Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall (Enhanced Media, Hillionaire Productions, Wonder Worthy Productions, Lifetime, 2024) and Call Me Miss Cleo (Dial Tone Films, Gunpowder & Sky, HBO Max, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, August 10) I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime about “Miss Cleo,” an oddball sort of celebrity who emerged in the early 2000’s as the public spokesperson for something called the “Psychic Readers Network.” One was a 2024 dramatization of her life called Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall, and one was a 2022 feature-length documentary for what was then HBO Max called Call Me Miss Cleo. I can’t remember ever hearing of her at the time, but I recall that in 1994 a man I was briefly dating expressed interest in going to work for one of the psychic phone services but didn’t pursue it, possibly because he was put off by their business model. The Psychic Readers Network and its competitors offered so-called “free” readings by phone, but when you called their 1-800 number they really put you onto a 1-900 number. The catch was that the call was “free” only for the first three minutes; if you stayed on the line longer than that, you were billed $4.95 for each additional minute –and the company trained its operators to keep customers on the phone for 18-20 minutes or even more. Many parents first found out about this when they got phone bills for hundreds of dollars, and soon discovered it was because their children had been calling the psychic hotlines, running up major charges and inadvertently costing their parents large sums of money. “Miss Cleo” (played in the movie by singer, rapper and actor Robin Yvette Allen, who’s better known by her stage name “The Lady of Rage”) was born Youree Dell Harris on August 12, 1962 in Los Angeles, California. She was African-American, though after her biological parents abandoned her she was taken in by an Afro-Caribbean family and raised by them.

As a young adult she married a man and had two daughters by him before he died, and her mother (who’s a major character in this film even though its imdb.com page doesn’t identify who plays her – probably Daphne Maxwell Reid, whose husband Tim Reid directed this) chewed her out for having married a man who was (otherwise) Gay. She settled in Seattle and worked for a Black theatre company at a space called the Langston Hughes Cultural Center, where, using the name “Ree Perris,” she produced, directed and/or starred in three plays she wrote herself: For Women Only, Summer Rhapsody and Supper Club Café. For her role in For Women Only she created a character called “Miss Cleo,” a Jamaican-born shaman, tarot card reader and devotée of the voodoo god Chango (the one invoked in Desi Arnaz’s huge hit “Babalù”). Disaster struck when Supper Club Café flopped at the box office and Harris absconded with $4,000 the theatre had been paid as a result of winning a college grant. She ultimately settled in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and out of sheer desperation to finance her own and her daughters’ lifestyle, she took a job as a phone operator with Psychic Readers Network. Psychic Readers’ Network was a shell company owned by something called Access Resource Services. Its owners were two young white men named Steven Feder (Shane Johnson) and Peter Stolz (Ian Bohen), and after having started and then being driven out of a rival phone-psychic company, Psychic Advisers’ Network – for which they recruited actor Billy Dee Williams (Diana Ross’s co-star in Lady Sings the Blues and Mahogany) as a celebrity spokesperson – they launched Psychic Readers’ Network on the same fundamentally corrupt and oppressive business model. Among their instructions to call operators were to get the names, addresses and phone numbers of every caller so they could be targeted for junk-mail ads for a wide variety of sleazy services aimed at separating their proven suckers from as much of their money as possible.

Using her Jamaican “Miss Cleo” character, Harris became by far the Psychic Readers’ Network’s most successful operator, and when Feder and Stolz realized their previous strategy of using faded Black celebrities as TV spokespeople wasn’t working, they hired “Miss Cleo” to do infomercials for their service. Miss Cleo eagerly accepted the additional income, even though she either knew or should have realized that much of what she was supposed to say on the air – notably that the calls were “free” when in fact, after the first three minutes, they weren’t – was B.S. Miss Cleo’s TV spots attracted the attention of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as well as several state attorneys general, including Florida’s, who took the lead in prosecuting them since the operation was based in Fort Lauderdale. They indicted Feder and Poltz for fraud, and later added Miss Cleo to the indictment. Meanwhile, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter named Dorothy Parvaz got a tip from some of the people she’d scammed at the Langston Hughes Cultural Center that “Miss Cleo” and “Ree Parris” were the same person. They’d recognized her from the Psychic Readers’ Network’s TV ads, and Parvaz decided to investigate. Among other items, she was able to come up with a birth certificate establishing that “Miss Cleo”’s real name was Youree Harris and she was born, not in Jamaica, but in L.A. She was also able to find out from the University of Southern California that Harris had never been a student there under any of her multiple names, despite her claims that she had been. Eventually the FTC prosecuted the Psychic Readers’ Network and indicted Feder, Stolz and Miss Cleo for fraud, and Miss Cleo was also the defendant in a civil suit for $400 million – way more money than she’d ever seen from the company.

It’s at this point that the stories in the fictional Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall (originally shot as Call Me Now: The Rise and Fall of Miss Cleo, after the “Call me now” catch phrase on her infomercials) and the documentary Call Me Miss Cleo diverge. Camara Davis, the writer of the dramatized version, has Miss Cleo take the Fifth Amendment during a deposition for her civil case, then turn state’s evidence and testify against the company in their fraud trial – neither of which happened, at least according to documentary directors Celia Aniskovich and Jennifer Brea. According to Aniskovich and Brea, the Florida D.A.’s office simply dropped Miss Cleo from the case after they realized it was bad P.R. to go after a Black woman who could make a plausible case that she’d just been an innocent victim recruited into a business that later turned out to be a fraud – even though her protestations of innocence rang hollow not only because she’d been a scam artist before at the Seattle theatre company but because how could she not have known that the Psychic Readers’ Network was a scam when the essential dishonesty of their business model was there for all to see. (It reminded me of the story about Marlene Dietrich making the film Judgment at Nuremberg, in which she played the widow of a Nazi bigwig who had died in the latter stages of World War II. She complained to the film’s director, Stanley Kramer, that she couldn’t say the lines about how she and her friends had no knowledge of the horrible, monstrous crimes against humanity the Nazis had committed. When he said, “Why not?,” she replied in her best stage whisper, “They knew!”)

It’s also unfortunate that writer Davis didn’t use any of the last 10 years of Miss Cleo’s life between the exposure of the Psychic Readers’ Network in court (in which Feder and Stolz agreed to forgive all outstanding phone bills from their operation and set up a $500 million fund to compensate their victims) in 2006 and her death from colorectal cancer on July 26, 2016 in a Palm Beach hospice at age 53. In 2006 Miss Cleo gave an interview to the Queer magazine The Advocate in which she came out as a Lesbian, and for the last 10 years she lived as such. At least two of her female lovers were interviewed, including Lou Ann LaBohn (who came out at age 61; I found myself wondering what she’d done before that) and Matt Sheridan, who presented as male during the interview because after Miss Cleo’s death he’d undergone gender confirmation surgery. She also had two young men who were identified as her godsons, and one of them acknowledged he’d always been Gay while the other one didn’t say one way or another but certainly gave off Gay vibes. The people who knew Miss Cleo during the last decade remembered her quite fondly as a woman who was only trying to help others. They also said she had a sort of “Rosebud” moment in which she recalled being molested by an adult male during her childhood, and one of the interviewees said that people who live through that experience either become bitter, hateful and exploitative or spend their lives reaching out to other people who need help. The documentary filmmakers definitely put Miss Cleo in the latter category.

Watching the two films back-to-back, one gets the impression that Miss Cleo in real life was a figure that resisted easy categorization. She may or may not have been genuinely psychic – she certainly seemed to have an intuitive grasp of other people’s consciousnesses and gave them advice based on it –and though there are parts of her life that made her look like a deliberate scam artist and crook, there are also parts that make her look genuinely noble. Miss Cleo: Her Rise and Fall was well directed by Tim Reid (whom I remember as an actor from the TV sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s) and ably acted, especially by Robin Yvette Allan as Miss Cleo, Daphne Maxwell Reid as her mother and Shane Johnson and Ian Bohen as the two young white scumbags who created the Psychic Readers’ Network and exploited Miss Cleo and all the other people who worked for them. (They were able to settle the cases against them without spending even one day inside a prison cell and keeping most of their ill-gotten gains from their enterprise.) But it wasn’t the film it could have been, and for that I mostly blame Camara Davis for not using the potentially rich material available, especially from the last decade of Miss Cleo’s life.