Bitter Blood (31 page)

“Dr. Klenner didn’t have patients,” observed a family acquaintance. “He had acolytes.”

“His patients thought he was right next to Christ,” said Phil Link. “They worshiped him. They thought there was nobody like Dr. Klenner.”

If, to some, Dr. Klenner’s patients seemed almost religiously dedicated, and if his shabby clinic seemed to become almost a shrine where the faithful brought their pain-racked bodies for the miracle of the master’s healing touch, it was not surprising, for a religious fervor indeed existed between Dr. Klenner and his patients.

He quoted the Bible to them. He prayed for them and assured them that he would continue to do so. He gave them prayer cards that promised protection from evil forces. He even anointed some with what he said were sacred waters from Our Lady of Lourdes, the Catholic shrine in France where millions of the lame and desperately ill seek miraculous cures. In a way, his clinic was a miniature American version of Lourdes, with vitamins replacing the sacred waters.

As Dr. Klenner’s experiments expanded, his fame grew. He was frequently written about in magazines and books, hailed by some as a genius, a medical pioneer. Irving Stone wrote about Dr. Klenner’s work in his book
The Healing Factor: Vitamin C Against Disease,
as did the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling in his 1970 best-seller,
Vitamin C and the Common Cold.
Dr. Klenner told family members that Linus Pauling had used his work extensively but only mentioned him briefly. He didn’t seem upset about it, though. “If he wants the big name for it, let him have it,” Dr. Klenner’s sister Agnes remembered him saying. “He doesn’t know much about it anyway.”

Dr. Klenner still depended on conventional treatments, but his practice grew more unconventional with the years. Some patients left with nothing more than a prayer and an old-time home remedy, something for which his mother’s faith had instilled lasting belief in Dr. Klenner. But more and more, he came to depend on vitamin C as a cure-all.

“Ascorbic acid is the safest and most valuable substance available to the physician,” he wrote in one of his medical journal articles. “Many headaches and many heartaches will be avoided with its proper use.”

He used it against all the viral and bacterial diseases, for bursitis, arthritis, poisoning, spider bites, and a host of other ailments. He began touting its use in treating cancer, saying that fifty grams a day administered intravenously would control the disease. “Who can say what one hundred grams or three hundred grams given intravenously daily for several months might accomplish in cancer!” he told a magazine interviewer. “The potential is so great and the employment so elementary that only the illiterate will continue to deny its use.”

“If you went to Dr. Klenner with an ingrown toenail, he’d give you a shot of vitamin C,” the local sheriff, Bobby Vernon, later noted.

In 1978, Dr. Klenner was rewarded for his work and long-held faith in vitamin C. On March 18, on the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of vitamin C by Hungarian researcher Albert Szent-Györgyi, who received the Nobel prize for physiology, Dr. Klenner was presented a gold plaque at a special symposium of the World Congress of Health. The plaque bore the likenesses of four men: Albert Szent-Györgyi, Linus Pauling, Irving Stone, and Fred Klenner. Dr. Klenner considered it his proudest honor. “On a gold medal with two Nobel Prize winners! And Irving Stone!” he told Bill Davis with glee. “You can’t get much higher than that.”

That wasn’t enough to satisfy some of his patients, though. “In my estimation, his work—works, I should say—were worthy of the Nobel Prize in several fields,” said Virginia Wiley, a patient for more than thirty years.

But to his colleagues in Reidsville, the recognition and awards meant little. Just as Dr. Klenner had been an outsider in Reidsville and his wife’s family, he also had become an outsider in his profession. Other doctors distanced themselves from him and his unorthodox treatments, especially after he began using large dosages of other vitamins to treat other ailments. They were skeptical of his claims, noting that they were based on clinical observations, not controlled experiments, that Dr. Klenner kept no records of his treatments and results. They thought that he held out false hope to those who had none and that his treatments were not only largely ineffectual but perhaps dangerous. They noted that few studies had been done to show the effects of massive amounts of vitamins on the body, particularly over long periods. They pointed out that some vitamins, such as A and D, which Dr. Klenner was using, were known to accumulate in the body in toxic quantities.

“Ridiculous,” Dr. Klenner responded to charges that vitamin treatment could be dangerous. “Vitamins are innocuous substances. After it all breaks down, what you don’t need, the body kicks out.”

“He knew other doctors laughed at him,” said a family friend, “but he also knew what he was doing would save lives.”

“Let’s face it,” said his friend Phil Link, “people called Dr. Klenner a quack. Used to make me damned mad. He was as dedicated and sincere as he could be. All he gave a damn about was his patients and his family.”

What some doctors suspected was that Dr. Klenner frequently diagnosed diseases that people didn’t have. That made curing them with vitamins easy. It became more evident that this was indeed the case after Dr. Klenner became a firm believer that massive amounts of B vitamins would cure multiple sclerosis, something that other doctors and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society denied. But as word spread about his treatment, more and more multiple sclerosis patients, many of them already crippled and given no hope anywhere else, began coming to Dr. Klenner, some of them moving temporarily to Reidsville from other states so that they could undergo long-term treatment. Dr. Klenner also began diagnosing more cases of multiple sclerosis. Many of these never had the disease, other doctors later discovered.

“I don’t think he deliberately misdiagnosed,” said one such patient, who held no bitterness about the fear Dr. Klenner’s diagnosis had stirred in him or the unnecessary treatments he had undergone. “He just believed so much that this worked that he wanted it to happen. I’m very aware his ego was part of it. He wanted to be Louis Pasteur or something.”

By the summer of 1980, when Dr. Klenner diagnosed his niece, Susie Newsom Lynch, as having multiple sclerosis, he no longer was a healthy man himself. The sixty-five vitamin tablets that he took every day—and had been taking for thirty-five years to stave off ill health—had not kept his blood pressure from rising or his heart from betraying him. A pacemaker stimulated his heart to action, and no longer could he climb the steep, creaking steps to his office without stopping to catch his breath. But he still did it every day at seventy-three, a tall, shambling, stoop-shouldered man with solid white hair and a kindly face. And his waiting room remained filled with desperate and devoted patients seeking the hope that only he could give.

23

Soon after Susie’s return from Taiwan, she began making weekly trips to Dr. Klenner’s clinic in Reidsville. For an hour she lay on an ancient treatment table while massive doses of B complex vitamins dripped into her veins, her uncle’s surefire cure for the multiple sclerosis he had diagnosed.

First came nicotinic acid, B
3
, which dilated her blood vessels and caused her to flush crimson. This, her uncle explained, would allow her body to absorb more B
1
thiamin, which followed. Not only would the B
1
rebuild her diseased nerves, he said, it also would provide her with a natural source of energy.

Energy was one thing for which Susie had little need that summer of 1980. To family and friends she seemed almost frenetic, her usual hyperactivity running at more than full speed. She was worried about building a future for herself and her boys, and she set about laying the foundation for it. She enrolled once again in graduate school at Wake Forest University, this time to study anthropology, a subject in which she and her brother had shared an avid interest since childhood. Despite her bad experience in Taiwan, she still had not given up the dream of somehow working in China, perhaps as a liaison for some big corporation, maybe even for the State Department. She had become interested in customs and protocol, and she was convinced that anthropology would lead her where she wanted to go. Her mother thought that frivolous. She should study something more practical, Florence said, something that would hold out better hope for a decent job. She was, after all, a mother of two children with no husband. Susie scoffed at her mother’s suggestions, reminding Florence that she was an adult fully capable of making her own decisions.

“Susie didn’t tend to set limits on herself,” said her friend Annette Hunt, who had been the only person to support Susie in her earlier decision to go to Taiwan. “Aim for the stars and see what happens, that was Susie. What seems ridiculous to most of us did not seem ridiculous to Susie. She did not put a lid on her jar.”

Bob judiciously avoided involving himself in the differences between his wife and daughter.

“Bob just absolutely thought Susie could do no wrong,” explained Annette.

“Bob just doted on her,” said a neighbor. “He just thought the sun rose and set in Susie.”

He was glad to have Susie home again, but Susie was not so pleased. She’d rather have a place of her own, she told friends, but that was simply financially impossible until she got her settlement from Tom.

Tom was in no condition to make a settlement at that time. His financial situation, if anything, had grown worse since he had been sending $500 monthly to Susie. He was relieved when he heard that she was returning early from Taiwan. In her first months there, she had written him a couple of times with news of the boys, and once she even arranged for him to telephone them. But it had been months since he’d talked with them and nearly a year since he’d seen them, and as soon as she returned to Greensboro he called and said he wanted the boys to come for a visit.

“There was a tremendous blowup,” he recalled. “She said, ‘Oh, no! There’s no way. You can come and see them anytime you want, but they’re not going to come out to New Mexico.’ I got all upset. I didn’t know what I could do. I mean, these were my kids. I ought to be able to see them. I thought I’d just call her up and we could arrange a visit and they could spend a month or so out here and we’d have a good time. There was never a question in my mind that there would be a problem.”

In late August, Tom received a letter from Susie’s lawyer, Sandy Sands, saying that Tom was not living up to the separation agreement. Sands noted that Tom had not sent Susie the title to her Audi Fox, that he hadn’t paid the $1,500 for furniture she left behind, and that she needed an additional $300 a month for school and child-care expenses.

“Another problem, which will have to be determined shortly, is the disposition of the house,” Sands wrote.

By then, Tom had consulted a lawyer, Mike Rueckhaus. A native of Albuquerque, Rueckhaus was thirty-eight, the father of three sons. Other local lawyers called him the Barracuda. “I don’t know if it’s deserved or not,” he said with a grin, “but I sure want ’em to think I’m going to cut ’em up and spit ’em out.”

His legal aggressiveness eventually led him to grow impatient with Tom.

“He’s a rough son-of-a-gun to represent because he’s too nice,” he complained. “He’s the kind of guy who’s going to be able to get up and look himself in the eye in the mirror every morning. Mr. Nice Guy. Mr. Passive. He kept believing what she was telling him. He always wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, and he was too willing to give in. When you’ve got somebody like Susie on the other side, that’s just like throwing gasoline on a fire. Every time he gives in, it just gets worse.”

Rueckhaus thought the best course was to get the jump on Susie by filing for divorce before she did, and on September 25, 1980, he filed in Bernalillo County. But he chose not to have notice served on Susie for two reasons: Tom didn’t have the money to make a settlement and still hoped that Susie would let the boys come visit him at Christmas and didn’t want to alienate her.

John and Jim had settled happily with their grandparents, John particularly so. He craved male attention and became close to his grandfather. Florence didn’t like being called Grandma, so she told the boys to call her GG, for gorgeous grandmother. That went back to her high school days in Reidsville when she was in a play called
The Flapper Grandmother,
in which the main character insisted on being called GG.

Although Florence was glad to have Susie and the boys living in her house, the old, familiar clash of wills between mother and daughter soon surfaced. Florence was distressed about her daughter’s slovenly housekeeping habits. Susie wouldn’t pick up after herself, Florence complained. Susie allowed the boys to leave messes. And she seemed to expect meals to be cooked and laundry done with no contribution of her own. Things had to change, Florence said. There could be no misunderstanding about whose house this was and who was in charge. Susie’s resentment about living with her parents grew deeper with her mother’s ultimatums.

John started school late that summer, and Susie found a child-care center at a nearby church for Jim. Susie had some night classes, including one so late that she spent one night a week at Nanna’s to keep from driving the twenty-five miles back to Greensboro. It had been only six months since Paw-Paw died, and Susie worried about Nanna being alone. On the night she stayed at Nanna’s, Bob and Florence looked after the boys. They also were happy to keep them when Susie went out with Guy Martin.