9 MEDICINE AVENUE

By 1950, McAdams was the most successful agency of the handful that focused on medical advertising, a specialty that a John Hopkins professor later dubbed Medicine Avenue.1 McAdams held that top spot for more than fifteen years until the big agencies played catch-up, after having mistakenly assumed the field would never take off.2 Sackler and Frohlich—whose agencies dominated early on—had a friendship that superseded any business rivalry.3 The duo, often joined by Arthur’s wife, Else, attended art auctions and spent weekends trolling through flea markets and small antique shops. One day, Arthur later recalled, “I came upon some Chinese ceramics and Ming furniture. My life has not been the same since.”4 Sackler’s awakening came at Transorient, a tiny Manhattan antique shop owned by a noted British art dealer, William Drummond.5 That chance visit sparked in Sackler what became a lifelong passion.

The same year he told his brothers he was pulling back from Creedmoor, he created a not-for-profit corporation in New York called the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation.6 It was the type of legal entity used by America’s wealthiest families to shelter their art holdings and to make bequests to museums and public trusts.7 I 8

It was far more, however, than their shared interest in fine art that tied Frohlich and Sackler. They pooled information about clients, cooperated on drug launch strategies, and divided the market between them when firms released virtually identical drugs.9 What no one then knew was that Arthur had secretly invested in Frohlich’s agency and had a controlling interest.10 When confronted years later, Sackler denied to The New York Times that he had any ownership stake in the Frohlich agency.11 “That’s because of conflicts of interest,” Michael Sonnenreich, later Arthur’s attorney and confidant, disclosed. “You couldn’t represent two firms with competing products, so Frohlich’s firm would handle a second product.”12 (Frohlich would later have his own secret ownership in a biweekly newspaper Sackler launched in 1960.)13

Although Arthur’s secret link with Frohlich’s agency gave him a step up on his other competitors, his rivals did not concern him. He was fully confident in his unorthodox vision for upending how pharma marketed its drugs. He pitched his novel ideas to one firm after another. No longer, he told them, should drug companies sell their products as if they were in a church and they could only whisper about it to the person in the adjoining pew. It was time, he contended, to develop sales departments capable of personally visiting thousands of doctors. Most physicians were so busy running their practices, he suggested, they did not have time to research which one of many drugs was the best to treat a patient’s condition. Sackler believed a drug company had to win the doctor’s loyalty for its entire product line. He brimmed with ideas. Promotions, drug conferences, advertisements in their favorite journals, exhibits at medical conventions, and saturating physicians with free samples. Although the FDA banned all direct drug advertising to the public, Arthur had a clever strategy for disguising product promotion as “news” covered in the consumer press.14 It was possible in America’s consumer culture to stoke a drug’s popularity by getting patients to ask for it by its brand name. It turned out to be an inspired idea, although as Frohlich noted, “no physician relished the prospect of hearing about new drugs from his patients.”15

Sackler had endless energy. His McAdams employees had no doubt he was a workaholic and perfectionist; one of his executives described him as “controversial, unsettling, [and] difficult.”16 Sackler was most demanding, however, on himself. Many who worked for him initially liked the highly charged atmosphere in which they competed to earn his approval.17 Over time, some burned out and left unhappy, not only about the long hours but also the withering criticism to which Sackler sometimes subjected employees.18

Sackler thought his workers needed “a thicker skin.”19 And he was so preoccupied with work that there was little time for his family. His relationship with his wife, Else, and his daughter, Carol, suffered. They were often asleep by the time he got home late from the office. When not working, he was scouring antique stores and auction houses. Else had stopped joining him on those expeditions; their five-year-old daughter had little patience for a full day of hunting for Chinese collectibles and Else did not like leaving her with a baby-sitter.

One night in February 1947, Arthur went to a costume party at a hospital in Far Rockway, Queens, where Mortimer and Raymond were completing internships. Early that evening, a curvaceous woman dressed as a cabaret singer transfixed him. Who is that? he asked Mortimer. It was Marietta Lutze, herself a doctor, and one of the heirs to Dr. Kade, a privately owned 120-year-old German pharmaceutical firm.20 Marietta had arrived in America only five months after the end of the war and began her medical internship at the same hospital as Sackler’s younger brothers.21

Arthur struck up a conversation. He learned she was twenty-nine, six years younger than he. She came from a liberal Protestant and Catholic family and got her medical degree at the University of Berlin during the war. Arthur knew that school was the one the Nazi propaganda machine had selected for the great spectacle of burning twenty thousand “degenerate” books. By the time Marietta began her studies in 1939, 250 Jewish professors and administrators had been expelled and replaced with Nazi Party members who promoted racial eugenics.22

Marietta’s first impressions of Sackler were his “professional air” and “his voice was very soft and persuasive, even comforting. I liked his blue eyes.… I don’t know what we talked about but, whatever it was, it was intense, I can say that.”23 He asked her for a date, never once mentioning he was married. She liked him but was so “overwhelmed” at work that she said no.

Shortly after meeting Marietta, Arthur found time that March to attend the three-day Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace in New York. The sponsoring organization was the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, a Communist Party front group. Sackler’s connection to the event was Alfred Stern, the businessman he had tried to interest seven years earlier in buying Schering. The two had become friends. Arthur mixed at cocktail parties hosted by the Sterns at their sprawling Central Park West co-op and at intimate dinners at the couple’s waterfront summer home in Connecticut.24

Arthur had an endless list of business ventures to pitch. In 1948 he again approached Stern, this time to see if he might be interested in helping Arthur buy Purdue Frederick, a small patent medicine company on New York’s Lower East Side. Named after its nineteenth-century founders, Drs. John Purdue Gray and George Frederick Bingham, its annual revenues were only $20,000, less than Arthur had spent the previous year on Asian art.25 It offered only a few “ethical over-the-counter” products; its top seller was Gray’s Glycerine Tonic Compound, an alcohol-based “metabolic cerebral tonic.”26 Arthur thought an established drug company, even a tiny one like Purdue Frederick, could play a role in their future business projects. Stern was not convinced, and as he had when Sackler approached him about purchasing Schering during World War II, he passed.27

Less than a week after Stern turned him down, Arthur accepted an appointment as the deputy director of research at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center.28 It was only part-time, he assured Mortimer and Raymond, who had wondered how he could manage all his responsibilities. Arthur assured them it was not a problem. In January 1949, Sackler created the Medical & Pharmaceutical Information Bureau (MPIB), the first company specializing in placing articles in the nonmedical lay press. It was part of his strategy designed to hype new drugs, sometimes before they even had FDA approval.29 Sackler referred his McAdams drug clients to MPIB; most did not know he was its founder. Every week MPIB sent draft articles to editors and reporters with whom Sackler had developed good relationships. A Senate investigation would later find that MPIB planted stories in many publications, including The Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest. They were ostensibly about “new developments in medicine.” Somewhere in each article, however, a “wonder drug” was invariably introduced. That generalized media coverage helped Sackler in creating public demand for a drug. Every time patients asked for “that marvelous drug I read about in the paper the other day” it buttressed the efforts of the pharmaceutical company’s detail men and ads. Wall Street traders soon realized that MPIB’s “news” sometimes provided an advance peek at a new blockbuster drug. A good MPIB article could cause a stock price to spike. (The same Senate probe later determined that Arthur Sackler traded stocks, including a large ownership position in Pfizer. Arthur sometimes made his buy and sell decisions on advance knowledge he had about what was in the MPIB publication pipeline. The SEC did not enforce “insider trading” cases against private individuals until 1965.)30

Marietta came back into Arthur’s life a few months after the birth of the Sacklers’ second daughter, Elizabeth Anne. When her hospital internship ended, she had asked Raymond and Mortimer if they knew where she might find the second internship she needed before she could take the exams for her American medical license. They suggested she talk to Arthur as he was then directing a large research project on schizophrenia at Creedmoor.31 After a brief stint at Queens General City Hospital, Marietta started working at Creedmoor with the Sacklers. Despite having discovered from his brothers that “he was married and had two children, [and] he’d had other relationships with women,” when Arthur again asked for a date, Marietta agreed.32

She was about to learn one of Arthur’s hardwired traits, a relentless focus on getting whatever he wanted. Daily flowers, gifts, surprise visits at all hours, “the intensity of the pursuit was overwhelming.” In a few months, she told him over dinner that “you’re the kind of man I could marry.” What followed were angst-ridden discussions in which they each acknowledged their passionate fling was destructive for Arthur’s wife and daughters. They decided to end their relationship. Their separation lasted only two weeks before the affair restarted.

In June 1949, Marietta returned to Germany to tend to her terminally ill grandmother. She had not felt well before her trip, battling fatigue and daily waves of nausea. “Even though I was a physician, I didn’t think to diagnose my own pregnancy.”33 When her grandmother died that July, Marietta was the sole heir to Dr. Kade, her family’s thriving pharmaceutical firm. It had emerged mostly unscathed from the devastation of World War II. Arthur sent her daily letters about how much he loved and missed her. In his note of June 30, he wrote: “When you come home, we will start a new life—it will be full of hope, joy and of passion.”34

On Marietta’s return to New York that fall, Arthur went to Mexico and got a fast divorce. Else retained custody of their daughters. To the surprise of many friends who expected Else to be furious with her husband’s betrayal, she remained a distant part of Arthur’s social circle. She was, as friends discovered, still attracted to his “maddening magnetism.” Else also knew that remaining on good terms was best for their daughters. Arthur loved her, not as a wife, but as someone he trusted. He let her retain her ownership stake in William Douglas McAdams.35

Arthur and Marietta married hastily that December. Sophie Sackler gave her new German daughter-in-law a cool reception. The Orthodox Jewish matriarch of the Sackler family was distressed not only because she saw Marietta as a homewrecker, but also because of her German heritage. How could she have been unaware of what the Nazis were doing to German Jews when she was studying for her medical degree in wartime Berlin? “It was best to protect myself as others did,” Marietta said, “much in the way the ‘wise monkeys’ hear no evil.”36 She tried to win over Sophie, but was not willing to convert to Judaism as had Else. Arthur was satisfied so long as his mother and new wife remained civil to each other, which they mostly did.

All the personal upheaval did not cause Arthur to lose any focus in his businesses. He had too many financial obligations to slow up. Just after they married, Marietta saw that he was under a “great financial burden.” Arthur was subsidizing his own medical research and ad agency, supporting his mother and mother-in-law, his ex-wife and two children, and even aiding his brothers and their families. Everyone looked to him for money.

“I compared him to the Atlas in front of Rockefeller Center who carries the world,” Marietta concluded. “To Arthur, that role may have felt natural.”37 What she did not realize then but soon saw was that Arthur envisioned himself as the sun in his own solar system; everyone else was merely “a planet… [who] could not step out of their separate non-intersecting orbits.”

On February 9, 1950, he rushed Marietta to New York Hospital for the birth of their first child. While she was in labor, he apologized to the delivering doctor because he was scheduled to make the dedication at the Creedmoor Institute. He left the hospital before the birth of his first son, Arthur Jr.38

Missing his son’s birth “marked the beginning of a pattern in our marriage,” Marietta later observed. It rankled her that “Arthur continued seeing his former wife (without consulting me) and he allowed her needs to take precedence over mine and the children.”39 Marietta soon discovered that, for Arthur, family was less important than his career. In the late summer of 1950, just after he turned thirty-seven, Arthur was appointed chairman of the First International Congress of Psychiatry. While many people would have found all the disparate obligations overwhelming, he thrived on an ever more demanding schedule. He sold his interest in his two-year-old medical article placement firm, MPIB. With that money he opened a small competitor to MPIB, Medimetrics. He even encouraged his friend and sometimes business partner, Bill Frohlich, to establish his own MPIB competitor (Science Information Bureau).40 This all happened while Arthur was preparing for the dedication of the Institute of Psychobiological Studies at Creedmoor.41 Although it was eighteen years after his friend Alfred Stern had funded Chicago’s Institute for Psychoanalysis, Arthur was proud that Creedmoor’s center was the first American facility devoted to biological psychiatry.42 The Sackler brothers saw it as an opportunity to further their research into possible connections between the endocrine system and mental illness.43 The trio, alone and with collaborators, would eventually publish more than 150 scientific papers about human behavior, pharmaceuticals, biological psychiatry, and experimental medicine.44 The Sacklers would be among the earliest to find a link between instances of psychosis and cortisone.

Complementing his work at Creedmoor, Arthur soon added to his responsibilities the editor-in-chief’s role at The Journal of Clinical and Experimental Psychopathology; its board of directors included some prominent international researchers as well as his brothers.45 Later he added the director’s role at the College of Pharmacy in Long Island University as well as becoming a professor of therapeutic research there.46

Most people with the demanding professional responsibilities Arthur had assumed would have had little opportunity or desire to indulge personal pursuits. Sackler not only found the spare time but delved into it with the same intensity with which he approached his businesses. What begun innocently enough as an interest in Chinese antiquities had become a self-admitted “passion.”47 “When some people are frustrated, they go out and buy a new hat, or tie,” he later said, “[so] my collections are in a sense the measure of my frustrations.”48 Marietta thought the compulsive collecting had less to do with his frustrations than with his overriding “necessity for prestige and recognition.”49 To his medical and advertising colleagues and fellow art collectors, Arthur Sackler was the epitome of a self-confident man who accomplished a great deal through discipline and organization. “A man of promethean intellect and energy,” was the judgment of Harvard art historian John Rosenfield.50

“His public side, of course, was charming,” noted Marietta. “A gifted intellectual, he could match anyone in debate. An engaging speaker and conversationalist, he moved people with his passion and intellectual power.”51

Marietta, however, was witness to another side, “the fine line between fascination and obsession.”52 She saw the restlessness caused by his deep “need to achieve… that his name not be forgotten by the world.” She was just beginning to understand how “his tremendous intellectual gifts were also his greatest demons, whipping him to produce ever more.”53

“At night, he’d come home from the office,” she recalled, “he would consume volumes on Chinese art and archaeology. I tried keeping up with him at first, but, soon, he outdistanced me. His speed of comprehension, his ability to integrate masses of material and his talent for turning all that knowledge into informed purchasing decisions were quite astonishing.”54 At an early moment of introspection, Arthur feared his collecting was “not always controllable.”55

The dealers knew he was a serious and compulsive collector. They often enticed him to buy pieces he could not afford by financing his costlier acquisitions. Some of those arrangements, Marietta recalled, “extended over many years.”56 It created new obligations that kept him running ever harder in his professional life. Meanwhile, boxes of “ritual bronzes and weapons, mirrors and ceramics, inscribed bones and archaic jades” filled their home and spilled over to storage warehouses. “There was too much to open, too much to appreciate; some objects known only by a packing list.”57

Arthur was in the early days of acquiring works of art that would become over time a stunning collection of Chinese and Asian antiquities, pre-Columbian and Iranian ceramics, Indian sculpture, Baroque terra-cottas, Postimpressionist paintings, Renaissance majolicas, and Piranesi drawings. A museum curator later dubbed him “a modern Medici.”58

“I contracted the disease,” he acknowledged later. “I was never able to develop an immunity to works of art.”59

“As his knowledge grew, he became more and more passionate about it,” said Marietta. “His fascination then turned in on itself and came to rule him.”60

Marietta was not just Arthur’s wife, she had become a psychiatrist after their marriage. She could not help but sometimes see him through her professional lens. “Addiction is a curse, be it drugs, women, or collecting.”61

I. Mortimer and Raymond were then working on the medical staff at Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital. They also incorporated their own charitable foundations in the 1960s. Much later they created parallel foundations and trusts in the United Kingdom. As of 2019, the author located twelve Sackler-named charitable foundations active in New York alone.