Fascinating New Yorkers: Power Freaks, Mobsters, Liberated Women, Creators, Queers and Crazies

By Clifford Browder

 

The scond title in the Wild New York series.  This collection of posts from Clifford Browder's blog includes

 

a prostitute's daughter who got to know two ex-kings and a future emperor;

a cardinal archbishop known in certain circles as "Franny";

a serial killer who terrorized the city;

a baroness who wore teaspoon earrings and a tomato-can bra;

and a pioneer in female erotica who had two husbands and kept a "lie box" to keep her two lives straight.

 

And many more, some remembered today and some forgotten, who fulfilled themselves richly or horrendously in the wild and crazy city of New York. Some of these people Browder knew or encountered briefly, and some he got to know through their works. He relates surprising things about J.P. Morgan and his nose; Nicky (Mr. Untouchable) Barnes; Ayn Rand, the high priestess of egoism; and Polly Adler, Queen of Tarts. Getting to know these New Yorkers, readers will be shocked or angered, puzzled or amused, but never bored.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clifford Browder
• Release date: Mar 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781733378222

Clifford Browder

Clifford Browder is a writer living in New York. He has published two biographies, a critical study,  and three nonfiction works about New York and New Yorkers: No Place for Normal: New York, Fascinating New Yorkers, and New Yorkers: A Feisty People.  His Metropolis series of historical fiction set in nineteenth-century New York has five novels to date: The Pleasuring of Men (his only gay-themed work), Bill Hope: His Story, Dark Knowledge, The Eye That Never Sleeps, and Forbidden Brownstones. His poetry has appeared online and in print. His blog, No Place for Normal: New York, is about anything and everything New York.  A longtime resident, he lives in Greenwich Village high above the Magnolia Bakery of “Sex and the City” fame, and thinks New York is the most exciting city in the world. He has never owned a television, a car, or a cell phone. Mostly vegan, he is fascinated by slime molds, never kills spiders, and eats garlic to fend off vampires. (So far, it seems to be working.) His blog: https://cbrowder.blogspot.com/ His motto: Geezers rock

Book preview

Power Freaks, Mobsters, Liberated Women,

Creators, Queers and Crazies

Introduction

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Dark Desires

1. Cardinal Spellman: Was He or Wasn’t He?

2. Roy Cohn, Attack-Dog Lawyer and AIDS Denier

3. Stanford White, Architect and Sybarite Seducer

4. David Berkowitz: Mr. Monster, Son of Sam

5. Dorothy Norman and Alfred Stieglitz: Passion, Adultery, and Art

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Men of Power

6. Boss Tweed: How About a New Sewer?

7. John Pierpont Morgan, Titan of Finance

8. Fiorello La Guardia, the Dynamo Mayor

9. Thomas Dewey and Lucky Luciano: The Gangbuster and the King of Crime

10. Walter Winchell and the Stork Club: Nothing Recedes like Success

11. Nicky Barnes and John Gotti: Mr. Untouchable and the Teflon Don

12. Al Sharpton: Rabble Rouser or Champion of His People?

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Remarkable Women

13. Eliza Jumel: The Prostitute’s Daughter Who Got to Know Monarchs

14. Polly Adler, Queen of Tarts

15. Helena Rubenstein: Beauty Is Power

16. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Dragon Lady and Vamp

17. Elsa Maxwell, Party-Giver to the World

18. Ayn Rand, High Priestess of Egoism

19. Ree Dragonette and Anaïs Nin: A Dynamic Poet and a Sexual Pioneer

20. Brooke Astor, Aristocrat of the People

Creators

21. Robert Moses, Builder and Destroyer

22. Rudolph Bing, Master of the Met

23. Dylan Thomas, Celtic Poet and Inebriate

24. Norman Mailer: Failed Novelist, Brilliant Journalist, Puncher, Stabber, Drunk

25. Andy Warhol: Genius or Fraud?

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Celebrities

26. Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell: A Gilded Friendship

27. Texas Guinan, Queen of Speakeasies

28. Fulton Sheen: Life Is Worth Living

29. Norman Vincent Peale, Purveyor of Positive Thinking

30. Hollywood in New York: Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Rita Hayworth

31. Hollywood in New York: Yul Brynner, Montgomery Clift, Rudolph Valentino

32. Quentin Crisp, the Stately Homo of England

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Bohemia

33. Joe Gould and the Baroness: Professor Seagull and Spinsterlollypops

34. Edna St. Vincent Millay, New Woman and Feminist Romantic

35. Julian Beck and Judith Malina: The Soul of the Living Theatre

36. Taylor Mead, an Almost Innocent

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Source Notes

Introduction

This book is a selection of posts from my blog, No Place for Normal: New York, which celebrates the wild, maddening, vastly creative, and unimaginably diverse city of New York. It is a second edition, for when the original publisher chose to not renew our contract and stopped selling it, I decided to publish it myself. Here you will find biographical sketches of people, some remembered and some forgotten, who lived a significant part of their lives in New York. New York is, and always has been, a mecca for power freaks, creative types, and liberated souls, as well as hustlers and weirdos and crazies, and readers will find examples of all of these, and more, in the pages that follow. To know these people is to know New York, past and present, and to appreciate the amazing energy and resourcefulness and creativity, and at times the sinister imperatives, of those who choose to fulfill themselves in this city. Certain themes emerge:

·  how power respects and seeks out power;

·  how immigration enriches the city and the nation;

·  the role of media in creating and destroying careers;

·  the importance of personality;

·  New York City’s preeminence as a place where you can be yourself.

Included are numerous personal reminiscences, and stories that have come to me from friends and acquaintances over the many years I have lived in New York. My most significant online and print sources are cited in the Source Notes at the end.

Dark Desires

1

Cardinal Spellman: Was He or Wasn’t He?

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He had a genius for making the right connections, for getting to know the rich

and powerful, and for getting his way, even if he had to fight, and fight hard, to do it. Stubborn – some might even say pigheaded – he wasn’t afraid to stir up controversy, probably relished it. But if, at the height of his power and renown, he was referred to by some in the younger set as Franny, often with a wink and a smile, he may have been leading a double life. And if so, what a double life it was!

Born to an Irish American family in Massachusetts in 1889, Francis Joseph Spellman served as an altar boy, later graduated from Fordham University in 1911, decided to study for the priesthood, and was sent to pursue those studies in Rome. Ordained in 1916, he returned to the U.S. and did pastoral work in Massachusetts, but was unable to become a military chaplain during World War I because he failed to meet the height requirement. Other posts followed, including U.S. attaché of the Vatican Secretariat of State in 1925. While in Rome from 1925 to 1931, he made useful contacts in the Curia, and in 1927, during a trip to Germany, he began a lifelong friendship with Eugenio Pacelli, then the papal nuncio to Germany. Named Auxiliary Bishop of Boston in 1932, Spellman did more pastoral work and in 1936 helped arrange a visit to these shores by Pacelli, now the Vatican’s cardinal secretary of state, so Pacelli could meet secretly with President Roosevelt to discuss establishing diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Holy See; Spellman was present at the meeting, though no formal ties resulted.

For a cleric on the rise, the friendship of a president is solid silver, but the friendship of a pope is gold. In 1939 Pope Pius XI died, to be succeeded by Pacelli as Pius XII. One of the new pope’s first acts was to make Spellman archbishop of New York and vicar of the U.S. armed forces, this last just in time for World War II. The new archbishop moved into the archiepiscopal residence, a handsome neo-Gothic structure at 452 Madison Avenue, at the corner of 51st Street, adjacent to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In these sanctified confines he would reside for the rest of his life amid oak paneling, thick red carpets, ornate furniture, priceless antiques, and a quiet almost unheard of in busy midtown Manhattan.

Archbishop Spellman was soon exerting great influence in religious and political matters and hosting prominent figures of the day. Once the U.S. entered World War II, His Eminence supported the war effort vigorously. In 1943 President Roosevelt sent him as his agent to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, where the globe-trotting prelate covered sixteen countries in four months. He met with Franco in Spain, Pius XII in Rome, and Churchill in London, and on his return to the U.S. helped arrange to have Rome declared an open city and thus free from bombing. Roosevelt’s death in 1945 diminished his influence in higher circles, but Pius XII made him a cardinal in 1946, just in time for the Cold War. As always, Spellman’s timing – or was it just dumb luck? – was flawless. And in his scarlet robes the cardinal was impressive.

In the years that followed – the years when I first became aware of him – Cardinal Spellman showed that, much as he loved the red of his robe, he loved the red, white, and blue just as much. A true American can neither be a Communist nor a Communist condoner, he declared. The first loyalty of every American is vigilantly to weed out and counteract Communism and convert American Communists to Americanism. Not surprisingly, he was a fervent supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who without offering hard evidence convinced the public that there were Communists in every nook and cranny of the government, and furthermore that—as I heard the Wisconsin senator once dramatically assert on television – the world was going up in flames. An old tradition in America, the politics of fear works wonders for those who practice it.

In 1949, when the gravediggers of Calvary Cemetery, a Catholic cemetery in Queens, went on strike for a pay raise, Spellman called them Communists and their strike immoral, recruited seminarians as strikebreakers to dig graves, and ample though he was in proportions, set a good example by doing a bit of grave-digging himself. When not so engaged, the archbishop was denouncing immoral Hollywood films and, in time, comedian Lenny Bruce.

No stranger to irreverence, the Jewish comedian sometimes imagined Christ and Moses returning to earth to observe people in East Harlem crammed twenty-five to a room, after which they would take note of the cardinal’s ten-thousand-dollar ring. Or the two visitors would enter St. Patrick’s Cathedral, followed by lepers whose flesh was falling on the polished floors, causing His Eminence to phone Rome in a panic and beg the pope to take them in, since in America he was up to his ass in crutches and wheelchairs. Admittedly, Bruce was breaching the limits allowed to comedy in America, where jibes at religion are unwelcome, and out-and-out obscenity is taboo. No wonder the archbishop encouraged the D.A., another Irish Catholic, to charge Bruce with obscenity. After a controversial six-month trial, Bruce was convicted in 1964 and sentenced to four months in a workhouse, but was set free on bail pending an appeal, and died of a drug overdose in 1966. In 2003 he received a posthumous pardon, the first in New York State, from Governor George Pataki.

The cardinal that I knew from photos at the time was a portly, spectacled, jowly prelate whom some thought cherubic and humble (I would have said a cuddly, well-fed little porker), a man with a ready smile but perhaps not too bright. But behind this façade was a shrewd player on the world stage. A longtime Jesuit friend and his official biographer described him as fearless, tireless, and shrewd, but at the same time humble, whimsical, sentimental, incredibly thoughtful, supremely loyal, and above all, a real priest. Mayors, senators, and businessman consulted him, referring to his office as the powerhouse. But he was also a tireless worker, a skillful administrator, a shrewd negotiator of real estate deals, and an excellent fund-raiser – in short, a first-rate businessman. And a poet and novelist as well; his novel The Foundling came out in 1951. But he was not one to admit error or to give up an opinion, no matter now outdated or unpopular; prudence was unknown to him.

In the 1960s the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the eruption of antiwar protests on college campuses across the country, brought new opportunities for the patriotic cardinal and his critics. So outspoken was His Eminence’s support of the war that protesters labeled it Spelly’s War. He spent Christmas 1965 with the troops in South Vietnam, said Mass in Saigon, sprinkled holy water on B-52 bombers, and blessed them prior to their departing on a mission. The war, he declared, was Christ’s war and a war for civilization, and the troops were Christ’s soldiers. Said a four-star general who met him at the airport, We hardly count it a war, if you don’t come.

All this resounded harshly in the Vatican, where Pius XII had died in 1958, to be succeeded by the reform-minded John XXIII (He should be selling bananas, Spellman reportedly opined), followed in turn by Paul VI, who favored negotiations to end the war. That the Cardinal Archbishop of New York was not in tune with the reigning pontiff was, to put it mildly, awkward. Vatican sources made it clear that the archbishop spoke only for himself, not for the pope or the Church. Back home, where humorous buttons were now all the rage, and the draft was controversial, a button saying DRAFT CARDINAL SPELLMAN was popular, as were T-shirts bearing the same imperative; in January 1967 war protesters disrupted a Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

In 1966, when Pope Paul VI initiated a policy whereby bishops would retire at age 75, Spellman, then 77, offered to resign, but the pope asked him to remain at his post.

He probably hankered to be the first American pope, but this was not to be, for he died in December 1967, the cause of his death never disclosed. Attending his funeral were President Lyndon Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, New York State Senators Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Mayor John Lindsay, and others. He was buried in the crypt under the main altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, alongside other archbishops and cardinals. His twenty-eight-year tenure as archbishop is the longest to date in the history of the archdiocese of New York. A New York City high school bears his name.

#

Now at last we come to the crucial question: was he or wasn’t he? Rumors

then and now have abounded. A friend informs me that in the standees line at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1950s gay jokes about Franny Spellman were rampant, especially among standees with a Catholic upbringing, though all the ones he remembered are too bawdy to bear repeating here. I’m always skeptical about such stories, until conclusive evidence appears, since some elements of the gay community commonly assert with conviction that this or that world leader or celebrity is or was screamingly gay, without offering solid proof. But Spellman’s case is not so simple.

One of Spellman’s biographers, John Cooney, whose work The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman appeared in 1984, mentioned four interviewees who stated that Spellman was indeed homosexual. Cooney offered no direct proof but was convinced that the allegations were true. I talked to many priests who worked for Spellman and they were incensed, dismayed, and angered by his conduct. Monsignor Eugene V. Clark, Spellman’s personal secretary for fifteen years, promptly labeled Cooney’s accusations preposterous. (Interestingly enough, Clark, an arch-conservative who was notoriously anti-gay in his pronouncements, had to resign as rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 2005 when, at age 79, he was named as the other man in a divorce case – a reminder that neither age nor a cassock is proof against the inroads of eros.)

Reinforcing Cooney’s claim is gay author and journalist Michelangelo Signorile’s online article Cardinal Spellman’s Dark Legacy (2002), which labels Spellman one of the most notorious, powerful, and sexually voracious homosexuals in the American Catholic Church’s history. According to him, the closeted cardinal was known as Franny to assorted Broadway chorus boys and others, but the Church pressured Cooney’s publisher, Times Books, to reduce the four pages on the Cardinal’s sexuality to a single paragraph that only mentioned rumors. Signorile also asserts that Spellman was involved in a relationship with a dancer in One Touch of Venus, a Broadway revue that ran from 1943 to 1945. Spellman would have his limousine pick up the dancer several nights a week and bring him to the archiepiscopal residence. And if a portly prelate might seem lacking in sex appeal to a frisky young chorus boy, his status as the Cardinal Archbishop of New York would have enhanced his image mightily. All of which prompts a titillating fantasy: after the performance, the young man whisked off from his theater by a dark limousine and minutes later emerging from it to slip into the neo-Gothic mansion and tread stealthily, among ornate furnishings and uniformed servants, into His Eminence’s presence and embrace. How they first connected is not explained. But when the young man asked Spellman how he could get away with it, the cardinal allegedly answered, "Who would believe that?" Who indeed?

It should be noted that Signorile has made a name for himself by outing public figures whom he claims are closeted homosexuals, a practice that many in the gay community denounce. Further complicating the picture is Curt Gentry’s biography J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (1991), which alleges that Hoover’s files had numerous allegations that Spellman was a very active homosexual (p. 347).

Surprisingly, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI’s declassified file on Spellman is available online and I have looked at it. Unsurprisingly, what are probably the most informative and juicy parts are blacked out. So what do we learn? Here is a sample from the 1940s:

·  A letter of June 16, 1942 to Hoover (signature deleted) giving him the names of those attending a luncheon at the archbishop’s residence on June 11, 1942, with all those names blacked out.

·  A letter of June 21, 1942, to Hoover from Spellman’s office (signature deleted) saying that the sender is glad Hoover enjoyed [another] luncheon, and that the archbishop has confirmed his standing invitation to Hoover to lunch at the archbishop’s residence whenever he is in New York.

·  A letter of November 30, 1942, from Spellman to Hoover congratulating him on your twenty-five years of devoted, patriotic, successful service to the country in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Hoover’s appreciative reply on December 10, 1942.

·  A letter to Hoover from Rome (signature deleted) of February 7, 1946, noting that Spellman will arrive in Rome on February 14 to be consecrated a cardinal by Pope Pius XII. The writer believes it will be of interest to the Bureau to know that there is speculation in Vatican circles and the Roman public at large regarding Spellman’s perhaps being appointed papal secretary of state, a position giving the recipient a better than average chance of being elected pope. Feeding the speculation is the fact that Pius XII is said to be tubercular and in poor health generally. [Spellman was indeed offered the position but turned it down.]

So what have we learned? About homosexuality, nothing; if there are any files mentioning it, they must still be classified. The letters show Spellman and Hoover exchanging cordialities, and His Eminence and others keeping the director well informed about Spellman’s activities and a possible significant appointment. Spellman was careful to maintain friendly ties with Hoover, and Hoover was keeping track of Spellman’s career. Which shows how powerful people deal with one another, which in itself is hardly surprising or shocking. The archbishop was probably carrying on a similar correspondence with every person of power within his ken, and Hoover was surely keeping files on hundreds of persons of influence.

It is of course in the Church’s interest to squelch, whenever possible, even rumors or allegations about His Eminence’s sexual proclivities. After all, what would happen if the charges turned out to be true? Would the Cardinal Spellman High School have to be rechristened? Would His Eminence’s remains have to be disinterred from under the main altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and if so, where should they go? Messy, messy, messy. But if he made a full confession on his deathbed, perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary. Who among us has not sinned? Still, messy in the extreme.

When I came to New York in the fall of 1953 to study French in graduate school at Columbia University, I heard nothing of these rumors, not at Columbia and not in the underground gay world that I was beginning to explore. I had a casual affair with a Broadway dancer who, as it happened, was a lapsed Catholic, but he never mentioned Spellman, perhaps because the subject never came up; we had other things to talk about ... and do. When, after a year and a half in San Francisco, I returned to New York in the fall of 1961, it was to teach French at St. John’s University in Jamaica, Queens, where I was one of a handful of non-Catholic teachers. Among the St. John’s faculty were a few closeted gay people. In keeping with the times (this was the turbulent 1960s), the younger members of the faculty were a rebellious bunch, impatient with the Church’s authoritarianism and rigid ideology. When a slew of both younger and older dissidents were suddenly terminated without explanation, many of us went out on strike in January 1966 and walked a picket line for the next six months; Spellman died in December 1967. Of all the Catholic community in New York at that time, my fellow strikers were surely the ones most open to rumors about Spellman, yet never once, on campus or on the picket line, did I hear a Franny joke or any reference to the sexuality of the Cardinal Archbishop of New York. So those rumors about him were obviously confined to a few tight circles: people in theater and the arts, Broadway chorus kids, standees at the Met.

So what do I conclude? Was Cardinal Spellman gay? Probably. Is it absolutely certain? Not quite. What would nudge me toward certainty? If one or several ninety-year-old ex-chorus boys tottered forth to announce, Yes, I had sex with His Eminence back in the 1940s. But for that, of course, time is running out. In the meantime, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Of all the archbishops of New York, to my knowledge it is only around Francis J. Spellman that rumors and innuendoes swirl.

Contact with the rich and famous, luncheons with J. Edgar Hoover, a confident of three presidents, a strike-breaking gravedigger, a white-hot patriot who blessed departing bombers, and posthumously the subject of a passionate controversy – what a life!

#

Finally, a Spellman quote: There are three ages of man – youth, age, and ‘you’re looking wonderful.’ His Eminence did have a sense of humor.

2

Roy Cohn, Attack-Dog Lawyer and AIDS Denier

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I first heard of him when, studying in France in 1953, it was reported that two twenty-somethings, members of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s staff, had been sent to Europe to investigate waste and mismanagement in U.S. Army bases, embassies, and offices of the U.S. Information Service, and to see if there was any – heaven forfend!—Communist or left-leaning literature available there. This was, after all, the early days of the Cold War, and the rabidly anti-Communist senator from Wisconsin cast his sinister shadow as far as Western Europe. The two peripatetic staff members were Roy Cohn and David Schine, though at the time their names barely impinged on my psyche. Their eighteen-day whirlwind tour, highly publicized, earned them the label junketeering gumshoes from a disgruntled U.S. employee in Germany whom they accused of having once signed a Communist Party petition, a charge that later cost him his job.

But this was mere prelude. Later that year I returned to the U.S. and began graduate studies in French at Columbia University, which brought me to New York. By the summer of 1954 I was busy writing my master’s thesis, but not so preoccupied that I didn’t find time every evening to join a throng of students in the campus TV room watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. The hearings had been provoked by Roy Cohn’s excessive demands on the Army to give special privileges to his friend David Schine, who had been drafted into the Army, but in Cohn’s opinion, merited nightly passes while in basic training, exemption from onerous kitchen duties, and respect such as few draftees ever received. So oppressive had Cohn’s interference become, climaxed by a threat to wreck the Army, that Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens brought formal charges against McCarthy and Cohn. Extensive Senate hearings followed, and it was the daily evening summary of those hearings that I and twenty million others watched obsessively.

The hearings revealed to us and the public at large the heavyset McCarthy’s obnoxious manner, and Roy Cohn’s heavy-lidded eyes, deep tan, and knowing grin, and above all his aggressiveness. They were not people you would care to meet. Climaxing the hearings was Army counsel Joseph Welch’s passionate response, when McCarthy questioned the loyalty of one of Welch’s aides: Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?—a query that provoked applause from the gallery. Indeed, it was a turning point in McCarthy’s career; from then on his support steadily eroded. In December 1954 he was formally censured by the Senate on a number of grounds.

Among the students watching the hearings, and not just the gay contingent, it

was commonly assumed that Cohn and Schine were lovers. How else could you explain Cohn’s fanatical insistence on special favors for his friend? And how else explain certain innuendoes that spectators elsewhere may not have caught, as for instance when McCarthy asked Welch for a definition of pixie, a word that Welch had used casually in a question, and Welch replied that a pixie was a close relative of a fairy. Or when Senator Ralph Flanders, Republican of Vermont, sauntered into the hearings one day to suggest that the relationships of those involved should be further explored. 

The going Washington rumor of the time about McCarthy, as I knew from an uncle who worked there as a PR man, was that the senator had a babe stashed away in a hotel. And since McCarthy had an abundance of enemies, savvy Washingtonians wondered why no one had leaked this to the press. The explanation: everybody else probably also had a babe stashed away and therefore shrank from opening that particular can of worms. But in New York there were other rumors, too. McCarthy, still a bachelor in his early forties, was gay. In 1953 he had married a researcher in his office and four years later they adopted a baby girl. His homosexuality was never established, but what also went unreported was his alcoholism, which contributed to his death in 1957.

The hearings made Roy Cohn famous, but who was he? He was born in 1927 in New York City to a nonobservant Jewish family, his father a judge with considerable political clout in the Democratic Party. Raised in a Park Avenue apartment, he proved to be a bright student, attending local schools and then Columbia Law School, and was admitted to the bar as soon as he reached the age of 21. Appointed to the staff of the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, he impressed others as precocious, brilliant, and arrogant, qualities that would characterize his whole career. He was soon making a name for himself prosecuting subversives, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951, and was transferred to Washington to serve as special assistant to the attorney general. In 1953 he went to work for Senator McCarthy and got his friend David Schine, the son of a multimillionaire real estate mogul, a job as consultant; their eighteen-day junket to Europe soon followed.

Cohn’s work with McCarthy ended in 1954, but his career had barely begun. Returning to New York, he joined the New York law firm Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, brought it numerous high-paying clients, and moved into the East Side townhouse that housed the firm’s offices, which made for a minimal commute. His professional and private life were so intermixed that his colleagues were not surprised to see his doting mother wandering about the office. An only child, he was close to her, and following his father’s death in 1959, moved into her seven-room Park Avenue apartment. After she died in 1969 he moved into a thirty-three-room townhouse at 39 East 68th Street (presumably the same one already housing his law firm’s offices), though he also had a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and in the summer went to Provincetown. For Roy Cohn, housing in New York City posed no problem.

Combative by nature, Cohn became known for his aggressive courtroom performance, intimidating prosecutors, flustering witnesses, and impressing jurors with a memory so accurate that he rarely referred to notes. My scare value is high, he once boasted. My area is controversy. My tough front is my biggest asset. I don’t write polite letters. I don’t like to plea-bargain. I like to fight. No, not a fellow you’d care to know socially, but maybe just the attorney you’d need, if you were involved in serious litigation and had a lot to lose. Esquire magazine called him a legal executioner; the National Law Journal, an assault specialist. His clients over the years included real estate mogul and future president Donald Trump; Mafia bosses Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti; the owners of the popular New York nightclub Studio 54; the New York Yankees; and Cardinal Spellman and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.

Yes, his contacts included both the Catholic Church and the Mafia, for Roy Cohn knew the ways of power. When mob boss John Gotti came back from a meeting with Cohn, and someone joked about John making a fix with a fag, Gotti is said to have replied, Who gives a fuck? That happy little homo just saved our asses.

Short and light of weight, Cohn was almost fragile in appearance (an impression well masked by his aggressive demeanor), with thinning hair and blue eyes often bloodshot from his late hours at fashionable discotheques. Socially active, he gave lavish celebrity-studded parties. All his life he had a penchant for the rich and powerful, and given his legal ability and political connections, they had a penchant for him. Among his friends were President Ronald Reagan, Norman Mailer, Bianca Jagger, Barbara Walters, Rupert Murdock, William F. Buckley, Jr., William Safire,