by John Edward
Meanwhile, Ramey put together a group reading, more or less for Adora’s benefit. “When Ramey called that night, I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard,” Adora told me later. “Ramey has a tendency to be like a huge idea person, and I’m more the one that carries things out. And I just thought she was wacky and affected by the reading she’d had and she wasn’t thinking clearly. I mean, we’re starting this company. How on earth would anyone take us seriously if we’re walking into pitch meetings talking about a show with a guy who talks to dead people? But in five minutes, I went from sitting there with all this crossed-arm body language, to a broken-down sobbing mess just like everybody else. I remember thinking, Okay, how’s this guy doing this? What’s the trick? I said to Ramey, ‘You’re absolutely right. This is a show.’”
Over the next few months, I put on paper how I saw the concept of the show—with a little help from my guides. By the spring of 1999, I had regained my footing and felt I was back in their good graces. I knew I was meant to do a show and that it was going to happen. This may sound a lot like my attitude about “One Last Time”—it was meant to be, so it would be. We know how that turned out. The difference now was a big one: I knew a show would happen, just not when.
Unlike before, I was now at peace with the idea that things would happen in the right place, at the right time, and under the right circumstances. If it happened now, great. If it happened five years from now, fine. I was in no hurry. Ramey and Adora liked that. “A lot of times we’re taking people around and they feel they need to be a star right this minute,” she said. I told her I didn’t feel I needed to be a star this minute, the next minute, the next day, or ever. In fact, I didn’t want to be a star. I realized having a TV show would raise my visibility a few notches, but I could care less about being recognized. I only cared if the work was. Adora asked me if I was ready for this. If the show happened, would I be able to handle the demands of doing spiritual work in the pressure cooker of the television industry? Would I be able to handle the grueling schedule, not to mention the stress that was sure to come from collaborating very closely with people whose work was entertainment. “You better know what you’d be getting into,” Adora said. “You better have your eyes wide open.”
My working title for the show we were trying to develop was “SoulMates.” I sent Ramey a three-page outline describing it as “a thirty-minute talk show with a humorous, emotional, and real-life inspirational edge.” The heart of the show would be readings. A few people from the audience would get picked to come up on the stage and be read, and we could do follow-ups with them to find out about the information that came through—what made sense and what didn’t, maybe a little personal history so the viewers would get to know the people whose spirits came through. There would also be celebrities—if we could get them to come on. This part didn’t mean a lot to me, but my guides were telling me that it would be a necessary ingredient of a successful show. They could discuss their beliefs and experiences, and maybe even tape a reading. We would give them control over what we aired. And since this would be a talk show of sorts, we could offer the standard inducement: They could come on and talk about their latest projects. I had a bunch of other ideas: interviews with authors of spiritual books, guest psychics, segments on mystical places, “everyday angels—ordinary people doing extraordinary things for others”—and “The Miracle Segment,” a discussion of historical and modernday miracles.
I was getting comfortable with the idea of having a television show, if not with actually doing one. At least not alone. My idea was to have a co-host, mainly so I wouldn’t have to do all the TV stuff that I knew wouldn’t come naturally and might even block the concentration I needed to do my readings. In fact, the way I saw it was that I should be the co-host—a psychic sidekick to someone else who could draw off at least half of the attention, if not more. I could come out, do the readings, and leave. My partner would do all the “we’ll be right backs” and “coming up nexts,” and do some commentary and banter to keep it moving and make it fun.
I had a few people in mind, but my first choice was Todd Pettengill, the radio comic from WPLJ in New York whom I’d worked closely with for three years. Todd had been one of my earliest patrons on radio and had helped force me to branch out. On the radio or at events, he was the comic relief between readings, specializing in making fun of stupid things I said trying to interpret information. His mock-the-medium routine was a big hit at the World Hunger Year benefit we did at Town Hall in New York. Most of the letters I got afterward were about how hilarious Todd was. I thought our chemistry would be great on TV, his humor playing off the emotions of the readings. What I didn’t want was a love-peace-New Age show that would have narrow appeal. “We will be careful not to be too psychic, spiritual, or religious,” I wrote in my proposal to Ramey. “We will want this to appeal to the general public.”
Ramey, Adora, and I talked about the project a lot over those months, fully aware that we were proposing a very rare thing in the TV business: a show completely without precedent. There were no models. We were making it up. To Ramey, this was incredibly liberating, if also a little bit frightening. As Adora had suggested after falling out of her chair laughing when Ramey first told her about it, starting up a company with such a weird idea was either brave and shrewd . . . or really, really stupid.
Eventually Ramey and Adora put together an eight-page proposal—a treatment, they called it—that jettisoned most of my secondary ideas and focused the show on the stories of ordinary people and the loved ones they reconnected with. Ramey wanted to stay close to her initial instinct—to build the show around the kind of powerful experience she’d had in the hotel room in October. She liked the idea of a co-host—it was too soon to suggest Todd or anybody else—but got rid of the title I’d come up with. She put a cover page on her proposal that said, for lack of anything better, “The John Edward Show.” Boy, did that look weird on paper. I’m, like, Ed Sullivan.
The first page was the hype. “John Edward is an internationally acclaimed psychic medium with a huge following. . . . The Larry King switchboard was blown out for hours. . . . John recently appeared on The Howard Stern Show.”
Page 2: movie-ad quotes from the stars. “You’re amazing! This is awesome!”—Roseanne. “That can’t have been a wild guess. That can’t have been a wild guess!”—Larry King. Then a detailed description of a typical show: “Segment Four: With the co-host roaming the audience, John gives readings to audience members. ‘Who ate at MacDonald’s? Anyone get food to go at McDonald’s?’ One woman finally raises her hand. ‘My name is Marion MacDonald.’ ‘Close enough. Has your husband passed?’ This is the money segment. This is why people tune in. In this segment, we have emotion, hope and closure.”
This being TV, Ramey and Adora knew they would be trying to sell this concept to men and women who would want to know exactly where all this emotion, hope, and closure would be coming from, and how we were going to make sure every episode had it. These were people who lived in a scripted, controlled, neatly packaged world. Ramey and Adora were of this world themselves, so they knew as well as anyone that “Reality TV” was an oxymoron. They didn’t think there would be a lot of interest in doing this show if it meant filling an audience with random people and then hoping some of them had interesting dead friends and relatives, and that they happened to be the ones who got read. You’re leaving this all up to chance? Thanks for coming in.
So they came up with a list of ideas to deal with that guaranteed issue before it even came up. Idea: “A group of friends come together to hear from their mutual friend who has died of AIDS. He cut them off toward the end of his life.” Idea: “Parents of a young man killed in the TWA Flight 800 crash have come to find a reason why their son had to die.” I didn’t like the sound of this. Leaving it up to chance was exactly what I’d been doing for fifteen years, and it seemed to work out fine. Ramey assured me that this was just pitch stuff, things you had to say just to get them t
o let you in the door. It occurred to me that all those years I’d spent in front of the tube hadn’t given me a clue to what was behind it. It’s like what they say about how sausage is made—you don’t want to know.
Ramey gave the whole pitch a catchy tag line—“Tune into a miracle with John Edward, the next dimension of talk”—and pronounced us ready for daytime. She said she would be sending out a package to half a dozen major syndicators, after which I would have to go out to L.A. to meet with the ones that were interested in making a pilot. Syndicators? I asked. Ramey explained that these were companies, or arms of companies, that produce and distribute the scores of daily shows—“strips,” they’re called—that fill most of the television day. Everything from Jerry Springer to Judge Judy to Family Feud to the same episodes of I Love Lucy that have been running for forty years. I’d heard of the bigger ones like Paramount and Columbia Tri-Star, whose logo I’d seen at the end of a thousand midnight reruns. But the other ones, Buena Vista, Studios USA, Twentieth Television, Telepictures, were names that meant nothing to me. “Those are the big shops to go to,” Ramey explained. “After that you’re going to the smaller syndicators, and we really don’t want to do that.”
First Ramey and Adora went around and talked to development executives without me. They wanted to get the yeah-sure-he-talks-to-dead-people stuff out of the way. Without me there, the programmers could say anything they wanted, and a number of them made the most of that opportunity. This was fine with me. The less time I had to spend in L.A., the better. I didn’t like the energy of the place, and although I loved Ramey and adored Adora, I didn’t like the vibe I got from a lot of people out there. Besides, as a nervous flyer, I could do without a lot of cross-country flights. So Ramey and Adora knew they were not going to get me out there every time some TV executive picked up the phone.
Which not all of them did. Or if they did, it was to laugh in Ramey’s ear, just as Adora had predicted. “A couple of people didn’t even want to let us in the door, and there were a couple that let us in, but only for curiosity’s sake,” Adora told me, but only much later, when it didn’t matter. At the time, both she and Ramey were all sunshine and optimism. I was the dark cloud. All of this—syndicators, strips, treatments, pilots—was mysterious and complicated to me. It was hard to imagine how you got from here to there. Not a bad time to remember my grandmother’s favorite saying: “Don’t look at how far you have to go; look at how far you’ve already come.”
Ramey narrowed down the list of people I should meet, and I flew out and started “taking” meetings. In L.A., you don’t have meetings or go to meetings. You take them. It must have something to do with the aggressive nature of Hollywood. I’m not sure what you do with meetings after you’ve taken them. Anyway, we took a whole handful. Every time I turned around, I was shaking hands with another vice president of development. There must have been more than twenty meetings over the course of those months—big groups of TV people around conference tables, all of them grilling me as I’m sure they never had anyone who had sat at that table before me. And of course, with varying degrees of tact, everyone wanted me to, you know, “do it.”
Ever since I was a teenager, people have been pointing their six-shooters at my feet: “Dance!” I was at a book signing in San Francisco once and a woman rushed over to me, screaming, “John Edward! Do it! Do it! Is my mother here?” So proving it has long been pretty much a daily activity for me, a test that’s never over. I had been through a version of the let’s-see-whatcha-got routine three years before, when I’d made the rounds of New York publishers, hoping that when I told an editor that her father was showing me all kinds of fishing stuff and she told me he was a professor of fisheries, she would then reach into her drawer and pull out a contract. The first part of that sentence happened. Not the last part.
Performing for television executives raised the stakes, but didn’t change what it was. Jump through this hoop like a big wet seal and I’ll pull a pilot deal from the bucket and toss it in your mouth. Still, even if that was my feeling on a purely personal, selfesteem level, I couldn’t really fault anybody for cross-examining me and for wanting a personal experience before even considering what we were proposing. After all, book publishers wanted to make sure I was real, and how big a risk were they taking? I would hardly be the first medium to publish a book. But I would be the first one to have a syndicated television show, if any one of these people decided to pull the trigger on this idea of thirty minutes of daily television “full of emotion, humor and enlightenment.”
I knew Ramey had her work cut out for her, so I told her I would do whatever I could to make her job easier. “If you need me to do strategic readings, I will,” I said. All I asked for was a little dignity. I wouldn’t read anybody during an introductory meeting, or as a prerequisite for a meeting. If they were truly interested in the show, we would arrange something later.
But Ramey and Adora were very protective and said I didn’t even have to do that. “If somebody says, ‘Hey, show us what you do,’ we will never make you do that,” Adora said. “We’ve made that clear to them. It’s just not fair to put you in that position. You’re not a dog-and-pony show.”
But of course I was. We met with one guy with not an ounce of class—the Hollywood Creep incarnate. He flew into the room without even an attempt at social grace, or consideration that perhaps I was something other than a piece of meat. “Okay, take my secretary, go in another room, and do what you do. Let’s go, I need you to go do this right away.” I just looked at him and concentrated really hard on not saying, “Your mother is coming through, and she thinks you’re an asshole, too.”
Ramey and Adora looked worried—Oh, God, what’s he gonna say?—so I decided to be a good boy and go along. “Fine, fine,” I said, not bothering to hide how infuriated I was. “You want me to do this, fine.” The secretary, who was barely out of her teens, had a major attitude. And I wasn’t exactly in a zone of love and positive energy. A young male who died in an accident came through, but she would not validate it. I couldn’t help myself. I leaned forward and told her, “Do you know that people wait months and sometimes even years for the opportunity that just fell in your lap? I suggest you appreciate it because it is happening, and there’s a reason. And that reason is your friend’s brother.” Then she validated the information, and came out and reported to her boss that I was for real. At which point, he took me into a room with a guest who was in town for a meeting and told me to read him. This person validated some information, but Mr. Hollywood couldn’t be bothered. I stopped, told him I was no longer interested in discussing any project with his company, and walked out. I told Ramey and Adora that no amount of money would get me to work with that guy. Don’t think you need to worry about that, they might have said.
If there had been any more like this guy in L.A., I might have gotten right back on the plane and headed for the nearest radio studio. Fortunately, the others were polite and interested, if skeptical. Adora was impressed, anyway. “You’ve answered these questions a million times, but every time you make it sound like it’s the first time,” she said. Maybe I really could be on TV. I had it down to sound bites. And some people seemed to really get what we were talking about. Not that they were running out of their shoes to sign me up. “They’re all intrigued and they’re all scared,” Ramey summed up over the phone after we’d made the rounds and I was back in New York. “I’m hearing ‘too risky—do you have a judge?’”
TV is an industry that loves a brand-new idea as long as someone else has done it first. Dead Man Talking? You go. No, you go. No, you go. I’m sure they wished I was Judge John. I could walk into the soundstage courtroom wearing robes and carrying sage incense, overrule objections that only I could hear, and give my verdict without having to ask the witnesses any questions. Psychic judge—can’t miss.
While we were waiting to hear back from the two or three studios that seemed interested, something very fortunate happened. During the summer of 1999
, a movie starring Bruce Willis and a remarkable kid named Haley Joel Osment came out, and suddenly everybody in America was saying, “I see dead people.” It was as if Sixth Sense dropped from the sky, and the people we were talking to looked up and went Hmmm. I went on Larry King Live with M. Night Shyamalan, who directed and wrote the film. I don’t know if his movie made the difference, but it didn’t hurt.
The first nibble came from Columbia Tri-Star. Ramey and Adora got all excited when I told them I was seeing a logo with feathers. “Oh, feathers!” Adora said. “The Pegasus in the Tri-Star logo! Okay, it’s going to be Tri-Star!” But it wasn’t. (Maybe I’d gotten my signals crossed. Could feathers have had something to do with Lucky Duck Productions, which was making the HBO documentary at the same time?)
Ramey thought the next best shot was Studios USA, producer and distributor of everything from the Sally-Maury-Jerry trio to Law & Order. She’d had some preliminary but promising conversations with people there. And some interesting things started happening, although they’re really only interesting in retrospect. While Ramey was starting to woo Studios USA, I got a call at my office from a woman named Tahira Bhatti-McClure. She worked in the programming department at the Sci Fi Channel in New York, and one of her jobs was to find new talent and fresh ideas for the network. Tahira told me that her mother-in-law had gone for a private reading after hearing me on WPLJ, and had given Tahira one of my brochures. She wanted to talk to me about the possibility of doing a show for Sci Fi. She thought it was cool that I was so young and, to hear her mother-in-law tell it, someone she as a TV programming developer should meet. I thanked Tahira for calling and asked her to get in touch with Ramey.
Tahira’s call took Ramey by surprise. She thought it was weird that someone from Sci Fi was trying to get in on the proposal. After all, things were starting to heat up with Studios USA—Sci Fi’s sister company at USA Networks. Anyway, she was glad to send Tahira a demo tape and treatment, so long as Tahira understood that we were setting our sights a little higher than a single cable channel. “Got it,” Tahira said. “Of course you’re shopping the syndicators. But don’t forget about us.” Tahira discussed me with her boss, who was interested and wanted to investigate further.