‘Never f--- a lawyer,’ one of Alan J Lerner’s friends counselled. But it was too late. Lerner had fallen for Corsican-born Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo, the youngest avocat ever called to the French Bar.

By 1965, at the height of Lerner’s fame – his hit stage musical My Fair Lady had just been made into a movie with Audrey Hepburn – he was involved in the messiest of divorce scandals.

The lyricist married tough cookie Micheline in 1957. She had made her name in Paris legal circles as a formidable criminal lawyer who prided herself on never losing a case. She was not the sort of person to tangle with in or out of court.

All but the last of Lerner’s eight marriages ended in divorce. ‘I have been married repeatedly,’ he once said. ‘I am not proud nor ashamed of it.’ Many people in the Lerner and Loewe circle suggested that it was Micheline’s interfering that ended the musical pair’s winning partnership in 1962. In his autobiography Lerner wrote: ‘All my wives were (lovely) – with one aberrational exception whose name will not appear in this book.’ This was Micheline. Success had not been altogether kind to the Oscar-winning librettist who had acquired an addiction to amphetamines which added fuel to his turbulent marriage to Micheline, the fate of which was sealed in 1964 when she filed for divorce.

Micheline engaged the original celebrity lawyer, Roy M Cohn who as Joseph McCarthy’s legal henchman, had prosecuted suspected communists with only the slimmest of evidence. Cohn was generally seen as a man who would stop at nothing to win a case (including entrapment, harassment, and bribing witnesses). Towards the end of his career he became a mentor to a young businessman called Donald Trump. Cohn was the fulcrum in Tony Kushner’s 1993 play Angels in America and the recent movie The Apprentice where he was played by Jeremy Strong.

In President Trump’s first term, angered by some PR disaster he was heard to mumble: ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’ ‘The bold-faced lies, guilt-free immorality, blithe refusal of introspection, and astonishing vulgarity that we now associate with President Trump are key elements of a style created by Cohn,’ wrote observer Oskar Eustis.

Like Micheline, Cohn had an early, precocious talent, being admitted to the New York Bar at the age of 21, first a ‘boy wonder’, later a ‘legal executioner’. As brilliant as he was arrogant Cohn soon rose to become special assistant to the US attorney general and was a protégé of J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI.

Seeing himself as a maverick, standing against long-established, respectable law firms and winning against the odds, Cohn went on to become a power broker and Mr Fixit for an array of high-profile (and dodgy) clients.

Hilarious accusations flew in the Lerner v Lerner divorce courtroom. Lerner said that one particularly argumentative summer with his wife ‘would have attracted the professional eye of any passing exorcist’. Lerner claimed that she had called him ‘a cheap musical comedy writer’ and he referred to her ‘cacophonic wilfulness’. Cohn was hired to impugn Lerner’s character.

In court, after the slippery Cohn played on Mr Lerner’s success and status he won for Mrs L the largest alimony payment in the history of New York state. Throughout his life the divorce courts became accustomed to Alan J Lerner’s face, but up until the day he died Micheline sought thousands of dollars in alimony arrears.

Lerner’s career never again scaled the heights of his My Fair Lady success or his enigmatic Camelot of 1962 which lent its name to the brief shining moment of the JFK presidency. His musical on the life of Coco Chanel was an infamous flop. Lerner once said: ‘The female sex has no greater fan than I, and I have the bills to prove it.” Roy Marcus Cohn was thrice tried and acquitted on federal charges of conspiracy, bribery, and fraud, and was finally disbarred only two months before his death from Aids in 1986.

British humourist and broadcaster Ned Sherrin recalled a breakfast interview he conducted with Cohn in 1978 during which the lawyer turned to an aide and, within Sherrin’s earshot, said: ‘Did you mail that cheque to the judge?’

Bluesky: @kenwilson84.bsky.social