World Travelers Don’t Leave Home Without Him

Eyes wide, the young man describes his upcoming journey to the Amazon jungle and beyond. River rafting. Land trekking. And an escapade into the wild heart of the Rio de Janeiro night life.

The doctor nods. He has been to the teeming Brazilian city and to the vast rain forest, along with nearly every other South American country.

“For this, you vill need protection,” he says. “Yellow fever vaccine. Typhoid. The verks .”

Later, a Beverly Hills woman needs shots for a Central American cruise. The doctor has traveled that region too, exploring tropical diseases from Panama to Costa Rica.

“Will I get a bad reaction?” she asks in a meek voice.

The doctor answers softly, gently guiding the needle into her left arm: “Only reaction come when you take out wallet to pay bill.”

Like devout parishioners, they flock to the tiny Hollywood Boulevard office of Dr. Partev Manasjan--the tourists, adventurers, globe-trotters and jet-setters. Rock ‘n’ rollers embarking on world tours. Actors filming in some far-flung, exotic or dangerous locale. Scientists en route to a new excavation.

For three decades, trusted vaccination needle in hand, the 83-year-old Armenian-born physician has been inoculator to the stars.

Doc Hollywood.

At his high-rise office hang dozens of autographed celebrity visages--Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Valerie Harper, Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope, Harrison Ford, David Lee Roth, even Steven Spielberg with his little extra-terrestrial pal.

The collection was his secretary’s idea. To Manasjan, they’re just patients, curious people like himself with an inherent need to see the world.

This white-haired physician doesn’t covet autographs. He prefers maps--bright wall-sized maps and little ones in black and white. Maps of the Old World and the new cover his walls like educational ivy.

Manasjan considers them guides for the curious soul. And he has followed them studiously, venturing to all seven continents, to almost every country on the globe, practicing medicine in Asia, Europe and the United States.

A World War II commander of a Russian army hospital battalion, Manasjan was captured by the Germans and spent three years in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps. After the war, he embarked on a life of travel that first took him to Los Angeles.

With countless miles already behind him, he still travels. Because now he can.

“In Soviet Union, you cannot travel to next city,” Manasjan says of his days there years ago. “I go because I want to feel how you feel when you are free.”

Since the early 1960s, the doctor has been among a handful of Los Angeles-area practitioners working in emporiatrics, the highly specialized dispensing of travel inoculations. It’s his effort to battle world travelers’ deadliest enemy: disease.

Despite its Hollywood address, there’s no self-important bluster at his Medical Clinic for Immunization. Be it Kevin Costner or Kevin Moscowitz, the question is not who you are but where you are going.

“My dad doesn’t go to movies, so he doesn’t recognize many celebrity patients,” said Paul Manasjan, an environmental health specialist with Los Angeles County. “He has this refreshing naivete. He treats everyone the same way.”

With his needle.

He pricks them. He sticks them. He gets under their skin.

But he doesn’t worship them. When one very well-known actress called for him to deliver an inoculation, he informed her that he didn’t do house calls. And when actor Glenn Ford showed up at the office, the doctor didn’t know who he was.

“So, vot you do for living?” he asked in an accent that is often a blur of Turkish, Russian, Armenian, German and English.

When Ford explained that he was an actor--expressing surprise that the physician hadn’t heard of him, the younger Manasjan recalls--the doctor flashed an innocent smile: “Maybe one day I will see your movie.”

Touring his star-studded gallery, Dr. Manasjan shyly points to a photograph of Spielberg’s ET.

“Look,” he says. “Eye-t.”

There are some stars, though, who do bedazzle the doctor. But they are not the luminaries of any new hip-hop Hollywood. They are entertainers of another era.

Like Jimmy Stewart, who, at 84, is a year older than Manasjan.

“He is honest man,” the physician says. “He is real star.”

Paul Manasjan says his father admires Stewart for his down-to-earth character: “They’re just a couple of old men who get along well. They talk about their lives. They talk about their kids.”

Stewart returns the compliment:

“I’m very grateful to him for that feeling. He’s a fine man as well.”

Partev Manasjan’s life began in the Armenian city of Yerevan, near the Black Sea.

“I loved to sing and dance,” he recalls. “But my father did not like this. He said ‘Look at your brother. He is studying to be doctor. And you are bum.’ ”

So Manasjan entered medical school, both to prove his father wrong and to help explain why his mother was so sickly. He never got the chance, because both died before he graduated.

Manasjan settled in Hollywood in 1950 and 10 years later changed from general practice to his medical specialty to suit his wanderlust.

Now, consulting regular international health bulletins from the Centers for Disease Control, the doctor tracks yellow fever, meningitis, tetanus and cholera.

He warns his patients of the horrible body sores that come with smallpox; the diarrhea, vomiting and soaring temperatures associated with cholera and typhoid, and the painful stiffness of tetanus.

“I tell them ‘Don’t drink water or Coke unless bottled. Don’t eat raw vegetables. Especially in countries with animals in streets.’ I say, ‘Just because you have shots, you do not have green light to be crazy.’ ”

Decades of jabbing Hollywood’s best and brightest have taught Manasjan something about America’s entertainers: Many are full of themselves.

Some cancel appointments a half-dozen times. Others have their secretaries stipulate that no autographs be solicited and direct that the waiting room be cleared before their arrival.

They clearly don’t know the doctor.

“Older actors like Jimmy Stewart, they behave better than young ones who put on dark sunglasses and want to show they are big men,” he says. “Older actors are more humble. If you have to prove it, you are not really famous.”

Several years ago, Manasjan tried to retire. He sold his practice and took up gardening.

He was miserable.

“I did not know what to do with me,” he says. “I try gardening. But gardening is harder job than practicing medicine.”

And patients kept asking for the doctor. So, he retrieved his practice, but now works only part time.

“His patients love him,” said Dr. Masood Haque, a professor of medicine and cardiology at USC and a friend of Manasjan’s. “If he told them to jump from the 10th floor, many would close their eyes and jump.”

If all goes well, Manasjan just might become the George Burns of the inoculation business, practicing past his 100th birthday.

“My life has taught me this,” he says. “Traditions are different, but people everywhere the same.

“They are all afraid of needles.”