From Daniel E. Slotnick’s New York Times obituary of “America’s Greatest Psychic” Kenny Kingston, who was full of life and other stuff:

“An elfin man with a shock of reddish-blond hair that lightened over time, Mr. Kingston was a regular guest on television shows like The Merv Griffin Show and Entertainment Tonight for years and built successful businesses around his professed spiritual abilities.

Beginning in the early 1990s, he promoted a psychic hotline through late-night television infomercials that made about $4 million a month at its peak, Ms. Porter said. He also wrote books, including Sweet Spirits (1978), its title a phrase he used to describe both the departed and the living. He charged $400 or so for private sessions.

Mr. Kingston said he held readings for John Wayne, Whoopi Goldberg and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, among other celebrities. Some clients, he said, kept in contact after they died. He told a CNN interviewer that Marilyn Monroe was studying philosophy in the afterlife and looking forward to being reincarnated, possibly as a man.

It was not his least plausible celebrity update. He told Los Angeles magazine in 1999 that long-dead actors like Errol Flynn and Orson Welles still frequented the Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood. He collected many such revelations in a book he titled I Still Talk To….

He also predicted Academy Award winners — erratically.

‘That proves I’m no charlatan,’ he told a Los Angeles Times columnist in 1988. ‘They’re never wrong. I’m just a happy medium!’

Mr. Kingston was born on Feb. 15, 1927, in Buffalo. His mother taught him to read tea leaves when he was about 4, and he was coached in spiritualism by Mae West, a family friend, Ms. Porter said.”

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“I went into a trance the other night…”: