It’s surprising to me that Bandler would cheerfully refer to NLP as a sociopathic hallucination that struck a chord with the business world. I’m not sure he’s ever been that blunt about it before. But I suppose, when you think about it, there is something sociopathic about seeing people as machines—computers that store desires in one part of the brain and doubts in another.
“See, it’s funny,” he says. “When you get people to think about their doubts, notice where their eyes move. They look down! So when salespeople slide that contract in, suddenly people feel doubt, because that’s where all the doubt stuff is.”
“So where should a salesperson put the contract?” I ask.
“They’ve got to buy themselves a clipboard!” he says. “When you ask people to think about things that are absolutely right for them, they look up! So you put the contract on a clipboard and present it to them up here!”
These were the kinds of ideas Bandler was typing in Santa Cruz at the age of twenty-five. The book would eventually be cowritten with linguistics professor John Grinder and published under the title The Structure of Magic.
Throughout the interview, I’m sitting on a low, dark red leather sofa with Bandler standing above me. “If I was standing and you were sitting,” I ask, “would I be forming different opinions of you?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”
“So are you deliberately positioning yourself in my hopes-and-desires eye line?” I ask.
There’s a silence. Bandler smiles to himself.
“No,” he says. “My leg hurts. That’s why I’m standing up.”
The Structure of Magic was a huge hit. “Time magazine, Psychology Today, all of these people started seeking me out in Santa Cruz,” he says. “And I started getting interest from places I really didn’t expect, like IBM.”
He designed sales-training programs for businesses across America. They made him rich. He bought a home in Hawaii and a mansion in Santa Cruz. He was hailed as a genius. The CIA and military intelligence squirreled him in, which is how I first heard of him. Had he really smuggled a tiny girl into Special Forces and got her to “model” a world-class sniper?
“It wasn’t a little girl,” he says. “It was a ten-year-old boy. And that’s not as great as it sounds. You can teach a ten-year-old boy to pretty much do anything.”
But by the early 1980s, things were spiraling downward for him. His first wife filed for divorce, claiming he choked her. According to a 1989 Mother Jones profile, he began to warn associates, “All I need to do is dial seven digits and with my connections with the Mafia I could have you all wiped out without even batting an eye.”
He struck up a friendship with his cocaine dealer, a fifty-four-year-old man named James Marino. By 1986 he was living in a house built by Marino. A few doors away lived Marino’s girlfriend, Corine Christensen.
In early November 1986, James Marino was beaten up, and he got it into his head that Corine had organized the beating so she could take over his cocaine business. Marino was paranoid, and he infected his friend with the paranoia. Bandler phoned Corine up, recording the conversation: “Why is my friend hurt? I’ll give you two more questions, and then I’ll blow your brains out. . . .”
Eight hours later, Corine Christensen was shot in the head at her home, and twelve hours after that Bandler was arrested for the murder.
I’ve been worried about bringing this up with him. Bandler may be quite brilliant and charismatic but he also seems overbearing and frightening. And although Paul McKenna himself strikes me as likable, his team of overzealous (literally overzealous) assistants scattered around the hotel are forever eyeing me with suspicion if I appear anything less than completely thrilled. Plus, earlier Jaime the PR rep cornered me in the corridor and said, “A few people have reported to me that you’ve been asking about banking and finance. You aren’t going to be writing about how NLP can be misused, are you?”
Then she looked me in the eye and added, “Some people are concerned.”
And that’s just because I was asking about banking! What’ll happen if I ask about murder—not the pretend murders Bandler jokes about onstage, but a real one?
Still, they aren’t in the room now.
“Tell me about the murder trial,” I say.
He doesn’t pause at all. He tells me what he told the jury—that James Marino did it. There were two men in the house when Corine was murdered—the famous Richard Bandler and the lowlife James Marino. Yes, he was there. He lifted her head, which is how her blood ended up on his shirt. Why do I think the police went after him?
“With me, the DA gets to make a big reputation,” he says. “But if it’s some thug drug dealer, you’re not going to make any mileage.”
The trial lasted three months. The jury acquitted Bandler after five hours of deliberation. On the stand, Bandler blamed Marino and Marino blamed Bandler. There was no way for the jury to know which of the two was telling the truth. Furthermore, James Marino was at times an unbelievable witness, frequently changing his story. Sometimes he was upstairs when Bandler shot her, sometimes he was downstairs. Plus, as the Mother Jones profile pointed out, who had the greater motive: the man who had been beaten up, or the man who was righteously indignant on behalf of a friend who had been beaten up?
“It took the jury longer to pick a foreman than to decide if I was guilty or innocent,” Bandler says. “The guy was a convicted felon! We caught him lying, falsifying evidence. . . .”
It is at this exact moment that Paul McKenna and the entire upper echelons of his company troop cheerfully into the room.
“The other guy was their stool pigeon they used to bust dope dealers!” Bandler is now hollering at me. “I mean, excuse me! A lot of very dirty things went on through that trial.”
Earlier today Paul McKenna got a compulsive blusher onstage and cured her of her blush. I am like the blush lady now, sitting on the chesterfield sofa, Bandler towering over me, yelling about the murder rap, while Paul McKenna and his managing director look anxiously on.
I change the subject. I say, half joking, that being an NLP genius must be awfuclass="underline" “To know in an instant what everyone’s thinking by their winks and tics and barely perceptible sideways glances and eye movements,” I say, “you must sometimes feel like one of those superheroes, ground down by their own superpowers.”
“Yeah,” Bandler replies, suddenly looking really quite upset. “It’s called the supermarket.”
He pauses.
“You walk into a supermarket and you hear someone say to their kid, ‘You’re never going to be as smart as other kids.’ And I see the kid’s eyes, pupils dilating, and I see the trance going on in that moment. . . . It became a burden to know as much as I did. I went through a lot of things to distract myself. I used to just sit and draw all the time. Just draw. Focus on drawing to keep my mind from thinking about this kind of stuff.” And then he goes quiet, as if he is falling into himself.
• • •
I SUPPOSE PEOPLE shouldn’t judge gurus until they need one. Luckily, I do, a bit. And so on Wednesday I use my ninety minutes with Paul McKenna to get him to cure me of my somewhat obsessive, debilitating conviction that something bad has happened to my wife and son when I can’t get ahold of them on the phone. I’ve always suffered from this. If I am in America and I can’t reach them on the phone, I become convinced that Elaine has fallen down the stairs and is lying at the bottom with a broken neck, and Joel is reaching up to grab the electrical cord of a newly boiled kettle. I have panicked unnecessarily about this all over the world.
Paul McKenna does Richard Bandler’s Swish technique on me. He gets me to picture one of my horrific imaginary scenes. I choose my son stepping out in front of a car.
He spots, from my eye and hand movements, that the mental image is situated in the top right hand of my vision, big, close to my eyes.