Dr. Feelgood (18 page)

After all those years of accelerated injections, I really began to come apart. . . . I attempted suicide but I was saved by my sister. . . . I was in a deep amphetamine coma, and when they got me to Lenox Hill Hospital, I was declared dead on arrival. . . . The doctors finally diagnosed it as amphetamine poisoning. . . . The first thing I did when I got out of the hospital was to go to Max for a shot. . . . After another year, I was more hooked than ever. . . . In another couple of months, I’m sure I would have been as dead as Mark Shaw and Nina and some of the others I haven’t told you about.
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With the help of a friend, Mann entered Alcoholics Anonymous, but told Hotchner, “I’m still unused to a life without the crutch of Max’s injections. After all, that’s all the life I had for more than twenty years.”
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While talking to Hotchner during Jacobson’s state license revocation hearings, Mann had been asked by the doctor in charge of the investigation to wait before publicly exposing Jacobson until the hearings were complete. The hearings took fourteen months before a five-doctor panel. Jacobson’s attorney, Simon Rose of the Louis Nizer firm, had prepared one of the best defenses the board had ever encountered. There were four thousand pages of testimony, more than ninety witnesses (most of whom were current or former patients), and countless pieces of evidence and exhibits. The New York state medical board ultimately revoked Jacobson’s license to practice medicine.

Hotchner concluded that although Harvey Mann suffered heinously from Jacobson’s drugs, “he had the ultimate satisfaction of knowing that by triggering this investigation, he had deterred others from being as victimized as he had been.”
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As the 1960s came to a close, Max was facing serious questions about his practice and methods on several fronts. First, the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) had been investigating Max for about five years prior to the 1972
New York Times
exposé of Max’s practices. A review by the BNDD showed that a substantial amount of the amphetamines he had purchased were unaccounted for. Where had they gone? Were there undisclosed purchases of Max’s drugs?

The BNDD had raided Max’s office in 1969, where they found conditions beyond unsanitary, and he was facing disciplinary charges as a result of that search. Second, several of Jacobson’s patients had reported him to authorizing agencies regarding his so-called “vitamin” injections. Film director Otto Preminger, who had a severe reaction to several of the doctor’s injections, reported him to the AMA.

Actor and Max’s former lab assistant Felice Orlandi, after a severe nervous breakdown that resulted in a prolonged hospitalization due to an overdose of methamphetamine injections, reported Max to the New York Medical Society. And the key complaint to both the
New York Times
and the State Board of Regents in 1969, made by Mark Shaw’s ex-wife, Gerri Trotta, was that Jacobson murdered his friend Shaw by methamphetamine poisoning. Although there was some investigation from Trotta’s claims, they never resulted in any criminal charges, formal or informal. Until the Controlled Substances Act was enacted in 1970, there were no real regulations regarding the use and dispensation of amphetamines. By 1970, however, amphetamine use by civilians became illegal with the passage of the U.S. Drug Abuse Regulation and Control Act. As a result, official government regulatory agencies began controlling distribution of the drug.

The investigations into the distribution of methamphetamines circled around Max Jacobson’s medical practice. But Jacobson believed that his methamphetamine injections could help heroin addicts free themselves from the drug. Unfortunately, that freedom came at the expense of addiction to meth. However, Jacobson was unafraid to make his opinions known. Thus, at the invitation of his friend and patient, representative Claude Pepper from Florida, Jacobson appeared before the House Select Committee on Crime on June 30, 1970, to discuss the treatment of heroin addiction. The biography Jacobson submitted to the committee contained this passage:

Dr. Jacobson is particularly interested in using his methods to counteract the severe physical and emotional stresses of those who live and work in environments of continual high pressure. . . . In this context he has been entrusted with the supervision of the health of a large number of highly-placed government officials, including several heads of state, numerous business and industrial leaders, and a great many top-rank members of the performing arts.
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Representative Pepper concurred, stating at the hearing, “I have known Dr. Jacobson for a long time and have the highest esteem for his professional excellence and for his achievements. He treated some of the most important and distinguished patients in the world, and I think he is a man of extraordinary professional skill and is particularly imaginative.”
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This testimony all occurred after the raid by the BNDD the year before, which became part of the investigation into Max’s practices that had been ongoing for nearly five years.

Despite Jacobson’s protestations of his good faith in treating patients, questions still arose about the levels of methamphetamine he was manufacturing, where the ingredients for his concoctions came from, and how the drugs were distributed. Max argued that he was simply supplying his MS patients with his injections to keep them free of pain and fatigue, running his research into the disease through his nonprofit corporation, the Constructive Research Foundation, on Long Island. Max had even hired the advertising agency McCann Erickson in 1969 to market his self-described research operation, the Constructive Research Foundation. That corporation still exists today, more than twenty-five years after Jacobson’s death.

One of the many events triggering close scrutiny of Jacobson’s medical practices and, ultimately, the
New York Times
exposé of him was the death of patient Mark Shaw. Had Max murdered him by overdosing him on his drugs? Dr. Michael M. Baden, the associate medical examiner of New York City, who performed the autopsy on Mark Shaw, agreed with Secret Service Agent and Shaw’s close friend Paul Landis regarding overdoses of methamphetamine. Landis said he believed that Shaw had been overdosed to the point of death. He pointed to the fact that Mark Shaw was only forty-seven when he died in his Kips Bay apartment in Manhattan on January 26, 1969. According to
New York Times
reporter Boyce Rensberger, when the medical examiner’s office called Jacobson, he insisted that Shaw had a history of heart disease and that he had died of a heart attack. The autopsy showed another cause. There was no evidence of heart disease, but Mr. Shaw’s internal organs were laden with methamphetamine residue. There was heavy scarring and discoloration along the veins in his arms—the tracks of someone who repeatedly injects himself with drugs. The death was ruled by the New York medical examiner as “acute and chronic intravenous amphetamine poisoning.” Yet there were no charges brought against Dr. Jacobson. According to Michael Samek, Jacobson was friends with New York attorney general Louis K. Lefkowitz, who, according to Samek, had the issue swept under the rug and kept out of the publications.

Despite all the loud complaints regarding Jacobson that were breaking the surface tension of public knowledge, the
New York Times
, where rumors about Max and his celebrity clientele were circulating, did not know about the dispensation of drugs at Max’s all-night parties at his office. Nor did the staff know that right across town from the
Times
offices, there was a doctor who was treating and thus controlling some of the most important icons of the twentieth century. But the
Times
would soon begin its own investigation as the forces in the media, smelling blood on the water, began to circle around the presidency of Richard Nixon and the rumors about Nixon’s possible connection to this strange Dr. Feelgood, who was distributing an energy-boosting magic elixir.

In late September 1972, a high-ranking, credible source gave a tip to an editor at the
New York Times
that vice president Spiro T. Agnew was a patient of the notorious Dr. Feelgood. When this report came to the editor, the
Times
, considered by its influential readers to be at the cutting edge of all media, had just been eclipsed by the
Washington Post’s
coverage of the unfolding Watergate story. Some media historians have said that the
Times
held back while the
Post
forged ahead. If the publishing executives at the
Times
believed that their investigative reporters had been relegated to back-draft of an exposé of Nixon and Watergate, the Dr. Feelgood story with the Agnew connection was tantalizing. Perhaps against the background of the unfolding Watergate story, two of the
Times
’s leading health journalists were assigned to find out about Dr. Max. There was the scent of a scandal in the air, perhaps a greater conspiracy, and Boyce Rensberger and Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., were on the case.

Boyce Rensberger was a science writer at the
Times.
He had joined the
Times
in 1971 after a stint as a science editor at the
Detroit Free Press.
Dr. Lawrence Altman became the
New York Times
’s medical correspondent in 1969. The authors interviewed both Mr. Rensberger and Dr. Altman, along with noted
Times
health journalist Jane Brody, on their perspectives of Dr. Jacobson and the pieces that appeared in the
Times
about Max.

Rensberger recalled first staking out, from his car, the 87th Street offices of Jacobson with Altman. They noticed several noted personalities leaving the building. In fact, what they noticed was an ongoing stream of people they recognized—celebrities, literary figures, and the like—entering the building. What was going on in there, and why had Vice President Agnew’s name come up?

The burning questions were who was Dr. Feelgood, and what was going on in this office? For almost twenty years, Dr. Max had flown under the
Times’s
radar. Yes, stories about which celebrities were on drugs had surfaced and then disappeared. Rumors abounded about the strange man with the accent whom reporters had seen around President Kennedy. But the stories went nowhere because Kennedy’s real physiological problems were hidden from the public, with press complicity, much like Woodrow Wilson’s incapacitating stroke and FDR’s paralysis were kept hidden from the public. But this was a different era. Watergate was breaking. The Pentagon Papers story was brewing. Nixon was facing a circle of critics who were closing in. Rules had changed, journalistic gladiatorial combat was in the offing, and the gloves had come off.

The
Times
reporters smelled a real scandal with potentially widereaching repercussions. Here was a physician who had been out front as drugging world leaders, iconic actors, singers, opera stars, writers, director, producers, and the cream of the New York literati. And then there were the stories about Jacobson and JFK and the influence Jacobson exerted with his drugs, especially at the disastrous Vienna Summit, the results of which had been reported a decade earlier by
Times
reporter James Reston.

The late-night parties at Max’s office, the names of movie stars, writers, politicians, and celebrities who attended the parties, and the dispensation of drugs were all taking place in the
Times
’s own home city. Yet none of this had been made public. But all of that was about to change.

Times
reporters Rensberger and Altman were handed the assignment to find out if the rumor about Agnew seeking amphetamines was true. They went to Jacobson’s office to talk to the doctor, but Jacobson did not view the reporters as investigators. He truly believed, according to Mike Samek, that he was now going to receive his day in the sun. He was going to be recognized for his work and get the acceptance he had sought. For a sociopathic narcissist, it was a dream come true. Jacobson was never shy about boasting about his famous patients. According to Rensberger, he once boasted about how many celebrities’ careers he had made possible. He told composer Burton Lane’s wife during a preview of Lerner’s
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
, that he had worked with the Kennedys and showed her his tie clip, which had a PT-109 insignia. Max boasted further that he had traveled with the Kennedys and treated Jack and Jackie Kennedy, who, he said, could not have made it without him. And he boasted that Kennedy have him the tie clip in gratitude.

Now, talking to Rensberger and Altman, Max imagined he would become the long-awaited and acknowledged medical miracle man, the savior of presidents, statesmen, and artists. He could come out of his lab and be touted to the world. Jacobson went full-out to impress the reporters. He now had his platform for glory.

Jacobson took Rensberger and Altman on a grand tour of his medical practice. Altman, in an interview with the authors, recalled that at some point in the interview with Jacobson, Max excused himself to go to the restroom. Rensberger recalled that “when he returned from the bathroom, I noticed blood droplets on his arm; he had just shot-up. . . . Max bragged about his laboratory, which was located in the office. . . . It was filthy, there was garbage on the floor. . . . He was dressed in rumpled clothes, a stained lab-coat. . . . He had dirty fingernails. . . . He had a deep accent but it was less than Kissinger. . . . He looked younger than seventy-two.”
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Both Altman and Rensberger recalled Jacobson’s showing him a vial of his drug with “rocks” at the bottom that he said were “radioactive” and gave the patient “extra energy.” He would not tell Altman the contents of the vial. Rensberger commented that Jacobson did not strike him as “intelligent” but “acted compassionate, had a great bedside manner when we watched him with a patient. . . . I think Max felt he was helping people . . . but most of all he had an infatuation with celebrity.”
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Jacobson told them of his safari with Prince Radziwill, explained how he was Cecil B. DeMille’s personal physician in Egypt during the filming of
The Ten Commandments
, and showed them Eddie Fisher’s picture at Max’s wedding to his third wife, Ruth, a photo that had Fisher’s inscription, “He’s still my God.” Max told them of his other celebrity patients he treated, and of course he told him of how he was important to President Kennedy.