Art Cohn (April 5, 1909 – March 22, 1958) was an American sportswriter, screenwriter and author. Cohn and Hollywood producer Mike Todd died in a plane crash in New Mexico in 1958.
Career
Sportswriter
Cohn was born in New York City. Early in his career he wrote for the Long Beach Press-Telegram.[2] From 1936 to 1943, he was a sportswriter and sports editor for the Oakland Tribune,[3] which published his sports column Cohn-ing Tower (wordplay on "conning tower"). He worked as a press correspondent during World War II.[4] In January 1958, after being away from newspaper work for 14 years, Cohn joined The San Francisco Examiner;[5][6] in his first column there, he wrote, "Things seem to happen where I happen to be."[4]
Cohn was a controversial opinion writer of the time; he "afflicted the sports world with hard questions about racial equality long before the civil rights movement."[7] He was also a boxing fan.
Cohn was the author of the Joe E. Lewis biography The Joker Is Wild, published by Random House in 1955, on which the movie The Joker Is Wild (1957) was based. At the time of his death, Cohn was writing a biography of Mike Todd, The Nine Lives of Michael Todd, which was finished by Cohn's wife and released by Random House in 1958.
Death
Cohn died on March 22, 1958, in the same plane crash that killed Broadway theatre and Hollywood film producer Mike Todd, pilot Bill Verner and co-pilot Tom Barclay. The twin-engine, 12-passenger Lockheed Lodestar crashed in bad weather in the Zuni Mountains near Grants, New Mexico. Ironically, Todd had named the plane The Lucky Liz after wife Elizabeth Taylor. Cohn, a resident of Beverly Hills, was survived by his wife, Marta, and his two sons, Ian and Ted.[4]
