Dr. Feelgood (20 page)

Max began a series of appeals to regain his license. He closed his 87th Street office and worked out of his apartment at 305 West 86th Street. Many of his patients visited him, including author Roger Rapoport, who wrote a chapter about Max in his book
The Super-Doctors
; actor/playwright Alvin Aronson said that “we would go into one of his bedrooms” for treatment. Mike Samek said that Max was definitely changed, “but he still continued his practice at his apartment.”
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And Eddie Fisher said, “I still saw Max [at] his place,”
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but that his glory days were definitely over. Max had to remain out of the spotlight, and his patients visited him strictly on the down-low. Everyone was aware that Max had lost his license. Miracle Max was legally barred from medical practice.

After he lost his license, Max continued to stay physically active, swimming in his apartment building’s pool every day, which made him look younger than his years. But the final blow struck him when his attempt to regain his license failed, and the state Board of Regents denied his reinstatement in May 1979. A state spokesmen noted that the then seventy-nine-year-old Jacobson didn’t seem ready to enter into the “mainstream of practice” again. Then, in June 1979, the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris, of which Max was proudly a member and where he had hospital privileges since he was a physician in Paris in the early 1930s, stripped him of his affiliation because they questioned the legitimacy of the treatments he was providing. Max had lived to be a physician. It was his life’s goal. He realized on the loss of his appeal and his losing the affiliation with the Pasteur Institute that he would soon be fully branded a charlatan and would have to live life as a civilian. His powers as a medical wizard had been stripped.

“I visited Max and Ruth at their apartment around two weeks prior to Max’s death. He was undoubtedly a broken man,” recalled Alvin Aronson.
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“The end for Max was horrible,” recalled Eddie Fisher. “The last time I saw Max was at his wedding in 1973; I think it was in Vegas. But it wasn’t really Max; he was a shadow of what he was. . . . It was after he was being crucified in the newspapers. . . . It was what was left of a crazy genius. . . . His own drugs had destroyed him. . . . At the wedding reception his wife, Ruth, who was a nurse from his office, had to feed him. And then she took him into a private room and gave him a dose of his own medicine. . . . Although many people wanted him prosecuted, he ended up working quietly in the back room of another doctor’s office for about three years. . . . When he died, he had become his last victim.”
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After his death, there was no obituary for Max in the
New York Times
. Alvin Aronson said that he and his wife had dinner with Ruth Jacobson a couple of weeks after his death, where she told him, “I won’t give those bastards any money. I don’t want his obituary in that rag.”
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The Jacobson story turns out to be a story of how one man dispensing powerful methamphetamines not only changed the course of US presidential history, but also wound up creating what amounted to nothing less than a subculture of celebrity addicts. As a result, Jacobson ultimately became an instrument for the media in their pursuit of Richard Nixon, even while his actions helped convince President Nixon to launch the War on Drugs.

In his book
Ailing, Aging, Addicted: Studies of Compromised Leadership
, author Dr. Bert E. Park presents an intriguing analogy relevant not only to JFK’s situation, but also to Max Jacobson’s. Park strongly argued that Jacobson was a sociopath, a quack, and a financial opportunist. Park draws a strong parallel between the relationship of Adolf Hitler to his private doctor, amphetamine specialist Dr. Theodore Morell, and that of John F. Kennedy to Dr. Max Jacobson. Park suggests that Morell had so thoroughly drugged Hitler to the point where he became even more psychotic, paranoid, and delusional than he already was, committing resources to an unsustainable invasion of the Soviet Union. Even Hitler’s generals realized how demented their leader was and plotted his assassination. Did those behind the Kennedy assassination see a similarity between what the German generals did and what they had to do? Park also theorizes what might have occurred if JFK had not been assassinated in 1963 and had continued to be treated by Jacobson, suggesting that Kennedy might have become completely irrational; with his finger on a nuclear trigger, that irrationality could have been very dangerous. The dangers of placing a patient in just such a state of irrational behavior was also suggested in Jacobson’s license revocation hearing. However, Jacobson was true to his promise to Jackie Kennedy and did not elaborate on his relationship with President Kennedy and his routine visits to the White House.

In the four thousand pages of testimony assembled over a two-year period by the New York State Board of Regents Review Committee on Discipline, the White House is mentioned only once. Jacobson had kept his promise not to implicate JFK, even though Robert Kennedy had told the FBI about his brother’s treatment; the story itself had eventually leaked. Privately, however, the self-assured doctor openly spelled out in his diary his treatment of JFK and the close relationship they shared.

Methamphetamine injections were all Jacobson knew, a practice he continued to use on himself and all his patients, regardless of the disease he was treating, until the day he lost his license. If Max perceived himself to be a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, able to conquer death by rejuvenating the dying cells in a patient’s body, he also had to confront Frankenstein’s monster, which he never did. It was himself.

Flagrantly manufacturing his concoctions without a license to do so in his rush to dispense them day and night, Jacobson also failed to maintain adequate quality control or sterility standards. Records indicate that Jacobson’s “nightly mailings left the respondent’s office at the rate of 2 to 30 vials to locations throughout the United States and the world.”
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In other words, without formal approval or oversight from an authorizing agency to manufacture, sell, and ship his elixir, Max was essentially a drug pusher. Ultimately, Max was found guilty of malfeasance. In the words of the inquiry summation: “Adulterated drugs [were found] . . . consisting of filthy, putrid, and/or decomposed substances.”
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Jacobson also failed to keep proper records of the stimulants and depressants he prescribed. No doubt he dealt in large quantities, particularly when it came to staples of his pharmacopoeia, methamphetamine HCL, and dextroamphetamine sulfate. Within a two-year period alone, the doctor was unable to account for 1,474 grams of purchased methamphetamine, another count on which he was found liable.

More alarming was Jacobson’s willingness to supply his patients with injectable medication to be self-administered. These patients were addicts allowed by their doctor to inject themselves with a dangerous addictive substance. By the state board estimate, at least 90 percent of his patients were afforded this dubious luxury. President Kennedy was among them. The FBI charged with analyzing these medications in 1961 uncovered five vials that Jacobson had left behind in the White House, each revealing high concentrations of amphetamines and steroids. Robert Kennedy was so alarmed by Jacobson’s increasing access to his brother that he had the FDA, via the FBI, analyze fifteen separate vials he demanded from Jacobson on the spot. Both independent reports coincide with what the state later disclosed.

Jacobson never denied that he used amphetamines liberally, on himself as well as his patients. They were not illegal, nor were their negative attributes and psychologically addictive properties common knowledge outside of the medical profession. The New York State medical licensing authority had to determine whether Jacobson’s self-administration of the drugs rendered him medically and psychologically incompetent to treat patients.

How had Jacobson managed to thrive for so long without being questioned? To be sure, the era in which he practiced seemed to allow for as much blue-sky thinking as legitimate science-based medicine. Snake Oil salesmen were providing self-described cures of all kinds and so-called “New Age” practitioners promised spiritual as well as physical health. American society had its share of medical charlatans and quick-fix practitioners by the 1960s, and artists and socially connected individuals flocked to them. To accommodate and exploit those socialites who were naive enough to judge a physician’s credentials by his social visibility, there was much to be said for this up-and-coming immigrant German who created the impressive façade of research while cultivating a reputation as “Dr. Feelgood” among those who passed through his doors.

The cloak of legitimacy, particularly scientific legitimacy, has often masked the crass commercialism of charlatans posing as serious doctors. Adolf Hitler’s doctor, Theodore Morell, who advertised himself as a skin and venereal disease expert, actually made a small fortune in the methamphetamine-laced drugs he manufactured, labeled, and sold in his own laboratories. Like Jacobson, amphetamines were the mainstay of Morell’s treatment of the Fuehrer, who, like Kennedy and other celebrities, had been introduced to his future physician through social connections. Such well-placed contacts played into the hands of two physicians cut from the same cloth, motivated as they were to build a socially prominent clientele that would eventually catapult them to the attention of their respective leaders.

Did Jacobson actually perform any legitimate medical research, as he had claimed? His scientific papers, such as one published in 1968 on tissue regeneration, did not follow the protocols or steps necessary to be considered “scientific.” He had never had an article accepted by the Journal of the American Medical Association. By the time the New York State Board of Regents began its investigation, Jacobson belonged to no professional societies, did not have staff privileges at any hospital in New York, and had been deemed a fraud by the official association conducting research into MS.

New York Times
reporter Boyce Rensberger determined that Jacobson had purchased at least 29.7 pounds of amphetamines in five years, enough for 100,000 doses per year. He wrote,

The doctor’s office reported that Dr. Jacobson buys amphetamines at the rate of 80 grams per month. This is enough to make 100 fairly strong doses of 25 milligrams per day. According to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which investigated Jacobson at different times over almost five years, a review by the agency of the doctor’s records showed a substantial quantity of the amphetamines he had purchased was unaccounted for. In 1965, the bureau ordered seizure on all controlled drugs in Dr. Jacobson’s possession, an action he contested in a suit that is still pending.
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There were other “amphetamine” physicians who had started up practices in Manhattan, namely Dr. Robert Freymann and Dr. John Bishop. Freymann, like Jacobson, had escaped Nazi Germany and set up his practice in New York in the mid-1930s. Like Jacobson, he had some celebrity patients, who included Jackie Kennedy toward the latter part of her life, jazz great Charlie Parker, and the Beatles. Like Jacobson, both Bishop and Freymann lost their licenses in 1975 after they were exposed by the
New York Times
. This was one of the great medical scandals of the 1970s and became one of the causa belli for Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs, which continues unabated today

One of the stories circulating about Max Jacobson’s second wife, Nina Hagen, was that the doctor murdered her because of an alleged affair she had with JFK’s college roommate, Chuck Spalding. According to the story, Nina began having an affair with Spalding, which resulted in the breakup of Mr. Spalding’s marriage. Many blame the affair on the fact that both were addicted to Max’s injections of amphetamine.

Was it jealousy that led Max to eliminate Nina gradually, but intentionally, or was Max just carelessly dispensing his drugs to her? Alan Jay Lerner’s assistant and Jacobson patient Doris Shapiro remembered the death of Nina in her book
We Danced All Night
: “One night Max and his wife, Nina, came to the Waldorf offices [of Alan Jay Lerner]. We were sitting around the large upholstered room while Max fussed with his bag, when suddenly Nina said softly, ‘I don’t feel well.’ Max heard her and began to prepare a syringe. ‘No, Max,’ she said. ‘No more.’

“‘Come,’ he said coddlingly. ‘I’ll make you feel better.’ He took her into another room, holding the syringe. After they came out, she sat quietly, saying, ‘Yes, thank you.’ She felt better.”
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Shapiro wrote that she learned a week later that Nina was dead. Shapiro noted that once Nina entered the hospital, she was beyond Max’s ability to treat her, because he had no hospital affiliations. Shapiro later recalled meeting one of Max’s “nurses” named Beatrice. Shapiro asked her what had happened to Nina. Beatrice looked very sad, “crestfallen,” Shapiro remembered, and revealed, “I’m afraid Max did it.” She asked Beatrice how the hospital listed Nina’s cause of death. “Oh, they said some virus or something, I don’t know,”
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Doris said Beatrice told her. But when she asked whether the hospital had performed an autopsy, Beatrice answered that there was no request for one.

Alvin Aronson, who was an Alan Jay Lerner associate, had a clear recognition of the event Doris Shapiro described in her book. He said, “I was shocked that Nina had passed away. . . . When Max came into the offices the next day, I was flabbergasted. . . . He had a strange look upon his face . . . almost a look of contentment.”
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Michael Samek disputed Shapiro’s and Aronson’s accounts, recalling that Max “couldn’t stand funerals. Nina’s death was traumatic for him. She died in the early 1960s. The night when his wife was dying, I stayed up with him half the night composing a letter to JFK, which he never sent. It was all happening at once.”
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But, ultimately, it was all about the drugs, which he continued to dispense after Nina’s death.