… and that little boy who nobody liked grew up to be … Roy Cohn! — Paul Harvey
Wow! — Jasper, Grampa, “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet”
Known colloquially as “the blue-haired lawyer” in the archives of Simpsonia, the above-pictured adversary was supposedly modeled after Joseph McCarthy errand boy Roy Cohn. Here’s an appealing fellow …
While the facial resemblance isn’t so much there, it was supposedly Cohn’s thick New York accent that made its way into the show. A little of that can be heard around the 1:50 mark here:
Cohn was pretty much a maniac throughout his professional career, even after he hopped off the Red Scare bandwagon. His various ethical crimes would have given Lionel Hutz himself a run for his money. This one for example:
… a Florida court found that Mr. Cohn had entered the hospital room of Lewis S. Rosenstiel, the multimillionaire head of Schenley Industries, and “misrepresesnted the nature, content and purpose of the document that he offered Mr. Rosenstiel for execution.” The document, which the dying client shakily signed, was a codicil to his will that would have made Mr. Cohn and certain others the executors of the will.
Cohn died in 1986, a victim of the AIDS epidemic. Years later, Tony Kushner famously revitalized him for use as a character in his Angels In America play … take it, Al.
