Roy Cohn

The scene: The premiere of "Citizen Cohn," HBO Pictures' new biopic of lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn was chief counsel to Communist-hunting Sen. Joe McCarthy and a powerhouse in New York and Washington society until his death in 1986. After the screening Thursday night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, guests attended an al fresco party in the parking lot.

I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Stayton's article on HBO's "Angels in America." ("The Next Life," Nov. 30). It was interesting to learn the entire genesis of the project starting with the NEA grant to the present. In February 1994, I saw "Angels in America: Perestroika" on Broadway. Before the curtain went up, I noticed Al Pacino sitting two rows behind me. During the intermission I asked the usher if he saw him as well. The usher responded, "Oh, yeah, he comes in at least three times a week.

Roy M. Cohn, who was chief counsel to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy during the communist "witch hunts" of the 1950s, was buried Monday after a funeral shrouded in secrecy, his law office said. A woman answering the telephone at Cohn's Manhattan law office said the funeral was held about 1 p.m. in New York. She declined further details. Cohn died Saturday at age 59 at a Bethesda, Md., hospital of complications stemming from AIDS.

Re "College Officials in the Hot Seat," Oct. 17: By putting Cal State Northridge President Blenda J. Wilson and another higher education official under oath and asking them if they were under the influence of drugs in testimony before an Oct. 16 Assembly budget subcommittee on education finance hearing, Chairman Bernie Richter (R-Chico) and subcommittee counsel Robert J. Corry conjured up disturbing parallels to the reprehensible tactics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn. Richter and Corry, who conducted the hearing on race and gender preferences in a thinly veiled attempt to promote Prop.

A lawyer's disciplinary committee has recommended disbarment for flamboyant attorney Roy Cohn, whose career has seen him at the side of people from Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy to reputed mobster Carmine Galante, the New York Daily News reported Friday. The committee, which found Cohn, 58, guilty of professional misconduct, will make its recommendation to the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court within one week, the report says.

James Woods is stuck in fast-forward again. Wide-eyed, excited, involved and talking faster than most people should try to think, he is darting around in a movie gear-cluttered office inside this city's main Carnegie Library. Woods is rehearsing a scene from "Citizen Cohn," an HBO bio-movie about Roy Cohn, the surly chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy who became a national household name and baby-faced pariah of America's left wing during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1953-54.

Roy Marcus Cohn, revered and reviled ever since he served as Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's chief inquisitor in the bitter hunt for communists in the l950s, died Saturday of complications stemming from AIDS. He was 59. Cohn, a high-priced New York lawyer until his recent disbarment, died at 6 a.m. at the clinical center of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., a Washington suburb, where he was undergoing treatment, according to Irene Haske, chief of the center's communications.

Sooner or later, Roy Cohn's biographer said, still shaking his head after 18 months and 500 pages of grappling with this very issue, it comes down to this: How could a man "so morally repugnant" get away with it? How could Cohn court, and win, the rich, the powerful, the influential? How did a 25-year-old lawyer rise to become general counsel to America's chief communist chaser, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, then survive to prosper long after McCarthy's fall? How did Cohn seduce the press?

Actor Ron Vawter thinks of Roy Cohn and Jack Smith as chameleons: men who changed the color of their skin to avoid being eaten. Cohn was a powerful right-wing lawyer who rose to prominence as the hatchet man for Joseph McCarthy, the redbaiting U.S. senator who bullied the political Establishment in the '50s. Smith was a performance artist whose 1962 avant-garde film "Flaming Creatures" featured cavorting drag queens. But what made these two "chameleons" vulnerable was their homosexuality.

Once again, it was as much a New Year's Eve event as the annual dropping of the brightly lit ball at Times Square. Limousines double-parked outside the elegant Upper East Side six-story town house. The parade of tuxedos and ball gowns through the thick oak doors easily rivaled a Hollywood premier. Champagne flowed freely--and so did tears when the thin, haggard-looking 58-year-old host slowly rose to speak.

The death of G. David Schine (June 20) brings back unwelcome memories of his trip to Germany in 1952 or 1953 with Roy Cohn, top aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The appearance of these two young gumshoes on behalf of the demagogic, red-baiting McCarthy struck fear and loathing in hundreds of government clerks and officials. I was working for the Stars & Stripes, the U.S. Army newspaper, in Darmstadt, Germany, when we received the alarming news that Schine and Cohn were arriving to investigate alleged Communist influences in U.S. installations.

When Andy Warhol decreed 15 minutes of world fame as modern man's birthright he obviously wasn't speaking about himself. Nearly a decade after his death, the painter-filmmaker-scenemaker is more famous than ever. This year, two Warhol-related films ("I Shot Andy Warhol" and "Basquiat") are scheduled for release, and the parade of books that began with the "tell-all" opuses of Victor Bockris, Bob Collaciello and Pat Hackett shows no sign of abating. What's different now is that the spotlight has shifted from Warhol to his circle at the Factory.

As someone who was working as a fund-raiser at the Mark Taper Forum at the time, I can tell you that in the days leading up to the premiere of "Angels in America," Tony Kushner was about as terrified as a man can be without falling over dead ("The Play That Made Us Gasp," by Lawrence Christon, Aug. 6). He knew he had something, he just didn't think it was that big of a something, and he was sincerely worried that the Taper would lose its shirt. When I mentioned to him that I was certain he would win the Pulitzer Prize, he said, "I'll bet you $100 I don't."

Roy Cohn succumbed to AIDS in 1986, difficult and abrasive to the end. "Well, at last," a doctor says about his patient's death in HBO's "Citizen Cohn," "he did something human." Without a doubt, HBO makes the most interesting movies on U.S. television, if not necessarily the most successful.

James Woods is stuck in fast-forward again. Wide-eyed, excited, involved and talking faster than most people should try to think, he is darting around in a movie gear-cluttered office inside this city's main Carnegie Library. Woods is rehearsing a scene from "Citizen Cohn," an HBO bio-movie about Roy Cohn, the surly chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy who became a national household name and baby-faced pariah of America's left wing during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1953-54.

The scene: The premiere of "Citizen Cohn," HBO Pictures' new biopic of lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn was chief counsel to Communist-hunting Sen. Joe McCarthy and a powerhouse in New York and Washington society until his death in 1986. After the screening Thursday night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, guests attended an al fresco party in the parking lot.

Could you really hate a man who told Winston Churchill over dinner at Lord Beaverbrook's, as he filched food from the former prime minister's plate, that in World War II, "the United States saved England's ass"? Or silenced an officious desk clerk at Tokyo's Imperial Hotel who wanted to inspect his departing luggage with: "You've got a lot of . . . nerve talking about a bath mat after you bombed Pearl Harbor!"

Epic Casting: Ron Leibman will play Roy Cohn, the controversial attorney who died of AIDS, in "Angels in America," the two-part epic that will be presented at the Mark Taper Forum next fall.

The words are fictitious. The event is not. The persona virtually real: megalomanic, loud at inappropriate moments and unctuous as a matter of political expediency. That approximates the "Roy Cohn" half of Ron Vawter's "Roy Cohn/Jack Smith," that has taken up residence in MOCA's Ahmanson Auditorium. It is a coarse, comic fantasy. The second and more exotic half of the bill, "Jack Smith," is an intently observed re-creation of New York performance pioneer Jack Smith at work.

Actor Ron Vawter thinks of Roy Cohn and Jack Smith as chameleons: men who changed the color of their skin to avoid being eaten. Cohn was a powerful right-wing lawyer who rose to prominence as the hatchet man for Joseph McCarthy, the redbaiting U.S. senator who bullied the political Establishment in the '50s. Smith was a performance artist whose 1962 avant-garde film "Flaming Creatures" featured cavorting drag queens. But what made these two "chameleons" vulnerable was their homosexuality.