BY DENISE FLAIM
Ten years ago, I pitched a story to my editor about a cop's kid from Glen Cove who was fast becoming a Long Island legend. A jeans-and-T-shirt-wearing "medium" who said he could talk to dead people, John Edward had a list of clients willing to wait a year to have a reading in his Huntington home.
He sounds, I said, like a story.
But just before I sat down with Edward for our first formal interview, I got a phone call at the office. It was Edward, fresh from the StairMaster. Three entities kept "coming through" while he was at the gym, he said. And they were not taking no for an answer.
Then, rapid fire, came my late grandparents, if you want to believe it was them. Edward gave me their names, clear as day. He knew plenty of things that you couldn't check on the database at Ellis Island: The still in my maternal grandfather's basement. The great-uncle buried in the family plot, and what he died of. The fact that I had my grandmother's rosary beads - even if I didn't know I did, until, at Edward's insistence, I went home and looked.
Reporters are believers
My objectivity on life support, I passed the story on to a colleague, Bill Falk, now editor of the American edition of The Week magazine. After tireless reporting, countless interviews and a test involving a Texas murderer and his death-row attorney, Falk arrived at much the same conclusion I had:
If Edward was faking it, he'd be damned if he knew how.
That was then, this is now, and a lot has changed. Six books, two television shows (currently, "John Edward Cross Country" on the WE cable network) and millions of dollars later, Edward, 38, is nothing short of an empire. He has a three-year waiting list for private readings, down from seven because he's no longer taking new names. (One person who will never get a session, he vows, is the owner of johnedward.com, who "held it hostage for a reading" and forced him to revert to a dot-net Web address.)
Instead of the metaphysical tete-a-tetes that were his stock in trade when I first met him more than a decade ago, Edward now focuses on group readings. He's just come back from a tour of Australia, where he drew stadium crowds of more than 12,000. (Periodically, he gets confused with Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards: "Edwards with an "S" ... 'senator,'" he jokes. "Edward with a 'D' ... 'dead.'")
Wednesday night finds Edward much closer to home as he kicks off a five-day, seven-show engagement at the North Fork Theatre at Westbury.
"I love the hometown crowd," says Edward, noting that this is the fifth consecutive year he has done holiday-time appearances at the theater in the round, under the glaring overhead lights that he jokingly calls "the mothership."
Feeling the pull
"I go by pull," he says of how he selects the audience members who will get a reading. The pushier the spirit - as my Italian ancestors attest - the better your chances.
Sitting in his Suffolk County office with the glass-block windows and nondescript front, sipping a bottle of Fiji water, Edward is exactly the man I met 10 years ago, except a whole lot more famous. He still favors jeans and T-shirts (today, a red one with the Indiana University logo). He still has his two Bichons, though they are now ancient. And he still is a Long Islander, although as a concession to stalkers and death threats, he moved to a more private residence.
His wife, Sandra, still runs a nearby dance studio - fans who recognize him when he drops by "are very respectful" about not infringing on his privacy. Except maybe for the guy who shouted out, "Hey, it's 'Crossing Over' John," he recalls. "What's that - like, Johnny 'Bag of Donuts'?"
That inaugural Newsday story prepared him for the media frenzy to come. Before the story ran, Edward says his "spirit guides" showed him copies of the as yet-undistributed paper under a puppy. "What they were saying," he says, "was that this story is great and all, but know that tomorrow puppies are going to be trained on it."
Given his fame and relative fortune, I'm surprised that Edward has decided to remain in staid suburbia.
"I mean, why don't you just pack it all up and move to ... Barbados?" I ask.
Visibly surprised, Edward asks how I came up with that Caribbean nation.
"I don't know - it's the first thing that popped into my head," I say.
Eerie, says Edward, considering that Barbados, which he visited in 1988, is his favorite place on Earth.
"You're not the only one who can do that psychic stuff," I joke.
Joe Nickell, a former stage magician and "mentalist" who is now a senior research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in Amherst, N.Y., would say that's an understatement.
Edward, he says, practices "sleight of tongue."
"The average person watching John Edward is not better suited to understand what he is doing than the average person watching a magician perform an illusion and trying to figure out how he does that," says Nickell, who has never met Edward but who has studied tapes of his appearances and written about him. "If you are a willing participant, if you've already bought into what he is doing, you will start helping clarify what he is saying."
Nickell says Edward uses techniques like "cold reading" - instantly sizing up a person based on their facial expressions, clothing and other tell-tale indicators - as well as asking revelatory questions that subjects later misremember as statements of fact. ("Do you have a sister?" morphs into "He told me I had a sister.")
Not surprisingly, Edward is dismissive of his critics, noting that everything they accuse him of they turn out to be guilty of themselves, such as manipulating tapes of his readings to make the validating information land on the cutting-room floor.
His son has the touch
But instead of focusing on the negative - he compares it in workshops to "urinating in a Jacuzzi" - he has more uplifting things to occupy him, such as his two children - Justin, 5, and Olivia, 10 months. In response to the obvious question - has his son inherited his ability? - Edward says he thinks all children are open to the metaphysical because they have not yet been taught not to be, and Justin is no exception.
When Justin was 3 years old, during dinner, Edward noticed a "pull" in the room, but couldn't get any information. Finally, in frustration, he pointed to the area behind his son, and asked, "Who's there?"
His son turned, smiled and answered with the name of Edward's late mother.
Plans of a dynasty are the last thing on Edward's mind. He "never needed" the fame he now enjoys, he says, "never looked for it," which is why he says it was easy to keep on living the life he has always lived, except for concessions like world travel and the four security cameras that pan the front and back of the building. In comparison, dark spirits are more easily dissuaded, with some burning sage, or visualizations of white light.
A distinctly Marian-looking statue of a shapely woman dressed in blue looks on from the other room, a gift from his mother-in-law that unnerves him slightly. "I don't think Mary should be hot," shrugs this devout Catholic, who makes an annual visit to Mexico City's shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Edward has a conference call in 15 minutes to discuss some tentative Vegas appearances, similar in format to his Westbury run. Maybe Orlando will follow.
Before that, in early January, he heads Down Under again, for a charity event for Terri Irwin, widow of Steve, the "Crocodile Hunter."
Deep, impermeable waters out there, as the late Aussie learned to his peril. But someone has to plumb them.
WHEN&WHERE: John Edward, with special guest spiritual-intuitive Char Margolis, at the the North Fork Theatre at Westbury (960 Brush Hollow Rd.) for seven performances Wednesday through Sunday. Tickets are $69, $49 and $39 and are available at the North Fork Theatre at Westbury box office, online at livenation.com or ticketmaster.com, Charge by phone at 212-307-7171 or 631-888-9000. Limited seating available. For more information, call 516-334-0800
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