The Ugly World of Dr. Arnie Klein, Beverly Hills’ King of Botox
Traitors are not tolerated in the kingdom of Dr. Arnold Klein. The 67-year-old Father of Botox, who once led a Beverly Hills beauty revolution and became nearly as famous as the stars he treated, is now waging war against his enemies. The list is long. First, there are the powers in the music business who arranged the final concert tour of his most famous patient, the late Michael Jackson. He charges them with conspiring to control the singer’s estate and with using Klein as a scapegoat by alleging that he had gotten Jackson addicted to the narcotic Demerol. Then there are the rats who he says masqueraded as patients in order to issue him a subpoena, forcing him to appear before the Medical Board of California for purported irregularities. Worst of all are his former office manager and former accountant. He alleges that they have attempted to ruin him by releasing Jackson’s medical records in the involuntary-manslaughter trial of the singer’s personal doctor, Conrad Murray, who was convicted last November and sentenced to four years in prison. He also alleges that they embezzled tens of millions of dollars from him and tried to kill him. Because of them, Klein claims, he was forced to declare bankruptcy in January 2011, put one of his homes on the market, and auction off his art and memorabilia.
Klein is also striking back at the Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.), which he says is a “drug cartel” controlled by the pharmaceutical giants, and at the jackals of the media. To keep his followers and fans up-to-date, he posts intimate details about his predicament on Facebook.
I approached the doctor for an interview, but he informed me through his publicistthat if I intended to interview his former employees I would get no cooperation from him. Then one day in November my phone rang, and Klein, in a deep, gravelly voice, began talking nonstop: “I’ve given my life for other people and have gotten screwed for it. . . . Do you know I discovered the first human gene? … Do you know I treated the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia? … My great-great-uncle is Albert Einstein Lawrence Klein, my cousin, won the Nobel Prize.”
He soon got to his former office manager, Jason Pfeiffer, and former accountant, Muhammad Khilji. In January 2011, Klein filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, listing assets of about $6 million and debts of $8.4 million. In June 2011 he filed suit against Pfeiffer and Khilji, as well as various banks and investment and mortgage companies. In the suit, Klein claims that on March 20, 2009, as he was recuperating from an unstated illness at his Laguna Beach house, Pfeiffer and Khilji brought documents for him to sign, including one that would allow them to make health decisions for him during any period of incapacity; a general power of attorney; a codicil to his will, naming them as executors; and an amendment to his trust, naming them as co-trustees. According to his complaint, “Dr. Klein discovered that his investment accounts were raided, bank accounts were opened in his name without his knowledge and then pilfered, and his assets were jeopardized.”
“They stole $22 million from me, O.K.?,” Klein told me on the phone. “If you are going to mention Jason Pfeiffer [and Muhammad Khilji], these guys who embezzled from me, illegally released Michael Jackson’s records, what are you going to say? Are you going to say they are good people? They are the scum of the earth!”
At one point he demanded, “Who funded 9/11?”
“You know who?”
“Pakistani Muslims, sir,” he said. “They use a system called hawala.”
Klein has claimed on Facebook that Khilji used hawala, the ancient informal money-transfer system employed by al-Qaeda to move funds around the world, to clean out his employer’s assets and transfer them into far-flung bank accounts, to which only he and Pfeiffer had access.
“They opened 41 illegal bank accounts in my name,” said Klein. “I have records of all this stuff. Also, they tried to overdose me … so I would bleed to death . . . They tried to overdose me on Coumadin [blood thinner], because I was in atrial flutter [abnormal heart rhythm], and they changed my will in the middle of the night without notarizing it.”
All I wanted, I told Klein, was to write a balanced story about the case, which would necessitate interviewing both the doctor and his detractors. “Their filings are part of your bankruptcy filing,” I said.
“What you may think you know is zero,” he said. “You cannot interview Jason and Muhammad. You have to swear to me that you won’t.”
I told him Vanity Fair does not make such promises.
“If I show you all the forged bank accounts and everything, what is that going to do for you?” he asked.
“I’ll print them,” I said.
“Will you give me editorial control?” he asked.
“Of course I cannot do that,” I said.
Earlier he had told me, “I treat everyone in the world. Do you know what it is like to eat fried chicken in Buckingham Palace with Queen Elizabeth? Michael [Jackson] opened every door. The other person who opened every door for me was [the actor] Danny Kaye. I’m sure you have never met the Maharaja of Baroda. I didn’t even know there was a Maharaja of Baroda when I met him I’m a Jewish kid, son of a rabbi, hyper-academic, Westinghouse scholar, who came to a weird world out in California because I hated Philadelphia.” (After speaking to me, Klein subsequently refused repeated requests for comment.)
Khilji and Pfeiffer deny all of Klein’s charges, including raiding his assets, opening illegal bank accounts, trying to overdose him, and changing his will. Khilji has said that Klein had recovered from an illness and “asked us” to bring him the documents “before something happened” to him. Both Pfeiffer and Khilji have filed counterclaims, and Khilji has said that Klein is an opportunist who squandered his fortune on a lifestyle he couldn’t afford.
The King of Lips
Arnold William Klein has always stood out. Born in the blue-collar Detroit suburb of Mount Clemens, Michigan, the bookworm forsook his family’s business—a health spa known for its mineral baths—for a degree in medicine. At the University of Pennsylvania, where he was influenced by Andy Warhol and the architect Louis Kahn, he considered specializing in psychiatry but eventually decided on dermatology. After graduating from the university’s school of medicine, he went on to become chief resident in dermatology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and then found himself languishing, at the age of 30, with a small practice in the town of Riverside, “giving light treatments and picking pimples,” he has written.
On the advice of an aunt, he tried his luck in Beverly Hills. “I was told there was no room for young doctors and I would starve,” he later wrote on Facebook. Nevertheless, he rented a 700-square-foot space and began telling local physicians, according to his own account, “ ‘Look, I’m really good, so send me your most difficult cases.’ … Six months later I had a full practice Soon, with the help of [the acne medication] Retin-A, I was fixing acne without light-treatments or voodoo.”
Within a year he was visited by Merv Griffin, who asked him to be a guest on his television show. Klein told the audience, among other things, how to recognize a melanoma. “The next day people were asking for my autograph, and soon thereafter I received 10,000 letters, many of which came from folks who said I had saved their lives.” Klein has written, “I did three more shows. On the third, I mentioned a little thing I was playing with called collagen.”
Thanks to collagen, the lips-and-wrinkle-line filler, Klein soon became known as the King of Lips. His expertise was officially recognized when the “ski jump” elevation in the upper lip was named the Glogau-Klein point in honor of him and fellow dermatologist Richard Glogau. His office expanded as his famous patients multiplied. By 1985 his reputation had grown to the point that, when he traveled to Rome for an audience with Pope John Paul II, the pontiff, according to Klein’s posting on Facebook, “lifted his pant leg to show me a skin condition no one in Rome could fix.” (Klein wrote that he had cured it.)
By 1981, Klein was living in a 30-room mansion, with his brother, two aunts, a cousin, a cook, and a housekeeper. His life was his patients, and he was on call 24–7. His office walls began filling with photographs of the beautiful and famous, including Rock Hudson. Handsome young men would soon be flocking to him with raised purple skin lesions, and Klein has written that he became the “first physician to diagnose Kaposi’s sarcoma [one of the opportunistic diseases associated with H.I.V.] in Southern California.”
“Don’t forget, I founded AmFAR in my house,” he told me, referring to the American Foundation for AIDS Research, which he helped establish with Dr. Mathilde Krim, Elizabeth Taylor, and David Geffen in 1985. “I raised $320 million for AIDS,” he said. “Who started the Elizabeth Taylor Endowment at U.C.L.A.? That was me. I gave them a million-dollar check from [the late socialite and philanthropist] Doris Duke for AIDS.”
Taylor became one of Klein’s biggest supporters. “He’s the most brilliant doctor in the world. He’s supposed to be a dermatologist, but he is so much more,” she would declare at an AIDS benefit in 2003. “I cannot tell you how many times he has seen me and said, ‘Elizabeth! Off to the hospital!’ ” She later inscribed a copy of her book Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair with Jewelry, “My beloved Arnie. I love you more than I can tell. I feel you have saved my fading life.” Klein’s artistry was visible in Taylor’s face. “She was voted the best lips in the land,” he once said.
Collagen lips became Klein’s forte. When Goldie Hawn was filming The First Wives Club (1996), Klein was flown to New York by the producers to inject her lips with saline so that they would have the inflated look often associated with rejected first wives. “The guy is a master,” Arlene Howard, his former publicist, told me. “When I would come back to my office, my staff would think I had had a face-lift. Where a lot of doctors go zip, zip, zip through injections, Klein takes his time. What one doctor would do in 20 minutes, he would do in an hour.” Klein’s friend Sandy Gibson adds, “His office was Grand Central. When he injected your face with collagen he left no needle-entry marks. A cc. here and a cc. there and no more frown lines or crow’s-feet. And you looked natural, not frozen.”
In 2002, another pharmaceutical bonanza surfaced: the F.D.A. approval of Botox (a purified form of botulinum toxin, a nerve poison produced by the bacteria that causes botulism) to relax facial muscles and soften wrinkles. Between September 2000 and December 2003, court records show, Klein or his company received nearly $500,000 from Allergan, the manufacturer of Botox.
Klein’s clinic, at 435 North Roxbury, became a virtual fountain of youth. He recently boasted on Facebook of “having been the doctor to three presidents, two Popes [and] several real queens.” According to one former observer, “Agents from CAA, whose offices were nearby, lined up.” Another recalled, “[The late movie mogul] Lew and [his wife] Edie Wasserman loved him. He was the skin doctor!” Among the testimonials on Klein’s Web site are those from David Geffen, Dustin Hoffman, Larry Ellison, and Linda Evans, and there are photos of Sharon Stone and Dolly Parton on his Facebook page. The director Penny Marshall appears on a YouTube video of a birthday party for Klein. In the video, the cake is decorated with a syringe, on top of which is a candle, and people yell, “Blow out the syringe!”
“You had to demand his attention,” one former patient told me, “because the office was booked three months out.” There was a special phone line, another former patient explained, “if you were on the A-list. If you were on the B-list, you waited three months. C-list? You never got an appointment at all.” At her concert at the Hollywood Bowl last summer, Dolly Parton announced onstage, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap, and I owe it all to Dr. Arnie Klein.”
Klein’s résumé would eventually grow to 30 pages: honors, affiliations, memberships, 150 papers in medical journals, several textbooks, and countless appearances in the mainstream media. “If you asked him a question, he was like an encyclopedia,” said one actor, adding that, as Klein’s reputation grew, so did his bills. “I went for Botox, and while I think it was done well, the price was $5,000.”
Soon Klein was living in luxury. The walls of his house were covered with works by David Hockney, Andy Warhol, and Herb Ritts, and his dinner parties were populated with his stellar patients. “I went to a Seder at his house and sat next to Cher,” said Sandy Gibson. Klein’s weight grew with his ego, and his style of apparel segued from drab physician’s scrubs to rock-star plumage—colorful scarves, skull rings, and expensive jewelry, including a Rolex decorated with diamond-and-ruby lips, a gift from Cher. In a 2003 story titled “Dr. K and the Women,” the Los Angeles Times described Klein at a Hollywood luncheon: “He wore a black suit, a tie studded with red rhinestones (a $500 gift from a client) and a walking cane he told those within earshot was a recent gift from Michael Jackson.” Klein was introduced that day by the philanthropist Wallis Annenberg, who called him “a brilliant physician” who is “world renowned.”
One former patient told me, “He was wonderful, but his shortcoming was he adored Michael Jackson.”
Michael, Arnie, and Debbie
‘Michael was probably the purest person I ever met,” Klein told me. “He did not have a mean bone in his body He had one wish in life—or very few. One was to meet Mrs. Walt Disney, who was my patient.” According to Klein, that wish came true.
Jackson didn’t become a Klein patient until his landmark appearance at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, on the 25th anniversary of Motown, March 25, 1983, when he unleashed the Moonwalk. Among the cheering multitude in the audience was Arnie Klein. “I was blown away,” he told me. “A week later I was sitting in David Geffen’s driveway and in comes Michael Jackson. He is sitting in the back of a Lincoln Town Car and he looked very lonely. Within a week, David brought Michael to me. When I walked into the room, I took one look.” He saw what he would later call a “butterfly rash” on Jackson’s face and severe crusting of the scalp. “I diagnosed him with lupus,” Klein said, referring to the auto-immune disease that can cause skin lesions. In addition to lupus, Jackson had vitiligo, a disorder that strips pigment from the skin. In Jackson’s case, his body was spotted with pale patches.
On January 27, 1984, Jackson appeared at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium to film a Pepsi commercial. Fireworks on the set went off prematurely, and his hair burst into flames. “I spent the night at the hospital, in his room, just telling him what it is like to be burned, because I was badly burned as a two-and-a-half-year-old kid,” Klein said. “That’s how we really bonded.” As Carrie Fisher would later write in Shockaholic, “They each had something that the other desperately coveted. Arnie wanted to be friends … with the biggest star on the planet … and Michael wanted access to the farthest reaches of the medical community 24–7.”
Dr. Steven Hoefflin, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, repaired Jackson’s scalp in a series of operations that included two nose jobs. “Reportedly [Jackson] had somewhere between 20–30 nose jobs done by Dr. Hoefflin,” Klein has posted. “I know everything he does,” he told me of Hoefflin. “I was the one who got Michael to fire him—are you aware of that?—in 2003.” (Hoefflin declined to comment, citing his ongoing litigation with Klein.) After that, Klein became one of Jackson’s chief physicians, in charge of treating his vitiligo and other skin ailments. He also became, as he has often said and written, “the closest person in the world to Michael Jackson.”
According to Jackson biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, in 1993 Jackson decided to bleach his scrotum. He used a cream Klein had prescribed many times over the years called Benoquin, but it burned his skin. Klein had Debbie Rowe, his medical assistant since 1977, look after the singer. When Jackson was embroiled in his first pedophilia lawsuit, in the 1990s, Klein vouched for him with the boy’s mother, saying that Michael was “absolutely heterosexual” and there was no reason for concern, according to Taraborrelli. Law-enforcement authorities insisted on photographing Jackson nude, however, to see if the boy’s drawing of the singer’s private parts matched, and Klein joined Jackson to facilitate the photo session. (Jackson settled that case for approximately $25 million.)