www.02138mag.com
Under the Knife
by
Allison Hoffman
March/April 2008
, Page
84
The real question isn't this particular patient. The real question is ... 'Why is this attack going on?'"
Around 7:30 p.m. On Saturday, November 10, a woman dialed 911 from an address in Playa del Rey, a funky beachfront neighborhood in Los Angeles. In a recording of the call, she tells dispatchers she’s with someone who is recovering from breast surgery and may have had a heart attack. “She’s not breathing, she’s not breathing,” the caller says. “I’m trying to do CPR. She’s cold and clammy.”
The minutes tick by. Another woman frantically yells, “Dr. West! Dr. West! Please wake up! C’mon, c’mon! Dr. West!” The caller cries that the patient is about to roll out of bed. Someone starts hyperventilating. Someone else focuses long enough to send two puffs of air into the patient’s lungs.
Within an hour, Dr. Donda West, the 58-year-old professor and mother of rapper and hip-hop producer Kanye West, would be pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. An autopsy three days later proved inconclusive. Two months later, the Los Angeles County medical examiner would issue a report noting that West had coronary artery disease and suffered complications from the trio of surgeries—a breast enhancement, a tummy tuck, and liposuction—that she underwent the day before she died. Yet the report did not specify the cause of death.
Long before that medical uncertainty, Donda West’s bizarre demise had been turned into a celebrity whodunit. West was, after all, not just the mother of one of the world’s most successful hip-hop artists, but something of a celebrity as a result. In 2005, Kanye had made her famous with the song, “Hey Mama,” in which he rapped,
I said Mommy I’ma love you til you don’t hurt no more
And when you get older, you ain’t gotta work no more
And I’ma gonna get you that mansion we couldn’t afford
See you’re unbreakable, unmistakable, highly capable …
The gritty single mom had become a tragic heroine, and it didn’t take long for the dirt-diggers at TMZ.com, the popular gossip site, to identify a villain: West’s cosmetic surgeon, the Harvard-educated physician Jan Adams.
It’s not clear when or how West first met Jan Adams, or why she chose him, when she could have had any plastics guy in L.A.. Glenda Lee, her longtime friend and Kanye’s godmother, told investigators that West consulted with four doctors before choosing Adams. One rumor held that Oprah Winfrey, who had once featured Adams on her show, had recommended him to West, but Winfrey categorically denied it.
Whatever the case, Adams gave every appearance of being a skilled doctor and upstanding man. He grew up raised by a single mother in Middletown, an Ohio steel town. His intelligence and football prowess carried him to Cambridge. After finishing in 1978, Adams returned for medical school at Ohio State, followed by a residency at Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital and plastic and reconstructive surgery training at the University of Michigan. In 1992, he arrived in L.A.to begin a fellowship in aesthetic surgery at UCLA, and, within a few years, he was practicing out of a plush Beverly Hills office. In 2000, he published a book, Everything Women of Color Should Know About Cosmetic Surgery, and, in October 2003, he appeared on Oprah to plug his new Discovery Channel show, Plastic Surgery Before and After.
TMZ’s bloggers quickly recast Adams as a fraud. He wasn’t a "Beverly Hills doctor," the site said: He practiced out of an outpatient clinic above a Kinko’s in a strip mall. He had a record of conflict with medical authorities and patients. In April 2007, the California medical board filed papers seeking the suspension of Adams’ medical license following two DUI pleas, one in 2003 and another in 2006. Court records showed that Adams owed $750,000 in civil malpractice settlements, including about $150,000 to a woman who claimed that, in a 1996 surgery, Adams left a sponge in one of her breasts. Another patient charged that Adams sent her home immediately after a tummy tuck and breast lift; she produced photographs of gaping wounds and ragged scars alleged to be Adams’ handiwork. Adams turned out not to be board-certified in plastic surgery, and a malpractice suit filed in March 2007 alleged that he lied about that fact to a patient.
Under the Knife, page 2
Jan Adams leaves Larry King Live studios in New York-where he walked off the set soon after the interview began. November 20, 2007.Adams turns out to not even be an official Harvard graduate. When this magazine tried to check his year of graduation, the Harvard College registrar confirmed that Adams never received a diploma despite completing the credits for a degree in psychology in 1977, possibly because he owed Harvard money.
There was more: anger management training, a patient who claimed that Adams got her drunk and pregnant, another girlfriend who won a restraining order against him. But the specifics, almost overwhelming in their seedy detail, mattered less than the big picture: Once considered a successful, reputable surgeon—a role model, even—Jan Adams was now portrayed as a smooth-talking charlatan whose luck had run out. Stories about the plastic surgeon whose work had preceded West’s death quickly appeared in People, Us Weekly, and other tabloids.
Adams insisted that he was innocent of wrongdoing. He told People that the malpractice suits were filed by people who “represent a bad choice in terms of patient.” He confided to the Los Angeles Times that he thought West might have overdosed on Vicodin, had a heart attack, or suffered a pulmonary embolism.
On November 20, Adams appeared on Larry King Live just hours after West’s funeral in Oklahoma City, an affair attended by over 1500, including the reigning couple of hip-hop, Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Wearing a brown zip-front top and black T-shirt, Adams said that the Wests had asked that he not speak—the family had threatened to try to have his medical license revoked if he commented on Donda’s death. Then Adams apologized for wasting King’s time, unwound an earpiece from around his head, stood up, and walked off the set. And then he went underground, ceasing to talk with the press for weeks. Through his then-spokesperson, Kevin Williams, Adams declined to speak to 02138, saying he was waiting for the right time to address the “conjecture and rumors” swirling around him. "The one time I talked to him, I said, 'This is awful.' He said, 'No, this is going to pass,'" recalls Adams’ uncle and mentor, Pearlman Hicks, a prominent plastic surgeon himself. "I thought, he just doesn’t realize … "
Born April 21, 1954, Jan Adams was raised by his mother, Gwen Adams, after his father left when he was four. Gwen worked as a secretary at Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. Their house was next door to a church and across the street from the field where Jan would later run track and play football for the Middletown High Middies, an enterprise Gwen Adams encouraged as much as she pushed him to excel academically.
“His mother would never accept anything less than excellence,” says Karl Gaston, a Middletown fireman who was a childhood friend of Adams. Full of books, the Adams house was a gathering place for friends and neighbors. “They had this wraparound porch, and everyone had to turn that corner to go down the street,” Gaston says, “so it was a good spot where everyone would be talking and laughing.”
Adams was elected class president and went to Boys State, but he got his first taste of renown as the Middies’ starting quarterback; he threw for more than 1,100 yards and 25 touchdowns over two seasons. His mother never missed a game. “She is my inspiration,” Adams later told the Baltimore AfroAmerican.
Adams said that he wanted to be a doctor, and his 1972 acceptance to Harvard seemed proof that this was a young man on the rise. “We were all happy we knew someone who was going to Harvard,” Gaston recalls, “even though we didn’t even know what it was about, except that it was prestigious and validated how smart this guy was.”
Adams played football and basketball as a Harvard freshman, but quit, telling friends that he had a heart condition. Nevertheless, he enjoyed his time in Cambridge. “He wasn’t an introverted Harvard student,” Hicks says. “He was out and about.” After Adams’ residency at UCLA, Hicks welcomed his nephew into his own practice in Long Beach, south of L.A. “He was a good guy, a relative, a good surgeon,” says Hicks. “You can’t ask for more than that.” He hoped that, one day, Adams would take over the practice. But Adams didn’t seem happy working in his uncle’s business, and Hicks says that he began neglecting to pay his share of the office expenses, prompting a falling out that landed them in small claims court. (Hicks sued Adams for $250,000, but later dropped the suit.) “I don’t think he really wanted to be in Long Beach,” Hicks says. “He wanted other things. He wanted to be a celebrity doctor.”
In the early 1990s, Adams went to work with Dr. John Williams, a well-known surgeon in the city of Palm Desert who was once married to Eva Gabor. At some point, Adams traveled to Stanford University to take the written portion of his medical board exam, only to withdraw. While some who knew Adams wondered if he had failed, he told colleagues that he did not take the test for medical reasons that he did not specify; he did not try again to pass his boards before his qualification window expired. “It’s a mystery to me why he never took the boards,” says Dr. Anthony Griffin, a Brown graduate who took the first part of the medical exams with Adams.
Under the Knife, page 3
Top: Donda and Kanye West at a signing in London for her memoir, Raising Kanye. June 30, 2007. Bottom: Kanye performs with his mother during a taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show in Burbanks, Calif. May 10, 2006.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.
Under the Knife, page 4
Jan Adams on Larry King, Nov. 20, 2007.Once in California, West seemed to take a more active interest in her appearance; in TV interviews for her book, she looked polished and telegenic, with new reddish hair extensions. She had much to look forward to: her son’s planned wedding to girlfriend Alexis Phifer and the Grammy Awards in February 2008— Graduation had sold nearly a million copies its first week in release and would win four Grammys. Donda West was starting a new chapter in her life, and may have wanted a new look to go with it.
But at the time of her surgery, West was in less than perfect health. According to the coroner’s report, she was borderline diabetic, clinically obese—at 5’2”, she weighed 188 pounds—and had a family history of heart disease; her right coronary artery was 50- to 70-percent blocked. Before the operation, which lasted more than five hours, Adams apparently advised West to go to an aftercare center. Instead, she chose to go home in the company of her nephew, a trained nurse named Stephan Scoggins, and two women of unknown expertise identified in the coroner’s report only as “Diana” and “Nubia.” (Scoggins declined to speak to 02138, saying, “We’re just trying to get back to living.”)
Donda West surely could have afforded the best medical care, and surely knew that such care was readily available for the wealthy and famous. On the other hand, why would Donda West have questioned the credentials of a doctor who had a Harvard resumé, appeared on Oprah, and hosted a TV show?
Some in the world of Los Angeles plastic surgery have suggested that West may have chosen Adams partly because she felt particularly comfortable with a black doctor who emphasized his treatment of black patients. Adams’ book detailed differences in scarring patterns for women with dark skin, and provided case studies demystifying tummy tucks, liposuction, breast reductions, and narrowing noses. Adams wrote that black women’s faces age differently than white women’s, tending toward sagging in the forehead rather than in the jowls.
The idea that ethnic differences matter in plastic surgery isn’t just marketing hype, according to Dr. Anthony Griffin, a plastic surgeon who’s known Adams for years. Black patients, he says, tend to have “thicker skin layers” than whites, requiring different sutures. He adds that people with “ethnic skin” are prone to keloid scars, which can grow beyond the initial wound.
But other doctors say that any experienced surgeon could have performed West’s surgery. “There’s nothing ethnic to a breast lift or a tummy tuck or a liposuction,” says Dr. Larry Koplin, a well-known (and white) Beverly Hills surgeon. But, Koplin adds, with some types of cosmetic procedures, such as rhinoplasty or eye surgery, it might make sense for patients to find doctors familiar with their own ethnic groups.
So what went wrong? It’s likely that no one will ever know. But complications are common in plastic surgery and can be especially problematic when a patient has preexisting health issues. Every doctor interviewed for this article sooner or later said, “It could have been me.”
By all accounts, Adams’ professional future looks grim. Even if he can avoid further legal quagmires and attract new patients—he admits to losing numerous old ones—his celebrity status has been reduced to sordid tabloid headlines.
Although the Wests haven’t filed any lawsuits against Adams, the threat seemed to weigh heavily on him when he returned to Larry King’s set on January 23, 13 days after the autopsy was released. He told King that his practice was “almost destroyed” by the negative publicity, and avoided any topic likely to irritate the West family.
“Did the autopsy clear you of any involvement, do you think, in [Donda West’s] death?” King asked.
“I think the autopsy speaks for itself, period,” Adams responded.
For someone used to being on television, Adams seemed strangely agitated. He bit his lip, looked at the ceiling, and spoke in contorted sentences. Malpractice suits, he insisted, are “a symbol of the foulness that has sort of contaminated our entire society.” But Adams reserved his strongest words for those whom he felt had criticized him, implying that such critics, perhaps, were racist. "When people attack you like that—and I’m talking [about] the press—you have to say, 'Why do they fear you?' Because generally people attack someone whom they fear,” Adams said. “The real question isn’t … this particular patient. The real question out there is … 'Why is this attack going on?'"
Larry King asked Adams to come back another time, but that seemed an unlikely, unpleasant possibility for both. After the commercial break, King had already moved on to investigate a brand-new celebrity tragedy: Heath Ledger, the Australian actor, who had been found dead in his Manhattan apartment the previous day. Jan Adams’ time in the spotlight was almost up.
02138 Magazine Copyright © 2006 - 2007 All rights reserved