Call Me Miss Cleo sets the controversial hotline psychic's story straight

A new biopic, Call Me Miss Cleo, explores the rise and fall of the controversial queen of the psychic hotline era, Miss Cleo.

Today on Commotion, podcaster and comedian Ashley Ray joins host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about whether the backlash against her was appropriate, and Miss Cleo's place in popular culture today.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: I want to talk about Youree Harris — that's Miss Cleo's real name. How did she start first making waves in the psychic hotline game?

Ashley: She started in the theatre. She was a Philadelphia actress, who was in a play with a Jamaican character named Cleo. That's how she came up with it. She did eventually scam everyone at that theater…. She ended up leaving town, and before she left, though, she did give each person a letter apologizing, and telling them how much money she owed them and promising she would make it right someday.

Elamin: Oh, wow.

Ashley: So it's not like she was a scam artist. It really did seem like she was this woman who got in over her head. But she leaves town, she goes to Florida, and that's where she gets pulled into this. She needs a job. She has two daughters to support. She finds the opportunity to work at a phone line. When she starts, they're basically all looking for ways to just keep people on the line and keep it interesting. She uses this Miss Cleo character, who has a Jamaican accent — she does not, that is not her real voice. She starts playing it up, pretending to look at tarot cards on the phone calls. It helps her build a reputation, to the point where people would just call in for Miss Cleo.

In basically a year, she had generated more income by herself than a combined team of psychic callers. That's when they were like, "We've got to do something with this lady and really make her the centre story." They didn't mind that she was playing a character, because at the time all of these phone lines made it clear that they were for entertainment purposes only. It's not like she felt this moral conflict; she saw it as an actor who took a role that was starting to blow up.

Elamin: It is hard to overemphasize the idea of how magnetic she was…. At her peak, how big of a deal was Miss Cleo?

Ashley: According to the documentary that came out, Call Me Miss Cleo, at her peak she was generating $24 million alone for this company.

Elamin: Wow.

Ashley: Yeah, I mean, obviously it reached a point where her phone calls and her television appearances were so popular, people couldn't even get to Miss Cleo when they called…. So many people were calling in that they just could not even cover it. They had to literally pull people off the streets to pretend to be psychics because people go, "Well, fine, I guess I'll talk to someone else." That's how big she was.

Was she seeing that on the back end? In Florida, she did have a nice house. She was making a lot of money, but it was temporary. She also was not getting nearly enough of that $24 million  as she should have. She at one point was served, and she had to file for bankruptcy. So again, it's this thing where she created this character, but pretty quickly when the Psychic Network saw how much money they can make off of it, they started basically controlling and owning her. They owned Miss Cleo, and Youree Harris really did not own any part of it.

Elamin: This is someone who keeps popping up in pop culture around us…. In the past two years alone, there have been two movies about Miss Cleo. Why do you think she's still a pop culture fixture?

Ashley: I think mostly it was a lot of fun…. Like, the whole thing just seems so nostalgic and so '90s. But also, I mean, there was a lot of fun in Miss Cleo as a character. The sketches were funny. It was funny to watch the infomercials and see if there'd be some new drama. I also think the reason her character worked is because she told people what they wanted to hear. She knew how to tap into those dreams, and I think that made her fit into this mammy stereotype that I think really worked for some listeners and audiences.

I think she probably could have been a tarot-reading Oprah had things gone her way more. I think that's why as a character she stuck for so long, because she really did almost reach this sort of Oprah-level of presence and brand recognition…. You can just say, "Call me now," and people know who and what you're talking about. So personally, I think if Miss Cleo were still here, she would probably be having some sort of Britney Spears-esque redemption tale where people would finally be like, you know what? She wasn't the one pulling the strings here. She was this woman doing her best. Yes, she knew she wasn't Jamaican, but it was a character. She knew it was for entertainment. And I think we would see that people have more sympathy towards her today.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Ashley Ray produced by Ty Callender.