Dr Robert Kyle, who died in September aged 98, was the Mayo Clinic doctor who identified Michael York’s rare illness. The actor’s wife had brought the case to him.
Patricia McCallum is a photographer and author who has been married to the actor Michael York, star of Cabaret and Logan’s Run, since 1968. In 2012, after about three years of wrong diagnoses, she got in touch with Dr Robert Kyle, a blood specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He worked out that her husband had amyloidosis, a rare disease in which abnormal proteins build up in the organs.
Kyle died on 2 September. He had worked at Mayo from 1961 until he fully retired at 95 in 2023, and the International Myeloma Foundation called him the father of myeloma. Headline Magazine could find no public comment from the couple on his death.
Michael York’s wife was born Patricia Watson in Jamaica, the daughter of an English diplomat. As a teenager she eloped with an American military pilot, Roy Alwood McCallum, and the marriage was brief. Their son, Rick McCallum, was born in Heidelberg in 1954 and went on to produce the Star Wars prequels. She has worked as Pat York since marrying Michael, but Getty Images captions from premieres and galas between the 1980s and the 2010s name her as Patricia McCallum.
| At a glance | |
|---|---|
| Professional name | Pat York |
| Born | Patricia Watson, in Jamaica. Her year of birth has not been published |
| Work | Photographer and author, formerly travel editor at Glamour |
| Married | Michael York, 27 March 1968, at Kensington Register Office in London |
| Children | Rick McCallum, born 1954, from her first marriage. She and Michael have no children together |
| Home | Charter House, Rochester, Minnesota, since 2022 |
| Michael York’s illness | AL amyloidosis, confirmed at Mayo in 2012, with stem cell transplants in 2012 and 2018 |
Table of Contents
How Michael York’s amyloidosis was found
The first sign was dark circles under Michael’s eyes, which appeared around 2008. He hid them with make-up at first, but they grew worse and turned purple, and he took to wearing dark glasses in public.
For Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, the couple stayed in Washington with a friend, the biologist William Haseltine. Haseltine asked him what the hell was wrong with his eyes, Michael told The Guardian in 2013. Back in Los Angeles, an eye specialist diagnosed Fabry disease, an inherited disorder. Michael later called it “the first of many” wrong diagnoses.
He felt worse still on a lecture cruise from Dubai, and two weeks later Pat found him unconscious on the floor. Doctors at Cedars-Sinai, a Los Angeles hospital, diagnosed multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, and put him on chemotherapy. The treatment left him feeling worse, and his voice kept deteriorating.
Pat was worried he had been misdiagnosed. “I didn’t know for sure. But I didn’t feel confident,” she told Rochester Magazine, a local title, in 2023. The Mayo Clinic’s own account of the case says she kept pushing for answers.
A doctor in Los Angeles gave her Kyle’s number. By then Kyle no longer saw patients, but he still worked at Mayo as a consultant. Early in his career he had gone through every amyloidosis case in the clinic’s records and described one form of it, primary systemic amyloidosis.
The two talked by phone and emailed, and Kyle asked for Michael’s blood and urine test results. When he asked what Michael’s symptoms were, Pat told him everything, including the purple marks around her husband’s eyes. “You know, I don’t think he’s got multiple myeloma,” Kyle said, according to Pat. “I think he’s got amyloidosis.”
Michael has described his type, AL amyloidosis, as the “dominant” form of the disease. It is hard to recognise because its symptoms vary from patient to patient, and when The Guardian covered his case in 2013, only 500 to 600 cases were diagnosed in the UK each year.
Tests at Mayo confirmed Kyle’s view. Michael had a stem cell transplant there on 12 July 2012, using his own stem cells, and later called it his “second birthday”. He had a scan at London’s Royal Free Hospital in September 2013, at the time the only hospital offering a scan that could locate all the amyloid deposits in the body, and it showed most of his had gone. Six years after the first transplant, he needed a second.
Michael told The Lady in 2013 that during his illness Pat had been “like a lioness” who had all the questions for the doctors.
“The doctors here [at Mayo] saved my life. But she did, too, not taking no for an answer and also keeping a positive frame of mind.”
Michael York, in a Heritage Auctions release, 2021
How a Glamour assignment led to marriage
Pat started out in the fashion department of Vogue in New York and moved to Glamour as travel editor. On a trip with the photographer David Bailey she bought a Nikon in Japan, and he gave her lessons every evening. Once her art directors saw the results, they stopped sending a photographer with her.
Glamour then sent her to London in spring 1967 to photograph Michael, whose first two films had just come out in New York. He had been told a Pat McCallum was coming. “I was expecting this Irishman,” he told The Lady. “But I opened the door, and there’s this beautiful blonde.” He did not notice her camera bag and made her a cup of tea.
Each was engaged to someone else at the time. Pat told her fiancé, the magazine publisher S.I. Newhouse, that she was taking a “sabbatical”, and both engagements ended. That autumn she went with Michael to India, where he was filming The Guru, and on Valentine’s Day 1968 he proposed on Juhu Beach in Bombay, now Mumbai.
A couple of weeks later she was dangerously ill. Pills a London specialist had given her to keep her well in India had set off an allergy to sulphur. Michael credits a visiting surgeon with saving her life and says he more or less carried her back to England, where they married at Kensington Register Office on 27 March 1968, his 26th birthday.
Her photographs and books
Her pictures from the 1960s include a shot of Jane Fonda cooking at a stove in her chain bikini costume on the set of Barbarella. After the wedding she kept working, sometimes on the sets of Michael’s films, and London’s National Portrait Gallery holds a portrait she took of him in 1985. Museums that have shown her work include the Marble Palace of the Russian State Museum in St Petersburg and the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany.
After the illness in India, she wrote in 2009, she turned to homeopathic remedies and avoided conventional medicine as much as she could, though she believed the two should work together and that there were heroes in both fields. Her cadaver photographs began in the late 1990s, while she was researching a book about doctors who combined the two. One of them, the chiropractic neurologist Dr Mark Pick, taught dissection, and she took pictures in his lab and once performed a dissection herself under his guidance. The prints spread across the 17th-century oak dining table at home, which was also her workspace, and Michael had to clear a space to eat. He has called his first reaction “visual cowardice”, but he came round to the work.
She has published four books:
- Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Gallimard, 1981), photographs from the French television film of Michel Tournier’s novel, with Michael as Robinson Crusoe
- Going Strong (Arcade, 1991), portraits and interviews with people aged 75 to 104 who were still working, inspired partly by her grandmother
- Pat York: Covered-Uncovered (Galerie Gmurzynska, 2004), which puts her celebrity portraits alongside the cadaver photographs and pictures of people posing nude at work, among them the couple’s plumber
- Fame and Frame (teNeues, 2008), portraits from 40 years of her career
A fifth, a collection of people she photographed laughing, was in progress in 2024.
Life in Rochester
In 2022 the couple sold the Hollywood Hills house they had owned since 1976 and made Rochester their permanent home. They live in a fourth-floor apartment at Charter House, a retirement community connected to the Mayo Clinic’s downtown campus. The house sold in half an hour, Pat told the city’s local paper, the Post Bulletin, and neither of them regretted the move. “I wanted Michael to get better,” she said.
Two years after the move, Michael was doing voice work for films and seeing Dr Morie Gertz and Dr Angela Dispenzieri at Mayo for regular check-ups on his amyloidosis. Pat had 26 of her photographs on show at the Rochester Art Center. “Michael thinks I am working too hard all of the time,” she told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “I just think it’s necessary.”
Michael is now 84, and the couple have been married for 58 years. Pat told ABC 6 News, a local TV station, in 2024 that they had been apart only once in their marriage, for a week, when Michael was filming in Russia and she had to go back to Los Angeles for an opening of her own.
