The 1990s were fundamentally unlike the era we now live in. Many were frustrated by the narrow pipeline of pre-Internet culture that limited us to a few radio stations, over-analyzed movies, vedette-worshipping magazines and a handful of unwatchable TV channels.
A punk rock-like feeling of subcutaneous social rage filled the air, a response to the bleak landscape of vacuity, which we attempted to fill with everything alternative weekly newspapers to topless car washes.
One prominent fad was the 1-976 phone line trend where desperate people would agree to pay up to $5 a minute for astrology, or sexy talk or whatever would sell.
Jojo Savard became a pervasive figure for the telephone astrology phone jungle and this article from 1995 wrestles with the value of the goods she was selling. (I get it now, all that rambling contextualization to erase the guilt about taking aim at such low-hanging fruit.. tsk tsk - Chimples).
I was lounging on a beach in Goa when this hit the presses so I missed the reaction but the kindly news editor Chris Sheridan assured me that it was a big deal and that he had nominated it to a Quebec journalism award.
Savard was profiled as a young painter in a Sunday Express article in the early 1970s (I'll add it if I can' dig it up) so she was likely born somewhere around 1945 to 1950, so she was undoubtedly a few years older than 39, as she told me.
Fortune sellers
Jojo Savard was a two-bit columnist in Allo Police when a telephone call changed her life. Now she's one of North America's best-known astrologers. A look at Jojo's rise to the top of the dubious world of star charts and $5-a-minute phone lines
Montreal Mirror Jan 26 1995
by Kristian Gravenor
A telephone cradled on my shoulder, I begin to tell the future. “Being a Cancer, you're obsessed with your work,” I say, reading from the appropriate chapter of an astrology paperback. Knowing nothing about the woman on the other end of the phone – other than her birthday- doesn't stop me from telling her, “You'll be going through a period of intense change in about six months.” For good measure, I also tell her she must overcome her jealous behavior.
My audition would have passed, I later find out, if I had told the Psychic Alliance recruiter that her career would change more rapidly. “I've only got three more weeks until I'm getting out of this place for good,” she says. She then encourages me to try out again, but this time with more books at hand.
Given a successful audition, anybody can become a clairvoyant and answer calls for the Miami-based Psychic Alliance, fronted throughout the United States and Canada by local astrologer Jojo Savard. Operators receive 35-cents from the $4.99 per minute charged to callers to have their futures revealed. Francophone operators get paid 50 cents a minute, while any operator able to pull in over $5,000 per week for the company gets an extra 15 cents per minute bonus.To start their working day, Psychic Alliance operators, working from their homes, first dial an 800 number to hear Savard's daily message, then another number to log in. Anglos are encouraged to try their hand at taking French calls because, “It's easy, we're always saying more or less the same words,” according to a supervisor, Nicole.
Perhaps nobody has had better luck calling the Psychic Alliance than Jojo herself. About a year ago, while traveling in the States, Savard saw the company's previous infomercial. She called the line, asked to speak to the boss and eventually convinced him to allow her to replace the existing spokesperson.
Ormadz is the Miami-based owner of the Psychic Alliance. Vice-president Peter Berg considers Savard-- clairvoyant, entertainer and motivator – an astrological phenomenon herself. When he visited Montreal for the first time, he recalls, “People were coming up and talking to her and touching her. There is no comparable person in astrology in the States.
“She's like a star,” adds Berg. “We intend to be in this business for a long time.”
Since her call to Ormadz, the 39-year-old Savard's star has been on the rise. Within months, she went from the relative obscurity of occasional appearances on Shirleyand a column in Allo Police to being a near-ubiquitous feature on late-night TV. Since June, the Psychic Alliance's half-hour infomercial has become a fixture on several stations in the Montreal area, including CFCCF, which gets $,000 a week for the spot. The company has similar arrangements throughout Canada, as well as in cities like Boston, Miami and San Francisco, although some stations, like Burlington, Vermont's WCAZ, refuse such advertising.
“For my family, I was a tragedy, now I'm a hero,' she says in her always-enthusiastic way.The infomercial contains moments of questionable taste, including that of Jojo's boasting that she predicted the early death of her brother. Her hardly-breathtaking prediction of Jean Chretien's election victory is coupled with a letter from Chretien's wife, Aline, which is presented as if it were an endorsement. Later, clean-cut “performance coach” Brett Costan says, “People want to have an exciting life,” the comes to the unlikely conclusion that “Psychic Alliance is the first step to making that happen.”
But the most prominent testimony in the infomercial comes from somebody who has never phoned the Psychic Alliance and never agreed to appear in an ad for the service. Cecilia Wylie, 63, of St. Jovite was a retired clerk living on an annual income of $5,00 when she spent her last $6 on 6/49 tickets last February 10. By choosing numbers ending in zeros, as recommended in a book by Savard, she won $100,000.
Wylie said that when she called Savard to tell her about her good fortune Savard responded by asking Wylie to call Montreal AM Live when Savard made one of her frequent appearances on the CFCF daytime talk show. The infomercial clearly suggests Wylie got her inspiration to purchase her lotto ticket from that televised phone call, a suggestion Wylie says is untrue.
Savard then invited Wylie to Miami to appear with her on a television talk show, a segment of which also figures in the infomercial. Wylie said Savard paid for her trip but didn't say she would be using her talks how appearance as a testimonial. “It was supposed to be a show (broadcast) in Florida,” Wylie recalls. “I didn't know they were going to use it for advertising all over the world.”
Wylie says she didn't know whether or not her testimony has encouraged people to call the Psychic Alliance to get winning lottery numbers, but she admits that she was hoping to help Savard advance her career. “I did this because she asked me if I could help her get a contract with the States,” said Wylie. She also said she has tried to reach Savard since seeing herself in the ad but, so far, hasn't been called back.
A new infomercial, which Savard says will be less “commercial,” could soon be in the works, but she is currently more occupied by her efforts to hire a PR rep in Los Angeles with the clout to book her onto The Tonight Show with Jay Leno or Late Show with David Letterman. She says the media exposure would open up unconquered markets in North America and Europe.
Speaking form her stately Cote Ste. Catherine Street home in a recent late-night interview, the newly-married Savard credits the Psychic Alliance with turning her life around. “For my family, I was a tragedy, now I'm a hero,' she says in her always-enthusiastic way.
She adds that she's ready to take on such high-profile psychic-phone-line competitors ad Dionne Warwick and LaToya Jackson. “I'm the queen now. I went to Toronto and Vancouver recently and I was received like (famed astrologer) Jeanne Dixon,” she recalled. “I was already pretty popular but it went boom. My name is now known all over the place. “
Savard is not the first astrologer to develop a cult-like following in Montreal. In the late '60s, a mysterious figure named John Manelesco was a prominent fixture on local TV and radio until his career was felled by allegations of fraud. Then-mayor Jean Drapeau passed a bylaw in the late 1970s prohibiting the purveyor of clairvoyance but the law was later overturned as unconstitutional.
Drapeau worried that soothsayers were fleecing the poor and uneducated. Skeptics like Drapeau will always be concerned, but now even some believers have doubts about the Psychic Alliance. Eulene Scobie, who, like three of callers, is a woman, describes her self as a low-income earner, “always interested in psychic encounters” but who understands that “they can't always be dead right for everything.”
Her assessment of her experience with Jojo's telephone counseling was that it was inaccurate, except when the operated said, “I see somebody traveling.” Her daughter soon after went on a basketball trip. The prediction was followed by advice to buy lotto tickets based on the numbers in her birthday. The remainder of the 10-minute, $59.98 call was spent fixing her address in order to get the free horoscope book advertised in the infomercial. As of last week, Scobie still hadn't received the book.
“Apart from the fact that they didn't live up to their promise of sending the book, there is no place to complain,” Scobie says, adding that Savard never returned the messages she left for her at CFCF and CIQC.
Savard, who says he always returns her calls, says the book was “too popular” but adds she is unaware of complaints from callers failing to receive the book.
And Savard and her Miami partners insist that unsatisfied customers are entitled to a full refund. Unfortunately the number to call to complain, 1-800-333-9867, is difficult to obtain without spending $4.999 a minute to get it. Once you get through, an answering machine promise to return calls “within the next few days.” a message I left Dec. 20 “concerning a funding” has yet to be returned.
So why does the Psychic Alliance charge $4.99 per minute while competitor like J.Z. Crystal cost only $2? Quality, replies Savard who boasts that, “we hired all of their good psychics away.” She then invokes the hoary psychological principle that people will value the information more if they pay more for it. She eventually concludes, “I'm not twisting arms. People don't have to call if they don't want to.”
Savard also justifies the cost as a reimbursement for her years of training. In a TV interview last October, Savard said that, “God knows with my three years in India I could be called a guru. “ Later in the program she said it was two years. More recently she told the Mirror she spent seven months in India earning a masters' degree in palmistry and astrology from “an international centre in Bombay.”
Yet Savard and oversized blonde pigtails and high-seed banter have spared a love-in with a media hungry for the outlandish. Once exception is TVA talk-show host Jean-Luc Mongrain, who confronted Savard with the story of a staff researcher who called the line five times and was given different career advice each time.
Savard, a longtime acquaintance of Mongrain, clearly feels betrayed. “I don't see him making inquires on such sponsors as Labatt's or McDonald's.” She says Mongrain shouldn't object to otherwise taking money to “help people” as long as he is doing the same. 'What is he making, $60,000 a year?” she asks rhetorically. Savard refused to say whether she earns more or less than that.
But while she'll fight to defend her own credibility, Savard's reign on the company's operators is loose, and their code of professional ethics remains vague. For example, many sex-line operators pride themselves on discouraging mental unstable people form calling. But when asked whether the Psychic Alliance imposes such rules, Savard says, “I don't see why we would need that.”
Is Savard able to predict the future? When she told me during a chance encounter last year that “your career will go through the roof soon,” I swiftly fell on professional hard time. And more recently, when promised a spread in the UQAM student paper, Savard predicted that the paper's circulation – stable at 12,000 for 15 years- would double in a year. When questioned about this bold prediction, Savard tied the growth to several conditions, including that the reporters start writing splashier articles.
Scientific studies have repeatedly discredited astrology but he believe in carpetbag cosmology live on. Savard describes her profession as “the mother of the esoteric sciences” - esoteric defined as something that is known and understood by a chosen few.
But Pierre Chastenay, scientific adviser to the Dow Planetarium says, “Astrology is not a science at all. It was invented thousands of year ago before people knew anything about the nature of stars and planets and people thought the gods lived in the sky and pushed the planets around. Thet thought maybe by watching them, we could tell what was in store for us.
“But planets follow orbits around the sun and we can predict them with mindboggling accuracy now.
He adds that the mere passage of time since their invention has made astrological signs outdated. For example, October babies are considered Libras but should actually be Leos because the planetary alignments are no longer as they were when the system was invented 2,000 years ago. “But,” says Chatesnay, “ there’s a lot of money in it. I can understand why they want to do it.”