Frank Andrews at his home in New York City on October 17, 2024. Photo / Todd Heisler, The New York Times
Frank Andrews has done readings for John Lennon, Princess Grace and other celebrities. At 83, he is still talking to ghosts, providing “weather forecasts” and making friends.
Frank Andrews wants people to know something about being a psychic: it is exhausting. Picking up random energy, being visited by unexpected phantasmas, listening to the troubles of the very much alive. It’s emotionally draining, especially if you’ve been doing the job for nearly 60 years.
Andrews, 83, has counted John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Princess Grace, Perry Ellis, Betsey Johnson and Jason Alexander among his many clients. Then there are his current patrons, many of whom are famous but whose names he will never reveal. “That’s why they trust me,” he said.
If it were up to Andrews, he would hang up his metaphysical mantle and see only one or two people a week. But his devotees, some of whom have been working with him for more than 40 years, won’t hear of it. “They won’t let me go,” he said, only half joking. They clamour for him to decipher their palms, read their astrological charts and tell them what is in the cards. Top of the list? Romance.
“Everyone wants to be in love,” said Andrews, who makes no predictions about politics.
On a balmy October afternoon, Andrews’ three-storey Mulberry Street brownstone in Manhattan was decked out in Halloween decorations. Pumpkins, gourds, cardboard witches and black cats commingled with antique furniture and rugs: think Grandma’s house, if Grandma spoke to ghosts every night.
Almost every inch of the townhouse’s walls is covered in art that was given to him by friends and clients. A Buddha figurine here. A crystal ball there. Fish swimming around a recessed tank built into a wall.
“It has a calming effect on people,” Andrews said of the fish tank. “Also, the water helps me to focus as I look away from the cards.”
Andrews sat at a breakfast nook overlooking a magnolia tree in his back garden. Vibrant, with round eyes, a face devoid of lines, and a head full of white hair (“A lot of women say, ‘Is that real? Can I touch it?’”), he didn’t look much older than the silk screen his pal Andy Warhol did of him in the late 1980s – a trade for a set of lithographs Yoko Ono had given Andrews of her and John Lennon having sex.
Other than difficulty hearing and some limitations with his walking, Andrews said he felt pretty good.
Eric Sherman, a psychoanalyst with an office in Manhattan, visits Andrews every three months for what Sherman calls a “psychic mammogram”.
“Sometimes I have very specific concerns, but a lot of times I just go to him for a weather forecast,” said Sherman, 73, who met Andrews 35 years ago. “When you know what the weather is, you know how to dress. Sometimes the weather forecast is incorrect and you’re carrying an umbrella when you didn’t need one, but more often than not you’re happy you have the umbrella when there’s a downpour.”
Sherman believes Andrews, whom he considers a friend, is generally “very accurate”. “Timing is the hardest thing for a psychic, so he might tell you something will happen in a month and it’ll happen in five months,” he said. “But he gets the nature of the situation accurate in the overwhelming majority of instances.”
Rick Skye, an actor and cabaret singer in his late 50s, met Andrews 30 years ago. At the time, Skye was seeking career advice. “He said, ‘You’re going to work in the business but not until you’re 40,’” Skye recalled. “When you’re 22 you don’t want to have to wait until 40. When I turned 40, he said, ‘You’re going to be a big success in England.’ I thought, ‘I don’t know anyone in England.’ He said, ‘A woman is going to help you. Don’t worry about it, it’s going to be a big success.’”
Three weeks later, a friend of a friend was searching for an American cabaret singer to bring to London. Within a month, Skye opened a show there. “They gave me a standing ovation,” he said. Since then, he’s received offers to sing in Scotland, Ireland and on the West End. “Frank was right,” he noted.
Andrews was born Frank Iacuzzo in Buffalo, New York, the son of a restaurant owner and a member of a family of intuitives. He had his first vision at around age 10, when a distant relative showed up at the foot of his bed. “I came to say goodbye,” she said.
The next morning the phone rang. His mother went into another room to talk. “Guess who died last night?” she said when she returned.
“Grace,” he said. “I saw her. She was in my room last night.”
“Oh, you saw a ghost,” his mother said, offhandedly. “Don’t tell anyone because they’ll think you’re crazy.”
Being a gay child who saw dead people wasn’t easy in Buffalo. Andrews fled to Manhattan in 1959 to study pantomime and eventually got a job at the American Museum of Natural History, where he sold radio guides for 50 cents. Not long after, he met Marion Tanner, on whom the novel Auntie Mame was based. She encouraged him to study tarot and pursue a career as a professional seer. (Andrews’ younger sister, Terry Iacuzzo, is a well-known tarot teacher in the city.)
Strictly by word of mouth, he soon built up a large clientele of people willing to pay $5 a reading. These days, his price is up to $500 (NZ$846). “I’m hoping that will keep people from calling,” he said. He did, however, play a psychic in Greta Gerwig’s Mistress America, in a scene that was shot in his living room. It’s still decorated similarly to how it was in the late ‘60s, when he bought it with a down payment of $6000.
Andrews is revered for his discretion and honesty. If he sees something, he’ll say something, as Monica Carden can attest.
The first time Carden visited him, he kicked her out of his home. Carden, now 54, was living in Hong Kong and Italy, where she was a vice president for an Italian fashion house. Her life was a wreck: she was getting a divorce, leaving her job, and worrying about her parents’ health.
“I was looking for someone to tell me I was going to be OK,” she said.
Andrews laid out his cards on a Biedermeier table, took one look at the spread before him and shook his head. “There’s too much going on and you’re mixing me up,” he said. Then he told her to leave.
She said she was alarmed at the time, but they ended up becoming close friends after she reached out a month later and offered to cook him dinner at her home. His predictions, of course, eventually proved accurate, according to Carden.
Tanya Selvaratnam, 53, an author and filmmaker in Manhattan, has been seeing Andrews for years. “It’s somewhere between the cost of a trainer and a therapist in terms of cost,” Selvaratnam said, “and it’s well worth it because Frank is so warm and delightful to be around and he imparts wisdom.”
She credits Andrews with changing the trajectory of her life. When they met 30 years ago, she was studying legal history at Harvard University. “Frank said, ‘Finish, take the diploma and then put it in a drawer. You’re an artist.’”
“He’s seen me through miscarriages and two type of cancers and a divorce and an abusive relationship,” Selvaratnam said. “The key is to listen to what he says and interpret it in your own way. Not everyone can do that. They want to be told it’s going to be happily ever after. He’ll say, ‘it’s going to be fine for the moment but don’t expect it to be long-lasting’.”
Selvaratnam and her friend, avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson, dined with Andrews. “He did a reading for me, and I didn’t recognise it as a reading,” Anderson, 77, said. “It feels like you’re talking to an intuitive friend.”
And a funny one. At one point during a conversation with this reporter, a light flickered on.
A celestial visitor?
“Timer,” Andrews said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Abby Ellin
Photographs by: Todd Heisler
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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