‘90s late-night TV was a gathering of call-in psychics. Few were more famous than Miss Cleo from the Psychic Readers Network, with her catchphrase “call me now.” HBO’s documentary Call Me Miss Cleo, produced by Gunpowder & Sky, investigates whether the sapphic psychic was for real or a fraud.
Miss Cleo’s voice guides the narrative. The filmmakers speak to several people in an attempt to decode the mystery that is Miss Cleo. Interviewees include friends who have experienced her readings; former clients and fellow phone psychics who fell for a hotline scheme; former colleagues she allegedly scammed; journalists attempting to make sense of her; government figures who helped with her downfall; and ex-partners who loved her.
So who was Miss Cleo?
Miss Cleo, born Youree Dell Harris in Los Angeles, in 1962, was an American television personality who appropriated a Jamaican accent to play a voodoo priestess character on the pay-per-minute call service Psychic Readers Network. She was discarded from the public conscience as quickly as she gained fame, dying of colon cancer in 2016.
Miss Cleo was a character, sure, but did Youree Dell Harris have a psychic gift? We will never truly know. Some swore by her talent. However, we do know that Harris was originally a playwright and performer who went by the name Ree Perris in the late ‘90s. Even if her gift was real, her character was not.
Former colleagues said that the Miss Cleo character was born out of a play called “For Women Only” that Harris once worked on, prior to PRN, for a troupe. Harris did not have a Jamaican accent, as far as the former colleagues knew. The falsified character was enough for many people to disbelieve Harris was a psychic at all.
Harris maintained that she had a gift in her “Hotline” interview: “I absolutely commune and chat with those on the other side — some call them dead, some call them spirits — but absolutely with the energy and vibrations with those that crossed over. … more broader than a medium, for me, it’s a broader belief system.”
She wouldn’t be the first to have lied in an interview. Late-night hotlines probably needed an engaging, “exotic” character or stereotypical magic figure more than they needed authenticity.
There were other signs that Harris might have been a bit of a fraud, regardless of whether she had a talent for tarot or not. Former colleagues said she was under contract at the theatre earlier in her career and was paid a set amount that she was supposed to disperse among those involved in the production. She allegedly never paid up and then disappeared. They didn’t see her again until her psychic hotline gig appeared on their TV late at night.
Harris kept her background equally as mysterious as her character Miss Cleo. She had a number of aliases. Besides Miss Cleo, Harris went by Cleomili Harris and Youree Perris. Some interviewees said she went by other mystical identities, too, leading them to believe she could have been battling mental illness. Others mentioned stories about abuse she said she suffered as a child.
In a 2012 interview Harris said that she took her psychic ability seriously: her sister encouraged her to work for the Psychic Readers Network but Harris said it was silly and she had a “reputation to maintain.” Ultimately, she decided to read her tarot cards on camera and the Network was inundated with callers. She catapulted to fame from there, doing live readings with callers who were stunned by how accurate she was. Some interviewees believe that she wanted to help people. Some believe she was too accurate to be lying.
However, others who worked for the network, which shut down in the ‘00s after a Federal Trade Commission investigation, admitted they weren’t real psychics themselves – they just needed work. They explained how it worked: they wore headsets, were given a script to do “a reading,” and were pressured to keep the caller on the phone.
The first three minutes of the call were free, but it was $4.99 a minute thereafter. When people would call to speak to Miss Cleo specifically, their wait for her to be available would contribute to the overall bill.
“Miss Cleo people didn’t know a damn thing,” said Barbara Melit, a former PRN psychic who was the whistleblower who helped bring down the operation.
If the allegations are true, and Harris had a shady past herself, it doesn’t change that she was also taken advantage of by the Network. The more profits the company made, the more they demanded from their “psychics.” Despite Miss Cleo being the biggest attraction, she did not get her share of the money made.
Several former psychics said: “[the Network] preyed on the souls that needed to be seen.” This is true of customers. But Harris desperately needed to be seen, too.
It was Harris’ energy and charisma that made her so convincing. “She was quick on the draw,” said Bennett Madison, another former PRN phone psychic. “She would take these sort of ordinary questions and launch into sort of very funny, very unexpected sort of spiels about whatever the topic at hand was. I don’t really believe in, like, psychics or magic. But I do think that there are certain people who are good at being able to talk to someone and sort of understand who they are in an instinctive way and be able to give advice in a way that feels magical.”
“It was the best Insta[gram] Live you could’ve had in 1997. It was so good, so good,” Raven-Symoné said. “When I saw Miss Cleo, I did believe.”
