Sham Read online

  Schlessinger has reinvented herself whenever she deemed it expedient. This is most noticeable in her outlook on religion, or the lack of same. Brought up in what she describes as an “inter-faithless” marriage, she admits to living her early life in “secular” fashion. Schlessinger and her son Deryk, her only child with Bishop,3 embraced Judaism in 1996. Two years later the family converted to Orthodox Judaism, aspects of which she cited freely in rendering her moral pronouncements. Jewish organizations, including the National Council of Young Israel, honored her for her religious stances. But on August 5, 2003, Schlessinger opened her show by announcing that she would practice Judaism no more. In a series of introspective descants over the ensuing month, she explained that she felt frustrated by the effort she’d invested in following the Jewish faith, and openly chafed at her shabby treatment at the hands of fellow Jews. She even hinted at increasingly warm feelings toward Christianity, a move that—some insiders say—might enable her to reverse the attrition in listener base she’s suffered in recent years.

  Schlessinger will say that she “made mistakes,” but some think she’s made perhaps a few too many to be taken seriously as an oracle of probity and righteousness. “You suspect after a while that maybe she’s not so much about helping people as using them to elevate her own standing and have a forum for thoughts she just wants to get ‘out there,’ ” Michael Hurd, PhD, a psychologist and the author of Effective Therapy, told me. “And sometimes I’ve wondered if she’s trying to heal herself.” Schlessinger’s unauthorized biographer, Vickie Bane, similarly paints her as an obsessive-compulsive narcissist whose concern for others is limited to what they can do for her, and whose will to win can be almost frightening.

  There was, for instance, her mostly one-sided feud with Barbara De Angelis, a fellow talk-therapist. After De Angelis beat out Schlessinger for a coveted time slot, Schlessinger apparently embarked on a sub-rosa campaign to undo her. Derogatory information on De Angelis somehow found its way to the desks of personnel at the radio station that employed them both. Companies who interacted with De Angelis began receiving anonymous calls informing them that De Angelis wasn’t actually a doctor and therefore should not be described as one on the air. Even years after De Angelis left the station and Schlessinger inherited her time slot, the bad blood reportedly continued, at least on Dr. Laura’s part.

  Notwithstanding all these doubts about Schlessinger’s character, a much more basic question emerges: Does radio therapy even work? Surprisingly, some in psychiatric circles vote yes. They voice qualified support for the idea that radio shows can provide value to people who are already 98 percent of the way toward a momentous decision and just need that final pat on the back—or kick in the butt—from someone they respect. Also, a radio shrink like Dr. Laura may represent a worthwhile form of shock therapy for a caller who does, in fact, inhabit a world of alibis and denial. Hurd concedes, “She has a bullshit detector unlike anything I’ve ever seen. That’s a very useful quality for a psychotherapist. She pays very close attention to contradictions in what people are saying, and confronts them on it.”

  Unfortunately, says Hurd, there’s a huge difference between recognizing a problem and fixing a problem. He believes that in her rush to reduce even the most complex behavioral issues to words like slut, Schlessinger “does her callers a disservice.” Hurd adds, “I would never say, ‘Kick your husband out.’ I would say, ‘What would happen if you kicked your husband out? What would happen in the short run, and what would happen in the long run?’ A therapist’s job is to help people think.” Making matters worse is that many people who call radio shows are nowhere near that defining moment described above. On the contrary, they’re in obvious distress, struggling with major complicated dilemmas that seem insoluble to them. The radio format seldom allows for long-form calls, and Schlessinger is historically impatient with callers who don’t cut to the chase, at times to the extent of chiding her screener for giving a forum to callers whose questions were too vague or multifaceted. If Schlessinger tolerates such calls at all, she’ll generally seize on a subjective vision of the caller’s distress and bulldoze forward with her verdict regardless of any added context or embellished character studies that emerge as the call proceeds. She’ll interrupt callers at will, bullying them until they commit to positions that, surely in some cases, do not represent their true reasons for calling. “Not everything can be so easily resolved to black and white,” says Hurd. “Even the law recognizes shades of guilt and mitigating circumstances.” Rarely, halfway through a call, the caller will blurt something that manages to bring Schlessinger up short, forcing her to begin anew. But for every caller in that category, how many others are there who never quite get to the remark that broadens the good doctor’s perspective?

  The worst treatment is reserved for callers and others who touch on Schlessinger’s pet peeves. At those times her determination to climb on her soapbox and trumpet her ideals may result in the merciless character assassination of innocents. She berated a Connecticut eighth-grader—by name—for writing an award-winning essay on free speech that disagreed with Schlessinger’s very public call for restrictions on Internet usage in libraries.

  “If she was my daughter,” said Schlessinger, “I’d probably put her up for adoption.”

  Lastly, following Dr. Laura’s advice sometimes has put callers in the position of needing even more advice from her, on more desperate or sensitive matters. During Schlessinger’s show of July 30, 2004, a young female caller complained about her husband of one year, who, as this woman described him, was turning out to be a sexual pervert. Among other things, he displayed a fondness for “facials,” which disgusted the caller (and, seemingly, the host). For this reason, as well as others that surfaced during the call, Schlessinger advised the woman to leave her new husband. Now, it’s reasonable to assume that if this woman had learned more about her mate’s proclivities earlier in the courtship, she might have avoided disaster. But because she was trying to follow Dr. Laura’s staple script about “saving yourself for marriage,” she did not discover her husband’s sexual tastes until after she’d already said “I do.” So back she came to Schlessinger for advice on extricating herself from this unsavory mess. Note, also, that Schlessinger did not tell the woman she might be overreacting, or that finding a comfortable sexual style often requires great patience and understanding—especially when couples have had no intimate exposure to each other before the wedding. Such are the catch-22’s that can result when people (a) entrust their outlooks on life to a self-styled guru and (b) make momentous decisions based on the simplistic patter of call-in shows.

  NOTABLE FOR:

  Her explanation after nude pictures of her appeared online in 1998. Schlessinger said, simply, “In my twenties, I was my own moral authority.”

  Some things never change.

  MEN ARE FROM MARS, JOHN GRAY IS FROM PLUTO

  “Once upon a time,” reads the signature line of the Web site for John Gray Counseling Centers Inc., “men lived on Mars and women lived on Venus. They met, fell in love and lived happily together, entranced by and accepting their differences. And then everything changed when they came to Earth and forgot they were from different worlds.”

  A different world is where Gray himself came from, some would argue. There are also nagging questions about where his credentials came from. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

  Gray’s 1992 book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, was the best-selling book of the 1990s, excepting only the various versions of the Bible, collectively. His publisher, HarperCollins, which publishes more than a few SHAM authors, proclaims Gray “the best-selling relationship author of all time.” It’s hard to argue. Men Are from Mars has sold some fifteen million copies in forty-three languages—it reportedly hit the best-seller lists in Bosnia—as well as two million audiocassettes and three hundred thousand videos. It also created a new linguistic and social currency revolving around that whole Mars/Venus dichotomy.
>
  At a time when many women were pushing for a gender-blind society, Gray emerged with a message that was politically incorrect and culturally anachronistic. He preached that men and women really are fundamentally different, and he reduced male-female communication problems to those hoary stereotypes that feminists hated: Mars was more logical and analytical, Venus was more given to emotionalism and flights of fancy.

  But it worked. Today, Gray’s annual income exceeds $10 million. Spin-off books have included Mars and Venus Together Forever, Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, Mars and Venus in Love, and, my own nomination for hokiest self-help title, What You Feel You Can Heal. Like Dr. Phil and others in the movement, Gray increasingly has taken a the-world-is-my-oyster approach to brand extension. In 1999 he wrote a parenting book, Children Are from Heaven. In 2003 he published The Mars and Venus Diet and Exercise Solution.

  At the height of the Mars/Venus craze, Gray became a frequent guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, and The Today Show. He sat for interviews with Barbara Walters and Larry King. Time, Newsweek, People, and Forbes profiled him. For a while, Gray had a TV show hosted by Cybill Shepherd. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus even inspired a board game, an exclusive deal with Club Med for Mars/Venus-themed getaways, and a musical. That’s right. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, the musical, opened at the storied Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas in 2000 and ran for a year. Memorable line: “I think my libido has gone incognito.”

  All the while Gray continued dispensing his unique brand of relationship advice. His syndicated column still reaches thirty million readers through two hundred papers, among them the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the New York Daily News. He gets $50,000 per speech. Ongoing, too, is a gamut of large seminars, smaller workshops, and personal-coaching sessions conducted in eighteen states and Mexico by thirty-six counselors, all of whom “have been personally trained by Dr. John Gray in the principles presented in his books, tapes, videos, and seminars,” according to Gray’s literature. For those who can’t wait for a seminar, Gray offers real-time Mars/Venus relationship coaching via telephone. For $1.99 per minute, another set of trained counselors will address such timeless topics as “Are you attracting the wrong people?” “Are you wasting your time?” and “Why doesn’t he call?”

  And what sort of advice are his readers and clients getting? In his advice column for Redbook magazine, he offers this banal insight to a married couple trying to resolve a series of arguments: “The outcome you want is one that works for both of you.” In Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, Gray tells women who want to talk during sex to “make little noises and not use complete sentences,” because a woman using complete sentences in bed “can be a turnoff.” He pontificates on the meaning of women’s underwear, explaining that when “she wears silky pink or lace, she is ready to surrender to sex as a romantic expression of loving vulnerability” and that a “cotton T-shirt with matching panties . . . may mean she doesn’t need a lot of foreplay.” According to Gray, such boudoir attire suggests that the woman whom it adorns “may not be in the mood for an orgasm” but rather might be “happy and satisfied” by feeling her partner’s “orgasm inside her.”

  Clearly such precise knowledge of the most minute aspects of human sexual behavior and etiquette can only result from a significant track record of academic study and clinical research. Or so one would think.

  First of all, “Dr.” John Gray is not a medical doctor but a PhD—and a questionable one at that. In recent years multiple sources and reports have challenged Gray’s credentials. He received his doctorate in 1982 from Columbia Pacific University, a nonaccredited correspondence college that California’s attorney general once described as a diploma mill. The state later fined the school and ordered it to shut down. The professional therapist societies to which Gray belongs, the American Counseling Association and the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors, both require PhD’s—real ones—for membership. They’ve avoided comment on the Gray situation.

  This makes Gray’s counseling centers a particular matter of concern to some of his credentialed colleagues, one of whom likens the vast counseling network to a house of cards. “To talk about his ‘certification procedure’ “—a short course designed to produce entrepreneurial John Gray clones—“seems a little odd when the head guy himself isn’t certified,” the psychiatrist told me.

  Gray’s master’s and bachelor’s degrees aren’t from conventional institutions of higher education, either. They’re from the Maharishi European Research University in Switzerland. It’s not often that experts on human sexuality spend the better part of a decade as celibate monks, but that’s what Gray did, as secretary to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who achieved his greatest fame as a spiritual adviser to the Beatles. The Maharishi’s various schools of higher learning are best known for their emphasis on levitation. Maharishi University came to Iowa during the 1970s, and the largest structure on campus, its “Golden Dome,” is reserved for practice in that Eastern art.

  Revelations about Gray’s academic past have not dulled his hubris in the least. “You can measure that school by the quality of the students they put out,” he has said of Columbia Pacific. “Myself for example.” Lack of professional licenses notwithstanding, Gray continues to identify himself in his official bio as “an internationally recognized expert in the fields of communication and relationships.” In a realm that’s rife with fraud and scandal, the “credential gap” of some of SHAM’s exalted leadership is one of the great underreported stories.

  A final, interesting Gray tidbit: He was once married to the irrepressible Barbara De Angelis, the same radio host who became involved in a feud with Laura Schlessinger. De Angelis is another self-proclaimed sexologist; she came to the field after being, among other things, a magician’s assistant to Doug Henning. She was wife number one for Gray; he was husband number three (of five, to date, including Henning) for her. De Angelis’s contributions to the SHAM oeuvre include the optimistically titled How to Make Love All the Time and Are You the One for Me? Perhaps Gray and De Angelis found their own answers to the latter question during some function at Columbia Pacific University, where De Angelis received her doctorate as well.

  NOTABLE FOR:

  Telling Inside Edition in 2003, “I don’t need to put PhD by my name. I’m the most famous author in the world.”

  MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: A RETURN TO GIBBERISH?

  The ex–cabaret songstress Marianne Williamson has been a key figure in SHAM’s Spiritual Division ever since Oprah, the éminence grise of self-help, embraced Williamson’s 1992 book, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles. For thirty-nine weeks the book sat atop the New York Times best-seller list, and three of her next eight books reached that same lofty perch. At the height of her appeal, Williamson acquired the nickname “Mother Teresa for the ‘90s,” joining Deepak Chopra and unreconstituted psychic Sylvia Browne as the anointed leadership of the New Age.

  In explaining the spiritual underpinnings of secular life, Williamson looks back to Christianity’s misunderstood (she would argue) origins. Her books, tapes, lectures, and usual proliferation of other materials provide a unique vision of spirituality, one that offers salvation without sacrifice, satisfaction without sin. Lots of gain, no pain. The New Age movement as a whole, says Robert Ellwood, a professor of religion at the University of Southern California and the author of The Sixties Spiritual Awakening, represents “a sort of build-your-own-religion kit, a way to pick and choose the rules, keeping the convenient precepts while discarding the cumbersome ones.”

  Above all, the cheery thought that one could have a self-improvement program anchored in miracles or angels is a manifestation of the force Williamson has exerted on the culture over the past decade. She made it sound credible.

  Williamson’s formative influences are interesting. She was born in Houston to Jewish lawyers, and to say her parents indoctrinated her in liberalism under
states the case: In 1965, when she was just thirteen, her father took her to Vietnam to see the reviled “military-industrial complex” at work. She later majored in philosophy and theater at suburban Los Angeles’s Pomona College, and supported herself for a time as a nightclub act, at one point sharing an apartment with budding actress Laura Dern. Williamson has been honest about the drug abuse and heavy drinking that preceded her spiritual rebirth.

  She first won note in 1983 when her Los Angeles–area talks on the link between spirituality and life began drawing dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. (Her striking, if vaguely haunted, looks didn’t hurt.) Williamson chose as her topic “A Course in Miracles,” which she described as a “self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy.” The lecture was really her spin on a theology expressed in a three-book series of the same name by psychologist Helen Schucman, who claimed she was channeling Jesus when she compiled it. According to Schucman, Jesus said to her, “This is a course in miracles; please take notes.” She did, and the resulting volumes, published in 1975 by the Foundation for Inner Peace, represent “Christianity lite”: more love, forgiveness, and unity; less suffering, sacrifice, and ceremony. One million copies of the original course were in print by the time Williamson’s lectures had graduated from coffeehouses to amphitheaters, attracting some powerful admirers en route. Liz Taylor asked her to preside over her 1991 wedding to Larry Fortensky at Michael Jackson’s now-infamous Neverland Ranch. Hillary Clinton had her to the White House for a chat.