Roy Cohn film on HBO a personal mission for documentarian Ivy Meeropol
You can’t get more personal with a documentary than Ivy Meeropol is with “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn,” which airs on HBO on Thursday.
Cohn, the notorious homosexual hypocrite, power broker, mentor to Donald Trump and disbarred lawyer who died of AIDS in 1986, was the prosecutor who sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair in 1953 as Soviet atomic-era spies.
The Rosenbergs were Meeropol’s grandparents. Now 52, when did she realize this was her legacy?
“I always have a hard time answering this question. I feel I always knew. I was so young when I found out the basic information,” she said.
“The family story is I was about 5 or 6 and kept asking. I knew my father was adopted because my younger brother was adopted. So I asked, What happened to your other parents? I’d meet that with silence but I kept pestering until they told me the truth: They were executed, the electric chair.
“As a little kid that was too much. I didn’t want to know any more.”
That changed when Ivy was 10 and her father reopened the case. “At that point in my life, we lived in a bubble of supporters, sympathizers and friends. I knew the bare minimum of what happened.”
Then she saw a PBS 1974 newsreel documentary “The Unquiet Death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.”
“That was the first time I saw footage of my father and brother going in and out of Sing Sing. That was hard.”
As an adult, Meeropol in 2004 released an acclaimed familial documentary, “Heir to an Execution.”
“Bully” finds her returning to her family only briefly.
“It took me a while to get to the point and make ‘Execution’ and embrace my legacy,” she said. “I didn’t want to go back to my family story when I went about Roy Cohn.”
“Bully” follows last year’s Roy Cohn bio-doc “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” from Matt Tyrnauer.
“I think they’re complementary,” Meeropol said. “There’s only one subject we share, Dave Marcus, the Cohn cousin. Everyone else in my film he doesn’t have.”
“Bully” revels in revealing closeted Cohn’s hypocritical, flagrant very gay summers in Provincetown.
“I’ve been going there my whole life and that’s where I started the film. I knew he had been seen there.
“Instead of a lot of talking heads who talk about Cohn’s role in history, these were people who knew him and how he behaved in daily life.”
In “Bully” we discover Cohn’s sit-down restaurant dinners come with holders full of cocaine next to a perfectly placed pill to mellow out.
“We had all these tapes,” Meeropol noted, “and were off to the races.”