Petrelis Files

Baba Wawa:
'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.

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." . . .

Click here to read the entire article.