14 
A GODFATHER OF THE MAFIA SORT
1960
Barbara Walters and Roy Cohn were dating.
“Happy, Happy: Was that Lou Walters’ daughter Barbara with fight impresario Roy Cohn at Sherm’s Stork?” Walter Winchell’s column clucked in August 1960. (Translation: Sherman Billingsley owned and operated the Stork Club; Cohn headed a syndicate that had staged a heavyweight rematch between Ingemar Johansson and Floyd Patterson at the Polo Grounds.) Six months later, Lee Mortimer’s “New York Confidential” said suggestively, “The Roy M. Cohn dates with Barbara Walters, Lou’s daughter, are beginning to take on that look.”
A stack of psychiatric treatises and pop-psychology books have been written on the subject of fathers and daughters, including when the father is an absent or distant figure. But it isn’t hard to see that Barbara was drawn to men who resembled Lou Walters, in his charm and his faults. She fell for men who had a certain swagger, who broke the rules. Men like Roy Cohn.
He commanded the best tables in the hottest night spots, at the Stork Club, El Morocco, the Diamond Horseshoe, the Copacabana, and of course the Latin Quarter. He was outrageous and amusing. She was smitten. He was “the first person she became extremely passionate about,” said Joan Gilbert Peyser, a high school friend from Birch Wathen, though Barbara never publicly described her feelings with that intensity. “I know she wanted to marry Cohn. At least, I remember her telling me she did.”
He made no secret that there were times when he wanted to marry her. Near the end of Cohn’s life, Washington Post reporter Lois Romano asked him if he had any great loves. “Barbara Walters,” he replied without missing a beat. “Barbara Walters. Oh, boy, did we ever discuss getting married…. We discussed it before her marriage, after marriage, during her marriage.” But he added, wistfully, “You know how those things are.”
One friend said Roy and Barbara were engaged for a time, something Barbara would dispute. The wife of Hearst columnist George Sokolsky, with whom Cohn was as close as a father, said Roy gave Barbara a ring sometime between her first and second marriages. “We were out together and Barbara showed me the engagement ring,” Dorothy Sokolsky said. “Roy was sitting right there.” Broadway columnists hinted at their engagement. “No Pain, but Plenty of Fun,” Mortimer wrote. “Roy M. Cohn back with Barbara Walters, Lou’s daughter, at the Stork, but refusing to confirm that he’ll do the same as his law partner, Dick Schilling, for whom he’s tossing a bachelor party.”
Later, Roy delayed the purchase of an elegant four-story townhouse on East 68th Street that would become the base of his personal and professional life until Barbara could tour the property and approve it. He suggested that, after they married, her parents and sister could live in their own apartment on the building’s top floor. It was the closest she came to accepting one of his marriage proposals, she said. “For one moment I thought maybe. But ‘maybe’ never became ‘yes.’ ”
Besides other complications, Roy’s domineering mother, Dora Marcus Cohn, didn’t think Barbara, or any other woman, was good enough for her son. She dismissed her as “that girl.” One evening, when Barbara knew she would see Dora at a friend’s wedding, she slipped Roy’s engagement ring off her finger and put it on a chain around her neck, Sokolsky said. Barbara and his mother “never got along,” Roy said. “My mother always wanted me to get married, as long as I didn’t get married to anybody.”
For decades, though, Barbara and Roy were at least confidants, if not more. He teasingly inscribed a copy of his book, A Fool for a Client, to her: “For Chickie—Who I always knew would accomplish Joe McCarthy’s dream of restoring me to daytime television.” When Barbara’s mother visited New York, Roy escorted them to lunch at Windows on the World, the posh restaurant on the top floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
Roy and Barbara and another friend, Yvonne O’Brian, became a regular threesome for long, gossipy lunches at the East Side’s most fashionable restaurants. Yvonne was married to Jack O’Brian of Hearst, one of the first TV columnists. At a lunch at “21,” the two women once took from Roy a pair of his cuff links they admired, in the shape of leopards jumping, and discovered they were the right size for their fingers. They wore them out of the restaurant as rings and never gave them back. One of Yvonne’s daughters still has hers.
Barbara said she and Roy were never intimate, their physical contact limited to “a peck on the cheek.” He never told her he was gay; she never made it clear when she realized he was. It was a time homosexuality carried serious cultural and legal stigmas; until 1962, same-sex activity was a crime in all fifty states. On his deathbed, he was still denying rumors that he was dying of HIV/AIDS and threatened to sue anyone who said he was. Then muckraking columnist Jack Anderson revealed that Roy was part of an AIDS trial at the National Institutes of Health. When he died, the NIH listed a virus linked to AIDS as a secondary cause of death. A square for him in the Memorial AIDS Quilt labels him “Bully. Coward. Victim.”
In retrospect, Barbara said, he might have portrayed her as his romantic partner “because I was his claim to heterosexuality.” By then, at least, she understood what he had hidden for so long.
In the fall of 1960, Barbara got yet another panicky call from her mother.
Her father finally seemed to be recovering from his attempted suicide and the collapse of the Café de Paris two years earlier. He had landed a contract to stage shows at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas, and he and Dena and Jackie had moved there. Now Dena was on the phone, telling Barbara that her father had to cancel a planned trip to New York. “He can’t, or he’ll be arrested,” she said in the desperate voice her daughter knew too well. He was still dealing with the Internal Revenue Service over his failure to pay taxes for his nightclub, now defunct, and he had missed the latest court date in New York. For that, a warrant had been issued for his arrest.
Roy happened to call that night, she said, and he insisted they get together to talk about it. A week later, the warrant against her father was dropped in a process that was surely extralegal.
Roy Cohn was a master fixer.
“He had strong connections and friendships with most of the major judges in New York,” Barbara said. His father, Albert Cohn, had been a judge. “Over the years, for one reason or another, Roy had done a lot of favors for various judges and politicians.” He never told her how he had made her father’s legal problem evaporate, but she assumed that he asked someone powerful for a favor and got it. “Roy was like a godfather,” Barbara said—a godfather of the Mafia sort, not of the religious variety. “You do a favor for me, I do a favor for you.”
For nearly a half-century, Barbara told almost no one what he had done for her, not even when friends expressed mystification about her relationship with such a controversial figure, a man who, among other things, was charged three times with professional misconduct and later became a mentor to Donald Trump. For Barbara, unsavory allegations and even Mob ties weren’t necessarily disqualifying; protecting her family came first. Like her emergency loan from gangster Louis Chesler to repay her father’s debts, a powerful man with a shady reputation once again had provided a safety net when she needed one.
“I knew all his faults, but I could never forget what he had done for my father,” she said of Roy. And for her. The day would come when she would return the favor.