Dr. Feelgood (10 page)

Despite all of DeMille’s worrying,
The Ten Commandments
was an unqualified success and earned Academy Award nominations for best picture and best actor, Charlton Heston. That film would be the last one DeMille would ever direct. After suffering from another heart attack, he turned over the directing reins on his next picture,
The Buccaneer
, to his son-in-law, Anthony Quinn. When Jacobson saw DeMille again, it was at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan, where DeMille had a meeting with one of the heads of Paramount to terminate his contract with the studio. It would also be the last time Jacobson would ever see DeMille alive.

DeMille had been seeing Jacobson occasionally since 1952, but no one in DeMille’s inner circle seemed to know or care what Jacobson was prescribing; they knew only that it banished DeMille’s fatigue and made sleep optional. Jacobson’s manner and thriving medical practice gave him an aura of omnipotence that wasn’t to be found in the usual dispenser of pep pills that were epidemic in Hollywood in the 1940s. Tennessee Williams would write that the doctor had “a magical atmosphere of understanding and compassion. . . . I don’t think he ever took my blood pressure or my pulse or had me fill out a form about my medical history. He just looked at me . . . then started concocting a shot, drawing a bit of fluid from one bottle and another as my suspense and my alarm increased. But the aftermath of the injection was almost miraculous. I felt as if a concrete sarcophagus about me had sprung open and I was released as a bird on a wing.”
¹⁰
Williams’s response was not unusual; one female patient described the effects of the injection as resembling an orgasm.

Cecil’s adopted son, Richard DeMille, however, smelled a rat. “Max Jacobson was what we would now call a guru. He was slightly mysterious and always had the latest medical information and spoke in a technical language that had a great sound to it. He was a total charlatan.”
¹¹
Henry Noerdlinger, who was more sophisticated than most of the people on DeMille’s staff, was on to Jacobson fairly quickly. Noerdlinger remembers going into a tent in Egypt with Jacobson one day, and, without a word, the doctor said, “Don’t tell me. I know what’s wrong with you,” whereupon he produced a syringe, had Noerdlinger drop his pants, and gave him a shot.

“He was a most peculiar doctor,” (as quoted by Eyman in
Empire of Dreams
) Noerdlinger would say to anyone who asked him. When Joan Brooskin, a member of the crew on
The Ten Commandments
, came down with dengue fever, Jacobson gave her a couple of shots and told her that not only would she get over the fever, but “she would never have migraines or menstrual cramps again!”
¹²

“When DeMille’s energy lagged, he would pick himself up with a shot of Dr. Feelgood’s juice,” remembered DeMille’s son-in-law, actor Anthony Quinn. “He was hooked and so was Katherine,” Quinn said about his wife.
¹³
“She even started taking the children to Dr. Feelgood.” Quinn, too, began seeing Jacobson for pick-meups. DeMille’s increasing dependency on his drug-pushing doctor, attested to by the unquestioned respect in his correspondence to Jacobson, would be the most obvious manifestation of a naivete that Donald Hayne, a crew member on a number of motion pictures, had observed: “The latest glib expert to come along can make an impression on DeMille, at least if he proclaims an expertise in a field that DeMille is unfamiliar.”
²⁵¹⁴

There are many stories about Jacobson’s influence among celebrities on both the West and East Coasts. If his unacknowledged strategy was to exert greater control over an ever-widening circle of patients, it was working.

The hype surrounding the powerful feel-good elixir formulated by Max Jacobson was spreading through the artistic community of New York in the early 1950s. But when Jacobson met show business promoter Milton Blackstone, the doctor’s influence via Blackstone’s network spread like a virus through the entertainment industry. The story of their relationship began at a small resort in the Catskill Mountains, just two hours north of Manhattan.

Jacobson was still a young man studying medicine in Berlin in the 1920s when Jennie Grossinger and her husband Harry, who was also her first cousin, purchased more than one hundred acres of farmland and built a small hotel in the Catskill Mountains, soon to become known as the Borscht Belt, and a starting point for many great comedians of the 1950s. Milton Blackstone, a young hustling advertising promoter in the 1930s, whose real name was Moshe Schwartzstein, had been a frequent guest at the hotel and became fast friends with Jennie, whom he convinced to expand the hotel beyond its Jewish clientele. It was thought by many that Blackstone and Jennie were lovers. However, the truth was that Blackstone was gay and Jennie was his cover, according to screen writer and producer Rocky Kalish.
¹⁵

During the years of the Great Depression, Blackstone, who was a master at promotion, began using different types of gimmicks to attract guests to make the long drive from enclaves in the Bronx and Brooklyn up the country roads along the southern tier of New York State to the Catskill resort. Blackstone also used his connections in the sports world to bring sports writers up to the new resort and even convinced lightweight boxing champ Barney Ross to open his training camp there.

In 1934, Blackstone’s star was on the rise, and he was able to attract many Broadway celebrities to Grossinger’s. Soon the show business columnists arrived, and the hotel became a celebrity stop where Broadway and nightclub personalities could hobnob informally with the columnists and reviewers who could promote their reputations. And at the center of it all was Milton Blackstone.

With cash in the form of loans, raised by Milton Blackstone from his financial sources, Grossinger’s quickly became a worldclass resort by the 1940s and began paying back the loan from Milton Blackstone. The money was delivered to Blackstone’s employee, Austin “Rocky” Kalish, a young man who would soon become the television screenwriter for episodes of
F Troop, Family Affair, Maude
, and
Good Times.

When Blackstone became Jacobson’s patient in the mid-1940s, he spread the word about the doctor’s special vitamin shot that increased a person’s energy level. Blackstone said it was almost like magic. Singer Eddie Fisher once said, “Max and Milton were exact opposites. Loud and arrogant, Max didn’t care how he looked or what he said.”
¹⁶
All that mattered was that Jacobson could cure whatever ailed a patient with a single injection, which made the patient feel good. The word spread, and Jacobson started to add patients from the entertainment industry to his list. Within a very short time he became the “in” doctor for singers who lost their voice, actors who needed to get over the jitters, authors who suffered from writer’s block, and politicians before important speeches. All types of public performers were becoming patients, and soon business in Max’s office was standing room only.

The relationship between Milton Blackstone and Max Jacobson soon flourished, with Rocky Kalish acting as the go-between, picking up bags of preloaded medicine syringes from Max’s office and bringing them over to Blackstone’s New York office or up to Grossinger’s, where he also had an office. And, according to Kalish,
¹⁷
Blackstone Advertising began to flourish as well. Blackstone had turned Grossinger’s into a world-class resort, reaching out beyond its Jewish clientele who came for the kosher gehaimishe food to the entertainers who would transform television in the 1950s and 1960s and to sports greats such as the boxing champions who trained there, including Rocky Marciano, Ingemar Johannson, Max Baer, and welterweight Barney Ross.

Another one of Blackstone’s clients was vaudeville, motion picture, and night club comedian and singer Eddie Cantor, whose trademark song was “If You Knew Susie.” Cantor had his own television show in the 1950s and was always looking for new talent. One of the performers Blackstone identified for Cantor was singer and local heartthrob Eddie Fisher. In a typical Blackstone stunt, he made an arrangement with Jennie Grossinger to bring Cantor to the resort to meet Eddie Fisher, a lifeguard at Grossingers as well as an aspiring entertainer. The deal was simple: If Eddie’s performance before the Grossinger audience was successful—that is, if the audience liked him—Cantor would agree to give Fisher a national television debut on his show. But to make sure that Fisher’s performance was popular, the Grossinger nieces and their friends circulated among the audience with instructions to get the crowd to cheer wildly when Fisher completed his number. It was a set-up, but it worked, and when Eddie Cantor, who knew all about the arrangement, saw the audience reaction, he got up and announced that he would invite Eddie Fisher to sing on his show. Eddie was a hit; he began making records and more television appearances, and thus was a legend created. Eddie Fisher became Milton Blackstone’s protégé.

Blackstone encouraged Eddie Fisher to find ways to pump up his energy because he wanted to tour Fisher around the country to promote his record albums. To facilitate that, Blackstone cemented the relationship between Fisher and Jacobson and, in Eddie Fisher’s own words,
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Jacobson became a “second father” to him, providing him with as many special injections as he needed to keep him going.

As Milton Blackstone’s influence grew in the entertainment industry, so did Max Jacobson’s connection to artists and performers. Max was already treating writers Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Rod Serling, and one of modern America’s most important screenwriters and playwrights, Paddy Chayefsky, whose screenplay
Network
predicted the rise of corporate ownership of the media, the merging of news and entertainment, and even reality television shows themselves.

Rod Serling was also one of the most prolific television writers of the 1950s, creating teleplays for
Playhouse 90, Kraft
, and other dramatic, long-form television series before his series
The Twilight Zone
, which led him to become friends with Chayefsky. Serling and Chayefsky had the same agent, Blanche Gaines, who was one of Max’s patients, as well, and brought Chayefsky to Max first. Then, either Gaines or Chayefsky introduced Rod Serling to Jacobson. Rod became quickly addicted to methamphetamines, which, though ultimately destructive, enabled him to write at a furious pace as well as produce
The Twilight Zone.

One of Max Jacobson’s most unfortunate victims was Serling’s friend, actor Bob Cummings, who starred in a 1960 episode of
The Twilight Zone
. Cummings most likely became connected to Max Jacobson before he met Rod Serling, though, because by the time he appeared on
The Twilight Zone
, he was already a meth addict. Cummings’s connection to Jacobson was most likely through his friendship with singer Rosemary Clooney and her husband, actor Jose Ferrer, who were both Jacobson patients. Rosemary Clooney’s nephew, George Clooney, who said that his aunt had gone into decline towards the end of her career, could not determine whether that decline was a result of her relationship with Max Jacobson and his methamphetamine injections.
¹⁹
But regardless of who introduced Cummings to Jacobson, it was a relationship that destroyed Cummings’s career as well as his life.

The story of Bob Cummings is one of the great Hollywood tragedies that mark the path of devastation traveled by many of Max Jacobson’s patients, including screen legend Marilyn Monroe. The story of Cummings’s descent is a classic example of how destructive methamphetamines can be, not just because of drug dependency but also because the downside of a methamphetamine high is a near-clinical depression. It was that depression that caused Cummings’s downward spiral until he was unable to care for himself.

Robert Cummings was one of the great film and television actors of the mid-twentieth century. From Academy Award–winning films such as
Kings Row
, in which he played out one of the most homoerotic scenes in motion pictures with future president Ronald Reagan, to Hitchcock’s
Saboteur
and
Dial M For Murder
, to television’s
Love That Bob
, Cummings was Hollywood royalty during the 1940s and 1950s. He maintained his youthful appearance through his regimen of exercise and health foods, and his book,
Stay Young and Vital
,
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became a national bestseller. Yet his secret addiction to Jacobson’s elixir was kept closeted for more than fifty years.

How did Cummings get hooked on methamphetamines? Bob started with Max Jacobson in 1954 when he was in New York to do the CBS anthology series
Studio One
in the first and original production of Reginald Rose’s
Twelve Angry Men
, which later became a feature film starring Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb. Rose was also a client of Blanche Gaines, the agent for Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky. Rose, as did Rosemary Clooney and her jusband José Ferrar, recommended Jacobson to Cummings, who quickly became addicted to the drug. On his visit to New York City, he scheduled a visit to Jacobson’s office, where he complained to Jacobson about a loss of energy. Jacobson suggested to Cummings his therapy of “a B-12 mixture of vitamin shots.” He assured Cummings, who liked to know the contents of anything he took, that the formula would be a mixture of vitamins and other ingredients such as “sheep sperm” and “monkey gonads.” Jacobson claimed that the formula he used in his injections made him the modern incarnation of Ponce de León, delivering the fountain of youth to his patients. He firmly believed that his concoction would help Cummings’s stamina and arouse his sexual desire, as well.

A couple of assumptions can be made regarding Cummings’s knowledge of what “Magic Max’s” serum consisted of. First, Cummings was the son of a physician and was not totally naive about medicine, legitimate or otherwise. He was very well-read on the subject of vitamins and supplements, had experimented with many of them, and was very aware of their effects. Second, by the time he became Jacobson’s patient, he most likely had heard the scuttlebutt from other patients who believed the injections contained methamphetamines, but Cummings was so pleased with the results that he most likely ignored what he might have suspected the true contents were. By the time he was addicted to the mixture, it was too late.