by John Edward
When we later pieced this story together, the timing of things suggested maybe a little string-pulling from the other side, and I don’t mean the West Coast. Here’s what happened: A day or so after Ramey and Tahira talked on the phone, Bonnie Hammer, Tahira’s boss, was at an event at the William Morris Agency in New York. In the course of mingling with her colleagues, Bonnie heard that Studios USA was going after a deal with a young psychic medium from New York. When a major entertainment company is said to be talking to one of us about a syndicated show, it tends to get talked about. And someone like Bonnie Hammer tends to listen. Whatever happens inside the head of the person who runs the Sci Fi Channel when she recognizes something she wants—that’s what seems to have happened to Bonnie. She realized the psychic that Studios USA was pursuing was the same one Tahira had talked to.
First thing next morning, Tahira went to Bonnie’s office—with the tape she’d just gotten from Ramey. They watched it together, and ten minutes later, Tahira was on the phone setting up a meeting. In the meantime, Bonnie and Tahira came out and sat in on a small group reading at the Holiday Inn on Long Island that was practically my home stage. During the reading, there were messages for Bonnie from members of her family that she validated and appreciated. I liked her right away—there was definitely something special about her. She seemed to really get what I was all about, without even knowing much about me.
Ramey flew to New York, and we met in Bonnie’s office on the twentieth floor of USA Network’s New York headquarters on Sixth Avenue. Bonnie had only recently taken over programming at Sci Fi and explained that she was on the hunt for alternative shows that would broaden the channel. “Anything outside of what we know to be true,” is the way she described the genre she was trying to develop. “If it’s speculative, if you can’t quantify it with proof, then it fits. You can’t really prove the afterlife. People either believe it or they don’t believe it. Even if there are all kinds of affirmations and confirmations, in your gut you have to want to believe it.”
Bonnie said later, “Nothing was popping until I saw this piece of tape.” She told me at that first meeting that she wanted to take the next step, and get approval from her boss in L.A. to make a pilot. “I really would love to do something with you,” she said. “I would love to just let you do what you do and just capture it with cameras.”
Despite all the good feelings with Sci Fi, Ramey saw it as a backup. She was going hard for the channel’s big sister. There was a woman at Studios USA named Libby Gill who was as gung-ho as Bonnie, and the exact opposite of the Hollywood Creep. She understood the idea from Day One and became its champion. That wasn’t so easy a thing to be. One of the people Libby worked with came to our first meeting with body language that said “I don’t think so.” He was upfront about not being a believer, and he hammered us hard. “What’s the show?” he asked, like the network guy in that famous Seinfeld episode. Ramey could have told him it was a show about nothing—nothing you’ve ever seen before. But she didn’t want to scare him. So she told him it’s a show like you have seen before—with a twist. “The show is stories,” she said. “It’s human stories. It’s about love and loss and all the things that every talk show is about. Only there’s another dimension.” I walked out of that meeting thinking that was the last we would see of them.
But Ramey thought she had them hooked. The only thing holding them back, it seemed to her, was that they didn’t want to make a commitment based mostly on a tape of me on Leeza and Entertainment Tonight, an eight-page treatment, and some meetings. They needed to see me do it. So she and Adora set up a “showcase” in a fancy room at the Bel Age Hotel and invited about thirty-five people. Half were from the studio; the other were half friends and acquaintances of Ramey and Adora’s who might bring some interesting guests from the spirit world. One of them was a woman who ran an adoption agency and was going to be subletting her office space—Lucille Ball’s office from the fifties—to the Media-Savvy madames. At the Bel Age, I did what I normally do with a group—some readings, some explanation, some stand-up philosophy. The first person I read was the adoption lady. She had lost two babies to crib death. Then I went right to a couple of guys I later found out were two of the biggest executives at Studios USA. And I got pulled over to the development guy who had been so skeptical at our earlier meeting. His father came through, and I got information, which he validated, that a former girlfriend had breast cancer and that he needed to call her.
Afterwards, Ramey was beaming. “You blew them away,” she said. She was sure we’d closed the deal.
Two weeks later, I was getting off a plane in Tucson for the Miraval experiment with Gary Schwartz, when I got a cell-to-cell call from Ramey. “They want the show!” she screamed. “Studios USA! They want the show!”
Silence on my end. “It’s not going to happen,” I said.
“What do you mean it’s not going to happen?”
“I don’t know. Something’s not right. I’m getting that it’s not happening.”
“John, they just called. They want the show. They want to make a deal.”
“No, it’s not going to happen.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that,” Ramey said, crestfallen. “I mean, we already popped the champagne.”
“Sorry. Better put the cork back in the bottle.”
That was on a Friday. On Monday, Ramey called back. Well, about that champagne. It looks like we have to do one more meeting. There was someone new moving into a top job at Studios USA. We would need her support. We had the meeting in New York, and Adora came out thinking we’d sailed through.
“That was great,” she said. “Piece of cake.”
“Are you nuts?” I said. “That went really bad.”
She looked at me like I was insane. “No, it didn’t,” she said. “It went really well.”
“Did we go to the same meeting?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t do what you do.”
“She’s going to pass,” I said.
Adora hoped this was a case of a psychic having an off-day. You read your people, we’ll read ours.
A few days later, the new programming chief at Studios USA turned our green light red. “She thinks it’s too risky for her first project,” Ramey said. “So we’re back to square one.”
Ramey’s call confirmed what I already knew, but it stirred up that old internal dialogue with The Boys. Once again, I had to wonder what the deal was, universally speaking. Why put me through all these meetings and hard work with these big syndication companies if you’re only going to blow me out of the water in the end?
Unlike nine months before, though, I wasn’t about to slip into a funk over this. I allowed myself one bad day, checked back in with my TV-show mantra—Yeah, fine, whatever, if it happens now, it happens now—and just said screw it, not my time. I remembered the lesson of Darth Vader, the lady at the Barnes & Noble in Santa Monica. My Boys had a plan. All I had to do was trust them and watch it happen. This time it was easy to turn the corner and focus on other things. Namely—ironically—One Last Time.
The book was out in paperback, a second chance at life, and this time I was taking some control of the process. A mutual colleague had introduced me to a woman named Debbie Luican, who was the executive director of the San Diego branch of the Learning Annex, a kind of national adult education organization. Debbie worked with the A-list spiritual speakers—Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Sylvia Browne—and agreed to work with me. She was a straight-ahead, no-nonsense type, supportive but very matter-of-fact about my work, as if to say, I’ve spent a lot of time around psychics. You’re not going to impress me. She simply said: “You’ve got a really important message. Stay focused.” I found that incredibly refreshing. It was exactly the kind of unadorned, straight-to-the-point support I needed to hear.
Debbie first organized events in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix, and then, starting in September 1999, a forty-city tour that would last nine months and
help put the book on some regional bestseller lists—although nationally it would remain only a moderate success. But with my new and improved Zenlike attitude, and knowing that at least this time I was doing it my way, I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about numbers.
Having exhausted our possibilities with all the big TV syndication companies, square one for Ramey and Adora was the Sci Fi Network. Ramey called Bonnie Hammer, who was ready to pounce. All she had to do was get the support of her boss, Stephen Chao, president of USA Cable. Stephen had popped in for five minutes at my first meeting with Bonnie earlier in the summer. He joked around—Hey, what am I thinking?—which is his style, and talked about the potential for syndicating the show even if it started on Sci Fi. I didn’t know if he was a believer or not, but as Bonnie says, that wasn’t the point. “His only concern was that he didn’t want to have an imposter, which is very different from does he believe or not believe,” Bonnie said. “The thing that Stephen needed to believe was that we had the real enchilada—that if these things are true, then we have a true representative of what it is.” The other things he wanted to make sure about, of course, were that Bonnie and her team understood what the show would be, and that I could do television.
If I had any concerns about doing the show for a channel with the word fiction in its name, Stephen moved quickly to diffuse that. “That’s the name of the channel,” he had said at that meeting. “And the truth is that to a lot of people this is science fiction. But there are a lot of people who believe it, and they’re going to be watching this channel.”
I had to believe Stephen knew something about breaking new ground in TV. So his support soothed the letdown Ramey felt about not making a deal with a big syndicator. It sounded like we might eventually get there anyway. I flashed back to the psychic billboard I saw on the bus in Central Park five years earlier: The answer is Sci Fi.
The Catch
HERE’S HOW IT WORKS IN TELEVISION: If the programmers at a network like an idea for a show on paper, they order a pilot to see if it translates onto the screen. If they like the pilot enough, they’ll put the show into production for what amounts to a trial run. Usually it’s thirteen weeks of episodes. That’s the extent of the commitment. After that, it has almost nothing to do with whether they like it or not. The only people whose taste counts at that point is the viewers. Ratings.
Bonnie Hammer wanted a pilot in a hurry—six weeks—so we got right down to planning. One good thing about doing the show for Sci Fi was that we were in New York. We had a long list of things that had to be discussed and decided. The format of the show was the big issue, and within that were a million smaller ones. How much of the show would be readings? Who would be read? How many people would be in the audience? How would they be chosen? Would there be celebrity readings? What about a co-host? And then there was an equal number of technical TV questions. What would the set look like? How would it be shot? Would there be any scripted material? And, of course, what was the show going to be called? “SoulMates” was out. Everyone seemed to want my name in the title, but maybe as the second part, as in Something-or-Other with John Edward. One of the names on the list of candidates was “Crossing Over,” and the consensus seemed to be Yeah, okay, that’s fine for now. We’ve got more pressing problems. This was just a pilot. We’d come up with a title eventually.
It dawned on Bonnie that it was a blessing that we were starting at Sci Fi. This was Crossing Over in more ways than one. Nothing like this had ever been attempted in television. So syndicating it from scratch might have been the worst thing we could do. Instead, we could give the show what Ramey called a “soft launch”—a quiet, measured beginning on cable, like opening a Broadway show on the road to get the kinks out. Plus, as Stephen Chao had pointed out, we would be on a channel whose viewers would be predisposed to believing what they were seeing. We could build an audience from there. We could let the show evolve, make our mistakes, figure out what worked and what didn’t—and then, if things went well and Stephen and his boss, the legendary Barry Diller, liked what they saw, we’d have a shot at a wider audience through syndication.
When we first saw how the deal broke—Studios USA backing out, its little sister Sci Fi waiting outside the door, eyes in the keyhole—Ramey wondered if it was all a setup by the parent company to manipulate a deal in their favor. Only later did we realize that this had not been planned. The head of Studios USA really didn’t want to make this her very first project, and the head of Sci Fi really did see it as the perfect show for her up-and-coming channel. “It sort of organically happened that way,” Ramey said. To me, it was happening the way it was supposed to happen. Fatalism was not necessarily the operating philosophy of people who work in the television industry, but Ramey seemed to be enjoying the ride. She wasn’t going to be arguing with The Boys.
Ramey hired a director named Peter Kimball, who had worked on Oprah, and he arranged to borrow and redress the Maury Povich set, a Studios USA show that was shot at the Hotel Pennsylvania, across the street from Madison Square Garden. The first big decision Bonnie made was that I would be on my own. She didn’t like the idea of a co-host, not after she came to the group reading on Long Island. “I want pure John,” she said. Uh-oh. I really didn’t think pure John was such a great idea.
“I’ve never done this before,” I protested. “I’ve never had to talk to a camera.” That wasn’t completely true. I remembered being on a show in Boston once where they asked me to read something from a TelePrompTer. I was bad. Really, really bad. But Bonnie is an awfully persuasive person, especially when she believes in something. Ramey and Adora said don’t worry, you’ll be fine. “If you really can’t do it, we’ll have to revisit it and find another way of doing it. Maybe with voiceovers.” In the back of my mind, I was thinking that this was just the pilot. Bonnie will let me have a co-host if and when we do the real show. She’ll see how bad I am.
For now, my attitude about the whole thing was that all I knew about television was how to work the remote. Bonnie and Ramey were the TV people, and it would be up to them to figure out how to turn this idea we had been talking about for a year into something that Stephen Chao could pop into his VCR in L.A. and see what he needed to see to call up Bonnie in New York and say, “Let’s do it.” As long as they didn’t interfere with my work, I wouldn’t interfere with theirs.
Interference turned out to be a matter of interpretation. We taped the pilot on a Friday and Saturday in early December, and during one session on stage. I read a family for whom a spirit came through very forcefully. “It’s like boom, boom, and he falls,” I told them. Then I was shown the face of a friend of Sandra’s and mine—a flight attendant for TWA. “Did he pass in a crash?” I asked. “It’s Flight 800, isn’t it.” It was. Then, awhile later, I was pulled over to a woman in the audience. “You went to Mexico,” I said. Yes. “There was a night when people got really smashed. Someone ended up face down in the sand.” Yes. “Your sister wants you to know she saw the whole thing. . . . Wait a minute, did she die in a plane crash, too?” There were several more families that had lost relatives in the explosion of the New York-to-Paris TWA Flight 800 off the south shore of Long Island in 1996.
Knowing that our opportunities to gather strong material for the pilot would be limited, Ramey thought bringing in families of the TWA victims was a prudent idea. But I was uncomfortable with it, mostly because it represented a violation of one of my most basic guiding principles. These people no doubt came in expecting, or at least hoping, that I would connect with the person they lost in the accident. If I was preaching the gospel of “check your expectations at the door,” it would be hypocritical of me to be actually raising those expectations myself.
Ramey had mentioned during the planning stages that she might try to come up with some “themes” for the pilot. I wasn’t wild about the idea, but wanted to let her do her thing and didn’t think too much about it. But now that I had experienced it, I felt more than ever that this had to be a
show that essentially produced itself. It couldn’t be like a regular talk show where most of the work happened before an inch of tape was shot: producers wracking their brains for fresh ideas; hitting the phones to book the right guests; researching the topic to prep the star; and then scripting, editing, and packaging the show to exploit that fresh idea to the max.
That couldn’t be the process in Crossing Over, or whatever we were calling this. In this show, ideas would be what we got after we taped. Booking only needed to mean opening the doors to the studio and getting everybody in a seat. The real guests would announce themselves, in their way, at their time. And we couldn’t in any way think of the people who came to the show as vehicles brought in for our use. So Ramey had to abandon all the other ideas that were apparently being discussed: Families of victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. People with organ transplants who wanted to connect with their donors. And “Saturday Night Dead”—bringing in the families and friends of Gilda Radner, Phil Hartman, and other departed Saturday Night Live stars.
On those two days in December, we shot hours and hours of tape, trying different approaches to see what worked best. Ramey brought in an audience of about a hundred, and others much smaller. They tried some different lighting and camera positions, some different ways of introducing and closing the show. And of course there was the matter of my aura. I’m not speaking universally here. I’m speaking of my clothes. Did they want me in a suit or a collarless skintight shirt? Glasses or contacts? Did they want a cool medium for the cool medium? Or a regular guy for the folks in Cincinnati? My grandmother would have been so pleased—all these people concerned about the way I presented myself. I just did what they told me, wore the clothes they handed me, spoke the words they wrote for me, then did what I do. I was determined to ignore all the TV stuff and concentrate on not changing anything about the work. Bonnie just wanted to “capture it with cameras.” I just had to make sure I wasn’t captured by the cameras.