who was dating one of Dad’s cronies, taught me how to rip phone books in half. In my my teens when Mrs. William Randolph Hearst asked me, over tea at her Southampton home, what I wanted to be when I grew up and I answered ‘a writer,’ she wagged her finger at me and proclaimed, ‘Read Dickens, Read Dickens.’ Stash Radziwill taught me how to make banana daiquiris on the Ford estate. Jackie Kennedy approached me at a Sacred Heart School play to ask me why I was wearing a black arm band about the sleeve of my jacket and then smiled, bowing her head in approval when I answered, ‘Kent State.’ Salvador Dalí ceded his ocelot to me to walk around a drug-drenched party in a flat above Carnegie Hall. Andy Warhol, D.A. Pennybaker and the completely out there artist Valli, attended the dinner at ‘John’s’ in the Village when, after dropping out of college, it was decided I should spend some months in Spain in an attempt to get my act together. (Hemingway got it right!) Before leaving I rode up in a tiny elevator with my pal Will Hearst at 810 Fifth Avenue very late one night with Richard Nixon who, unasked, offered a long and absurd explanation as to what he was doing there at that hour. Happily ensconced in Spain weeks later, I met Gerald Brennan who lent me his first edition of Joyce’s Ulysses to read in his library.
I never met Roy Cohn. But he is an integral part of one of my earliest memories, and when he reappeared last week in The Guardian and in The New Yorker and in The New York Times the memory returned. It was Christmas at our apartment in Highbridge circa 1957. Set up under the tree and waiting for me upon my early morning appearance, was a beautiful set of electric Lionel toy trains. Realistically rendered hunter green coach cars carrying The New York Central Line logo were attached to a sleek locomotive. They sat upon thick ‘O gauge’ metal tracks. My father, in a tuxedo without his jacket or bowtie, sat sound asleep in a chair nearby still holding a glass of champagne from the night before’s festivities. I woke him to thank him for the wondrous gift and to help me plug in the transformer. He sweetly obliged and said, ‘Don’t thank me. You should thank Mr. Roy Cohn.’
The name stuck with me, and when I began to read about Cohn later in life, I sometimes doubted this memory. My father was a progressive Liberal Democrat who legislated for civil rights and the establishment of Medicaid and Medicare. Any connections to smarmy right-wing elements would have been out of character. But he was also a dedicated denizen of the New York night scene. Who knew what characters he might have found himself sharing drinks with in dark, upscale Manhattan bars? When I asked my two older siblings the other day if they were aware of any relationship he might have had with Roy Cohn, both replied with rotund denial. Then I took a look at Wikipedia and was rewarded immediately. In the very first paragraph under the ‘Early Life’ heading, I found the following: ‘His great-uncle was Joshua Lionel Cowen, the founder and long time owner of the Lionel Corporation, a manufacturer of toy trains.’
Clearly he wanted some sort of favor from my father. I can only hope he came up empty-handed for his trouble, even though I loved the trains.
Lessons to be learned. In these times of post-truth best not to rely too heavily on the recall of older siblings eager to preserve their own set of facts. When considering the priesthood, go first to Spain. When considering a career as a writer, “Read Dickens!’
John J. Healey /June 20th, 2017 / Madrid
