It isn’t illegal in California to practice without board certification, but the lack thereof makes malpractice insurance prohibitively expensive; a lawyer for one of Adams’ former patients told 02138 that Adams practiced without insurance. “It’s called ‘going bare,’” says Candis Cohen, a spokesperson for the state medical board. The lack of certification meant that Adams was relegated to performing surgeries at outpatient surgical centers and small hospitals, as larger hospitals are reluctant to allow physicians who are not board-certified on staff.

By the mid-90s, Adams was practicing out of a brick-and-brass building two blocks west of Rodeo Drive. The building, at 450 North Bedford, wasn’t the flashiest on the block; that was next door, where more than 25 plastic surgeons, dermatologists, and acupuncturists with names like the “90210 Surgery Center” cluster around a soaring atrium decorated with potted palms and a granite fountain. But Adams’ building, filled with psychiatrists and dentists, was certainly respectable; in his book, Adams said he chose it because it felt like it had been around forever, just like he wanted to be. “It was important that I, as a black man, show the world that I was performing surgery on a standard as high [as], if not higher, than the next guy,” Adams wrote. “Second-class citizenship is not good enough for me ... By moving my office to Beverly Hills, I was moving into the big leagues.”

Other surgeons remember Adams walking around in scrubs or working the room at the McCormick & Schmick’s on Rodeo. But he didn’t show up in places where surgeons tend to congregate—not at medical conferences in Vegas, nor at meetings of professional associations around town. Instead, he attended the Essence Awards, building a persona within the black community, and business-association meetings, where he pushed a line of skin-care products—lighteners and microdermabrasion kits under the brand Dr. Jan Adams Women of Color.

The Women of Color line was just one of Adams’ numerous extracurricular activities. In the late 1990s, he posed for print ads for Chanel’s Allure Homme fragrance; the 1998 campaign ran in GQ and other men’s magazines. He appeared on a motivational infomercial called Power Living By Jake, which apparently led to a gig on an NBC talk show called The Other Half. Also featuring Danny Bonaduce, Dick Clark and actor Mario Lopez, The Other Half premiered in September 2001. Adams told the Baltimore AfroAmerican that his job “was to play the “over-educated, somewhat attractive black guy who works all the time.” He wasn’t, he said, a plastic surgeon who happened to be black. “I’m a black man who is a plastic surgeon. There is a clear difference.” But by December Adams was off the show. Variety reported that he was developing his Discovery Channel program, and noted that Adams planned to write a book called Harvard from the Back of the Bus. If Adams ever wrote it, the book has never been published. In June 2002, Ebony magazine put the 48-year-old Adams on its list of “Super Bachelors.” That year, he started hosting Plastic Surgery Before and After. Meanwhile, Adams was working out of outpatient centers, including one in a squat cement building next to a regional hospital in Fountain Valley, a postwar suburb that’s geographically and culturally far removed from Beverly Hills.

By the time Donda West arrived for her surgery, Adams was gone from Bedford Drive; his only remaining Beverly Hills presence was a P.O. box registered to J. Rudalgo Skin Care, Inc. Instead, he had a new address: the Brentwood Surgery Center. Located on the second floor of a strip mall on Wilshire Boulevard, the place looks more like a waxing salon than a surgeon’s office, with a black-tiled floor and a waiting area decorated with generic fabric-covered chairs and a regular tube TV in the corner. The doctor in the office next door advertises “Breast and General Surgery.” Next to that office is a chiropractor, a Pilates studio, a dentist, and, in the way of L.A. strip malls, a so-so Tandoori place.

In a way, it’s surprising that Donda West, an attractive woman with a radiant smile, even wanted cosmetic surgery. In a 2007 autobiography, Raising Kanye, West comes across as a no-nonsense woman brimming with confidence. Her father was a civil rights leader in Oklahoma City, and she was sitting-in at lunch counters before her feet could touch the floor. As an adult, she projected the air of someone too busy to worry about her looks. For years, she sported a close-cropped hairstyle and never corrected the Lauren Hutton-esque gap between her front teeth. When Kanye was 15, Donda recalled, he offered to forfeit his allowance if she’d go to Jenny Craig: “I didn’t even take it personally.”

A graduate of Virginia Union with an Auburn Ph.D., West taught English at Chicago State University for 24 years. Colleagues remember Kanye running around hallways or reading in conference rooms while his mother worked. Her devotion to education would impress Kanye, who quit college to become a producer but struggled with the sense that he let his mother down. His three albums are entitled College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation.

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