Lost at Sea (27 page)

“Yes,” he said.

And so on. My guess is that Colette genuinely believes herself to be psychic and doesn’t realize she’s actually dabbling in the dodgy art of cold reading. I think she thinks she’s tapping into her psychic impulses when she picks up on her audience’s inadvertent clues.

But then, perplexingly, Colette had a moment of seeming psychic brilliance. Apropos of nothing, she told a woman called Jean that her recently deceased husband loved to ride around on his all-terrain bike and enjoyed eating tuna sandwiches. Jean practically shrieked that the bike and tuna were indeed her dead husband’s two very favorite things. Colette looked thrilled and you should have seen the smile on Jean’s face. It lifted everyone’s spirits.

Now I watch Sylvia playing the slots. She is a truly enigmatic person. She was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1936, to a salesman father, and has been a professional psychic for fifty-three years. In 1959, when she was twenty-two, she married a man named Gary Dufresne. They divorced in 1972. A few months ago he gave an interview to Robert Lancaster of stopsylvia.com. He said he couldn’t remain silent any more after hearing about the Shawn Hornbeck incident: “I try to get her out of my mind as much as possible, but the damage she does to unsuspecting people in crisis situations is just atrocious.”

He said that one evening back in the early seventies, Sylvia held a tarot party at their home in San Francisco: “I said to her as we were washing dishes and she was wiping, I said, ‘Sylvia, how can you tell people this kind of stuff? You know it’s not true, and some of these people actually are probably going to believe it.’ And she said, ‘Screw ’em. Anybody who believes this stuff oughtta be taken.’”

In return, Sylvia has called her former husband “a liar and dark soul entity, but at least the asshole gave me children.”

In 1992, she was indicted on several charges of investment fraud and grand theft. She pleaded no contest to “sale of security without permit”—a felony—and was given two hundred hours of community service.

Famous anti-psychics, such as Richard Dawkins, are often criticized for using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Dawkins’s last television documentary,
The Enemies of Reason
, was roundly condemned for making silly, harmless psychics seem too villainous. But Sylvia isn’t harmless. In 2002, for instance, the parents of missing Holly Krewson turned their lives upside down in response to one of Sylvia’s visions. Holly vanished in April 1995. Seven years later her mother, Gwen, went on
Montel
, where Sylvia told her Holly was alive and well and working as a stripper in a lap-dancing club on Hollywood and Vine. Gwen immediately flew to Los Angeles and frantically scoured the strip clubs, interviewing dancers and club owners and customers, and handing out flyers, and all the while Holly was lying dead and unidentified in San Diego.

DAY 3: CORFU

I’m sitting next to Evelyn, the woman with the stomach cramps. “My heart’s racing to see if she calls out my name,” she whispers. Evelyn has come onto this cruise specifically to ask Sylvia about her stomach pain.

“Evelyn,” Sylvia calls.

She walks to the microphone.

“Uh,” she stammers.

“Speak up, honey,” Sylvia says.

“Um,” Evelyn says.

Sylvia looks impatient.

“I—uh—think I’ve got a poltergeist in my house because things keep moving in my dishwasher,” Evelyn says quickly. “Can you tell me the poltergeist’s name?”

“The poltergeist is an older relative called Doug,” Sylvia says.

“Thank you, Sylvia,” Evelyn says.

She sits back down. I look at her. She shrugs.

•   •   •

IT’S THE EVENING
of the cocktail party. We all put on formal wear and bustle around the Queen’s lounge, excited about our opportunity to mingle with Sylvia. But she doesn’t show up. We wait for an hour, then disperse, confused and disappointed. I bump into Evelyn on the way out. She’s looking maudlin.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“This whole Doug business has really knocked me for a loop,” she replies. “Who’s Doug? I don’t have any older relative called Doug. I don’t know anyone remotely like that.” She pauses. “I used to idolize Sylvia but now I’m kind of off her. And those one- and two-word answers she gives . . .” Evelyn screws up her face. “She’s so cold. And why didn’t she turn up at the cocktail party?”

I spot Nancy, Sylvia’s nice-looking assistant. I decide to tell her I’m a journalist and I’m on this cruise because I want to interview Sylvia.

“Sylvia doesn’t like to give interviews,” Nancy replies. “She says, ‘Journalists can go to hell. I’m famous enough. All they do is turn on me.’” Still, Nancy says, she’ll give it a go.

In the Explorations coffee bar I find Cassie (not her real name), a very likable young German woman and a huge Sylvia fan. I sat next to her on the transfer bus from the Rome airport.

“The most bizarre thing just happened,” she says.

She says she and two others from the group were just in the shopping arcade when they spotted Sylvia.

“Look! There’s Sylvia!” Cassie said.

“When I said it, Sylvia looked up with a start,” Cassie says. “Her face immediately contorted into a kind of horrified grimace that she’d been spotted by some fans. Honestly! She looked like a vampire looks when a shaft of light hits them. She hissed ‘Go!’ to the man pushing her wheelchair. And—whoosh—she was gone. He spun her around and pushed her away really fast. It was nasty. Something is not sitting right with me anymore. She’s not a friendly person. Did she think I was going to jump on her?”

Cassie’s story resigns me to the obvious: There isn’t a chance in hell Sylvia will grant me an interview.

DAY 4: SOME OTHER GREEK ISLAND

Sylvia’s assistant, Nancy, rushes up to me in the lido restaurant. Sylvia has agreed to an interview. Five p.m., the Neptune lounge.

It’s time for our next two-hour lecture with Sylvia. She seems in a far better mood today.

“I want to know if my son will come back safely,” one woman asks.

“Yes, honey,” Sylvia replies.

“I’m having cardiology work done soon,” asks the next person. “Am I going to get better?”

“Yes, you are.” Sylvia smiles.

“Will my daughter live past twenty-five?” asks the third.

“At least into her fifties,” Sylvia says.

And so on. All this is in stark contrast to the other grouchy evening when it seemed that nobody’s sick relative was going to make it past 2009. I can’t help wondering whether, if Shawn Hornbeck’s parents had gone to Sylvia today, she would have told them that their son was alive and well.

At 5:00 p.m., I knock on the door of the Neptune lounge. It is swanky and invitation-only—reserved for guests staying on the rarefied seventh floor. Sylvia is there to greet me, along with one of the four men who seem always to surround her. I tell her what Cassie said about her being rude in the shopping arcade. It’s a relatively trivial allegation, but I’m curious to see how she’ll respond.

She denies it. “You can approach me anywhere, anytime,” she says. “I’ve never, ever been rude to anyone, anywhere. No one could ever accuse me—when I’m eating dinner and they come to me, or if I’m in the casino—I have never, ever been hateful. Never! That’s one thing I’ve been so much against. These people put you there! To be rude to them is just terrible.”

The thing is, just before the interview, I bumped into Cassie’s two companions from the shopping arcade. They both told me Sylvia had been startlingly rude to them and now they’re really off her.

I’ve wanted to interview Sylvia for years, but I suddenly wonder if it is pointless. I think she’s a consummate pro who will just say anything.

“There are times,” I say, “when you’ve got it wrong in a very bad way with missing—”

“The kid,” interrupts Sylvia. She means Shawn Hornbeck. “Yeah, I believed the kid was dead.” She shrugs. “What I found out later—Larry King wanted me to come on and explain but I said I’m not going to explain anything—is there were three children missing. I think what I did was I got my wires crossed. There was a blond and two boys who are dead. I think I picked up the wrong kid.”

“Shawn Hornbeck,” I say. “Were the other kids missing from the same area?”

“Absolutely,” Sylvia says.

“At the same time?” I ask.

“Yes,” Sylvia says. “I have a tiny newspaper cutting about them back in my office.”

(I later realize that, of course, “three children missing” in the “same area” is annoyingly too vague to be checkable.)

“Then there was Opal Jo Jennings,” I say.

Sylvia looks blankly at me.

“Back in 1999,” I say.

Sylvia still looks blank.

“You said she was sold into white slavery in Japan but actually she was dead,” I prompt.

“I don’t remember that case at all,” Sylvia says.

“Little girl,” I say. “She’d been killed but you said she’d been sold into white slavery in Japan.”

“No,” Sylvia says. She shakes her head. “Don’t remember that. Not at all. All I remember was that kid Van.”

“Shawn,” I say.

“Van Hornwell?” Sylvia says.

“Shawn Hornbeck,” I say.

“Yeah. Hornbeck,” Sylvia says. “I don’t remember the Japanese girl at all.” She pauses. “Look,” she says, “no psychic—and this is what they don’t understand—can ever be one hundred percent. That’s God.”

By “they” she’s referring to her two biggest critics, James Randi and Robert Lancaster. She says she doesn’t care what they say about her: “The whole thing about my job”—she pauses and corrects herself—“God-given career, is if you’re right, you’re right. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And the people that are gonna love you will love you and the people that won’t, won’t.”

Then, just as I think how self-assured she must be not to let their attacks eat her up, she says, “I’ve had a private investigator on Randi and Lancaster, and I have enough on them to hang ’em.” She reels off a few defamatory allegations, then adds, “But I’m not going to play that game. That’s vengeance, see? Who cares? Randi is an evil little man. When I told him he was going to have a heart attack, and then he did—ha!—he wouldn’t give me any kudos.”

In the end it is a short interview, just half an hour. What was I thinking? That she would admit to being a fraud? I will give her this, though: I believe that she is genuinely passionate and knowledgeable about spiritual things. The only times during the interview when she becomes really animated are when she talks about Mother Goddess this and that. So I don’t believe that part is fake. But there is no doubt that she makes a fortune saying very serious, cruel, showstopping things to people in distress, especially, it seems, when she’s in a grumpy mood.

“I don’t think people should go to a psychic to hear a fairy story,” she says. “It might be nice for a time, but what about the validity in the future?”

“But when you’re dealing with missing kids and you’re wrong,” I say, “it’s very, very bad.”

“Right.” She shrugs.

“What do you say to people who say you’re a fraud?” I ask.

“My years,” she replies. “My years of validation save me.” She pauses. “If after fifty-three years I was a fraud, don’t you think they would have found out?”

DAY 5: DISEMBARKATION

I jump ship in Athens, two days early. I miss Sylvia’s final lecture. The next day I receive an e-mail from Cassie, the German fan who went off her after she was rude in the shopping arcade. “Please call me!” she writes. “Sylvia talked so harsh about you! I wrote everything down she said!”

I phone her.

“You have no idea what that woman said about you yesterday!” Cassie says. “She got up onstage and said to the audience, ‘Are you guys enjoying the trip?’ And everyone yelled, ‘Yeah! Whooh!’ And then she said, ‘Because I heard that some of you aren’t enjoying the trip.’ And she launched into this huge attack on you! She said, ‘I had an interview with this pale little man and he said I was rude to some of you in the shopping arcade. You must have seen him around. He’s a creepy little worm. . . .’ She said you were a worm and a creep and a dark soul entity. She just went on and on about you. It lasted for about twenty minutes!”

“How did the audience respond?” I ask.

“People didn’t know where the hell this was coming from,” Cassie says. “A few of them said to me afterward, ‘I didn’t pay four thousand euros to listen to someone go on like that.’”

All this proves one thing to me. Now I know for sure that Sylvia isn’t psychic, because I don’t have a dark soul at all. I have a very light soul.

The Fall of a Pop Impresario

S
eptember 10, 2001. The Old Bailey trial of the pop mogul and former pop star Jonathan King, in which he is accused of a series of child-sex offenses dating back to the sixties, seventies, and eighties, begins this morning. Back in July, Judge Paget decided, for the purposes of case management, to have three trials instead of one. So the jury will hear only the charges that relate to the years between 1982 and 1987. There are six within this time frame—one buggery, one attempted buggery, and four indecent assaults on boys aged fourteen and fifteen.

I have been having an e-mail correspondence with Jonathan King for the past nine months, and last night he e-mailed me to say, “I think you know, young Ronson, that whichever way it goes for me you could have an award-winning story here, if you’re brave. You can change the face of Great Britain if you do it well. Good luck! JK.”

I have just returned from New York, and in the canteen on the third floor of the Old Bailey—in the minutes before the trial is due to begin—Jonathan King comes over to make small talk about my trip.

“Did you bring me any presents back?” he asks. “Any small boys? Just kidding! Don’t you think it is amazing that I have retained my sense of humor?”

He smiles across the canteen at his arresting officers. They smile faintly back. Jonathan has always told me about his good relationship with the police, how kind they were to him during his arrest, and he looks a little crestfallen at their evident withdrawal of affection.

“The police are far less friendly than they were,” he says. “Quite boot-faced, in fact. And there doesn’t even seem to be a senior officer around. I’m getting quite insulted that I’m so unimportant that only constables are allowed anywhere near the case.”

He looks at me for a response. What should I say? Yes, his crimes are so significant and he is so famous that it would seem appropriate for a more senior officer to be in attendance? In the end, I just shrug.

There are half a dozen journalists here today covering the case. In the lobby outside the court, Jonathan approaches some to shake their hands. “Who’s the gorgeous blonde with a TV cameraman?” he whispers to me. “Sorry if this ruins my image.”

“I felt terrible about shaking his hand,” one reporter says a little later. “I felt disgusting. I was standing there thinking, ‘What’s he done with that hand?’ I should have refused to shake it.”

“I just asked my solicitor if it’s unusual for the accused to make a point of shaking the hands of the press and the prosecution barrister,” Jonathan says as we walk into court. “He said it was absolutely unheard-of!” Jonathan laughs, and adds, “You know, I fully intend to change the legal system just like I changed the pop industry.”

And at that, we take our seats. The jury is selected, and the trial begins.

•   •   •

ON NOVEMBER 24, 2000,
Jonathan King was charged with three child-sex offenses dating back thirty-two years. In the light of the publicity surrounding his arrest, a dozen other boys (now men) came forward to tell police that King had abused them, too, during the seventies and eighties. Some said he picked them up at the Walton Hop, a disco in Walton-on-Thames run by his friend Deniz Corday. Others said he cruised them in his Rolls-Royce in London. He’d pull over and ask why they were out so late and did they know who he was. He was Jonathan King! Did they want a lift?

He told the boys he was conducting market research into the tastes of young people. Did they like his music? His TV shows? Were they fans of
Entertainment USA
, his BBC2 series? He asked them to complete a questionnaire—written by him—to list their hobbies in order of preference. Cars? Music? Family and friends? Sex? “Oh, really?” Jonathan would say to them. “You’ve only put sex at number two?”

And so they would get talking about sex. He sometimes took them to his Bayswater mews house, with its mirrored toilet and casually scattered photos of naked women on the coffee table. Sometimes he took them to car parks, or to the forests near the Walton Hop. He showed them photographs of naked Colombian air hostesses and Samantha Fox. He could, he said, arrange for them to have sex with the women in the photos.

Sometimes, within the bundle of photographs of naked women he would hand the boys, there would be a picture of himself naked. “Oh!” he’d say, blushing a little. “Sorry. You weren’t supposed to see that one of me!” (When the police raided King’s house, they say they found ten overnight bags, each stuffed with his seduction kit—his questionnaires and photos of Sam Fox and photos of himself naked—all packed and ready for when the urge took him to get into his Rolls-Royce and start driving around.)

He told the boys that it was fine if they wanted to masturbate. And then things would progress from there. Some of the boys reported that his whole body would start to shake as he sat next to them in the Rolls-Royce.

And then he “went for it,” in the words of one victim. None of the boys say he forced himself onto them. They all say they just sat there, awed by his celebrity. The boys all say that Jonathan King has emotionally scarred them for life, although almost all of them returned, on many occasions, and became the victims of more assaults.

Later, Jonathan King will spend his last weekend of freedom—the weekend before the guilty verdicts—recording for me a video diary of his feelings about the charges. At one point, midway through this twenty-minute tape, he hollers into the camera about this perplexing aspect of the case. “They kept coming back to me again and again and again, although this vile behavior was supposed to be taking place!” He laughs as if he’s delivering a funny monologue on some TV entertainment show. “Why on earth would anybody do that? I’d be out of that house as fast as I possibly could! I’d make damned sure I was never alone with that person again. Mad!”

When the police asked Jonathan why all these boys—who have never met or even spoken to each other—had almost identical stories to tell, he replied that he didn’t know. I am determined to ask at least one victim why he continually went back for more.

The defense argues that the police actively encouraged claims of emotional scarring when they interviewed the victims, because, without it, what else was there? Just some sex, long ago. The danger, says the defense team, is that if Jonathan is found guilty, the judge will sentence him not only for the acts themselves but also for the quantity of emotional scarring the victims claim to have. And how can that be quantified, especially in this age of the self, when the whole world seems to be forever looking to their childhoods for clues as to why they turned out so badly?

“Jonathan King,” says David Jeremy, the prosecution barrister, in his opening remarks to the jury, “was exploiting the young by his celebrity.”

When I first heard about King’s arrest, I looked back at his press interviews for clues, and found a quote he gave
Music Week
magazine in 1997: “I am a 15-year-old trapped inside a 52-year-old body.”

I talked to some of his friends from the pop industry, and one of them said, “Poor Jonathan. We were all doing that sort of thing back then.”

I attended an early hearing at Staines magistrates’ court. Jonathan King arrived in a chauffeured car. The windows were blacked out. Two builders watched him from a distance. As he walked past them and into the court, one of them yelled, “Fucking nonce!”

He kept walking. Inside, he noticed me on the press benches. We had appeared together on Talk Radio a few years ago and he recognized me. On his way out, he gave me a lavish bow, as if I had just witnessed a theatrical event, starring him. Outside, the builders were still there. They shouted, “Fucking nonce!” again.

My e-mail correspondence with Jonathan began soon after this hearing. In one e-mail, he asked me if I would consider it fair if, say, Mick Jagger was arrested today for having sex with a fifteen-year-old girl in 1970. I agreed that it wouldn’t be. He told me that he was being charged with the same crime that destroyed Oscar Wilde—the buggering of teenage boys—and we perceive Wilde to have been unjustly treated by a puritanical society from long ago. I wonder if the reason why we look less kindly upon Jonathan King is because he sang “Leap Up and Down (Wave Your Knickers in the Air),” while Oscar Wilde wrote
De Profundis
.

In another e-mail, he wrote about Neil and Christine Hamilton, falsely accused of rape while being filmed by Louis Theroux, whom Jonathan sees as my great competitor in the humorous journalism market. He wrote, “Louis EVERYWHERE . . . but who on earth would want to cover the Hamiltons, famous for doing NOTHING. Still, I do hope The Real Jon Ronson will have the balls, courage and integrity to take up the crusade (whatever the outcome) that it is GROSSLY unfair for the accused person/people to be smeared all over the media. Over to you, Ronson (we don’t just want a Theroux treatment, do we?).”

Later, in court, some of the victims say that Jonathan had a trick of making them feel special, as if they could do anything, as if they could make it big in show business, just so long as they stuck with him (and didn’t tell anyone what had happened). Has King got legitimate grievances against the legal system, or is he simply trying to seduce me in the same way he seduced the boys?

His Jagger analogy was alluding to some covert homophobia at the heart of the case. But perhaps the real contrast lies somewhere else. Mick Jagger (or, indeed, Bill Wyman) wouldn’t have needed to pretend he was conducting market research into the tastes of young people. He wouldn’t have needed to have promised them sex with Colombian air hostesses. But Jonathan did not, intrinsically, have much pulling power, so he did need those extra little touches. Perhaps the real contrast, then, is one of aesthetics.

The Walton Hop closed down in 1990. There were complaints of noise from the neighbors. But the Hop’s home, the Playhouse, still stands. Jimmy Pursey, the lead singer of Sham 69, was one of the Hop’s most regular teenage attendees. He went dancing there every Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday night throughout the seventies. One day, shortly before the trial began, Jimmy gave me a guided tour of the Playhouse.

“It’s so hard to explain to people who see in black-and-white the color that existed in this club,” he said. “The Playhouse was a theater for fringe plays and amateur dramatics. But on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays it would become paradise.”

Jimmy took me through the hall and toward the stage.

“It was inspirational,” said Jimmy. “This wasn’t table tennis. This was dancing. This was testing out your own sexuality. Normal people would become very unnormal. It was ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome.’ It was everything.”

He leaped up onto the stage and took me to the wings, stage right. We stood behind the curtains.

“This is where the inner sanctum was,” said Jimmy. “From here, Deniz Corday would have the best view of the teenagers who were a little bit bolder, a little bit more interesting.”

“Bolder and interesting in what way?” I asked.

“People like me,” said Jimmy. “If Deniz liked you, you’d be invited backstage and get a little bit of whisky added to your Coca-Cola. Backstage, you see. And you’d go, ‘Oh, I’m in with the big crowd now.’ That’s all there was to it with Deniz.”

“And Jonathan?” I asked.

“He’d drive into the Hop car park, and come backstage from the side,” he said. “And we’d all be going, ‘God! There’s a Rolls-Royce outside with a TV aerial coming from it! Ooh, it’s got a TV in the back and it’s a white Rolls-Royce!’ Because you’d never know if it was the Beatles.”

“But it wasn’t the Beatles,” I said.

“No,” said Jimmy. “It was Jonathan King.” He laughed. “A very big difference there!”

The Beatles lived on St. George’s Hill, in nearby Weybridge, and were often seen driving around Walton in their Rolls-Royces.

•   •   •

A DISPROPORTIONATE NUMBER
of celebrities who are now convicted pedophiles hung around backstage at the Walton Hop during the seventies and eighties. There was Jonathan King’s friend Tam Paton, the manager of the Bay City Rollers, who was convicted of child-sex offenses in the early eighties. (It was Paton who first introduced Jonathan King to the Hop—they met when Jonathan was invited to produce the Rollers’ debut single, “Keep On Dancing.”)

Chris Denning, the former Radio 1 DJ, was another Hop regular. He has a string of child-sex convictions, is currently in jail in Prague, and was friendly with King and Paton.

For Jimmy Pursey, the trick was to pick up the girls who were drawn to the Hop to see the Bay City Rollers while avoiding the attentions of the impresarios who orchestrated the night.

“It was fun with Deniz Corday,” said Jimmy. “Deniz would say, ‘Oh, Jimmy! Come here! I’d love to suck your fucking cock!’ Deniz was a silly, fluffy man. Then there was Tam Paton. I remember being back here having one of my whisky and Coca-Colas one night, and Tam turned to me and he said, ‘I like fucking lorry drivers.’ Chris Denning was more reckless. One time he placed his penis within the pages of a gay centerfold and showed it to my ex–bass player, who proceeded to kick the magazine, and Denning’s dick, and yell, ‘Come on, Jimmy, we’re fucking out of here!’ But Jonathan King was more like a Victorian doctor. It wasn’t an eerie vibe . . . but Jonathan had this highbrow, Cambridge, sophisticated thing about him. The Jekyll and Hyde thing. There wasn’t much conversation with Jonathan. And with Jonathan, you’d always had these rumors. ‘Oh, he got so and so into the white Rolls-Royce.’ And they’d always be the David Cassidy look-alike competition winners. Very beautiful.”

“Would he make a grand entrance?” I asked.

“Oh no,” said Jimmy. “It was never, ‘Look at me!’ He never went out onto the dance floor at all. He was much happier hiding backstage up here, behind the curtains, in the inner sanctum.” Jimmy paused. “The same way he hid behind all those pseudonyms, see? He’s always hiding. I think that’s the whole thing of his life. He always says, ‘That was me behind Genesis! That was me behind 10cc! That was me behind all those pseudonyms.’ But what do you do then, Jonathan? Who are you then, Jonathan?”