by John Edward
“I was totally skeptical,” Allison recalled during a conversation for this book. “Not cynical, because I wanted to believe it so bad. But I was so afraid that I was going to manipulate these people who were grieving. I knew Paul would never work on something cheesy. But I came from a place where I just didn’t believe this stuff. I vaguely thought, Oh wow, that would be so amazing if that was possible. But what’s the trick? There must be a trick. There’s either a trick or we’re going to have to get in there and give him information. I thought maybe Paul was getting involved in something that, you know, we’ll find out when we get there.”
Helen had been going to psychics for years. “She was like, ‘Yeah, I’m in,’ ” Allison said. “I’m like, ‘You’re in? Wait a second.’ ” Helen told her to think about it. So she thought about it and figured she’d give it a month. “Worse comes to worse, if I think it’s completely bogus, if I feel like we’re taking advantage of these poor people, then I’ll just leave. I think the major thing that made me decide to give it a try was that I really, really hoped I would be convinced that it was true. I am afraid to die. Time is going so fast, and there’s nothing else when you die. So my reasons for coming here were completely personal. It had nothing whatsoever to do with television. It was: Imagine if he can completely make me believe that there is something else, and that the fear I’ve had my whole entire life would somehow go away.”
When I first met Allison, I thought she wasn’t going to last on the show. She really looked like she was in the wrong 20 percent. But her attitude began to change after she saw me work live for the first time. The tapes she had seen were intriguing, she said, but not convincing. Weeks before we started taping, Allison and her associate producer, Christine Cipriani, walked up the block to the studio to watch a rehearsal show. “The two of us were like, yeah, whatever, we’ll watch this gallery. And then we were bawling, we were completely crying in the gallery. I was just completely amazed by the things that came through. Like crazy, specific things. In my whole life, there was never anything that ever made me believe this was even a slight possibility. And then in one second . . . I mean, it’s hard to erase thirty-two years of being a complete skeptic. But you can open your eyes a little bit.” Months later, she said, “I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t work on the show myself.”
With half the first season already shot, we finally got on the air in July, and that was like turning on a switch. The mail started coming in, people wanted tickets to the gallery or to get one-onone readings, and the show began to gather energy and take on a certain rhythm. A little before nine o’clock three mornings a week, the day’s gallery would line up outside the studio doors on Ninth Avenue. Then Jesse Shafer, our friendly gallery coordinator (and an aspiring actor who came in one day and announced he had gotten a bit part in an episode of Law & Order), would bring our guests inside, get them seated, and tell them what the show was all about. Then Maddy would make me up, and Risa, the wardrobe stylist, would present me with my clothes for the day. I would take the stage at around ten and welcome my first guest from the other side.
The goal was to get three half-hour shows (twenty-two minutes of actual show, leaving room for eight minutes of commercials) out of each day’s gallery. Paul, Shirley, and Dana had devised a system of leapfrogging producers that was a marvel of efficiency and order—as long as those in the great beyond stayed with the program. Which, of course, was something that couldn’t be counted on. “Can we go now? They’re starting,” I’ve said to Dana more than once, standing on the set and talking to him in the control room as we prepared to start shooting. As Charles wrote one day, the real control room is on the other side—not an easy concept for producers used to scheduling everything down to the bathroom breaks.
On any given day of shooting, three producers—Allison, Helen, and Lisa Tucker—were responsible for one show each. The way it worked was that the producer of the first show, say it’s Allison, would sit in the back row of the control room watching the first series of gallery readings on a monitor, scribbling copious notes of everything being said. After two or three readings, Shirley would turn around and ask Allison, “Do you have a show?” At the first break, Allison and her associate producer would dash from the control room to the set to pull out the people who had just been read. They would escort them behind some curtains, through a door, and down a narrow stairway to a small room where they would do the “post-analysis,” or simply the “posts,” as they became known. These were whole new terms in the psychic medium field. These were debriefings with cameras. What did the blue sweater mean? Did you understand when John talked about the sonogram on the refrigerator? How did it make you feel connecting with your son?
Allison would interview the people in black and white, while upstairs I would be back with the gallery in living color, doing the next set of readings for the second half-hour show. Those would be the responsibility of the next producer, Lisa, who would take the seat in the control room just vacated by Allison and begin taking notes on what she was seeing on the monitor. When Lisa had enough for a show, she’d grab the people in the gallery who had just been read and do her posts, while Helen took her seat in the control room and repeated the process once more. Mediumship for the masses.
This system yielded plenty of good readings—and not all of them were for the people in the gallery. In case anyone was under the impression that spirits knew and cared that we were making a TV show here—a show whose credibility we wanted to establish quickly and firmly—they wasted no time setting everyone straight. We had a hundred people in the gallery, but we also had half that number working on and around the set and in the control room. The inevitable happened almost immediately. One day, an older male figure came through claiming he had developed some kind of technical device.
“I have a cousin who worked on a water purifier,” a man in the gallery said.
“No,” I said. “This is some kind of health-care procedure. Invasive surgical practice or procedure.”
I looked around the gallery. No takers. Then a voice from beyond. “My godfather worked on the first heart transplant.” I looked up and saw that it was Doug, the stage manager. I just laughed and shook my head. “Nobody’s safe.”
“Has he passed?” I asked. Doug said yes.
“Godfather’s here.” Just then, another spirit stepped forward. I felt that Doug’s godfather was there as an escort. “But I feel like he needs to announce what he’s known for.”
“That would be my godfather,” Doug said wryly.
“By the way, he almost didn’t get credit for that transplant thing. I feel like he was passed up.”
“The credit went to someone else,” Doug acknowledged. (When he was posted later—yes, everyone gets posted, even the posters—Doug explained that his godfather was a cardiovascular thoracic surgeon as well as a mechanical engineer. When the first heart transplants were being performed in the 1960s, his godfather developed a machine that kept patients alive during the few minutes when they had no heart. Doug said his godfather was “very egocentric and didn’t feel that he got the credit he deserved.”)
The person Doug’s godfather was bringing with him had an even stronger energy. This was a younger male who was acknowledging either a Marge or Maggie and who wanted to thank Doug for “taking care of his art.” As Doug later explained, the person coming through was a friend named Michael, an artist who died of AIDS. Maggie was Michael’s close friend—“like his wife but not his wife,” Doug said—who had nursed him as he was dying. Doug and his partner had loved a reproduction Michael made of a painting by Donald Roller Wilson, an artist known for his oil paintings of chimps in dresses. The one they liked was a picture of a chimp named “Naughty Betty,” dressed like a woman with a huge floral headdress and pickles flying through the air. Doug commissioned Michael to reproduce another of Wilson’s paintings, but then Michael got sick and never finished it. After he passed, Maggie gave Doug and his partner Michael’s original “Naughty Betty” r
eproduction. They had it framed and put it up in a featured spot in their front room.
There were several other major validations, thanks to Michael being as demonstrative in spirit as he was in body. He showed me a cat being held by its tail so I would talk about how everyone despised his cat. And he got me to flip my wrist in a swatting motion, a mannerism that Doug said was a perfect rendition of “Michael’s ‘don’t even . . .’ gesture.” After we wrapped that day, Doug went home and called Maggie and told her, “Michael came to visit me at work today.”
IT WAS LIKE THIS throughout the first two months of the show’s life, one staff member after another doing their jobs on the set or in the control room and slowly realizing that the names and details coming from my mouth were not for anyone in the gallery. Some of the more veteran crew members came into this job thinking they had seen and done it all. The work had long since lost its glamour. Jim Scurty, a camera operator for thirty-one years, and a multiple Emmy winner, had heard that this was a talk show with a medium. Fine, whatever. It’s a job. I’ll never forget the sight of Jim peeking out from behind his camera viewfinder and saying, “Uh, I knew a guy in high school named Gaspare who committed suicide.”
One day a few months later, I was getting some information that included a name that sounded like Gehrig without the last “g.” Like Girish. When no one claimed the information, Dana broke in over the studio speaker, saying that he thought that Girish was the first name of the father of one of our associate producers, Nina Bhargava. Nina’s father had been to the show when we needed people for the gallery in the beginning, and Dana had met him and remembered his name. Nina was usually in the studio, but today for some reason she was back at the production office up the street, where Dana called from the control room. “John’s saying your dad’s name,” he told her.
“What?” Nina said. “I just got off the phone with him.”
“You have to come down here.”
“Oh, God. What if it’s not me? All these people will be staring at me.”
Nina ran down 55th Street to the studio and came out onto the set still wearing her coat. “I think your dad’s dad is coming through,” I told her. But Nina said she didn’t know him and would have trouble with names and details. Someone brought a phone out, and Nina called her father. The only thing bad about these spontaneous phone calls is Call Waiting.
“I’m on the phone with EZ Pass,” Nina’s father told her. The next thing Nina heard was a dial tone. She called him back and told him what was going on. I passed on the information I was getting. Some of it was from an older brother of Nina’s father who died when Girish was five or six, when the family was in India. Her father was able to validate it.
These neighborhood excursions didn’t have to involve someone connected to the show. One day, I was badgering a poor group of women who were sitting in the back row, diagonally to my left. I couldn’t understand how they didn’t know that they had a male to the side who passed in a car accident who was making references to someone named Richard, another named Tony or maybe Timmy, and that there was a connection to a teacher, to a falls somewhere, and to the number 16. “Guys, please think,” I implored. I was sure of the information, and pretty sure of the area of the gallery it was meant for. “I’m in the back row. Or I’m behind them. Is there anyone behind them?” But the women in the back row just kept shaking their heads. They couldn’t validate a single thing. And there was nobody behind them. Finally, the energy was brushed aside by others trying to come through. I just left the information with the women and asked them to please go home and try to validate this unfortunate soul who was trying so hard to make a connection. I went with the other readings.
At the end of the show, Dana came over the PA: “John, I think we figured out what was going on in the back row,” he said. Just then, Paul came onto the set with a man wearing a red parking attendant’s shirt. His name was Basil, and he worked in the garage adjoining the studio. “The garage attendant thinks this might be his story, so can you just spend a couple of seconds with him?” Paul asked.
I was totally baffled. “Um, how did . . . uh.” My stammering made the gallery giggle. “What exactly did they explain to you?” I asked Basil. “What did they say?”
“You’re getting a signal there’s a Richard involved,” Basil said in a strong Jamaican accent. “It happened when he was sixteen.”
“Okay, wait. Explain to me why you think this makes sense for you.”
“I have a brother Richard who died at sixteen in a car accident,” Basil said. “I was a teacher in Jamaica.”
There was a collective gasp from the gallery. I just stood there, agape.
“I was teaching at the school that he was attending,” Basil continued. “A particular evening, he was riding his bike and he got in an accident and hit his head on the asphalt and died.”
I had to know how this happened. “Who found Basil?” I asked the producers.
“Tjeerd,” someone said. He was one of the production assistants.
“That’s damn impressive,” I said.
“John, we work with you,” Paul said, as if nothing was impressive anymore. All in a day’s work here at Crossing Over.
Tjeerd explained that he had been watching me point toward the women in the back row, and noticed that I didn’t seem to be pointing right at them. It was more like past them—and in fact, at one point, I did ask if there was anyone behind them. “I felt compelled—compelled—to go out the back door, where you were pointing,” Tjeerd said. His first stop was a group of police officers who were standing on 55th Street. He related the information about the male who had passed in the accident, and asked if this made sense to any of them. No, this didn’t make any sense to them. In more ways than one. Then, Tjeerd went a few steps down the street, to the parking garage. That’s where he found Basil. Stunned, he recounted his brother’s passing.
“Wow,” I said, then turned to the women in the back row. “You’re definitely off the hook.” I turned back to Basil and asked him who had the “T” name.
“My brother. His name is Tonto.”
Back to the gallery: “Was there anything we missed?” We were rolling tape, of course, but there was an after-show informality to this.
“Falls,” people called out.
“Any type of falls connection?” I asked Basil, but as soon as the question left my lips, I had the answer. “Oh—Dunns River Falls. That’s freaky, even for me. I think the hair on my legs is standing up. I think you’ve seen the ultimate pull-in. I’ve never gone through a brick wall before.”
What was amazing about this for me was how it drove home how not about me this process is. I dropped the ball for Basil’s brother. And Tjeerd, a production assistant, picked it up because Basil’s brother saw his opportunity to get this message through. You could almost imagine him handing Tjeerd a little note and then whispering, “Would you mind going next door and giving this to my brother?”
Then there was the wild morning when I was getting all kinds of information but no clue to where I was supposed to go with it. Nobody in the gallery was acknowledging it, and I wasn’t being pulled anywhere. Then Dana came on the studio speaker and said that it might be for someone in the control room. I looked at the gallery and said, “Don’t go anywhere.” I hustled back to the control room, cameraman in tow, like one of those routines on Jay or Dave. When I got there, I saw Paul, and he had this half-smile on his face.
“Who’s the Merv or Marv?” I said.
“My dad was Marty,” Paul said. He had been listening in the control room and connected with enough that he had one of those “Well, it could be for me” moments. Later, when the tables were turned and Paul sat in the post-analysis interview chair, he said he was both dreading and awaiting this moment. “I was very scared this was happening,” he said. “I was trying to push it away because I don’t want this show to be part of my personal experience, but part of my professional experience and what’s best for the show. And I’m thi
nking while this is going down, Well, I’m not going to use this on air because this is not going to add to the credibility of what John does. On the other side of my brain, I’m thinking, Well, screw the credibility, my father’s coming through!”
But it wasn’t Marty after all. I went out of the control room to continue the search. I wound up back on the set, talking to the control room again over the speakers. Now I got a Kimberly. We have a producer named Kimberly Dunn, who was back in what we were now calling the out-of-control room. But we quickly ruled her out. “Who’s to your left?” I asked from the disk, not wanting to make another trip back there.
“Liz,” Kim said. “Liz Arias.” She’s our coordinating producer, the one who takes care of, basically, everything. Now the camera was back in there.
“Pass the mic to Liz,” I said. “Liz, are you in the corner?” She was. “It’s for you,” I said.
It wasn’t. Now Dana had the scene in the control room projected onto the big white sail behind me. “Oh, how cool,” I said, momentarily distracted from the ongoing confusion. Be careful what you ask for: I had stressed to the producers that I didn’t want the show edited in such a way that all the viewers saw was a highlight reel every night, all hits all the time. I wanted them to see reality: Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong. Well, this could be a highlight reel of the other kind. All confusion. The camera following me on this ludicrous search for someone willing to claim a Merv, five siblings, and a “C” name. Of course, a cynic watching this—or any of the other psychic treasure hunts that were becoming almost commonplace around our set—would think these were the most ridiculous charades. But what we say at the beginning of the show is true. It’s all real.
Just about the only person left was Helen Tierney, who was sitting in the control room taking notes for her show when she realized what she was writing made sense to her. “This might be all your fault,” I joked, looking at her projected image on the sail.