Kevorkian's Friends Contradict His Public Image As `Dr. Death'

PONTIAC, Mich. - The wiry doctor who brings carbon monoxide on his house calls used to come to Marie and Shelby Baylis' house every Thursday night, carrying a bottle of Faygo red pop and a bag of potato chips.

There, Jack Kevorkian and Shelby Baylis would spend hours brainstorming such inventions as a three-legged coffee cup, round playing cards and the "spring-a-ling" - a coil to strap on the bottom of shoes and give the wearer extra bounce. They would roll on the floor laughing, said Marie Baylis, Shelby's widow.

"They were like two little kids," Marie Baylis said. "Watching them, no one would believe they were doctors."

And none of Kevorkian's friends can believe that much of the world now considers him a ghoul.

"People really do have a wrong picture of Jack," said Baylis. "He's just a good person. He has a great sense of humor and he's got a big heart, and he's a very loyal person."

Cheryl Gale, the widow of Hugh Gale, Kevorkian's 13th assisted-suicide patient, said the man released on bail last Friday often acts in private "like a part of him is a little boy who never grew up." At a recent dinner for relatives and friends of Kevorkian's patients, he told jokes for hours until his audience begged him to stop.

The man who has been called "Doctor Death" really is playful, witty, warm and talented, his friends say. But the two words used most frequently to describe him are smart and forthright.

"He's the smartest individual I've ever met," said Richard Simonian, his accountant. "He's the kind of guy who thinks about something and does it."

Long before he became the most famous and controversial pathologist in history, Jack Kevorkian did a lot of things: He taught himself Japanese and German in high school. He learned to read music and built his own harpsichord. He created 18 shocking oil paintings and exhibited them.

He went to Los Angeles and made a full-length feature movie about Handel's "Messiah." He wrote dozens of journal articles and several books - including a diet book illustrated with his cartoons and spiced with his corny limericks. He invented and tried to market souvenir sun visors emblazoned with logos of local sports teams.

Kevorkian's hobbies wove around a legitimate career in pathology and a lifetime of pursuing unorthodox causes on the fringes of medicine. At Detroit Receiving Hospital, Kevorkian wore a black arm band while photographing the eyes of dying patients.

A few years later, he plunged a syringe into the heart of a dead girl in Pontiac General Hospital's pathology lab, drawing out her blood and transferring it through makeshift tubing into the veins of assistant Neil Nicol as part of his cadaver blood transfusion experiments.

For most of his life, Kevorkian has corresponded with death-row convicts and badgered prison officials across the nation, pushing his campaign for medical experiments and organ harvesting as part of the execution of consenting prisoners. He also has called for an international auction market for organs.

His proposals for the "medical exploitation" of "planned death" made him unemployable. His resume, he admitted, "scares the hell out of people."

People who know him well don't find Kevorkian at all frightening.

"Dr. Kevorkian is a wonderful, caring man," said Virginia Bernero, whose son, dying with AIDS, consulted Kevorkian in 1990. "I don't think he has a mean bone in his body."

Gerald Abrams, a University of Michigan pathologist who worked with Kevorkian years ago, said he was tired of people calling Kevorkian a kook. He did thorough, conscientious work and was highly personable, Abrams said.

Kevorkian's lack of tact often gets him in trouble; he has little tolerance for pretense. In writing about his proposals for medical experimentation, he both criticized and praised Nazi doctors. Before he helped 18 people die with carbon-monoxide gas, he remarked that the gas gives light-complexioned people a "rosy glow" that makes them look better as a corpse. Critics have seized on such blunt statements as evidence that Kevorkian is unfeeling.

By all accounts, Kevorkian had a normal childhood in a working-class neighborhood in Pontiac.

His parents were Armenian immigrants who told him horror stories of the Turkish atrocities they had fled. Kevorkian told a reporter the Jews "had it easy" compared to his ancestors.

Publicity about his proposal for prisoner experiments embarrassed the University of Michigan, and Kevorkian was forced to leave. He returned to Pontiac, working at the hospital and living with his mother. His father died of a heart attack, and his mother finally succumbed after a long bout with cancer, during which her doctor refused to take steps to shorten her agony.

In 1976, Kevorkian formed a Michigan corporation called Penumbra Inc. and drove to California in his Volkswagen van. Investing well over $100,000 of his own money, Kevorkian wrote a script, hired a director, actors and a production crew and made a full-length feature film about Handel's "Messiah."

The movie was a commercial flop, but Simonian said Kevorkian sold a few videos to Catholic hospitals around the country. That couldn't be confirmed.

Simonian said Kevorkian always had something new when he showed up in his office: a sketch of a combination dirigible and airplane, or a plan to use the Greek alphabet to codify the metric system. "He'd just drive me crazy with all his ideas," Simonian said. "You've got to be a little nutty if you're a genius."

Kevorkian used Penumbra Inc. to self-publish his wacky diet book, "Slimmeriks and the Demi-Diet," in 1978. Optimistically, Kevorkian printed 5,000, but most went unsold, Simonian said.

For the past five years, Kevorkian has lived in a sparsely furnished apartment on Main Street in Royal Oak, Mich. He must move out by the end of this month because the building is scheduled to be torn down.

Kevorkian ended an 18-day hunger strike Friday when he was released from a Michigan jail on $100 bond. He promised not to help anyone else die while an appeals court considers the constitutionality of assisted suicide.

Cheryl Gale said Kevorkian, questioned a few months ago by friends and relatives of his patients about his determination to fast if jailed, referred to the Armenian atrocities suffered by his parents and said: "I will not be a slave. My people were slaves, and they were slaughtered."

About the curious, inventive man whom millions consider a devil and millions see as an angel, Gale noted: "He has a big thing about freedom."

------------------------ OTHER SIDES TO KEVORKIAN ------------------------

Is he kidding?

-- In "Prescription: Medicide," Jack Kevorkian wrote that carbon monoxide "in light-complexioned people . . . often produces a rosy color that makes the victim look better as a corpse."

-- Asked what happens after you die, he said, "You rot."

-- In 1992, he wrote this limerick for Jay Leno: "A new machine I've been trying/ To devise could be used for applying/ To comics like Jay/ When the eggs that they lay/ In their monologues bomb and they're dying."

Kevorkian's published books

-- "The Story of Dissection" (Philosophical Library, New York, 1959) "Medical Research and the Death Penalty: A Dialogue" (Vantage Press, New York, 1960)

-- "Beyond Any Kind of God" (Philosophical Library, New York, 1966). The dust jacket calls this an "effort aimed at trying to peer into the Great Unknown" of life and death.

-- "Slimmeriks and the Demi-Diet" (Penumbra Inc., Southfield, 1978). It contains Kevorkian limericks, cartoons and diet advice.

-- "Prescription: Medicide" (Prometheus Books, Buffalo, N.Y., 1991) - Kevorkian's autobiography, warts and all.

Ideas that didn't pan out

-- The three-legged coffee cup

-- Round playing cards

-- The Spring-a-Ling - coiled springs to strap onto bottom of shoes

An idea that did

The suicide machine (built in the summer of 1989 for $30 from parts scavenged from garage sales and flea markets)

Knight-Ridder Newspapers

--------------------- ARTIST AND MOVIEMAKER ---------------------

Jack Kevorkian is also an artist and moviemaker. His work, much of it lost in shipment from a freight company in 1990, includes 18 oil paintings and several films and videos. He has said his work illustrates "how hypocritical we are."

PAINTINGS

Some of his paintings:

"Very Still Life" - a gruesome drawing of an iris growing out of the eye socket of a skull, with dismembered body parts in the background.

"Genocide" - a portrait of a headless man seated at a dinner table, knife and fork in hand. On a plate is the man's head, an apple in the mouth. On the table are warhead-shaped salt and pepper shakers, a helmet filled with bullets and a dish full of crosses.

"Death" - showing a man hanging by his bloody fingernails above a shaft with ghostly faces at the bottom of the abyss.

FILM

Kevorkian's filmmaking career spanned nearly 30 years. His works include:

"Handel's Messiah" - In his late 40s, Kevorkian spent his life savings on an 89-minute Cinemascope movie about Handel's "Messiah." Kevorkian used a tape of a University of Michigan Chorale performance of "The Messiah" for the sound track, wrote a script, hired a director and dozens of actors. Kevorkian tried to distribute the film himself but failed. The masters were lost in shipment.

"The Door" - In a video made in 1988 in Berkeley, Calif., Kevorkian is a professorial tour guide of the mind. He promises the viewer a trip into some "very hazy realms of human existence" using "reason and common sense" and avoiding "prejudice, dogma and biases." The video ends as Kevorkian talks about multiple universes and asks solemnly, "For what forms of existence are we the amoebas?"

Knight-Ridder Newspapers