When I talked with other people who had hep, I learned they took a similar approach. John Lavette, a retired flower merchant, came down with hep C while living the hippie life in Haight-Ashbury. Hippies tended to share everything, but when John learned he had hepatitis C, he became strictly personal with his toiletries. “When someone asks to borrow my toothbrush, I tell people, ‘Use your finger, dude. You’re not putting my toothbrush in your mouth,’” he said. “A friend recently asked me, ‘When you shave with a razor, something like a Bic, do you throw it out?’ I said, ‘I’ve thrown them out for the last ten years.’”
Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones from 1963 to 1967, is also scrupulous about not sharing anything that has even a tiny chance of picking up blood. His list of items is longer than John’s and includes cocaine straws. In the sixties, lines of cocaine were often laid out on tables at rock stars’ parties for guests like Andrew to snort.
He and I sat across from each other drinking chai on the patio of Terra Breads in Vancouver’s Olympic Village. Andrew had just come back from Pilates and Rolfing and was wearing a black T-shirt with a gold herringbone pattern across the front. Wispy white hair accentuated the narrowness of his face. His hazel eyes were framed by pouches on the bottom and thin eyebrows that arched so close to his eyes, I couldn’t see the lids. His shoulders were square and erect. He appeared to be in great physical shape for a seventy-year-old man, especially one with hepatitis C.
He must have been cool and handsome when he managed the rhythm and blues band, I mused. I thought back to a summer day when I was fourteen, when I milled among a crowd of sixty groupies in front of the Hotel Century on 47th Street near Times Square. The Rolling Stones’ limousine rolled out of a parking garage and stopped, waiting to make a turn. A horde of screaming teenagers rushed the car. They pressed against its shaded windows, trying to glimpse their idols. I lurched closest to the back of the limo. The other girls pushed forward. They bashed me into the bumper and pushed me atop the trunk. More than ten other girls piled on top of me, smacking my face against the rear window of the car. Brian Jones sat in the back seat. He scowled at me. He rapped his fist against the inside of the window right at my face. He pummeled the window again and again. His silky blond hair swayed as he pounded at me through the glass. The window vibrated. The car began to move. Gradually it moved faster. Gradually the other girls fell away. Last, I slipped off the back of the car. I was shaking and breathing hard. I had thought I might be run over, but only my knees were bruised from hitting the pavement.
I thought Andrew would have been in the limo with the Stones that day and couldn’t have missed the incident. I asked him whether he had seen me getting bumped about against the window.
“Well, I don’t know,” Andrew said. He had traveled the world with the Stones and had encountered countless mobs of groupies. He was partying a lot in those days, he said, and many scenes had become a blur to him.
In the heyday of rock ’n’ roll he hobnobbed not only with the Rolling Stones but also with many other rock stars whose music he had promoted or produced. His label, Immediate Records, produced music by Eric Clapton, John Mayall, Small Faces, Fleetwood Mac, Rod Stewart, and Nico, whom I had hung out with at the Scene nightclub in New York when my first husband’s band opened for hers (and Lou Reed’s), the Velvet Underground. I’d had a taste of the rock ’n’ roll party life, but Andrew Loog Oldham had consumed the full meal, imbibing, snorting, and injecting all sorts of drugs, including heroin and cocaine.
Eventually Andrew decided to get healthy and visited an alternative health care practitioner in Glens Falls, New York, who was associated with Scientology. Andrew and his wife, Esther, began taking Scientology courses, and Andrew asked to sign up for a Purification Rundown. The process, according to its designer, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, would purge the body of toxins, including those from IV drug use and LSD. Andrew was refused the treatment because he had once received shock therapy, so he visited another alternative medical man, who prescribed a similar toxin-cleansing regimen. For a month or two Andrew ingested huge amounts of niacin (vitamin B3). “You start off on 50 or 100 milligrams of niacin, and by the time you’re finished you’re up to 5,000 milligrams a day—and that is not good for a compromised liver,” he said as he pushed down the plunger on a Bodum of tea. In fact, high doses of niacin have been linked to severe and even fatal liver injury.
About two years later Andrew returned to the practitioner, who tested his muscles. Andrew, reading upside down, saw “hep C?” on the doctor’s note sheet. He asked the doctor why he had written that.
“He said, ‘I’m wondering if you have hep C,’” Andrew recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll go and get tested.’ So I did.”
In 1997 he learned he did have hepatitis C. Testing revealed 4 million bits of HCV in each milliliter of his blood. He visited more than one doctor who suggested treatment with interferon. “I never went back because I didn’t trust them,” Andrew said.
He said he knows a famous Spanish singer who tried to cure his hep C with interferon, and after five months the man’s marriage nearly broke up from the stress of treatment. Another friend told him, “Don’t you dare. My mother died from interferon.” On top of knowing about the horrible side effects of the drug, Andrew learned he was infected with hepatitis genotype 1a. Unlike some other types of hep C, which could be treated back then for twenty-four weeks, Andrew would have to do interferon for a year. “Instinctively, I didn’t want to go near it,” he said.
He carried on with alternative medicine. Sometimes he would go to four practitioners at a time. “I’ve been as obsessive about wellness as I was about unwellness,” he told me. He said alternative medicine helped him for at least eighteen years after he contracted hep, which he believed occurred in the 1980s.
Of many possible ways he may have acquired hep C, Andrew said, he suspects a tube he used to snort cocaine was the culprit. He said Tiffany’s jewelers used to sell cocaine straws for $175, which was a lot of money for most people in the eighties but not much for Andrew’s high-rolling friends. Andrew described the party toy as a shiny tube of silver, eight to ten inches long. Because it was so long, it often clogged up. He and his friends would scrape out the cocaine with paper clips. The straw could have had anybody’s blood on it, which may have given him hepatitis, Andrew said.
While blood could conceivably get on a razor or on a cocaine straw and transmit hepatitis C, transmission through medical tools is far more common. In fact, medical tools were the most common method of transmission until the mid-1990s. Historically, worldwide, most hepatitis C infections have been passed along by inadvertent medical exposure. Someone who has hep gets treated at an underequipped medical unit or mobile clinic; syringes, tubes, or vessels don’t get sterilized properly; and zing—that person’s hep C seeps into another person’s blood. It can be passed along through the same or other routes ad infinitum. . . or until everyone in the branching trail has been cured.
THE FIRST REPORTED incidence of the spread of hepatitis though contaminated medical tools occurred in 1883 in Bremen, Germany, at a shipbuilding company. A public health inspector discovered that hepatitis had been spread through cowpox inoculations that took place at the factory. Doctors collected and mixed the discharge from many patients who had cowpox, a mild disease, and the fluid was applied to scrapes on people’s skin to protect them against smallpox. About two hundred workers at the shipbuilding factory came down with hepatitis, out of thirteen hundred who had been inoculated.
During World War II, at least 26,771 soldiers who received a vaccine for yellow fever came down with hepatitis. It was hard to sterilize syringes, especially on the battlefield, where conditions were brutal and unpredictable. Close to 200,000 cases of hepatitis were reported among U.S. soldiers. Not long after the war—in 1950—transmission of the disease reached its peak.
The first disposable syringes, introduced in the 1950s, should have prevented most transmission of the disease in medical settings, but sloppy medical practices still occurred sporadically, especially