by John Edward
“I’m so sorry,” she said, embarrassed to find that she was now starring in her own segment. Would she have to post herself?
As I gave her information, she started to cry, and I could see somebody’s hand rubbing her back. I couldn’t imagine what this must be like for all these people on the staff who were being read, having to go back to work after these emotional experiences. It got to the point where everyone—camera operators, producers, utility guys, security guards—would come to work wondering if this was their day to hear from Grandma. Some started brushing up on family history, just in case. They saw what it was like when I got in someone’s face, insisting that they had an older female named Sarah with a beagle named after a car. Cameramen would have to focus both on their subjects and on my words—just in case. Even Bonnie Hammer, the head of Sci Fi, was not immune. She sat in the gallery one day and had to stand up in front of the national audience that she was personally trying to build, and have me tell her that her ex-father-in-law was here saying, “I knew the marriage wasn’t going to last.”
After a few months, it seemed that the only people on the staff whom I was in regular contact with but hadn’t read were Shirley Abraham, Charles Nordlander, and Jesse Shafer. They joked that they should start wearing big badges that said “U.” They were the Unread.
Working on Crossing Over means knowing that at any given moment you might wind up crying on the job. There have been readings that have left nearly everyone in the control room in tears, passing around the box of tissues Liz always has on hand. One of the most unforgettable moments since we’ve been on the air—one that brought a flood of letters and e-mails—was a reading of a young widow named Catherine, whose brother and husband came through together. Her brother had died at thirteen, and her husband, Steve, at thirty-two. Catherine had a young daughter named Megan, who was not yet three when her father died of lymphoma in 1996. They’d had difficulty conceiving, and for them, Megan was a beautiful gift. Steve “adored Megan, he lived and breathed Megan,” Catherine said later. Catherine had been dating someone when she came to the show, and she was nervous. She desperately wanted to hear from Steve, but she was worried he would disapprove of her seeing someone, let alone that she was contemplating marriage. Steve put her at ease, coming through with a literal symbol: a green light.
But it was Steve and Megan who had everyone in tears. In this work, I try not to evaluate the relative tragedy of deaths or judge the weight of their loved ones’ grief. But two kinds of death are particularly heartbreaking: One is that of a child and the grief of the parents. And the other is the death of a young parent, and the loss, not yet completely felt, suffered by a young child. I don’t know about you, but, like I said, I wouldn’t even want to think about which is worse.
“Why is Niagara Falls significant?” I asked Catherine.
“We were just there,” she said.
“You were just in Niagara Falls. Okay.”
“With my daughter.”
I concentrated in silence for a few seconds. Catherine’s husband was showing me something important.
“Did you find a feather there?” I asked her.
“Yes, and . . .” Catherine was crying.
“Did you tell your daughter that was from Daddy?”
“Yes.” She buried her face in her hands.
“This is a validation that he was there for you. Because he’s showing me the feather.” I told Catherine it was a good thing that feathers are my mother’s symbol to me. She leaves feathers for me. “That was definitely him there for her.”
“Thank you,” Catherine said. She later told us that she and Megan had gone to Niagara Falls to visit friends of hers and Steve’s from college. Catherine and Steve met in college and had gone to Niagara Falls to visit these friends. They hadn’t seen each other since Steve passed.
“By acknowledging stuff like that to her, it’s allowing her to know that even though Dad’s not here physically with her, spiritually he’s still connected. So that she’s moving through. She’s not going to feel like she doesn’t have him.”
But perhaps no one has been more moved than Jim Scurty, the camera operator who came in thinking this was just another talk-show job. He took the job because it was a job and he liked working with Dana. He barely even noticed what the show was about. Pretty much point and shoot. And then the weirdest thing happened. It occurred to him that this job was changing his life.
In the gallery one day was the family of a fourteen-year-old boy named Louis Acompora, who had died in a freak accident a year earlier when a lacrosse ball hit him in the chest between heartbeats. Louis was an exceptional kid, and his death devastated his school and community. His mother, father, and sister were in the gallery, and when I started validating Louis’s presence, they became understandably very emotional. Their pain struck a chord that no one on the show will ever forget. As I gave them the facts and details that Louis was giving me—ultimately that he died from an impact to the chest but not from a weapon—Jim Scurty’s camera was trained on the father.
“This man was bottled up with death,” Jim recalls. “I was shooting the close-up and watching the expression on his face, watching him begin to fall apart. First the tick and then the trembling in the chin and the kind of embarrassment, the eyes shifting while seeing if anybody’s watching. And I literally watched this person fall into this grief and surrender to it publicly. It was very hard to watch.”
Jim continued shooting through his own tears. It wasn’t the only time that he was left emotionally drained by what he photographed. Sometimes he would walk up to people in the gallery when we were finished taping and put his arm around them, offering some comforting words. Paul loved this—all these seemingly jaded crew guys falling into a job that made them go home and tell the people in their lives how much they loved and appreciated them.
I’m Over Here
I BEGAN TO REALIZE SOMETHING VERY COOL. I was forming a really special bond with the producers and crew members of the show. It felt a little like the way I connect with spirits, by raising my own vibrations as they lower theirs so we can meet somewhere in the middle. These were TV people, but there wasn’t an ounce of cynicism in them. They were real people who wanted to do a meaningful show. And I was a psychic medium guy, but I wasn’t so serious that I couldn’t have fun with it or appreciate the bizarre nature of what we were doing. I mean, a TV show about universal spirituality? Forget Millionaire or Survivor or The Weakest Link. This was like a cosmic game show. We joked about the promo lines: Whose dead relative is going to come through tonight? What’s going to be today’s Big Validation? Stay tuned as Crossing Over continues.
Right from the start, we knew we were doing something really different. Something so affecting it could make you cry the fifth time you saw it. And something so funny even the grieving widow had room to smile. Tissue boxes everywhere—onstage, backstage, and in the control room. And the staff keeping a Crossing Over Quote Board. “When you marry someone, you marry their family. Even their dead family.” I began holding ballroom-dance classes for the staff on the set after each taping. Producers pairing up with security guards, the assistant director with the stage manager, as a Latin beat played over the sound system—nobody could recall doing that on their previous jobs. It was a way of bringing us together.
And yet, none of us was so naïve that we didn’t feel the inevitable clash of cultures that was in the air these early months. The network didn’t completely buy my operating principle that we weren’t really making a TV show; we were just televising what I do. Even if all the people working with me on the show believed that—which they didn’t, at least not at first—they couldn’t completely ignore either pressures from above or their own impulses to do TV. In other words, to do what producers do—orchestrate, arrange, plan, control. In this case, it meant occasionally doing those things to the makeup of the gallery to maximize the chances that good, dramatic, and packageable stories would emerge.
The operative conce
pt was Theme Show. Bring in the golf announcer: John Edward doesn’t know it, but he’s walking into a gallery filled with people who have had organ transplants. When we come back, we’ll see if their donors come through.
Paul was an amazingly creative producer who loved to have fun and try new things—it’s more or less why he was doing the show in the first place—and his initial instincts were that there were a lot of cool things you could do with this. Nothing that would compromise the integrity of my work or the credibility of the show. Just cool ideas. But done responsibly. So the producers called organizations of people in dangerous lines of work—the police and firefighters’ associations, the movie stuntmen’s union—and asked if they would be willing to supply some grieving friends and relatives of members who had died in the line of duty. Click. They invited members of Mothers Against Drunk Driving to the gallery. Theme shows. The studio wanted them, and the producers couldn’t see why not. It’s the way things were done.
To me, this was dangerous territory—the biggest, thorniest, and most persistent issue associated with this project since Ramey had first pitched it. It’s important to state very clearly that the danger wasn’t deception or fraud. There was never, ever any suggestion from anybody that we do the kind of thing Elmer the infomercial man wanted to do a year earlier—feed me information and try to get me to make the host cry. Those guys weren’t even living on the same planet as the people working on Crossing Over. It was decided very early on that we would state before every show that I am never given information in advance about people I read. In the TV industry, each show has its “bible,” something that captures the essence or guiding principle of the show. That assurance was our bible. So, no, the danger of orchestrating the makeup of a gallery was not a perception of trickery. It was that the show would no longer be about the work. It would be about TV. We wouldn’t be honoring the process. And we might be getting a little too close to playing God.
“Do you want to play the game of whose death experience is more important?” I asked Paul during one of our drives into the city. “Do you really want to get involved in that?”
Paul considered this for a moment. “That’s a scary thought,” he said. But rolling tape without having any idea what you’ll find on it at the end of the day? Even scarier.
“So you mean like if on Elvis’s birthday we had an audience full of Elvis impersonators, you would have a problem with that?” Paul asked, deadpan.
“How sick are you?” I replied, laughing hysterically as we drove on the Long Island Expressway. “We’re talking about dead people here!”
Paul was kidding, of course, but he wasn’t kidding. He knew that some studio person somewhere would be thinking, Hmm, Elvis impersonators—I can promote that. They wanted something they could blurb in TV Guide. Wasn’t “man talks to dead people” enough?
At first, I dealt with this by not dealing with it. All I said was: Don’t tell me what you’re doing. Just make sure it’s not horrible. And if it’s a celebrity, don’t put anything on paper that I might come across, and of course don’t talk about it in front of me. Once I walked into an office and saw a board listing ideas for segments. I stopped, turned, and literally ran out. I think it’s safe to assume that none of these producers had ever worked on a show in which they constantly had to be on guard against telling the host what was going on—on orders from the host. They took this seriously. I found myself walking into offices and having people abruptly stop talking. I don’t think they were planning a surprise party for me. I would find out soon enough what they were talking about.
One day I walked out onto the disk, and was overwhelmed by an incredibly heavy, depressing, negative energy. There was a suicide in here. And then I saw the same thing, and then again. It confused the hell out of me until I realized what was going on. It was like TWA 800 again—but much, much worse. It seemed like most of the gallery was filled with people who had suicides in their lives. That was all I was going to take. I stormed into the control room and showed a side of myself that my new colleagues hadn’t seen. I was beyond furious. I felt like my brain was exploding and oozing out my ears. What is that out there? If you ever to do this to me again, I’m going to put your face through a wall. Don’t you ever, ever stack the deck like that again. That is so unfair to these people. So, so unfair. You’re manipulating emotions out there. You cannot do that.
“We’re just trying to give them the same opportunity—” someone said.
“Don’t be putting that bullshit on me. You’re not giving anybody any opportunity. You’re trying to do a theme show.”
It was as if we really were doing the cosmic game show Paul and I had joked about: Whose Death Is It Anyway? Contestants in the gallery competing to hear from their lost souls. Paul and Dana admitted that they were under pressure to deliver, at least occasionally, the kind of thing Ramey and Adora had promised in their original proposal, the one that offered Saturday Night Dead. Bonnie Hammer said she wanted an organic show. “If you stay true to what John does, the show will succeed,” she told the producers. But by that she meant that the essence of the show had to be what happens between me and the people I’m reading. It didn’t preclude the producers from having a hand in deciding who those people were. So for a while there, our concepts of “Pure John” were not totally in sync. There was no getting around the fact that this was a television show. But that didn’t stop me from trying to get everyone to pretend it wasn’t.
“I know you’re trying to do the right thing by the show,” I told Paul. “But you can’t control the other side. They don’t work like that. They’re not going to come through telling you what you want to hear because you’re doing a TV show. They can give a rat’s ass about the show. It has to happen naturally. And it will.”
After my diatribe in the control room—which was seconded by Suzane Northrop, who happened to be in the studio that day—the producers talked among themselves about how they were going to reconcile a conflict that seemed to be on a collision course. They had to concede that mixing in the occasional theme show felt more natural to them than letting fate run the show—and that’s what the people paying them wanted. So they had to decide whose culture this show was living in: theirs or mine. I was just the host of the show, the “talent,” getting a paycheck like everyone else. Unless you’re Oprah, the talent works for the show, not the other way around. I wasn’t Oprah, but I had to act like I was. “I have to be militant about my process,” I told them. “I have to really, really care, and I can’t bastardize what this is or sensationalize it. Because if I do, it’ll have an effect. They won’t stand for it.” I pointed upward. “The show will be cancelled.” When I said this couldn’t be like any other show, I wasn’t being arrogant or egotistical. I didn’t see it as trying to pull a power play. I thought I was just stating the obvious.
“You know what I think we have to do?” Dana said to Paul. “We have to surrender our egos, and surrender our control as producers, and just jump off this cliff. Let’s just take this leap of faith. We may get our butts kicked by the network. They may bounce us out of here. But you know what? I don’t believe I could make a good TV show by forcing something down John’s throat. And we wouldn’t want our jobs if we have to do it that way, anyway.”
Driving home that day, Paul said to me: “We’re really not producing this show, are we? We’re really just waiting and seeing what comes out and then post-producing.”
The man put a smile on my face. “You got it,” I said.
Out of this came two decisions. One, that we would not do anything to orchestrate who was in the galleries. We would fill them the same way I scheduled my private practice. I open the phone lines once a month, and whoever gets through gets through. With the show, people would write in for tickets and get on the list. It was a fair and simple system that didn’t involve any decisions on our part. That left the question of theme shows. We had another simple solution. We wouldn’t do them. Or rather, we would do them after the fact. Sci Fi
gave us an hour on Sundays to do special shows, so the producers would create compilation shows, following a certain theme. For example, gather up all the segments involving surprise-attack readings on staff members and package a show about that. Or do a show about pets that came through. You didn’t need to fill the gallery with members of the American Kennel Club.
Somehow, the entire issue faded. The show was starting to get a buzz, the numbers were getting strong, and as a team we were evolving, gradually coming around the concept that this really was a show that essentially produced itself. My guides have always given me great analogies and metaphors to explain what our world is all about—they just show them to me in pictures, and I say them. Now it seemed that the staff and I were playing out a metaphor after each taping. The after-work dance classes on the set symbolized how we were getting in step with how to do the show. One-twoone-two-three, now change partners . . .
It was the unpredictability of the universe that was making the show work. Keep it truly organic—no artificial ingredients—and see what happens. We didn’t need to go find great stories, I said to Paul one day. They will find us.
“I’M OVER HERE,” I said one morning, pointing toward a couple in the back row of the gallery. “Who has the background of either Brazilian or Portuguese?”
“I had a good friend who’s Colombian,” the woman said.
“No, this is Portuguese. My wife’s Portuguese, so I know it’s definitely Portuguese. I’m back here. I think I’m on this back row. One of you is either connected to someone who’s Brazilian, Portuguese, or just came back from one of these two places. There’s a Portuguese connection here.”
What followed was a classic Crossing Over tug-of-war.
“God, there’s a major Portuguese or Brazilian connection here.”