THE SUNDAY PROFILE : The Human Touch : To the world, he’s a renowned burn specialist. To some former colleagues, he’s an imperious ‘god.’ But to his patients, Dr. Dick Grossman is a healer of mind and body.

The anesthesia had worn off and once again 9-year-old Ryan Wilson could feel the pain.

“It hurts! It hurts!”

His doctor happened to be walking by. Earlier that morning, Dr. A. Richard Grossman and three other surgeons had huddled over Ryan in the operating room at Sherman Oaks Hospital, taking scalpels to the discolored flesh of his left arm and leg, searching for hope that the limbs could be saved.

A few days had passed since Ryan somehow got inside a Southern California Edison substation near his Santa Barbara County home and touched something he shouldn’t have. About 16,000 volts of electricity entered his hand and coursed through his arm, torso and leg before exiting his foot. Ryan was lucky to be alive. His arm and leg were burned from the inside out.

After surgery, the boy’s parents were stoic as Grossman gave his report in quiet tones: Ryan’s leg would have to be amputated below the knee. Not unlike that from a high-velocity gunshot, the exit wound of electrocution is worse than the entry. The prognosis on the arm was unclear; amputation remained a distinct possibility.

“It hurts! It hurts!”

Grossman stepped into Ryan’s room. “Where does it hurt?” he asked. In soothing tones he talked to Ryan as a nurse added painkiller to the IV. Very soon the boy became groggy.

On Ryan’s right index finger, a sensor glowed red with each heartbeat. A pulse oximeter measures oxygen levels in blood. But it reminded Ryan of something else. “E.T., phone home,” he murmured, extending his glowing fingertip.

The doctor touched his finger to Ryan’s. Then the boy drifted off to sleep.

*

This is a story about one of Los Angeles’ most storied physicians. Dr. Alan Richard Grossman, 62, is a burn specialist of international renown. “He’s certainly had a long and illustrious career,” says Dr. Bruce Zawacki, director of the respected burn unit at County-USC Medical Center.

Grossman’s got the touch, all right. The healing touch, the golden touch, just the right touch with the media. It’s easy to imagine physicians throughout Southern California scanning their Sunday papers and thinking, sheesh, another story on Dick Grossman?

This year, Grossman--”Dr. G” to his staff and patients--has even become a brand name of sorts. In June, the unit he founded 25 years ago was renamed the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital. And earlier this year, a second Grossman Burn Center opened at Martin Luther Hospital in Anaheim. When the head nurse there recently proffered a press kit, Grossman couldn’t resist a sly joke. “What’s a press kit?” he asked with a grin.

Grossman will also proudly remember 1995 as the year “Dr. Peter” joined his burn center team. Peter Grossman, 32, says he knew as a child, following his father on rounds, that he wanted to be a doctor.

“I would see the look in his patients’ eyes, and just the way they said, ‘thank you’ to him,” Peter Grossman recalls, “and I thought, you know, that’s what I want to do.”

Now, father is also grooming son in the art of the news conference. If there’s a knock against Dick Grossman, it’s from doctors who say he shamelessly courts publicity.

But, as often as not, the media seek out Grossman. When Richard Pryor set himself afire years ago while lighting a crack pipe, Grossman was his doctor. When wildfires raged in the hills above Malibu, victims were helicoptered to the burn center. When a car accident claimed the family of 13-year-old Rosie Garcia’s family and left her severely burned, the media came. When a triathlete was successfully treated for a flesh-eating bacteria, they came again.

And then there’s the tale of Bimbo the dog.

Badly burned when a gas main ruptured during the Northridge earthquake, Bimbo was taken to a Studio City veterinarian, who in turn sought out Grossman. With the dog’s kidneys failing, Grossman arranged for a KNX-AM (1070) chopper to fly Bimbo to the UC Davis veterinary school for dialysis.

It was a PR coup for the burn center and the radio station. Still, Bimbo died. Grossman now says euthanasia would have been wiser, but the dog’s owner sent a letter of gratitude just the same.

Grossman traces his fixation on the plight of burn patients to a stark tragedy early in his career. A native of Miami and graduate of Emory University, he was working in the emergency room of Chicago’s Cook County Hospital in 1958 when a fire trapped students inside Our Lady of Angels Elementary School. That December day, he counted 98 dead children.

Back then, burn care was in the dark ages. Zawacki says severe burn cases “were turned over to the youngest and least experienced surgeons” because patients had little hope for survival. “They died. They bled a lot. It was a terrible experience and there wasn’t a lot doctors could do.”

Not until the 1960s, after the Army Institute of Surgical Research and the Shrine Burn Institute committed funding for new surgical techniques, did burn care bloom as a specialty. Both Grossman and Zawacki have been at the forefront of advances over the last 30 years.

When Grossman arrived at the private Sherman Oaks Hospital 27 years ago, he persuaded hospital brass to set aside two beds for burn patients. It has since grown into a 30-bed, state-of-the-art facility that treats patients--many with little or no health coverage--from all over the world. The unit’s high-tech tools include a hyperbaric chamber--an oxygen-rich environment thought to speed healing--and cloned human epidermis for grafting.

Still, it’s the human touch that patients remember. A staff psychiatrist tends patients and their families, and a “play therapist” works with children. Many of the nurses have worked for Grossman for years, and former patients often return to counsel new arrivals.

Doctors’ egos are known to clash. “God” is what some former colleagues sarcastically call Grossman behind his back. The celebrated Dr. Grossman is imperious, unyielding in his authority, they say.

Peter Grossman understands. “There are times that he’s a dictator in that operating room,” he says. “There is a deity in there. . . . To work for him you have to know that his is the final word.”

“He’s a good surgeon,” says one doctor who requested anonymity. Good, but maybe not as great as his press clippings, is the implication. The same surgeon acknowledges, however, that the burn center deserves its excellent reputation--so give “God” his due.

Dr. Matt Young, the burn center’s pediatrician, calls good an understatement. “The reason we love our work and love Dr. G is because it is rare in life to do something that you feel is your destiny,” he says. “Grossman approaches his work as his destiny and the feeling is contagious.”

Based on a statistical comparison he made, Young suggests that Grossman’s mortality rate on severe burn cases is lower than that of other centers listed in the Journal of Burn Care. “There’s a guy in there now with 90% burns who would not survive anywhere else,” he says. “I really believe it.”

Patients lavish praise on Grossman. Hell is thought to be a place of fire, and he helped bring them back.

Twenty years later, Michael Thein remembers well his encounter with Grossman. He was a teenager, working on his motorcycle when a gasoline fire started and caused second- and third-degree burns over one-third of his body.

“I thought I was going to die,” he recalls. “I was laying in the ICU and Dr. Grossman took my hand very gently and made penetrating eye contact with me. He said, ‘Mike, you’re one of the lucky ones. You’re going to walk out of this place.’ ”

Peter Grossman says that if he could have just one of his father’s skills, the choice would be easy. It would be his father’s rapport with patients.

*

“He almost weeps for the child as he’s telling you what has to be done,” says Ryan’s mother, Irene Dutcher.

Dr. G was the first to tell her that Ryan would live. The Santa Barbara doctors who decided that he should be flown to the Grossman Burn Center had not been sure.

Once Ryan was stable, his family--including his father and his stepfather--and Grossman’s team went to work on his spirits. Jack Wilson reminded Ryan of the Purple Heart his grandfather had received during World War II. They’d give Ryan a medal, too, for being so brave.

Sometimes Ryan would say it was better that he had gotten hurt rather than his big sister because he was tough. But depression set in. It isn’t fair, he’d say, and everybody would agree. Seeing little Nathan, a brother born just five weeks before the accident, usually helped.

After the surgery to remove his leg, Ryan didn’t sleep for three days, save for catnaps. “It was like he was scared to go to sleep,” his mother says, “because he thought he’d lose something else.”

He seemed to know that his arm might not be saved. Once, he abruptly asked Grossman what it would be like to have a mechanical arm.

“You ever see ‘Robocop’? It’s like ‘Robocop,’ ” the doctor said.

Ryan cheered up a bit, temporarily.

In many hospitals, Ryan’s arm would have been amputated soon after arrival. But his radial artery was still functioning, providing blood and hope, so the surgical team--Dr. Michel Brones as well as both Grossmans--discussed rebuilding the arm.

Later, the artery gave out. The doctors might still have rebuilt the arm, but it would have done little more than push objects. Worse, the procedure would require transplanting an artery from the good right leg and muscle tissue from the back. Ryan, Grossman said, would be “a patchwork.”

Ryan’s parents listened to the options and agreed on amputation.

How do you tell a 9-year-old who has lost a leg that he must lose an arm as well?

Dr. G and Ryan’s mother talked about how to protect the boy’s sense of courage, his sense of control.

First, the doctor and his patient would talk it over, man to man:

I have a problem, Grossman told Ryan. You and I both know your arm isn’t going to get better. You and I know what we’re going to have to do. The problem is, I don’t know how to tell your mom. But I think you’re strong enough to tell her.

He left and Dutcher went into her son’s room.

“What did the doctor have to say?” she asked.

Tears rolled down Ryan’s cheeks. “My hand doesn’t work,” Ryan said. “They’re going to have to take my hand.”

“Are you scared?” Mom asked.

“Yes.”

“Should Mommy be scared?”

“No.”

At 5:30 the next morning, Dutcher sat with her son before the surgery. “I want to keep my arm! I want to keep my arm!” he cried.

On the way to the OR, Ryan asked his favorite nurse to hold his hand.

“I’m going to be like Terminator,” he told her. “He lost his arm.”

*

Dick Grossman says his colleagues are right. There is a deity in his OR, but it isn’t him. God helps decide who lives and who dies, he says.

He tells the story of Carlos Contreras, a Palmdale trucker and Jehovah’s Witness who was burned over 80% of his body in a crash. His faith forbade blood transfusions, and Grossman doubted Contreras could survive without them. But he did.

“Someone more powerful was able to say, ‘This man will not die.’ ”

Grossman can be reflective one moment, jocular the next. On a recent sunny day, he and wife Marilyn gave a tour of his 63-acre estate in Ventura County’s Hidden Valley. Two years ago, the Malibu wildfires threatened the large white farmhouse, even as Grossman tended fire victims. The house, built in 1928 from a design by architect Paul Williams, is in the throes of extensive remodeling.

The oak-studded property had been so neglected before he bought it in the ‘70s, Grossman says, that it “looked like Transylvania.” He dubbed it Brookfield Farms and, like the cosmetic surgeon he is, began a dramatic face lift. Now, it is a handsome place with stables, fields of vegetables, a rose garden and a man-made catfish pond fed by well water. A foreman and two other workers help tend the place.

Grossman says he owes much of his material success to 25 years of performing elective cosmetic surgery. “I was hustling,” he says. Now he prefers to concentrate on patients with genuine health concerns, while happily referring others to his son.

In a year of professional milestones, Grossman seems to have also achieved personal satisfaction, something that seemed to elude him as a younger man.

Peter Grossman was 13 when his parents divorced. He and brother Jeffrey, now 33 and a commercial photographer in Washington D.C., watched their dad work hard but also find time to coach Little League. Back then, Dick Grossman had another passion, traveling to Alaska and Africa in pursuit of horned “trophy animals” for his walls.

Peter believes his mother felt left out. “At home he was more closed off and less emotional,” he says. “He gave more of his emotional side to his patients than to his wife.”

A second marriage to a woman 20 years his junior lasted two years, ending in 1980.

Then, in 1990, he and Marilyn Kattleman met on a blind date. It seemed, they say, like kismet: Each had a dog named Sophie. They’ve all been together ever since.

Grossman jokingly calls himself a “dirt farmer” who lured a Beverly Hills socialite out to the country, though Brookfield is more “Falcon Crest” than “Green Acres.” Still, on Kattleman’s first visit to the farm, she recalls being startled when he pulled a potato out of the ground.

“He said, ‘Where do you think potatoes come from?’ I said: ‘Gelson’s.’ ”

“It’s a marriage that works,” Dick Grossman says. “We’re the same age. We’ve both been married three times. It’s not an amateur performance.”

It helps, she says, that he long ago gave up hunting and donated his trophies to a home for wayward boys. She was upset when he hooked a catfish and suggested she cook it for dinner. “It’s like eating one of your pets,” Marilyn says.

Dick Grossman, however, still speaks of his hunting days with unabashed pride. “I was a hunter before it became politically incorrect,” he says. “I gave it up because I had done it, and I had done it well. . . . I had achieved all I wished to achieve.”

But he is, after all, an image-conscious man. When pressed, Grossman allows that social pressure may have influenced his decision to quit hunting, just as it influenced another decision.

“I used to smoke. My sons hassled me about it all the time, but that didn’t make me stop. I stopped because it was no longer socially acceptable for me to smoke. Maybe that’s a stupid reason, but that’s why I stopped.”

With the afternoon giving way to dusk, Grossman begins to wonder when he’ll have to give up something more precious. At 62, he asks himself how soon he’ll lose the surgeon’s touch.

“If I can’t do the work that I’m able to today with the pair of hands I have today, OK, I’ll do the brain work, I’ll do the press. . . . I’ve seen too many surgeons go and operate beyond their capacities.”

That time may be years away. In the meantime, he speaks of the warm, rich satisfaction of working with Peter, the heir to the Grossman touch.

Peter, he says, “has a great pair of hands.”

*

A week ago Saturday, dozens of families gathered at Grossman Burn Center for the annual children’s holiday party, with clowns, a magician, a ventriloquist and Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

Dutcher had been looking forward to this day. Since his release in October, Ryan had been a knight for Halloween, his wheelchair decorated like a chariot. A few weeks later, he was fitted for an artificial leg. The artificial arm will come later.

“He’s just doing great,” his mother says.

The boy who had arrived by helicopter three months earlier walked back into the burn center smiling shyly as he gave a gift to favorite nurse Barbara Rook--a coffee cup bearing his picture and his scrawl: “I love you, Ryan.”

With the media, he proved a boy of few words. He seemed happier sitting with Barbara and the other nurses, watching the magic show.

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Dr. A. Richard Grossman

Age: 62.

Native?: No; born in Miami, now resides in Hidden Valley, Ventura County.

Family: Married to the former Marilyn Katleman. Two sons from a previous marriage, Jeffrey, 33, and Peter, 32.

Passions: Gardening and “getting dirty” on Brookfield Farms, his 63-acre estate.

On his material success: “Remember that old Garrett Morris line on ‘Saturday Night Live’? Breast augmentation been berry, berry good to me.”

On a patient who survived severe burns without blood transfusions: “The fact that he walked out was God’s will. What we did was help push him along.”

On his third marriage: “We’re the same age. We’ve both been married three times. It’s not an amateur performance.”