The Legacy of Arnold Klein, Michael Jackson’s Dermatologist

Arnold Klein, the Beverly Hills physician who was perhaps best known as Michael Jackson’s dermatologist, died last night in Palm Springs, California, at the age of 70. He was perhaps the first doctor to be known as a dermatologist to the stars. In 2011, Dolly Parton said: “It takes a lot of money to make me look this cheap, and I owe it all to Dr. Arnie Klein.”

To Parton, Cher, Elizabeth Taylor, and Klein’s close friend Carrie Fisher, as well as many other high-profile patients, Klein was known as Arnie. To Jackson, he was Arnell. (It was Klein who revealed in 1993 that Jackson had vitiligo, a disease that causes loss of skin color over time.) Ultimately, his 25-year relationship with the pop superstar evolved into much more than doctor-patient, and Klein both suggested and denied that he was the sperm donor for Jackson’s two older children. Their birth mother, Debbie Rowe, had been Klein’s office nurse.

While the Jackson connection made Klein notorious, the dermatologist will be remembered in the medical world for fathering the Botox generation. He arrived in L.A. in the 1970s after receiving his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, dermatology was still mostly concerned with treating acne, rashes, and venereal diseases, but by the end of the decade, Klein was presiding over the speciality’s transition to the treatment of cosmetic concerns—deflated cheeks and lips, wrinkles, and other signs of aging. He was involved in early trials of the first wrinkle filler, bovine collagen, and of Botox, and virtually every cosmetic advance after that.

I met Dr. Klein when I began covering plastic surgery for Allure in the early ’90s. People buzzed about his 90210 office, with its built-in fish tanks and Warhols, and his home in L.A.’s MacArthur Park neighborhood, which supposedly had a glamorous ballroom. He was always ready for a drop-in visit or a phone call and had a ready opinion for any journalist who asked. He gave me my first shot of Botox while drilling this maxim into my head: “Don’t hate a drug or a treatment. Hate the person who is using it badly.”

He did not embrace every fad, however. He disdained colleagues who opened med-spas. “I’m not going to run a beauty parlor; I’m a doctor,” he said to me. “It compromises my integrity.” He also warned against being the first patient to try a trendy treatment. “Let your best friend do it first,” he once told me. He worried about filler addiction, saying, “Once young women see how easy it is to erase a line or plump up lips, it’s not uncommon for them to want more. They often don’t know when to stop.” It was a prescient statement.

Though he was known as a pioneer with fillers, he was openly skeptical of the permanent ones and the risk of irreversible disfigurement. “The widespread use of permanent fillers will be a disaster,” he warned. “There are women who would stuff a Vuitton bag in their face if someone said it was permanent.” His critique found immortality in the 1996 film The First Wives Club. To give Goldie Hawn’s character cartoonishly exaggerated lips, Klein filled them with saline, a temporary filler that lasts only a few hours and is used by some as a dress rehearsal for other fillers.

Klein eventually faced a long investigation into his care of Michael Jackson and suffered financial difficulties that led him to declare bankruptcy in 2011. And though he’ll be remembered for the case that made him notorious, I hope he’s celebrated for his early support of AIDS research and the pivotal role he played in the history of cosmetic surgery.

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