by John Edward
Spirits have never been known to wait for me to be ready, and they weren’t impressed in the least that this was TV, where you start when the director says so. “Does anyone have someone who was murdered?” I asked the second I reached the stage for one session, having waited in the wings with this poor soul practically pushing me out there himself. “This is somebody who was stabbed. It was a brutal murder.”
A man in the back row called out. “My brother Vincent was stabbed. Stabbed seventeen times.”
“Did someone in the family have to identify him?”
“My mother and my sister.”
“Mom is still here?”
“No, she passed.”
“Okay, your mom is coming through. She’s with your brother.”
With that, the man in the audience tightened his lips, obviously trying to stay in control.
“Your brother walked into this,” I said. “That’s how it’s being shown. Are you aware of that?”
“It was mistaken identity,” he said. “He was mistaken for stealing something earlier in the day, but he didn’t do it. It was over a radio.”
“That’s the way he’s coming through. He’s not taking any responsibility for this. He didn’t do anything to bring this on. Do you have his blue hat?”
“Yes.” Now the man was quivering.
“He’s telling me . . . are you not going to computer class?”
“No,” he said, looking taken aback.
“Why not?”
“Don’t like it,” he retorted defensively.
“He’s telling me you should do that. It’s supposed to be good for your career.”
The man rolled his eyes with annoyance, a gesture that seemed to speak volumes about his relationship with his brother.
“He’s making me feel like it’s hard to get up in the morning. He’s telling me there are so many opportunities in front of you and you’re not taking them. It’s like he’s saying get over this and move forward. This is very important to do this.”
The reason I am not naming this person is that he’s been exposed enough. It turned out he worked in one of the back-office departments for Sci Fi and just happened to come by. I’m not even sure he knew what the pilot was for. But a tight shot of him at his most emotional and vulnerable later wound up being used not only for the pilot, but by a number of entertainment shows when they did stories about our show. So I want to protect his privacy now.
After two days of shooting, Ramey had the pilot edited and packaged. The name of the show? Crossing Over with John Edward. Nobody ever got around to revisiting the title, and it just sort of stuck. I liked the pilot. It was compelling but restrained, not overdone. But Bonnie thought it needed to be faster, more polished, to get it past her bosses in California. “You do a pilot for one reason,” Ramey explained to me. “That’s to get a green light. Once we get that, then you can move the show forward the way you want. But this is all about getting approval.” So we were really only making this pilot for the one or two people who had the power to say yes or no. “We have to think of their sensibilities,” Ramey said.
Ramey brought a box of videotapes home to L.A. and delivered them to Jean Wiegman, an experienced producer and editor who recut the pilot with an editing room full of young, fast video editors. The content of the new version wasn’t a lot different from the first one, but the opening was glitzier and the segues between segments were New York-fast. A lot of rapid-fire cuts of the best moments from the upcoming segment, with hip Sci Fi music and glib one-liners—“You can argue with the living, but the dead get the final word”—laid over it. There was a celebrity reading with actress Kari Wuhrer, the star of Sliders, a Sci Fi show about a parallel universe.
My own parallel universe was now in the hands of the lords of L.A. Although Ramey had delivered the pilot quickly, there was no immediate reply from the network. I wasn’t privy, of course, to the discussions between Bonnie and the people above her—and I don’t mean parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles—but I’ve since learned they had to do with making sure there really was a television show here, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Closure. We were looking for some of that ourselves.
In January, Bonnie asked me to come to Los Angeles and appear at the annual conference of the Television Critics Association. This is where the network bigwigs, producers, and stars get up in front of writers from newspapers and magazines and talk about their upcoming shows and the state of their networks. Bonnie wanted me to get up in front of them, introduce myself, and talk about Crossing Over. That the show hadn’t been approved yet was apparently a minor detail. So I went out on the stage by myself—as opposed to the panel discussions they usually had—and just talked about myself and the show, and then took questions. Then they showed a highlight reel on a large rear-projection screen.
As I walked out of the room, I saw that I was being followed by a group of people, and suddenly I was completely surrounded by about thirty journalists throwing questions at me and asking for readings. “Is Stephen seeing this?” Bonnie asked Ramey. “He’s watching,” Ramey said.
Ramey thought this was why Bonnie wanted me out here. “She’s very smart,” Ramey said later. “Bonnie knew that once you were presented it would give her a lot more heat. And Stephen let her do it. I’m sure he wanted to see, too. I think he intended to make this happen all along, but he just needed a little reaffirming. And he got it. Here were all these jaded TV critics, and they couldn’t get close enough.”
USA Networks made it official a few weeks later, announcing that Crossing Over would begin production in May and be on the air by summer. It would be on nightly at eleven o’clock, Sunday through Thursday, on the Sci Fi Channel. For thirteen weeks, anyway.
For Ramey, it was a bittersweet moment. It had never been her intention to run the show, only to develop and sell it and get it launched. So now that she and Adora had done what they’d set out to do, they would be returning to their other projects and turning their baby over to adoptive parents. From the beginning, our arrangement had a natural ending built into it. I wasn’t going to move to Los Angeles to do the show, and they weren’t going to move to New York. The funny thing about it was that this was news to me. We had never actually discussed what would happen if the pilot was picked up, so I had just assumed that Media-Savvy would be the production company, and Ramey and Adora would stay put as my TV spirit guides—my Girls. Maybe that’s what Mary Jo McCabe, the psychic in Baton Rouge, was sensing when she said she detected a new female energy among my guides.
Ramey and Adora would have loved to be able to be there when the show began to crawl and then take its first wobbly steps. But they had been tied down by the daily grind of syndicated television for twenty years. It wouldn’t make sense for them to jump right back in, no matter how exciting and innovative the show was, and no matter how emotionally invested in it they were. They would remain attached to the show as “executive consultants,” but their final job—and they knew it was a crucial one—would be to make sure they put in place a production team they trusted, people they knew I would be comfortable with. Ramey and Adora had no fears at all about Bonnie Hammer; they told me I couldn’t be in better hands. But Bonnie wouldn’t be the only one I would be dealing with at the corporate level. And she wouldn’t be producing the show. She agreed with the Media-Savvys that it was vital to make sure the key people were not even remotely cynical about the material. This couldn’t be just another gig to them.
A few months earlier, when Ramey was looking for someone to direct the pilot, she had checked with Richard Lawrence, her agent, and he had recommended a New York-based director named Dana Calderwood. Ramey met Dana at her hotel, and both of them being extremely sweet souls, they clicked right away. Dana was very open to the subject matter. Although he didn’t look or act particularly New Age-y, he was fond of noting that he and his wife had been married by a channeler in California (even if the channeler was a former TV executive). Dana was so eager to do the pil
ot that he tried to wiggle out of a commitment he’d made to go to Florida the same week to direct Double Dare 2000 for Nickelodeon. He couldn’t get out of it, and Ramey found somebody else. But now that the show was a go, she hoped he was available for more than a couple of days’ work. Dana was a great director, with a solid list of credits and an Emmy nomination. He directed Conan O’Brien’s late night show for its first two years, specials for CBS, and shows for Nickelodeon. He was also one of the few directors based in New York. Most important, he got the show. She urged Bonnie to call him.
Bonnie did call Dana, along with a few other directors and producers. Among them was Shirley Abraham, an experienced producer with a no-nonsense yet maternal style and a talent for assembling a solid staff. What Bonnie didn’t know was that Dana and Shirley were partners. They and a third associate, Charles Nordlander, a writer-producer, had a company called Glow in the Dark Productions. Bonnie was talking to other people, but she liked the Glow in the Dark threesome and wanted to see what kind of chemistry we might have.
Dana, Shirley, and Charles piled into a car and drove out to Long Island for a meeting in my office above the hair salon on Jericho Turnpike. Like just about everyone else I had been involved with over the past couple of years, they were about fifteen years older than I was—smart, experienced professionals in their mid-forties trying to find a way to converge their world with mine. We spent two hours talking out the show as if the treatment had never been written and the pilot never shot. They needed to wrap their brains around what the show would be, how they could blend my concept with Bonnie’s vision and their own ideas.
The first thing that was clear was that all three were intrigued and excited by the prospect of working on something so out of the mold. Having spent years in the trenches of the conventional, they thought this could be groundbreaking television, not a phrase they used lightly. I refer to people who have no experience with spiritual subjects as being “green.” The Glow in the Dark producers were not that. All of them had at least some degree of belief and experience with the idea of the survival of the soul and after-death communication. What they needed to do was translate that to the tube. They needed to know who I was as a person and what I wanted to accomplish as a medium. What was the message of the show? Not a question often asked in television. And by the way, that question and a thousand others had to be answered very quickly. Sci Fi wanted the show up and running in less than three months.
I had never thought about what goes into the making of a TV show, but it wasn’t exactly point-and-shoot. Not only would the producers have to hire more producers and a crew, but they would have to create a format and get it approved, find a studio, and design and build a set. And they would have to turn me into a TV personality. You know how I was pretty much assuming they’d give me my co-host so I could just come out and do readings? Not happening—Bonnie still wanted pure John. Shit. Didn’t she know it wasn’t so long ago that being asked to go on a radio show was enough to make me nauseous? It’s not how far we have to go; it’s how far we’ve come. Bonnie was adamant—“obnoxiously insistent,” is how she later put it. “You don’t need a crutch.”
So that was that. My only crutches would be the people producing the show. I liked the guys from Glow in the Dark, and so did Bonnie, and so did Ramey and Adora. So Dana Calderwood, Shirley Abraham, and Charles Nordlander became the first three members of the production team of Crossing Over with John Edward and No Co-Host.
Right after that, the new producers went on a recruiting binge. The first person Dana called was a producer he had worked with at a show called Fox After Breakfast. The guy’s name was Paul Shavelson, and Dana said he was incredibly smart and creative and funny. His name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Dana said Fox After Breakfast didn’t last very long, but it was preceded by a cable version called Breakfast Time, a wild, free-form show—the complete opposite of Today and the other network morning shows—that had gotten major buzz and positive press during the four years Paul had produced it. Dana said Paul would be the perfect person to help conceive Crossing Over. If we could get him. Apparently he was another one who was glad to be free of the grind of a daily show and enjoying the freelance life. He had moved his family to a great house overlooking the water on Long Island, and after getting axed from the Fox morning show for using puppets to make fun of his bosses, he had a great setup working out of a converted barn. He wouldn’t figure to be in any rush to sign up for another round of fourteen-hour workdays plus a commute into the city.
Dana called Paul and asked him if he was interested in working on a show about a guy who talks to dead people, a guy named John Edward. “That’s weird,” Paul told him. “I was riding the train with a friend of mine a few weeks ago, and he told me about this guy. He saw a documentary on HBO and was telling me about him.”
Paul had even more experience with spiritual subjects than Dana, even though he was married by a ferryboat captain, not a channeler. Although he was interested in the subject, he had to deal with a built-in bias against people who made a career of being a psychic. “I thought really spiritual people internalized it,” Paul has since told me. “They didn’t really preach, and they definitely didn’t make money on it. It’s almost like a ‘professional psychic’ is an oxymoron. You’re psychic—you don’t need money.”
Paul wasn’t so lofty on the subject that he didn’t want Dana to send him the pilot. But when he watched it, he was skeptical that Crossing Over could be a credible TV show. “I’m fascinated by John, and I would love to meet him and see what’s in his head,” he told Dana. “But I don’t see this as a TV show. It doesn’t look real to me. It almost looked like magic. Like you could almost pop John out of that and put in David Copperfield. And it would be like theater. You would go and watch a big magic show. That’s the problem I’ve always had with producing magic on TV. Who’s going to believe it? We all know that magic is an illusion, and you can assume that on TV you can do anything you want. If you give me enough money, I can make my house float. I could levitate anything. So as fascinating as the subject is to me, I don’t know if this ever will be a vehicle for TV.”
Dana must have thought Paul was giving him a big, resounding no thanks. But what he was really saying was that there was only one way to make this idea work. And that was to find a way for viewers to take something from the experience of watching other people’s departed relatives come through. As Paul later put it: “How can we grow from that experience of knowing that their souls are still part of our lives? How can we connect?” Paul said he’d like to at least see if this could be done.
Dana was hoping that Paul would say that. What he thought this project needed was a lot of careful thought by a group of smart people with integrity and a sure grasp of the subject. And fast. A lot of decisions had to be made quickly. “There’s something here,” Dana said.
“Well, the only way to really see what it is, is to see him work live,” Paul said.
There was no time to waste. He would have to come and see me at my next event a few days later, but it would involve a little traveling. Paul and Dana would have to come to Barbados.
— CHAPTER 8 —
Crossing Over
Call Me Michael
In May of 2000, three of my favorite mediums—Shelley Peck and Suzane Northrop from New York, and Robert Browne from England—joined me for a retreat on one of my favorite islands. I gathered fifty people from all over the country, and a few from as far away as Australia, for a shorts-and-bare-feet event on Barbados. It turned out to be one of the most magical experiences I’ve ever had.
We did a series of psychic workshops during the day, led by Sandy Anastasi, one of my first mentors, and her husband, John Maerz. And then at night, we divided the participants into four groups—red, blue, green, and orange—for readings by the four mediums. We rotated each night so each group of about twelve would be read by each medium during the week. My hope and goal was that by the end of the retreat, ever
y person would get a message from at least one relative. If I couldn’t get something, maybe Suzane would, and if Suzane couldn’t maybe Shelley would, and if Shelley couldn’t get it, maybe Robert would.
Some phenomenal things happened that week—the first being that my colleagues agreed to join me. It was a lot of work for them, a major commitment of time. For the participants, meanwhile, it was a wonderful, emotionally satisfying bonding experience—both with their loved ones who had passed, and with each other. On the first night, each group was united by a color, but by the fourth, they were like a family. They could recognize each other’s relatives when they came through—no, no, that’s your uncle, remember he came through with Shelley the other night? The energy of these people was fantastic, and the setting was perfect.
One of the people who came was Terri Kaplowitz. She is the grandmother of Mikey DiSabato, the little boy who drowned in his family’s swimming pool in 1993 when he was three and a half years old. Mikey and his family had become part of my life in the years since. He had come through many times during readings with his parents, his grandparents, and his aunt. And he felt comfortable enough to visit me regularly on his own. Pretty independent for a three-and-a-half-year-old. But of course, spirits aren’t three, or thirty, or any age. They are timeless souls. The finer points of metaphysics aside, Mikey had a special place in my heart, and so did his family. He was Chapter 20 of One Last Time. I called it “Mikey and Me.” It made his grandma a celebrity at the retreat. Everyone knew the story and wanted to talk to Terri.