by John Edward
“Now suspicious,” Jaroff wrote, “O’Neill recalled that while the audience was waiting to be seated, Edward’s aides were scurrying about, striking up conversations and getting people to fill out cards with their name, family tree, and other facts. Once inside the auditorium, where each family was directed to preassigned seats, more than an hour passed before show time while ‘technical difficulties’ backstage were corrected. And what did most of the audience—drawn by the prospect of communicating with their departed relatives—talk about during the delays? Those departed relatives, of course. These conversations, O’Neill suspects, may have been picked up by the microphones strategically placed around the auditorium and then passed on to the medium.”
What does it say about the state of American journalism when validating information is more important to a fast-talking ballroom-dancing psychic medium than to a science writer for the country’s premier news magazine? To those of us on the show, of course, the charges were beyond ludicrous. Yes, we preassign seats. Pretty much the way they preassign seats at the rides at Disneyworld. And about those “technical difficulties:” They’re called Producing a Daily Television Show. When Paul looked back at the log for the day that Michael O’Neill was in the gallery, he found that the morning gallery had run later than usual, which delayed the lunch break for the crew and the taping of the afternoon gallery, which included O’Neill. I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought it was just point and shoot.
And, yes, it’s true that a lot of people on the show—I’m sure they don’t appreciate being called my “aides”—do a whole lot of “scurrying about.” That’s practically the job description of most people who work on TV shows. But as much as they might like to go around striking up conversation with members of the gallery, with all this scurrying about they don’t have time do that and hand out all those cards and get all that family information down and then collect the cards and scurry backstage so I can read the cards and memorize all that fascinating family information while the aides are lining up to tell me where the people who filled out the cards I was reading are sitting. And I really have to do that fast, because there are more aides waiting to relay all the information they have just written down after listening in to all the chatter being picked up by those strategically placed microphones that apparently we didn’t place strategically enough that eagle-eye Michael O’Neill couldn’t detect them, or at least detect that he suspected he detected them. Of course, how could Leon Jaroff know any of this? He hadn’t had time to come by our “auditorium” and have a look around.
Whether or not Michael O’Neill wanted to believe his grandfather came through that day was for him alone to decide. But whatever button the experience pushed, it led him to e-mail his suspicions to the James Randi Educational Foundation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Leon Jaroff heard about O’Neill from Randi, his fellow Skeptic. Or rather, Selective Skeptic. He wasn’t at all skeptical of Michael O’Neill or his “suspicions.” Randi quoted O’Neill liberally in his column in Skeptic magazine. “I think the whole place is bugged somehow,” Randi quoted O’Neill as saying. “My guess is that [Edward] is backstage listening and looking at us all and noting certain readings. When he finally appeared, he looked at the audience as if he were trying to spot people he recognized. He also had ringers in the audience. I can tell because about fifteen people arrived in a chartered van, and once inside, they did not sit together.” On that, Time magazine based its story on Crossing Over.
I had expected something like this to happen, ever since the New York Post ran a story on its TV page raising the possibility that I was the Devil Himself—illustrated by a huge picture of me with computer-generated horns. If I didn’t know it already, that confirmed that psychic mediums are what’s known in the media as Fair Game, which is a nice way of saying Raw Meat. Jaroff’s story was so over-the-top absurd that on one level I thought it was actually funny. I mean, did this guy—or any of the army of editors they supposedly have at the news magazines—actually think we would go around gathering information about people before the show and expect nobody to say anything about it for nearly a year? What was so special about Michael O’Neill, “a New York City marketing manager,” that he was the one who finally cracked the case?
Jaroff’s story lit a series of brushfires on two coasts. At the show itself, staff members were outraged and upset, and I was angry on their behalf, much more so than for myself. These were professionals, and this was a despicable and groundless attack on their integrity. Their commitment to the show and to me was not something I took lightly or for granted. They didn’t deserve this. It was all the more disturbing because we knew almost immediately that the network was very concerned, and we weren’t sure what that was about. We could feel the rumblings three thousand miles away, and we only hoped it was parental concern we were feeling. I didn’t want them to “defend” the show, but I did want them to show us support and fight back somehow. On the other hand, it was clear pretty quickly that there were some higher-ups who seemed to be realizing that, come to think of it, they didn’t know a whole heck of a lot about how this show was produced. For all they knew, we were bugging the place and doing who knew what else.
Paul was ordered to prepare a detailed report of our procedures: everything from how the gallery was picked to where every microphone was. They wanted to know everything that happened to members of the gallery from the moment they wrote in for tickets to the moment they left the building when taping was over. Who talked to them, and about what? Did they fill out any forms? What information were they asked to give? For the record, the only paperwork that gallery members are asked to give us is a legal release granting us permission to include them on the show, and contact information for post-taping interviews. The only thing our gallery coordinator, Jesse Shafer, talks to them about is what’s going to happen in the next few hours and where the bathrooms are. Neither the producers nor I have anything to do with the process of filling the gallery.
Meanwhile, just in case someone asked, Paul and Dana tested the microphones that are indeed “strategically placed” above the set—to pick up applause and “ambient noise.” They found that if they listened real closely in the control room, and everyone was real quiet, they could hear people talking. But it was difficult to make out much of what was said. It was hard to imagine anyone of any intelligence thinking that an entire television show would be dependent on producers straining to hear snippets of whispered conversation and hoping they picked up enough to fill three shows.
Paul and Dana carried out their little investigations with a mixture of annoyance and amusement. “I’ve been on game shows that have more to hide,” Dana said. When he and Paul watched the raw tape of Michael O’Neill’s reading and compared it to the show that aired, it confirmed what we knew: There was no creative editing to make it look as if O’Neill was answering yes to information he couldn’t validate. Cynical people like Leon Jaroff are so willfully ignorant of the reality of what I do and of how Crossing Over is produced that they wouldn’t even consider the possibility that manipulative editing is the very symbol of what the show is not about. Unfortunately, Jaroff is in a position of tremendous power because he happens to write for Time magazine. Had he done the most basic journalism, he would have learned that in our continuing effort to make the show a mirror of the process, we were doing even less editing than when we started, even for time. We were letting the readings breathe a little bit more. The real problem was that the editors of Time allowed someone with such an obvious bias to write about the show in the first place. Instead of printing the shoddy, lazy “reporting” of a confirmed skeptic—the kind of reckless junk you expect to find on the Internet—why not assign the story to a reporter who would approach the story like any other: with eyes and mind open, and with fairness and accuracy the first priority?
Larry King, right on top of the story, invited me on his show to talk about the controversy. He also had Sylvia Browne and James Van Praagh in Los Angeles, along wi
th a variety of skeptics, including Paul Kurtz, a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo and publisher of The Skeptical Inquirer. And Leon Jaroff himself.
“By the way, Larry,” Jaroff said, after James, Sylvia, and I were introduced as authors of books, “I have written a book, too, but it’s on a real subject, the human genome project. I thought I would throw that in.”
When Larry asked Jaroff if I and other mediums are frauds, Jaroff said: “I will say two things. One, I think they’re very good at what they do, but I think what they do is baloney.” When Larry asked him why, Jaroff said, “Because they use a technique that has been known to magicians for years. It is called cold reading, and then there are variations of it which are called warm reading and hot reading.”
A few days later, the network sent out the lawyers to have a look around. This was so they could state publicly what the show’s procedures were. And so they would have all the information they needed should they decide to take legal action. Paul showed them around one day. “There’s John’s bathroom,” he said when he brought them into my dressing room. “His boom box. His socks. Nothing to hide.” There were long, involved discussions of what procedures could be instituted to guarantee that nobody got information about members of the gallery in advance—not that anyone thought we were doing that. It was all about perception. There were ideas about code numbers and computer systems to ensure that the hands of no one directly connected to the show ever touched a ticket request. “At a certain point, how much time, energy, and money do we want to spend on something that we’re doing legitimately in the first place?” Dana said.
There was definite sentiment for a lawsuit around the show, and it did seem that one was being seriously considered. The studio had a lot at stake with syndication. Two months before, Crossing Over had been the talk at the National Association of Television Producers and Executives annual meeting in Las Vegas. By then, the show had been picked up by stations in more than 90 percent of the country’s major markets, and wherever I went at the convention, people wanted to talk to me about the show. Now, two months later, word was that competing syndicators were spreading the Time story in the hopes of getting stations to drop us before they aired even one show. But weeks later, none had pulled out, which seemed to cool any thoughts that USA Networks would sue no less than Time Warner AOL over whether Psychic Boy over here was cheating.
Charles Nordlander wrote a letter to Time, which was published heavily edited—for space, I guess they would say, not for content. And Bonnie Hammer wrote an angry letter to Norman Pearlstine, the editorial director of Time Incorporated, lodging “the strongest possible protest over the grossly negligent and irresponsible journalism by writer Leon Jaroff.” She demanded a retraction, which never came.
After the tempest died down, I thought about why I was doing the show in the first place. It was to reach people. The audience was my only real concern. And they were the ones hurt the most. It pained me to think that anyone who had sat in our gallery over the past nine months and gone home more aware and connected than when they arrived might wonder if it had all been a grand illusion. Would John Shauder question, for just a second, if we’d had his name on our list and dispatched our staff of researchers to dig into his past? Would Catherine start to wonder if it was possible that while waiting for the taping to begin, she had been standing near some hidden microphone and mentioned the feather that fell at her daughter’s feet at Niagara Falls? And what about all those people watching at home? Would some of them think it was just a magic show after all?
Yes, I could look back and see how far we had come. But that didn’t mean we didn’t have far to go. Or still don’t for that matter.
EPILOGUE
Unitel Studios, New York City
May 2, 2001
I’m standing on the luminescent disk that has been my second home for nearly a year, about to say good-bye and thanks for coming to the last gallery before we get a two-week break. The rest isn’t for the weary. It’s for the backlogged. Too much tape is piling up in the post-production department, so Paul has decided to take some time off from shooting to let them catch up. I love the show, but I can use the break. We all can.
I glance at the signal from Doug Fogal, my faithful stage manager, that it’s time to wrap up. Seems like a lifetime ago that Doug was counting me down as I waited uneasily offstage, about to go out and greet my first official gallery. Now, all these galleries later, I look out and see what I always see at this moment: disappointed faces, people wondering why their families didn’t come through, why they weren’t among the lucky ones, like soldiers who’ve come up empty at mail call. I tell them I wish I could have read them all.
But among those disappointed faces are many others who may not have gotten the messages they wanted to hear but who got the bigger message: that the experience was as much for them as for the people who were read. They got comfort and insight through the readings of those sitting nearby, and I feel their appreciation. And I hope they—and the people watching at home—accept my take-home message: Always remember to communicate, appreciate, and validate the people in your lives, past and present. And you don’t need a medium to appreciate and communicate with those on the other side. Nor should you get fixated on the other side at the expense of your life here on earth. If there’s one thing those on the other side want us to know it’s that you don’t have to worry about them. Move on with your life, enjoy it, value it, and don’t make it about waiting for that reunion in the great beyond. There’s a reason they call it the afterlife.
I turn and bound off the disk, feeling good about the day’s work. I stop for a series of little chats before heading off the set and up the stairs of the old theater to my dressing room. There’s a Time magazine on a table along the way, and for a second, I’m jolted back to the reality that no matter how much work I do, this will never be easy, or easily accepted. Even I had my doubts at the beginning. Should I even be doing this on TV? I’m not sure it’s honoring the process when what I’m doing is called a “show.”
I knew that doing this on national television would be like painting a big bullseye on my back. Those who see mediums as con artists making money off people’s grief would be lining up to take their shots. But if anything’s become clear to me, it’s that while the cynics and snipers may never go away, they are becoming more and more outdated and irrelevant every day. They’re still marching to the same old beat of disbelief. They say they want scientific proof, but it’s hard to see evidence when you’ve got your blinders on, your back turned, and your mind closed to everything but what you have always believed. I have to chuckle at the irony: Whose position is really based on faith (or lack thereof), and whose on evidence? But like I said: They’re not going anywhere.
Not long ago, I was on a flight to San Diego, reading Shirley MacLaine’s book, The Camino. There was a passage in which she was musing about how the media cover spiritual topics, and her analogy was pointed, if not original. She thought they were like a pack of dogs. At that moment, my Boys kicked in with an “oh, by the way” comment. And it was that I would be a “warrior” for my field. Instantly, I let out an expletive. The man who had the luxury of sitting next to me looked over as if I suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. I smiled painfully with an apologetic glance, and then just stared straight out at the clouds. All I could focus on was that word. Warrior. It implied struggle, if not outright battle. How could that be possible when I refuse to defend what I do? I much preferred “ambassador.”
I understand their message more clearly each day. While finishing up this book, I attended the bat mitzvah of a friend’s daughter. We arrived late, and while Sandra went to the ladies’ room, I sat outside in a chair. Just then, a swarm of teenage boys and girls came flying out of the party room, heading for their respective bathrooms. The boys kept going, but one after another, the girls noticed me and stopped to try to figure out how they knew me. Finally, one of them said, “Oh my God! That’s
the man who talks to God!” Another girl corrected her. “No—he’s in the movies.” The girls swarmed around, looking at me as if my spacecraft were parked outside. I really wanted to know what was taking Sandra so long. “Well, what do you do?” one of the girls asked.
Suddenly I found myself in my own episode of Touched by an Angel. “I don’t talk to God,” I said. “Well, actually we can all talk to God. He listens to all of us, not just people on TV. I’m on a show that deals with psychic stuff.” One darted another a look.
“You believe him?” Her friend—red hair and freckles—leaned forward, hands on hips. “I think you’re a big fake!” she said, then turned and marched off to the ladies’ room.
I’d just been dissed by someone in junior high. The last time that happened was when I made a date with a girl, only to have her show up with her boyfriend. Yes, I get the warrior message.
ALONE NOW IN MY DRESSING ROOM, taking off my makeup and hanging up my wardrobe, I’m not in a fighting mood. There’s a stack of letters nearby from people writing to say how much Crossing Over has helped them. Many of them have included photos of their loved ones or little tokens of appreciation. There’s a letter from a mom and dad saying thanks for giving them a One Last Time with their son. They want me to have a framed Special Olympics-type medal he had won. When I read letters like these, it takes the sting off the attacks. I’m finding myself getting less and less angry at the cynics. More and more, I feel sorry for them.
But I don’t need letters to feel validated about the past year. I only have to flip through my mental file of memorable moments. I think of Carla and Vincent, newlyweds who were sitting in the gallery one day. Carla’s dad came through saying he danced at her wedding. Carla said she had his picture pinned inside her gown. I think of the woman who connected with a little boy who drowned in front of her eyes when she was a little girl—and I think of how much it moved Diane Wheeler-Nicholson, one of our producers.