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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Quigley's eyes are huge and brown with a tiny ring of blue around the edge of each iris. When she makes a point, she opens them wide in a startled expression of extra emphasis, as if to say: "All the better to see the future with, my dear!"
When I walk through the door of her apartment in the city's tony Pacific Heights district, she cries: "I'm thrilled to meet you because your horoscope is incredible!" Her eyes are wide, her face lit up and her head is shaking back and forth just a bit, as if she simply can't believe her good fortune at encountering the possessor of such vast, yet unrealized potential. As she puts our takeout lunch in the refrigerator, Quigley explains that 1971, the year in which I was born, is an excellent vintage, a tremendous year for "business tycoons" and other budding players on the world stage. "Do you like this job?" she will later ask me pointedly over lunch. The clear implication: I have a much higher calling. What am I waiting for?
But before we ponder my happy destiny, we retire to the living room, an oasis of understated, old-world good taste, to discuss Joan Quigley. The bookcases are stocked with weathered volumes on Oriental rugs and orchids. Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" shares a shelf with "Modest Mansions." And dominating one side of the room are three incongruous PCs, on which, Quigley tells me, she often works until 6:30 a.m. This is where the world of the refined San Francisco high-society matron meets the driven, up-all-night Net entrepreneur.
Quigley was first exposed to astrology at the age of 15, when her mother visited an astrologer for what Quigley calls "an afternoon's entertainment, sort of a lark" and came home convinced that astrology was actually "quite scientific." The young Quigley read all the books that her mother bought on the subject, and when she returned to San Francisco after graduating from college she declared that her future lay in astrology. Her father, a lawyer and businessman, was not amused: "It was as though he had sent his daughter to Vassar and I wanted to be a refugee from a gypsy tea room," she says.
The astrologer with whom Quigley's mother consulted on that fateful afternoon agreed to become the aspiring stargazer's mentor. Think Mr. Miyagi to Daniel in "The Karate Kid," except with star charts. Tragically, this productive tutelage would be short-lived: "I studied with her for about a year, and one day she showed me her horoscope, and we both knew that she was going to die of a massive heart attack within the month," Quigley recalls.
The doomed astrologer offered her pupil this parting prediction: "Joan, you will be a very famous astrologer some day, and you will discover techniques I have never dreamed of." Quigley thinks her Web-based software will fulfill the prophesy. Her presidential prophesizing may have brought Quigley's name to the masses, but she's confident that the Internet will bring her work to them.
Like any artisan whose talents are in demand, Quigley has struggled for years with outsourcing dilemmas. She simply cannot read the entire world's charts on her own, cannot single-handedly fend off the global population's bad business partnerships, doomed marriages and fatal plane trips, one by one. But her experience farming out business to other practitioners of her craft has been less than satisfactory.
After the news broke about her secret consultations with Nancy Reagan, business boomed, and Quigley passed on some clients' horoscopes to another astrologer: "I gave a few to this young astrologer, and she absolutely wrecked them. She was so bad. I realized how few really reliable, quality astrologers there are." Her voice assumes a hushed tone: "There are some very good ones, but some of them really don't know what they're doing."
Quigley is also quick to distinguish her own works from the generic horoscopes in the newspaper. "I will not do sun-sign astrology, because it's not accurate," she states flatly. "I'm a serious professional. I'm not some sort of idiot, pop astrologer." She relies on the exact time, date and place of a client's birth to create hundreds of charts that outline predictions based on the relations of the stars. In order to do my "natal chart" -- the position of the planets when I was born -- Quigley needed the time (3:49 p.m.), date (Sept. 30, 1971) and place (Kingston, Ontario) of my birth. All that Libra, Scorpio, Cancer business is, she says, "a lot of bosh."
