Dr. Feelgood (9 page)

He built a laboratory at his office to continue his study of multiple sclerosis and develop his injectable potions, which he would distribute worldwide. Word spread about Dr. Jacobson’s special “miraculous treatments” of patients with MS and other neuromuscular diseases, and soon Jacobson was scheduling treatments for patients with MS every Wednesday. His use of an injection with methamphetamine and steroids, which Max called his “vitamin shot,” was his drug of choice for his MS patients.

Knowing that there was a growing celebrity community of refugees from Europe, Jacobson was hoping to reach out to them. Soon, many of his former patients from Berlin and Paris, including Anais Nin, Billy Wilder, and Henry Miller, reconnected with him. The treatments, actually stimulants and mood enhancers, that his patients sought were perfectly legal in the 1930s. In fact, in 1937 the American Medical Association approved amphetamine’s availability in tablet form, and it was immediately used to treat narcolepsy and the behavioral syndrome called minimal brain dysfunction (MBD). It was also recommended for use by physicians to treat their own fatigue, and in 1940, Burroughs Welcome marketed methamphetamine for the first time under the trade name Methedrine. Later, Glaxo Smith Kline entered the lucrative new amphetamine industry with its Dextroamphetamine for use by the military, a drug that later became Adderall and is still in use today as a major drug for the military and the most popular prescription medicine for ADHD in children as well as adults. World War II soldiers in the Allied and Axis forces were given liberal amounts of amphetamines. Pilots, tank drivers, and infantry used Benzedrine, Dexedrine, and Methedrine to stay awake for long periods of time and to enhance levels of courage and bravado.

Starting in the 1940s, usage of amphetamine tablets or Benzedrine by actors and singers to enhance their energy was common, and the drugs were available over the counter. Many German actors had experimented with different type of drugs that were prevalent in Berlin before Hitler. Rumors circulated that actors such as Peter Lorre and Bela Lugosi had experimented with various stimulants to enhance their performances, but ultimately some performers became severely addicted. Many actors used different forms of amphetamine, but Jacobson really took what would become known as “speed” to a whole new level.

When Jacobson began to achieve notoriety among the New York elite starting in the late 1940s, there were no other doctors who had perfected a form of methamphetamine that, in theory, had fewer side effects and was being touted as a miracle drug by celebrity endorsers. There were no drug manufacturers or even any meth labs to service the rich and famous or even the mass public with a “healthy,” vitamin-laced, methamphetamine cocktail. Jacobson had the entire market to himself, and he was out to exploit it. He just needed a larger and more influential patient base to spread the word of his wonder drugs.

Author and British historian Dr. Leslie Iversen notes that Jacobson did not substantiate or record his research or observations and subsequently did not publish scholarly papers for scientists to use his work as the basis of treatment. He may have been a pioneer in the creation of methamphetamine, Iversen admits, but Jacobson’s lack of a scientific process certainly convoluted his breakthrough in both the creation of the drug and the success in its usage. It is not farfetched to speculate that Jacobson had, by the 1940s, become so influenced by the methamphetamines he was self-injecting that he was more interested in expanding his base of influence with celebrity patients than he was in documenting his research in a scientific or scholarly way.

Soon after relocating to New York, tensions at home with Alice had mounted and risen to a boiling point, leading to their eventual divorce. His personal life improved, however, when he reconnected with Nina Hagen, who had also emigrated to the United States. Max had fallen in love with Nina when they first met in Germany after she had taken a bad fall from a horse. She was still a young teenager then, but Max had become enchanted with her. By 1945, in the afterglow of the defeat of Nazi Germany and a new start in America, he fell in love with Nina all over again, and they married in 1946 and had a daughter, Jill, who was born on September 22, 1947.

In 1946, Jacobson established a corporation named the Constructive Research Foundation for the ostensible purpose of researching and ultimately curing neuromuscular diseases such as MS when, in fact, he was using the foundation as a façade to purchase vast amounts of the raw materials to make and distribute his injectable concoctions. It was a profitable venture, even though the corporation was established as a nonprofit, and kept Jacobson solvent while he claimed that he was undertaking purely altruistic research. His lucrative business came at a personal and professional cost, however.

Although Jacobson had initially had hospital privileges in New York, he was denied access to those hospitals starting in 1946 due to what the hospitals’ medical administrators determined were his “irregular” treatments. Accordingly, although he had remained a member of the American Medical Association until 1971, he had to refer his patients to other doctors if they needed surgery or hospital care. “Max always experimented with his mixtures on himself, before he applied it to any patient,” recalled Mike Samek,
⁷
talking about his friend’s willingness to experience what he thought his patients would experience. However, it was eagerness for self-experimentation that would eventually be one of the charges leveled at him during his New York state medical license revocation hearings thirty years later.

By the late 1940s, Jacobson’s office became a Venus flytrap for countless numbers of celebrities from all spheres. There was future vice president Nelson Rockefeller and senator Claude Pepper; opera stars Leontyne Price, Maria Callas, and Paul Robeson; sportscaster Mel Allen; physicist Dr. Niels Bohr; composer Leonard Bernstein; actors Eddie Fisher and Ingrid Bergman; jazz singer Mabel Mercer; playwright George S. Kaufman; and choreographer and director Bob Fosse, just to name a few. One of Jacobson’s most powerful and high-profile patients was the Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille.

Jacobson himself said that he had stabilized his practice by the early 1950s with a functioning office staffed with a receptionist and assistants. It was around this time he was faced with an emergency concerning a major Hollywood motion picture,
The Ten Commandments
, and the impact it was having on director DeMille, who was in trouble with Paramount, the studio making the film. DeMille was over budget, and during the filming he had suffered a serious heart attack. Attending to him was a local physician, Dr. Hussein Ibrahim, as well as Max Jacobson, whom DeMille had flown to the set on location in Egypt. Both doctors advised DeMille that his recovery would require four weeks of bed rest, but his response was, “Forget it, gentlemen. I’m going to the set in the morning.” So he and Jacobson worked out a plan that would enable him to continue directing with as little physical stress as possible. And as long as the director’s spirits were high from methamphetamine, it worked. When dysentery began afflicting workers on the set, DeMille said, according to Scott Eyman in
The Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille
,
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“Most of us have suffered from dysentery, which we did not seem able to cure, so I sent for Dr. Max Jacobson to come in from New York. He flew out here with Yul Brynner . . . he has been here for four days now and we are all in much better shape. . . . As you know, he is one of the best doctors in America, and I felt the situation was sufficiently important to bring him on my personal expense, which I did.” In fact, DeMille was so enamored with the results of Jacobson’s injections and their ability to increase energy levels that when it came time for him to shoot the scene in which actor Charlton Heston, portraying Moses, receives the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, DeMille asked Jacobson to give Heston an injection, to which request Jacobson obliged.

Writer and director Billy Wilder said he’d met Jacobson again on a flight with Cecil B. DeMille to Egypt when DeMille was on location. Jacobson, he said “pumps him full of amphetamine magic shots so that DeMille can still climb ladders and shoot the scenes with maybe six thousand extras standing around.”
⁹

After principal photography on
The Ten Commandments
was completed, DeMille returned to the United States for editing and post production. However, DeMille had become saddened by the death of his brother in March 1955 and summoned Jacobson to Hollywood, where the doctor demanded that DeMille decrease his schedule and relegate the film editing to someone else. Jacobson’s treatment seemed to restore DeMille’s professional abilities, and his optimism was further restored after he had seen the first cut of
The Ten Commandments.
As the schedule for the release and promotion of the film was finalized, and the studio told DeMille he had to promote the film personally in foreign markets as well as in the United States, DeMille demanded that Jacobson travel with him to keep up his energy. Together, they would meet with Pope Pius XII in Rome, German Chancellor Conrad Adenauer, the mayor of Berlin Willy Brandt, and Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill in England. It was a junket that took Jacobson back to the Europe of his youth.

Jacobson, who was always happy to be in the midst of pomp and ceremony, was especially impressed at DeMille’s treatment in Rome. They were met by the chief representative of Paramount Studios in Italy, who led the group to their suite in the Hotel Exelsior, one of the premier hotels in Rome. Jacobson was especially impressed at how much the hotel suite had been set up for DeMille’s predilections, including a rocking chair and other amenities. One morning, Jacobson found DeMille on the balcony of the hotel room rehearsing for his meeting with Pope Pius XII. He was so engrossed in the moment as he practiced his presentation that he hadn’t noticed the crowd gathering in the street below. When Jacobson pointed this out, DeMille waved embarrassedly and went back inside to his rocking chair. DeMille’s practice paid off the next day, when DeMille’s audience with the Pope at the summer residence at Castel Gondolfo was confirmed, and DeMille invited his secretary, his daughter, and her husband, the Paramount representatives in Italy, and Jacobson and his wife, Nina, to come along. On their arrival at the papal residence, the group was led into a large reception hall with huge red tapestries hanging from the walls and brightly decorated carpets on the floor. There they awaited the pope, who entered from an ante room.

A cardinal introduced the group to the Holy Father, and each person bowed when his or name was announced. The instructions to the group had been for them to wait until the Pope spoke before they addressed him. It was the protocol; however, DeMille started speaking immediately about how important his movie was and why it was especially important to the Italian people. Pope Pius nodded politely, perhaps surprised at the outspokenness of this American motion picture director, until the exasperated cardinal sputtered, “Ecco, ecco,” (enough, enough), and ushered the group toward the exit. As they left, DeMille realized he had almost forgotten the reason for the visit and turned back to present the Pope with an $8,000 check for charity. His mission was done.

The group’s next stop was Berlin. Less than a decade after the Berlin Airlift, during which Nina’s brother had been killed, and more than a decade after Jacobson’s escape from Nazi Germany, Jacobson found himself in a city where he had almost been killed had he not fled after the warning from the brown-shirted storm trooper.

After they landed in Germany, the DeMille group drove to Hotel, Am Zoo in the Western sector of Berlin, where they met Jacobson’s former nurse. His old office had been right near the hotel, but was now gone. In its place Jacobson saw a bomb crater that he noted in his diaries as very deep, almost the size of a building.

That evening, there was a dinner reception with several government officials in attendance in the meeting hall of the new Jewish community, at which DeMille was expected to give a speech. He was reluctant, even though Jacobson had brought DeMille’s petit mal seizures under control with his drugs. But DeMille’s worries proved to be prophetic, and the tense atmosphere of the reception was almost too much for him. Jacobson guessed that the audience attributed the forty-five seconds of silence as DeMille stood there, actually unconscious on his feet, to the emotional content of his address. But DeMille regained his senses after the seizure and continued his presentation. The trip to Berlin was tense, and Jacobson was relieved when their stay in the city came to an end.

The Jacobsons’ next stop was in Bonn, where Nina Hagen’s family had been very helpful to German Chancellor Adenauer twenty years earlier before the war and had essentially launched his career in banking. When Nina and Jacobson arrived at Adenauer’s office in Bonn as part of the DeMille entourage, they went directly to the Chancellor’s office at the Auswärtige Amt, the German equivalent of the U.S. State Department. When the Chancellor saw Nina, he embraced her, and ushered the Jacobsons into his office for a private conversation. Jacobson was interested in Adenauer’s relationship with his former mentor Dr. Niehans, asking the chancellor if he had been treated by him. Niehans was one of the inventors of cellular therapy. When Max was a medical student and then an intern, he studied Niehans’s theories about the rejuvenative process that takes place in living cells and sought to adapt them to his practice of internal medicine. It was Dr. Niehans who inspired Max’s early research in cellular therapy.

Jacobson remembered that Asenauer told him that he had seen him several times,” without any further elaboration, and then closed down the conversation. They left his private office to find DeMille’s entourage fidgeting restlessly in the reception area. They had a flight to catch. Their next stop was Shannon Airport in Ireland en route to London.

Before the DeMille group had left the United States for the trip to Europe, one of Sir Winston Churchill’s aides, who was concerned over the condition of Sir Winston, believed that the prime minister could benefit from a consultation with Jacobson and had arranged in advance a meeting between him and Lord Moran, Churchill’s personal physician. When the DeMille entourage arrived at the Dorchester Hotel in London, the desk informed Jacobson that Lord Moran was in the lobby. Jacobson invited him up to DeMille’s suite, where the director had already changed into a bathrobe. Lord Moran knew all about DeMille’s heart attacks and asked him why he refused to follow the standard guidelines for recovery. At that, DeMille threw off his bathrobe and proceeded to do a dozen pushups. When he got up, he said, “Does this answer your question?” As he strutted out of the room, he muttered, “I am a good example of Dr. Jacobson’s way of treating people.” Lord Moran asked Jacobson what he had prescribed for DeMille, and, without hesitation, Jacobson gave him a detailed summary of the medication and how he prescribed it while Moran scribbled notes on a pad. Jacobson said he didn’t believe in a soft bedside manner but rather a direct approach that demanded his patients to follow his specific, albeit unorthodox, instructions. Their conversation turned next to Churchill, who was uncooperative when it came to medical treatment. Jacobson made some suggestions, recommended some of the formulas he used, and said that he had been successful treating patients who were difficult. Lord Moran thanked Jacobson for the suggestions. Later that day, the DeMille entourage had an audience with a young Queen Elizabeth, attended a royal command performance, and headed back to the airport for the flight to New York and then to Los Angeles in time for the theatrical release of
The Ten Commandments.