Dr. Gerald S. Levey was a funny guy — so much so that he considered abandoning his plans to be a physician during his senior year at Cornell University, when he met and fell in love with fellow classmate Barbara Cohen.
“Jerry had a great sense of humor. He loved telling jokes,” said his longtime friend and colleague Dr. Alan G. Robinson, of Henrico, Va. “He told Barbara he was either going to be a stand-up comedian or a physician.”
Luckily for the world, Dr. Levey chose the latter.
He turned out to be a brilliant and visionary leader who transformed academic health centers at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, Los Angeles, while raising billions of dollars — yes, with a “B” — for research and state-of-the-art facilities, like the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.
Dr. Levey died June 25 at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 84.
As chair of medicine at the Pitt School of Medicine from 1979 to 1991, Dr. Levey oversaw a mammoth and much-needed reorganization of operations and finances at the struggling medical school.
He recruited distinguished faculty and department chiefs, implemented a physician practice plan and had the department back in the black within three years, according to news reports at the time.
In 1983, Dr. Levey was among the founders of what is now known as UPMC, a health system that has grown to include more than a dozen hospitals and hundreds of cancer treatment centers, rehabilitation and outpatient clinics and doctors’ offices.
The son of a Ukrainian immigrant, Dr. Levey grew up in Jersey City, N.J., where he knew from a very early age that he wanted to become a doctor, like his pediatrician.
“He made house calls, set my broken nose, stitched a nearly severed finger and fixed a fractured collarbone at our kitchen table,” Dr. Levey recalled in a Pitt alumni newsletter in 2010. “I was absolutely in awe of him.”
Dr. Levey loved spending summers at the Jersey Shore, where he became a lifeguard as a teen, he told the Lost Angeles Times in 1996. He saved more than one swimmer from the strong undertow and once had to politely enforce the dress code by asking a nude woman from California to put some clothes on.
“Let’s just say he was young and embarrassed and she was nude,” his sister Paula Westerman, of Redbank, N.J., recalled in the 1996 profile. “That, I believe, was his first experience with Californians.”
When Dr. Levey was 18, his father died of a heart attack and his mother found work as a secretary — a modest job that paid for her son’s college and medical school education.
After graduating two years early from high school, Dr. Levey enrolled at Cornell, where he met Ms. Cohen, who sat next to him in a folk music class.
It was a case, the doctor said in the Times story, “of assigned seating — and love at first sight.”
The couple married in 1961. Barbara Levey was the only woman in her class of 120 medical students at the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University in Syracuse.
A physician, she went on to serve as an associate dean and director of admissions at the Pitt School of Medicine, then worked as assistant vice chancellor for biomedical affairs at UCLA. She died in 2019.
Theirs was a love story, said their daughter Robin Levey Burkhardt, of Van Nuys, Calif.
“It was one of the truly great loves of our time,” said Ms. Levey Burkhardt, recalling a 50th anniversary necklace her father bought her mother to commemorate their first date.
“She never took it off. She really cherished that,” she said.
Dr. Levey’s long and fruitful relationship with Dr. Robinson began more than 40 years ago.
“I met him when he came to Pitt in 1979. At the time, I was the division chief of endocrinology and metabolism in the department of medicine. We agreed in a division chief meeting that we should all resign and let Jerry appoint whoever he wanted.
“Well, I was the only one who ever resigned,” he said, laughing. “Thankfully, he reappointed me and he asked me to be vice chair of medicine a couple years later. He became a very, very good friend of mine.”
Dr. Levey’s open-door policy and uncanny memory endeared him to colleagues and students alike, his friend said.
“He was very kind to people, and he knew everybody — every faculty member’s name, and there were hundreds of them,” Dr. Robinson said. “He remembered all of the residents and interns, even years later.
“ At the end of the year, he had a banquet for graduating students, and every year he wrote a poem, and he named every resident in the poem with some reference or specific event that he remembered.”
Dr. Levey shocked his colleagues in 1991 when he accepted an industry position — senior vice president of medical and scientific affairs at the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. in New Jersey.
“He and I had a very special relationship. I got to know him so well — when he left Pittsburgh, I was really disappointed,” Dr. Robinson said. “I thought he was leaving academic medicine and he was very skilled.”
Three years later, Dr. Levey was tapped by UCLA to head the newly merged roles of medical school dean and provost for medical sciences.
He never forgot the initial contact from UCLA officials in the fall of 1994, characterizing it as “the call I’d been waiting for all of my career,” the Times reported in 1996.
“After he had been there a little while, Jerry called me up and said, ‘Alan, I need some help out here. Would you consider moving to UCLA?’” said Dr. Robinson, who joined his friend on the West Coast as executive associate dean of the UCLA medical school.
At the time, the medical center at UCLA was mired in its own financial woes, including the need to build a new center after the 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged the facility.
Dr. Levey embraced the challenge, raising $2.52 billion and overseeing construction of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, which opened in 2008.
“Jerry told me that he expected me to run the medical school,” Dr. Robinson said. “We were together a lot — he was entertaining Hollywood luminaries and spent most of his time raising money. “I had two tuxedos, so I was sure I always had one clean.”
Dr. Levey courted relationships with several major donors and earned respect as a caring and decisive leader.
“He was a master at fundraising, and he was just kind to people,” Dr. Robinson said. “Jerry didn’t hesitate to make decisions.”
Dr. Levey retired in 2010 and authored two books, “Never Be Afraid to Do the Right Thing” and “A Gift for the Asking,” and he stayed in touch with his old friend.
“I went to see him every Wednesday, and later we FaceTimed every week,” Dr. Robinson said.
A devoted grandfather to his three grandchildren, skilled gardener and avid sports fan, Dr. Levey remained a lifelong fan of the New York Rangers hockey team.
He never forgot where he came from or what he was working for, his children said.
“He did so many enormous things and his accomplishments were many, but everything he did boiled down to the individual experience in the medical world,” his daughter said.
“No matter what he had going on in his life — and he had a couple of really huge jobs in his time — if you were a friend, a family member, or anybody that he knew and you needed anything, he would drop whatever he was doing for you,” said his son John Levey, of Yardley, Pa., Bucks County. “He was never too big for the moment. He always valued people first.”
In addition to his two children and his sister, Dr. Levey is survived by and three grandchildren.
Memorial donations are suggested to UCLA’s Parkinson’s Disease Research Fund at https://giving.ucla.edu.
Janice Crompton: jcrompton@post-gazette.com.
First Published: July 26, 2021, 9:42 a.m.
Updated: July 26, 2021, 9:44 a.m.