There won’t be any more calls to Miss Cleo… the iconic TV psychic is dead after battling cancer…
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She died Tuesday in Palm Beach County surrounded by family and close friends, according to a statement from her Fort Lauderdale attorney, William J. Cone Jr.
The Miss Cleo character inspired spoofs on late-night TV and gave Harris several other business opportunities, including a book, “Keepin’ It Real: A Practical Guide for Spiritual Living”.
“You can’t fool Miss Cleo!” the commercials stated as she ended each ad with a Jamaican tinged accent that urged: “Call me now!”. In 2006, she came out as a lesbian in the Advocate and voiced a character in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, but she lived a relatively private life after her commercials went off the air in 2003. “I was at Best Buy one day, and a gentleman said, ‘Miss Cleo, aren’t you supposed to be on the phone?’ I said, ‘Honey, do you really think that I do that while I’m traveling and doing press?’ I said, ‘You have a better chance of talking to me right here than you do if you called.’ I still remember my extension number, though”.
“I was always bothered by the fact that, you know, people took the “Call me now” quote very earnestly”, she said in a 2014 interview with Vice. She adopted her family’s Jamaican heritage for the role, persuading viewers to call for allegedly free psychic readings. “Unfortunately, yes”, she said when asked if she still got recognized.
“She had no Jamaican accent – she was born and raised in L.A.”, a former cast mate told the paper.
It was discovered by the Federal Trade Commission after the Access Resource Services (ARS), the company behind the hotline, was accused of committing a number of consumer violations, together with the Psychic Readers Network.
Harris briefly reprised the Miss Cleo character past year in a series of online advertisements for General Mills, which was bringing back its French Toast Crunch cereal. Eventually, the company’s Florida-based owners settled for $500 million, and the woman who made them that money faded into obscurity.
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Shaff, 38, said Miss Cleo knew that he was not a true psychic during his time with the network, but would not comment on whether he thought she was one. “So they refer to me as psychic – because the word voodoo scares just about everybody”, she explained.
