Baba Wawa:
'I Was [Roy Cohn's] Claim to Heterosexuality'
'I Was [Roy Cohn's] Claim to Heterosexuality'
The SF Chronicle's profile of Barbara Walters today on the publication of her memoir gave me more details than I wanted to know about her relationship with scummy lawyer Roy Cohn. Frankly, I break out in hives thinking of anyone, male or female, having anything approaching a romantic relationship or sex with Cohn and I hope Walters always denied his claims that they were more than pals.
From the Chron:
Although she wasn't particularly political at the time, she knew enough to detest McCarthy's henchman, the wily, cold-blooded Roy Cohn. A few years later, her father introduced her to Cohn, telling him his daughter always wanted to meet him. Walters shook his hand, but said to Cohn's face that she never wanted to meet him.Click here to read the entire article.
And yet, they became and remained friends until the day Cohn died of AIDS in 1986. Many of Walters' other friends were horrified that she would even talk to Cohn, but what Walters reveals for the first time in "Audition" is that Cohn somehow got a warrant for her father's arrest dismissed. He had failed to show up for a New York court date because the family was in Las Vegas at the time.
Cohn liked to hint that they were more than friends "because I was his claim to heterosexuality," Walters says. "He never said that he was gay, he never admitted to me that he had AIDS. He was a very complicated man. He died, alone, up to his ears in debt. He had been disbarred and he was hated. And I might have thought the same way, but he did something when my father was in trouble, [and] I never forgot that."
Loyalty, she says, means everything to her. "I still have many of the same friends I had when I was younger," she says.
Did Cohn have a secret "nice" side?
"I would not use the word nice," she laughs. "He was very smart. And funny. And, at the time, seemed to know everyone in New York. He was very friendly with the cardinal, he was very friendly with the most famous columnist in New York, Walter Winchell, he had a lot of extremely powerful friends." . . .
3 comments:
baba wawa lol
http://www.queersunited.blogspot.com
Barbara Walter's life was influenced greatly by her older sister and she's written a beautiful memoir about her life. I read another memoir of a life influence by a sibling that I recommend highly - I actually liked it even more. The memoir is ""My Stroke of Insight"" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Dr Taylor became a Harvard brain scientist to find the cause and cure for schizophrenia because her older brother was a sufferer. Then, crazy as life can be, Dr. Taylor had a stroke at age 37. What was amazing was that her left brain was shut down by the stroke - where language and thinking occur - but her right brain was fully functioning. She experienced bliss and nirvana and the way she writes about it (or talks about it in her now famous TED talk) is incredible.
What I took away from Dr. Taylor's book above all, and why I recommend it so highly, is that you don't have to have a stroke or take drugs to find the deep inner peace that she talks about. Her book explains how. ""I want what she's having"", and thanks to this wonderful book, I can!
Roy Cohn was a wonderful man and Barbara Walters turned him gay! He just wanted a woman to love him...
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