Dr. Feelgood (2 page)

The list of former patients and celebrities who were friends of patients was extensive and included show business icons Jerry Lewis, Tony Curtis, George Clooney, Roscoe Lee Browne singer Phyllis McGuire, actresses Alice Ghostley and Julie Newmar, Ed Asner, William Schallert of
The Patty Duke Show
, the late Art Linkletter, our friend Dwayne Hickman, comedian Joey Bishop, actor Jamie Farr from
M*A*S*H
, comedy writer Larry Gelbart, television legend Milton Berle, and many others—more than we can mention here.

Our research also included medical doctors, pharmacology experts, and Max Jacobson’s son, Dr. Thomas Jacobson. Interviews also included writers Roger Rapoport (
The Super-Doctors
), Nina Burleigh (
A Very Private Woman
, about the death of Mary Pinchot Meyer), professor and Kennedy scholar Robert Dallek, writer and journalist Jane Leavy (
The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle
), writer Curt Smith (
The Voice: Mel Allen
), and famed writer A. E. Hotchner, who cofounded the Newman’s Own food brand with Paul Newman.

Just reviewing the list of Max Jacobson’s patients in the appendix will give you an understanding of the breadth of Jacobson’s reach and the level of research into medical files and the depth of the interviews. Information from the
New York Times’s
Jane Brody, Lawrence Altman, Boyce Rensberger, writer Frederick Kempe (Berlin 1961), historian Lawrence Leamer, and writer Gore Vidal provided much-needed background about Jacobson and his patients within the context of American cultural history from 1940 through the early 1970s.

We wondered how many other lives were destroyed by this supposed vitamin cocktail that was supplied by the person the Secret Service code-named “Dr. Feelgood.” How had this German immigrant impacted American history? We relied on information provided by the late C. David Heymann, who had extensively interviewed John F. Kennedy, Jr., and whose research into the influence of Max Jacobson on both President Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy made him aware of the dark secret that ran like an underground stream through Camelot.

We learned far more than we bargained for, particularly discovering that heroes of our generation, cultural icons, and the screen and television actors who influenced our outlook on life were, after all, still human beings plagued with many of the shortcomings that plague the rest of us. We learned the dark truths about the final weeks of Marilyn Monroe, J. Edgar Hoover’s secret addiction to methamphetamines, Mickey Mantle’s use of performance-enhancing drugs as well as his reliance on Max Jacobson during the Mick’s homerun derby with Yankee teammate Roger Maris, and the solution to the Mary Meyer murder in Georgetown and her shared drug addiction with the president, to whom she brought LSD tabs from her friend Dr. Timothy Leary, all under the watchful eyes of James Jesus Angelton of the CIA.

The full story of Dr. Max Jacobson, his influence, his medicines, his rise and fall, and how he became a useful tool for the KGB, the CIA, the New York State Board of Regents, and the American national media has never been told until now. As jaded as we are, we admit to having been completely astonished.

DR. FEELGOOD

On December 3, 1979, funeral services were held for Dr. Max Jacobson at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel at Madison Avenue at 81st Street in his adopted hometown of New York City. The Campbell Chapel has been the home of countless notable funerals, including those held for Irving Berlin, Joan Crawford, Bat Masterson, Judy Garland, Walter Cronkite, Rudolph Valentino, Tennessee Williams, mob boss Frank Costello, and many others. Jacobson’s was a traditional Jewish memorial followed by a shiva, a Jewish mourning period in which the deceased’s family receives condolences at home. Jacobson’s friend Michael Samek remembered that the funeral was well attended and that Jacobson was buried at Mt. Hebron Cemetery, which is in Queens, New York, next to his wife Nina and his parents, Louis and Ernestine. The celebrities in attendance at Dr. Jacobson’s funeral attested to the doctor’s extensive influence in the entertainment industry, among artists and writers, and in the world of politics and government.

The impact of the life and practices of Dr. Max Jacobson has reverberated for decades. There have been more than two hundred books touching on Jacobson, his drugs, and the lives he destroyed. Some of these books were written by patients who knew him intimately (such as Doris Shapiro’s
We Danced All Night
and Eddie Fisher’s
Been There, Done That
), while others were written by historians and popular writers (such as Roger Rapoport’s
The Super-Doctors
, which takes a deeper look at Jacobson within a medical and historical context). Movies such as Blake Edwards’s
S.O.B.
have parodied him, and songs such as Aretha Franklin’s “Dr. Feelgood” have immortalized him. The deaths of former patients have been blamed on him, such as Jackie Kennedy’s fatal lymphoma, and actor Bob Cummings’s decline and his death from Parkinson’s disease. There were many other deaths including Kennedy family photographer and Jacobson’s friend Mark Shaw, Alan J. Lerner, and Max’s own wife, Nina.

Whether lionized or vilified by his patients, Dr. Max Jacobson has become a part of the fabric of the twentieth century. There have been credible studies of his impact on John F. Kennedy, Jr. by popular historians such as Robert Dallek, Seymour Hersh, Richard Reeves, Frederick Kempe, C. David Heymann, Barbara Leaming, and Lawrence Leamer, all of whom reported that JFK’s life was deeply influenced by his relationship with Jacobson. The internet is replete with conspiracy theories surrounding Jacobson. Radio talk show hosts have held discussions on the “Jacobson Effect.” His nickname, Dr. Feelgood, is now commonly used to refer to numerous modern doctors whose misuse of drugs caused their patients harm or death, such as the late Michael Jackson’s physician Dr. Conrad Murray. Even the widespread use of methamphetamines in the United States has been blamed on Jacobson. Dr. Leslie Iversen, one of the leading experts on amphetamine use and a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, directly links Jacobson’s drug practices to the current spread of methamphetamines.

Ironically, despite all his influence and notoriety, Max Jacobson did not become a rich man by any account. Claims, such as the one made by actor Felice Orlandi, that Jacobson ran a global amphetamine syndicate that made millions of dollars were not borne out by reality. Jacobson himself complained that the legal defense he raised before the state of New York was so expensive, he was afraid it might wipe him out. In their exposé of Jacobson published on December 4, 1972, Rensenberger, Brody, and Altman of the
New York Times
wrote that despite Max Jacobson’s rich clientele of patients, he lived very modestly in what could be called a middle-class apartment.

His best friend, Michael Samek, noted that “Max never got rich. He never set up a proper billing system. He was never paid by many patients and that includes President Kennedy. . . . Max was a very compassionate person. He wanted to help his patients. Max always said, ‘It’s better to feel good than to feel sick.’ Treating patients was his life—not money. He saw his practice as a sort of mission.”
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The debate continues as to whether Jacobson was a fraud and a charlatan or a cutting-edge and compassionate physician. As fascinating as Jacobson’s story is in and of itself, it is also the story of methamphetamine, a drug that deludes those who use it into thinking they are larger than life. The drug is a Venus flytrap that lures, entraps, and then finally kills its victims.

On a positive note, medical licensing laws changed because of Jacobson. The War on Drugs emerged, in a small measure, out of the scandal surrounding Jacobson. Because of the influence he wielded with a drug that frightened federal secret intelligence agencies, conspirators within those agencies took extreme measures to protect power they felt belonged to them.

Jacobson was not only an instrument of destruction— inadvertently as well as deliberately as he sought to exert his control over those around him—but he also was a tool used by the media to sell newspapers as the Nixon administration crumbled from within. He was vilified not just in the print and broadcast media, but by New York State regulators, who revoked his license to practice medicine as they made an example of a person they believed had abused every aspect of medical procedure when it came to preparing and dispensing medication. In a larger sense, too, Max Jacobson became the poster boy for drug abuse, and in the wake of his exposure, the federal government created and then prosecuted its War on Drugs.

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of the Max Jacobson story was the way it demonstrated how human networks formed, how a drug addiction can spread virally among specific groups, and how an individual at the center of that network, just like a spider, can weave and spread his web to ensnare others. Indeed, we can call the Jacobson story a tragedy, but it’s an illustrative tragedy showcasing the ways human beings influence others so as to create an entire social movement. As grandiose as this sounds, it’s true.

“If you look backwards, you face the future with your ass.”

—Dr. Max Jacobson

“Mrs. Dunn is calling,” the office receptionist announced.

A hunched-over, bespectacled man in a dirty, bloodstained lab coat looked up from under a curl of thick black hair, first at the syringe he was holding and then at his receptionist, and nodded. No matter what he was doing, Dr. Max Jacobson would take the call. “Mrs. Dunn” always took precedence.

“Mrs. Dunn” was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States. “Dunn” was the code name concocted by the president and the mysterious doctor from their earliest encounters. Ever since the first televised debate in the 1960 presidential campaign, Max Jacobson had become JFK’s unofficial doctor, keeping him upright, functioning, and invigorated. But it was a tightly kept secret, hidden from the American public and—as much as possible—from the press corps that followed the young president everywhere he went. No American could know that his president was calling on a doctor who had fled the Nazi takeover of Germany and worked out of a small, cluttered Upper East Side Manhattan office to summon him to the White House, where from time to time he received “special” injections. And Dr. Max Jacobson, although proud of what he was doing, dutifully kept the secret.

Jacobson was on the radar of both the CIA and the FBI, not simply because of his proximity to JFK, but because in the eyes of these intelligence and counterespionage services, he had become a person of interest. In addition to his association with known communist agents, Jacobson was also treating CIA officers. Among those officers was former OSS officer and JFK family photographer Mark Shaw. Both FBI and CIA interest only intensified when Jack Kennedy’s old college roommate, Chuck Spalding, introduced Jacobson to the then-Democratic candidate for president, whom Max began treating in 1960. As a consequence of Max’s associations and his new relationship with JFK, his office was placed under surveillance.

FBI surveillance of Max’s office noted, as did a reference in the CIA file, that Dr. Jacobson was treating an affluent, highly circumscribed clientele of patients, most of whom were connected to the arts. Although there was no speculation regarding the nature of Max’s treatments, both agencies remarked that Max’s high-profile clientele were devoted followers of the doctor. However, in at least one note in Max’s FBI file, the agency said that although Max described himself as a researcher for treating multiple sclerosis, the FBI noted that the multiple sclerosis society referred to Jacobson as a “quack” and a “charlatan,” a complaint that would later be lodged against him by Mark Shaw’s ex-wife Gerrit Trotta.
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On a Sunday in February 1963, Jacobson’s office was nearly destroyed by a “break-in.” Papers were removed, medical vials were missing, and the office was completely trashed. It had been assumed that the “raid” came from the FBI. When we acquired the FBI files through FOIA, there was much that was redacted and missing. JFK’s orthopedic specialist, Dr. Han Kraus, suffered a similar break-in. His Manhattan office was ransacked once, which President Kennedy and others blamed on J. Edgar Hoover, who was compiling a file on the Kennedys for his own purposes of self-protection. Robert Kennedy had made no bones about wanting to replace Hoover at the FBI, even talking to police chief William H. Parker in Los Angeles about taking over the Bureau. Dr. Kraus wisecracked, “Even if Hoover had gotten his hands on Kennedy’s files [which he didn’t], all that would have happened is that he would have discovered that Kennedy did exercises.”

Ken McKnight recalled, “The Food and Drug Administration was on Max’s back the whole time I knew him. After he began treating JFK and he became president, the FBI also began snooping around.”

Code-named “Dr. Feelgood” by the Secret Service detail guarding the president, Max Jacobson was an omnipresent figure among those surrounding President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline during the two-and-a-half years they occupied the White House. Jacobson and his wife had accompanied the president to meet Charles de Gaulle in Paris and would also be present at the Vienna summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961. The Jacobsons attended the president’s birthday party at Madison Square Garden and were frequent visitors at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, at the West Palm Beach winter White House, and at other celebrations. But only a select few, including the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, actually knew what was at the core of the president’s relationship with Dr. Jacobson.

It was the medicine, and the president was addicted to it.

As would be revealed decades later in a nasty hearing before the New York state medical licensing board and an exposé in the
New York Times
, Max Jacobson’s magic elixir was a concoction of different types of blood serum mixed with a powerful methamphetamine stimulant. This mixture of liquid methamphetamines injected directly into the president’s bloodstream gave the president, who suffered constant pain from back injuries, a reliable source of energy and a mental high. But, as JFK, Jackie, Marilyn Monroe, and scores of Dr. Jacobson’s other patients would ultimately discover, what “Miracle Max,” as he was nicknamed by singer Eddie Fisher, touted as his liquid vitamin cocktail actually came at a huge cost. A regimen of methamphetamine resulted in severe neuropsychological reactions, including manic depression or bipolar disorder, hypersexuality, and paranoid hypergrandiosity. In President Kennedy’s case, that reaction caused the almost stupor-like depression that he fell into while coming down from his meth high during the Vienna summit with Khrushchev and set into motion the chain of events that would ultimately cost him his own life.