by John Edward
Paul watched me read a group the night he arrived, and he was struck by how straightforward the readings were. “It’s like you’re just a guy giving someone directions—make a left, make a right—just matter-of-factly mapping it out,” he told me. “This is no mumbo-jumbo.” I didn’t have much time to talk to Paul and Dana during the retreat, and I changed my mind about letting them shoot the nighttime readings. It felt like too much of an invasion. Paul didn’t care. He wanted to see me in action, and just as important, he wanted to see how the readings affected people. To him, they represented the core audience of Crossing Over. He pulled many of them aside and, with Dana rolling the digital camera, talked to them about their readings, trying to understand what was going on between us and whether he could discern from that the essence of the show. “What difference did it mean to you that John knew your father’s name—why is that important?” Paul would ask someone. “It wasn’t so much that he knew his name,” he would be told. “It’s the fact that he knew that we used to go shopping at John’s Bargain Stores and that he loved clams casino. It means there’s this presence. I’m not cut off from him like cold turkey. He’s still a part of my life and my growth, my journey.”
Paul heard story after story like this—as if this was a big focus group—and by the end of the first night, he knew he would do the show. He says he came into this skeptical, but you could have fooled me. At our first few meetings back in New York, he talked intensely about building the show around the kinds of people he and Dana had met at the retreat. He liked the way I did my work and delivered information, but he thought it was their stories—and what viewers might take from them—that would make the show fly. “The readings are the vehicle, and they have to be shown in as genuine a light as possible, but it all has to be with an eye toward connecting the viewers with the spirits in their own lives,” Paul said. “To show you just making psychic statements that these people react to isn’t enough. I’m more interested in the subject of continued consciousness and how to use a psychic medium’s talents to deal with grief and make your experience here in this lifetime richer.”
Thinking about the unique connection this show might have with its viewers—and how the people in the studio could be seen as their surrogates—it occurred to Paul that calling them an “audience” didn’t do justice to their role. He had an idea. Let’s call it the “gallery,” he suggested. “Each person you read will be a portrait in the gallery.” Everyone loved the idea.
Paul was on a roll. The only obstacles for him now were his other clients. He was in New York helping create a show about people connecting with their loved ones, who happened to be dead, when he was supposed to be in California making specials for the TV Guide Channel about celebrities still very much alive. Paul is the type of person who loves to become completely consumed by a project and then complain about how overwhelmed he is.
One night after a meeting, I offered him a ride home to Long Island, and we wound up sitting on the FDR Drive for two hours waiting for a car fire to be cleared. It was the first quality time I’d had with Paul, and we spent it, naturally, talking about the show. It was the beginning of what became regular commutes to and from the city, during which we got to know each other’s backgrounds and motivations, and discovered we shared the same irreverent sense of humor. I began to feel that Paul’s energy was like manna from heaven. Paul was right: He was perfect for the show. It wasn’t just that his vision was the same as mine. It was that he helped clarify what my vision was, and how we could get it to the screen. I loved the irony of the short shrift Paul had given me two years earlier when I called him trying to get on his Fox After Breakfast show. “You blew me off,” I razzed him. He denied ever having talked to me—that was his story, and he was sticking to it.
During one of our rides, I got some insight into why Paul seemed to have such a deep feeling about this show. Five years earlier, he had gone through the devastating loss of his father, Marty. Paul cherished his father, and even after he passed, he felt his presence in his life every day. “He was a pharmacist,” Paul said one day during a conversation for this book. “And he totally had purpose in his life. He grew up on top of his father’s drugstore, and he opened up that store at seven o’clock in the morning and closed it at ten o’clock at night. He was just a beautiful person. When I got into my thirties and forties, we didn’t spend a lot of time together, but we were connected daily. We’d talk on the phone two or three times a week, and his energy and spirit were with me. And it really didn’t change much after he passed. Of course I grieved. But when I think about him, I still get inspired by him, and I still feel his love and his commitment to me. So when I was thinking about what the show was about, I had a very personal experience to draw from.”
In television, anyone who gets in front of a camera is known as “the talent.” Paul got right away that while it was an unusual talent that got me here, I wasn’t to be confused with an entertainer. I wasn’t doing this for the money, and I sure wasn’t doing it for the fame. As corny as it sounds, I was doing it to reach people, so many more than I could by doing what I was already doing. Of course I wanted a lot of people to watch the show, but what concerned me most were the lives that the show would touch. At an early meeting, I introduced everyone to my favorite phrase: “Honor the process.” I expected it to be the guiding principle of the show. No matter what pressures they felt from the network or from within themselves, no matter what the numbers were, they had to resist whatever TV instincts they had to do anything hokey or exploitative. “You really don’t care about TV,” Paul said in the car one day, as if I were a member of some species he’d never encountered before. “That’s why this is going to work.”
With Paul’s arrival, Ramey and Adora felt ready to cut the cord. “It was like an open adoption,” Adora said, “where we all just kind of sat in a circle and said, okay, this baby is yours now. Call us, keep in touch, let us know what we can do.”
The baby needed a roof over its head. Shirley found an available studio on the West Side of Manhattan, a converted old theater at the corner of Ninth Avenue and 55th Street that had once been the home of Sesame Street. It wasn’t fancy, but it seemed somehow fitting that it was a big old place with history. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ghosts of actors and actresses from the twenties started coming through. My dressing room had one of those star mirrors with lights around it and a barber’s chair where Maddy the makeup artist would use Preparation H to hide the lines on my face that were sure to develop after three straight days of shooting. The dressing room was upstairs. If you went across the hall and through a door, you found yourself in the dark, looking down at the set from a wide-open area filled with unused lighting and camera equipment. It took a few seconds to realize you were standing in the old theater’s balcony.
Shirley and Dana rented a floor of office space down the block. The first time I went to the office, I looked around and realized I was seeing an entire company of people in offices and cubicles, everyone on the phones or at computers or in little meetings, getting ready to help me put the work out there. This was my dream: to teach about spirit communication on a big scale. And now it was a reality. At least for thirteen weeks.
Dana’s main task these months was to create the show’s look. He knew it couldn’t be set up like a traditional talk show. Applying Paul’s gallery concept, his first thought was to borrow a look he remembered from the Broadway show Candide. It had little pockets of audience on and around the stage. For Crossing Over, he had in mind an asymmetrical set with stairs and assorted platforms holding gallery members. The idea was that I would go from place to place as the energies drew me from one area to another. But the lighting and set designers talked Dana out of it, saying it would be almost impossible to shoot, with all those different light patterns and camera angles. Eventually, he settled on a lit disk as my stage—inspired by the set he worked with on Nickelodeon’s Double Dare—and the gallery members sitting in a semicircle in three or four row
s of these sort of built-in cushioned benches.
Dana had a model made of the set and brought some Polaroid shots of it when he came to Barbados with Paul. We sat poolside in bathing suits as I flipped through the pictures, looking at them blankly and saying nothing. Dana took my nonreaction to mean I hated the design and that he was going to have to start all over, a frightening thought at this stage. But what he was actually seeing was my mind being blown. The first thing I noticed was that all around the set were large, irregularly shaped swatches of stretched nylon. These white “sails” would be backdrops, and the two biggest ones, front and center, would serve as screens to project the first few seconds of taped pieces as segues. When I do a reading, I focus on something blank—a wall, a floor—so that when I see quick flashes of information, they’re not overlaid on a busy image. It’s like seeing it on a movie screen. The set Dana had designed had these all over the studio. No matter where I looked, I would see these clean white sails. But I hadn’t talked to him about the set design—hadn’t even had one conversation—so he had no idea that the one he came up with fulfilled my only need. I told Dana that not only did I like the set, I thought it was perfect.
The show would be made up of three basic elements. Readings in the gallery would be the centerpiece. Then there would be private one-on-one readings that would be shot on the set but without an audience. Some of these would be with celebrities. And then the producers would do what they were calling “post-analyses,” when they took the people who had been read into a separate room and asked them to explain the messages that came through, what made sense and what didn’t, and to talk about the loved ones who came through and what the experience meant to them. They would be sent home with a prepaid FedEx® envelope to send us pictures that we could use in the finished segment. Dana came up with a creative way to keep the whole thing running efficiently. The post-analyses would be shot in evocative black and white, while the main cameras were upstairs shooting the next gallery segment.
There was only one big question left. The co-host question.
I wasn’t the only one who believed I shouldn’t be alone out there. Dana agreed that I needed a second banana, as he put it quaintly. Apparently buying into the “Honor the process” theme, he said he wanted to keep me from having to “sell soap.” He thought all the TV stuff would be bad for my credibility, and the show’s. Paul thought so, too. He wanted someone to act as a buffer—a “facilitator.” They weren’t thinking of a crazy cutup like Todd Pettengill. More like a combination of George Feneman, Groucho’s straight man on You Bet Your Life, and the guy outside the courtroom in People’s Court. And they were thinking this person ought to be a woman. One of the ideas he and Paul came up with was to have the facilitator whispering things like, “We’ll be right back with more of this reading,” as I continued talking in the gallery in the background. Dana called this the golf-announcer idea. It grew out of a discussion about how we could make the show look and be more authentic and you-are-there, and less packaged and edited. Doing the show live was even considered for a few seconds.
Facilitator, co-host—whatever you call it, Bonnie Hammer was still dead-set against having anyone on the stage but me. She let Paul and Dana interview people and even shoot some test shows with someone doing all the housekeeping. But in the end, she insisted, “This is your show. Don’t dilute it. I don’t want a sidekick, I don’t want someone for you to bounce humor off. You are funny enough, you are honest enough, you are interesting enough.”
I begged to differ. Really—I begged. “I’m not an actor, I’m not a performer,” I protested. “I won’t be any good at this.” I resisted until the last possible moment, coming up with every excuse imaginable until they practically had to throw me out there to get me to read the openings and closings and segues for our rehearsal and test shows. Charles Nordlander, the show’s writer, tried to make them easy and casual, and Dana explained why I had to do it. “You need to have at least a moment to make a connection with the audience,” Dana said. “You can’t just go out and start doing readings.” But I couldn’t see how reading from a TelePrompTer would make a connection with anyone.
Finally, we compromised. “You don’t have to come out and read,” Dana said. “You can just talk to the gallery, and we’ll capture that. Just go out there and explain what you’re going to do.” That I could handle. I’d been doing that in my lectures for years. Eventually, after a bunch of rehearsal shows, they got me to introduce taped segments and give the show a final thought by sitting among the gallery and reading what Charles had written for me on the TelePrompTer. Charles was working hard to capture my voice and make the introductions natural, and even I was beginning to see their value. The openings, closings, and segment introductions he wrote gave the readings context and the show more meaning. There was some discussion of whether there should be a “writer” listed in the credits that rolled at the end of each show. For the producers, as well as the network, the show’s credibility was the undercurrent of virtually every decision they made. They wanted to avoid even a subtle implication that the show might be cooked up. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if the show got any attention at all, that’s what skeptics, reporters, and viewers would be looking for. Would listing a “writer” suggest a lack of spontaneity, or even that the readings were staged?
It was the kind of question that the producers realized could come up again and again and only bog the show down in other people’s cynicism. There was no reason to hide the fact that the few seconds of material that were obviously not spontaneous—and which had nothing to do with the authenticity of the readings—were written by someone other than me. I’ve always said I would not defend my work because if I did I would be conceding that it needed to be defended. The same would go for the show. It was smart to be careful about how things were presented. But as long as it was done right, I would have nothing to defend.
— CHAPTER 9 —
Camera One
Closes In
What Is This?
On the morning of June 14, 2000, I stood in the darkness outside the white sails cloaking the set of the first television show devoted to communication with the dead. My eyes were trained on Doug Fogal, the stage manager. He had been stage manager for The Lion King on Broadway, among many other things, and a couple of months earlier he had gotten a call from his old friend Dana Calderwood asking if he wanted to work on a TV show with a psychic. Why not, Doug said. It’s a job. Three . . . two . . . one. . . .
Doug pointed to me, and I bounded out for the first time before a live gallery and cameras rolling tape, knowing that some of what was about to happen would find its way onto television screens across the country. Crossing Over with John Edward was launched, and my life would never be the same. Even if the show were a colossal flop, more people would see me in a single night than in a lifetime of lectures.
I managed to get through the opening, and welcome the first official gallery, and by extension, the first few hundred thousand viewers, or what-ever number would be tuned in to Sci Fi or stopping by on their way to a tearjerker on Lifetime or spinning wheels on the Game Show Channel. I rubbed my hands together, focused on the sail beyond the last row, and silently delivered the welcome to the other gallery, the one that really counted.
The first few weeks I felt like a little kid bicycling with training wheels and still falling every time I turned. But as Ramey pointed out, we were starting out in relative obscurity—compared to the syndication she had been shooting for, we were practically doing this in private—so if there was a time to tumble, get back on the bike, and find my balance, this was it.
I wasn’t the only one trying to find my way—there was a whole staff of people trying to find my way. And theirs. We were all struggling to figure out how to do a show that was so different from anything ever attempted on television that most of the fifty-six people hired to produce it weren’t even sure what this was. If I was so psychic that I could read everyone’s mind
, here’s what I would have heard those first weeks: Is this for real? That’s what a lot of them were asking each other in private conversations. Jim Scurty, a camera operator for thirty-one years, pulled Dana aside and asked for the truth: “Is this on the level, or is it a gimmick?” Dana basically told him that all he had to do was look through his camera lens. Eventually, he’d see the truth for himself. A few people on the staff wondered if they were participating in a hoax so sophisticated that no one working on the show knew about it. One crew member took producer Allison Blecker aside and asked bluntly, “Allison, is this bullshit?” She said she didn’t think so, but she really didn’t know. Not yet.
Allison was recruited to work on Crossing Over when she was a producer on The Aimsley Harriot Show, “a dancing chef singing variety show,” as she described it, that was ending after a one-year run on NBC. She got a call from Paul Shavelson, with whom she had worked on the Fox breakfast shows. “Want to work on a weird show?” Paul asked. Allison wouldn’t have expected anything less from Paul.
“All right, keep your mind open,” Paul said. “It’s this guy. He speaks to the dead.”
“Oh, great, Paul,” Allison said. “From a dancing chef to a guy who speaks to the dead.”
Allison had two reasons for not wanting to work on the show, and only one in favor. The upside was Paul. She loved working with him, as it seemed everyone did. The downsides were that she had a big, big problem with death—didn’t want to think about it, and definitely did not want to work with it—and two, she didn’t believe there was a guy who speaks to the dead. “I can’t think of a more depressing show to work on, people all the time saying, ‘My son died, my daughter died,’ ” Allison told Helen Tierney, her colleague at the dancing chef show, who had also worked with Paul, and also got a call from him wanting to know if she wanted to work on the guy-who-talks-to-dead-people show.