GARY QUINN COULD easily be one of the actors or hot young director/writer/agent-brigade who frequent the hip dining-out spots in LA. In his funky yellow-rimmed sunglasses and carefully gel-spiked hair, and with his SUV parked outside, Quinn, in fact, looks nothing like the psychic/angel-reader he is.
'I know, I know,' he says. People think I'm a cross between Keanu Reeves and David Schwimmer.'
It's not surprising that the man considered one of LA's most notable psychics has some celebrity gloss. Until he began doing the psychic thing seriously two years ago, he moved in the movie/TV star milieu, as an actor, screenwriter and personal assistant. Now, Hollywood hotshots count among his clients, seeking advice on whether to take a role, enter a relationship, leave a marriage.
I was told about Quinn - who is fresh-faced, smiling, and refreshingly free of the psycho-babble that seems to be a criteria for new age types - by a new friend in LA who was bowled over by his clairvoyant abilities.
'I'm really sceptical,' she had told me. 'But he saw things there's no way he could have known.' Quinn had also just signed a deal with Random House, which is publishing his first book, May The Angels Be With You, next spring. He has the unique ability, after you meet with him, of making you feel as if you can do just about anything - something he has proven in his own life.
After all, Quinn has gone from being a champion swimmer to Natassia Kinski's confidant; he once worked as personal assistant to 10 big-name TV stars at one time, before ending up poor and jobless in a haunted house in Les Halles, Paris; he says he and John Travolta have a 'weird karmic connection'. He also, against all odds, landed one of the best agents in the (spiritual books) business, and was paid a decent advance by a big New York publishing house - a rarity in the industry - after he reduced a senior executive to tears with messages from her grandmother in the hereafter.
'I guess everything just came my way,' he says. 'There is synchronicity in things, if we just let them happen. We get all the messages we need, but most people block them off. But if we listen, we can start creating miracles.' Few things have proven Quinn's theory right more than his coup when Barbara Molten, a San Francisco-based literary agent who represents no more than five authors at a time, signed him on.