Authors: Richard A. Lertzman,William J. Birnes
Dr. Feelgood
DR. FEELGOOD
Copyright © 2013 by Richard A. Lertzman and William J. Birnes
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file. ISBN: 978-1-62087-589-6
Printed in the United States of America
DR. FEELGOOD
T
HE
S
HOCKING
S
TORY
OF THE
D
OCTOR
W
HO
M
AY
H
AVE
C
HANGED
H
ISTORY
BY
T
REATING
AND
D
RUGGING
JFK, M
ARILYN
,
E
LVIS, AND
O
THER
P
ROMINENT
F
IGURES
R
ICHARD
A. L
ERTZMAN AND
W
ILLIAM
J. B
IRNES
ONTENTS
Chapter 1: JFK and Dr. Max Jacobson in Camelot
Chapter 2: A Kosher Butcher’s Son
Chapter 3: Setting Up Shop in Berlin
Chapter 4: A New Life in Czechoslovakia and Paris
Chapter 6: Milton Blackstone, Eddie Fisher, and the Tragic Undoing of Bob Cummings
Chapter 8: Max, Mel, and “The Mick”
Chapter 11: The Whistle Blower
Chapter 13: Miracle Max or Mad Max?
The journey to write this book took us throughout the United States and allowed us to talk to many individuals who were cogent of Dr. Max Jacobson. The authors lived peripatetic lives in our explorations for the truth. The kind generosity of these contributors allowed us to paint a picture of this mysterious physician who had purposely shrouded his life even as he wound a web of addiction from New York, through Washington, to Los Angeles, entrapping his patients in a downward spiral of self-destructive behaviors.
The story began with the intent to document the life of actor Robert Cummings, one of the most important A-list screen and television celebrities of the 1940s and ’50s, who wound up desperately broke and alone in an old age home in the San Fernando Valley as a result of his addiction to Dr. Feelgood’s methamphetamine injections. But as we began to understand the reach of Dr. Feelgood, his relationship with the Kennedys, the Sam Giancana’s organized crime family, and with Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack, we knew that this was a far bigger story than we had originally planned to write. We realized that Dr. Feelgood was a part of twentieth-century American political history and his story needed to be documented.
Our research was benefited by many people. We offer plaudits and thanks to those who have helped make this book a reality, especially, first and foremost, the late author C. David Heymann and his wife Bea Schwartz, who helped us with important facts and set us on our course in the right direction. Our other inspiration was actor and director Dwayne Hickman, who, though best known for portraying “Dobie Gillis” on television, was also a friend of Bob Cummings, who told us the first stories about Max Jacobson. We thank Joan Roberts for her support, as well.
Further acknowledgments go to to Melinda Cummings Cameron and her husband Professor Kim Cameron; television icon Art Linkletter and his wife Lois; Pamela Shoop; actress Julie Newmar; the late singer Andy Williams and press agent Paul Shefrin; journalist Seymour Hersh; socialite Tony Bradlee; Jill Jacobson and her youngest son, Matthew; the late psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Hatterer; the late Michael Samek; actor Roscoe Lee Browne; playwright Alvin Aronson; physician and pioneering astronaut Dr. David Simons; JFK Secret Service agent Paul Landis; the late Tony Curtis; legendary television and motion picture star Jerry Lewis; singer Phyllis McGuire; the late actress Alice Ghostley; television writers and producers Rocky and Irma Kalish; late television producer Bob Finkel;
Hustler
magazine owner and publisher Larry Flynt; writer and producer of
The Twillight Zone
Del Reisman; film editor Stanley Frazen; actress Eileen Wesson; actress Linda Henning; film director Sam Irvin; the late astrologer Sidney Omar; the late Hollywood photographer Wallace Sea-well; Patricia Cummings; talk show host and comedian Joey Bishop; actor Jamie Farr; comedy writer Larry Gelbart (
Oh, God
,
Tootsie
, and
M*A*S*H
); Gary Owens; actor William Schallert; actor Ed Asner; the late film and television director/writer Hal Kanter; the late writer Irving Brecher; the late TV legend Milton Berle and his son Bill Berle; the late producer and writer Leonard Stern; legendary head of the William Morris Agency-Norm Brokaw; super agent Jay Kanter; the late actor Bob Easton; critic writer Shawn Levy; Valentina Quinn, daughter of actor Anthony Quinn; the late singer Eddie Fisher; film director Robert Child (
Silent Wings
); and actress Ann B. Davis.
We offer a debt of gratitude to pharmacology expert, writer, and Oxford Professor Leslie Iverson; writer Roger Rappoport (
The Super Doctors
); author Nina Burleigh (
A Very Private Woman
); author and Professor Robert Dallek; writer Tania Grossinger (
Growing up at Grossingers
); David and Juliet Shaw (son of Mark Shaw); writer and journalist Jane Leavy (
The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle
); writer Curt Smith (
The Voice: Mel Allen
); writer A.E. Hotchner (and co-founder with Paul Newman of “Newman’s Own” brands); animal activist and national television and radio pet expert Tracy Hotchner; Laurel Cummings Jones; writer Linda Jay Geldens (
Rod Serling
); Washington Internist and author Dr. Jeffrey Kelman;
New York Times
journalists Jane Brody; Lawrence Altman, and Boyce Rensberger; writer Frederick Kempe (
Berlin 1961
); writer Gore Vidal; writers and historians Lawrence Leamer and Nigel Hamilton; Broadway producer (with Alan Jay Lerner) Bud Widney; actor Jason Wingreen; Robert Cummings, Jr.; actress Pat Suzuki (
Flower Drum Song
, the former wife of Mark Shaw); actress Rose Marie; former First Lady Nancy Reagan; film and television director William Asher; Tom Putnam (director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum); and countless others who were of great assistance in the creation of this book.
For Richard Lertzman, I’d like to thank my son Matthew David Lertzman for his great assistance and being a loyal travel companion on this adventure.
For Bill Birnes, I want to dedicate this work to my godfathers, Nathan Birnbaum (who once told me to forget everything I was doing and make a movie), and Benjamin Kubelsky, who, ironically, after a century, were both responsible for much of the show business history we describe in this book. And to the Gruskin/Birnes Agency, the inventors of show business merchandise licensing. And finally to “The Burns Brothers,” an early vaudeville song-and-dance team, and to “The Chicken Sisters,” who performed on the
Jack Benny Program
on radio.
When you approach a story, no matter how sensational it seems on the surface, the more you explore its ramifications, the twists it takes, and the bends it makes, the more you come to appreciate and understand the larger picture. This is exactly what we discovered as we uncovered the story of Dr. Max Jacobson, an individual who, in some fundamental ways, influenced American history, even if his influence was tangential rather than immediately intentional. What we discovered and what we want to establish beyond the sensationalism of this story is how a single individual, Max Jacobson, became a lightning rod for any entity—public, political, or commercial—that wanted to use him because of a synthesized drug he developed that behaves like a fast-spreading virus. He became a drug addict after he injected himself with his own methamphetamine-laced concoctions, and he addicted others, propelled by a psychosis that came from the methamphetamine itself. Even more than a sensational story, this is a fascinating case study of how human connections form, spread, and deteriorate so as to change the course of history. What Max Jacobson did still affects us today in how the press operates and in our war on drugs.
When we looked at the totality of Max Jacobson’s effect on American culture—albeit having started inside a niche segment of that culture—the lives that were destroyed or otherwise influenced, and the spread of Max Jacobson’s influence across cultural lines, we realized we were looking at more than a story about a drug; we were looking at a type of social phenomenon, something that British scientist and author Richard Dawkins
1
might call a “meme,” which was working its way through a social network that Max Jacobson helped create. But we soon found that this was more than something Max Jacobson created. Because Jacobson himself was an addict controlled by methamphetamine, it was the drug that had become the meme. It remains today as a party drug of choice, though it’s ingested in a different form. We found that all the way from a popular Aretha Franklin song about Dr. Feelgood, to a Blake Edwards motion picture that featured a meth-injecting doctor at Hollywood parties, to serious political histories by Seymour Hersh and Robert Dallek, Max Jacobson had merely been portrayed as an anecdotal cultural footnote when, in fact, he was the spear point of a cultural change in America. And that is what this book documents.
Our study of the infamous Dr. Feelgood, Dr. Max Jacobson, had a narrow beginning as a show-business biography of motion picture and television star Robert Cummings, who was widely known as one of the first health food advocates in Hollywood and who had written a hugely successful book,
How to Stay Young and Vital
, in 1960 that sold millions of copies. We started out to write the story of how this self-described “clean living” popular figure, who had starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Dial M for Murder
and
Saboteur
and costarred with Ronald Reagan, fell into a precipitous decline because of his addiction to Max Jacobson’s drug cocktail. As our interviews circled out from actor Dwayne Hickman, of
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
fame and Cummings’s co-star in
Love That Bob
, we realized that Cummings’s relationship with Jacobson mirrored Jacobson’s relationships with many show-business figures, artists, and even key political figures such as President Kennedy. We realized we were on the trail of a larger story about how some of America’s most influential personalities from the 1940s to the 1970s were influenced by a drug and the provider of that drug.
As we talked to other celebrities of that period, former Jacobson patients, and historians who shared their own records with us, we realized our story about Bob Cummings may become the story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy. Soon, such figures as J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Claude Pepper, vice president Spiro Agnew, and even presidents Richard Nixon and Harry Truman became involved. Who was Max Jacobson? And how did the drug he synthesized exert so much influence? What was really at work as the drug spread, and how had it remained under the radar for more than thirty years, only to emerge in a headline-making story on the pages of the
New York Times
and in the news broadcasts of a crusading young Geraldo Rivera?
To find the truths behind the Max Jacobson story, we have traveled throughout the United States to interview American legends from all walks of life, Max Jacobson’s patients, and family members and friends of patients. We learned that Jacobson’s influence extended worldwide and that his drug cocktail affected the lives of some of the most influential leaders of the twentieth century.
Our pursuit to research the life and denouement of Max Jacobson began in Branson, Missouri, with an interview with singer Andy Williams, then to Washington, D.C., for conversations with journalist Sy Hersh and socialite Tony Bradlee, the sister of ex-JFK mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer. Then, after researching FBI and CIA public documents, we met with C. David Heymann in Manhattan. In New York, we also spoke to noted psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Hatterer, who treated President Kennedy at New York’s Carlyle Hotel after an injection from Max Jacobson that so overdosed the president he began running naked through the halls of the hotel. We also spoke to Max Jacobson’s best friend, World War II hero and Medal of Honor recipient Michael Samek, a chemical engineer who understood what Max was mixing up in his lab and tried to help him organize his business, even as New York state authorities were closing in.