Everyone's into psychic advice in the Big Apple

Shirley Lowe - 1 November 1987

New York may be the slickest and sharpest of cities, but its smartest citizens are turning to tarot cards, psychics and inter-species communicators to solve their problems. Shirley Lowe has tuned in.

The Big Apple is turning into a crystal ball. Everyone you meet in New York seems to be having their cards and minds read or they’ve just got back from a meaningful session with their psychic.

Sit next to Phyllis Levy at a dinner party and she’ll tell you about her inter-species communicator, bump into Mary Ann Crenshaw in the street and she produces a chunk of crystal from her chic, black leather handbag which, she says, gives out good vibrations and expands her consciousness. look up an old friend, whose husband has left her, and you’ll find that she hasn’t turned to her mother, her preacher or even her therapist for advice, but to her psychic.

New Yorkers, living in the most technologically advanced city in the world, currently book like simple Latvian peasants as they turn to tarot cards, tune in to crystal consciousness, and pay psychics more than NZ$445 an hour for making predictions or “channelling advice from alleged spirits from another world. Phyllis Levy, a top executive in New York’s largest talent agency, has a cat called Barnaby who is so neurotic that he spends his days under a sofa, and has almost permanent colitis; Ms Levy called in Samantha Khurrie, an inter-species communicator, on a “try anything” basis. Ms Khurrie talks to animals by picking up their vibrations. She is retained by racehorse owners and zoos and, after chatting to the elephants at the San Diego zoo, was able to pass on their complaints about their quarters to the proper authorities.

She went into Ms Levy’s bedroom with Barnaby and, after an hour, came out saying things like “He told me how he felt on the day the street blew up and rocked the apartment, and I managed to calm him down and explain.” Barnaby, she said, had suffered a deprived kittenhood and she instructed his owner: “Think that your bands are large, warm, furry mittens filled with love.”

Ms Levy was sceptical as she wrote out the cheque for $140 “But then I mentioned that I had to take both my cats to the vet the following day, and how they always screamed and fought when I tried to put them in their boxes. ‘Oh I’ll just talk to them about that,’ said Samantha, And guess what? The next day, for the first time in 12 years, they jumped into their carrying cases without a whimper.”

Mary Ann Crenshaw, a New York fashion editor, says that she was meditating on her bit of crystal (a present from her therapist) and had put herself into a trance — “I’m quite good at that” — when she felt a strong presentiment of danger. “Half an hour later, I walked out of my doorway and was attacked by a large dog.” Mary Ann also goes to an astrologer who gives her such useful tips as “Don’t get your hair cut today; you’ll hate it.”

A well-known American novelist who, not surprisingly, doesn’t with to be named, says that when her husband left her after 17 years, she took his photograph to a psychic, who scraped it gently with her fingernail and revealed (over several hourly sessions at $180 a time) the comforting news that the busbund was miserable, suicidal and yearned to come home, and that his girlfriend had developed an irritating skin infection.

“I didn’t believe a word of it at first,” says my friend, “but I was totally convinced when she mentioned the girlfriend by name — it’s a most unusual nickname — and told me that she drove a grey Mercedes. ‘No, that’s his car, my husband’s,’ I said. And then I heard that he’d given it to her.”

Along the posh Upper East and Upper West sides there are Reader-Adviser signs where the Nail Clinics used to be

Mania Costalina of Cozy Nail, off Lexington Avenue in the mid-fifties, is also offering “Psychic Readings by Mrs Maria — Tarot Cards and Palm Reader — Advice on all Problems”; several restaurants employ resident psychics, so that you can sort out your love-life, or whether or not it’s a shrewd move to buy IBM today, between the soup and the spare ribs. Brian Bricker, a video company executive, picked up a tip about a business deal and a possible sales strategy from Carolyn Clark over lunch at the Akbar restaurant; not bad going for less than $20.

Gemstone shops like Star Magic and Crystal Resources are selling pieces of quartz crystal, citrine, tourmaline and amethyst. There is a pseudo-scientific belief that these gemstones have curative powers; a Manhattan businessman, Richard Perl, who ritually drops a crystal into his pocket each morning, says It helps him concentrate.

There are now some 2500 shops in the United States selling books on the paranormal and related topics, and they are pushing the popular How To Be Young And Beautiful And Make A Million Dollars And Be Loved While You’re Doing It handbooks off the shelves of general bookshops.

Shirley Maclaine, who discovered spiritualism in the mid-1970s, has sold five million copies of her four-book psychic autobiography (telling of her trek through the film and spirit world), and has two of them in the American best-seller charts. Her fourth book Dancing In The Light describes an out-of-body experience as a suicide victim In fabled Atlantis.

“I’ve made it all right for people who’ve been thinking about these things in private to do them with less fear and ridicule,” Maclaine says.

This psychic subculture has been labelled New Age thinking, but there are plenty of people who think it’s a lot of old nonsense and that Shirley Maciaine is not so much out on a limb as out of her mind.

New York new-agers are not like Californian hippies, moping around telling their beads. They tend to seek supernatural answers to practical problems. Psychologist Karlis Osis, at the American Society for Psychical Research in Manhattan told Georgia Dullea of the New York Times that he attributed the current interest in the paranormal to “a desire for more — not just income, but knowledge of the deeper dimensions of life and that also includes the spiritual.” Ms Dullea concluded that a desire for more tangible rewards was often the prime motivation for a visit to a psychic, and quoted psychic Patricia Barnes “Love, money, power — young people today want it all.”

wouldn’t mind some of it either, so, brimming with disbelief, I called in at The Gypsy Tea Kettle on Lexington Avenue and faced Joan Satie ($14 plus tip) over a small table. She correctly described my husband and the intricacies of his job without so much as a nod from me. She revealed a surprising knowledge about my family and my work, and told me I’d published two books (true) and had just been asked to write a screenplay (also true) from which I would make a great deal of money.

They obviously know a thing or two, these psychics.

— The Times.