Once when you were Pharoah...
"One life leads to another," says hypnotist Irv Mordes and so on and so on
BY ERIC ALAN BARTON
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News
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Don't Drink the Water III
An underling becomes the sacrificial lamb, but Bill Flaherty must go
Letters
Letters for August 21, 2003
An artistic conflict
Irv Mordes has a manuscript under his wrinkled and spotted hands, but he doesn't want to open it yet. It's too soon. He needs to build up anticipation for that four-inch-thick text of his life's most important work. So he ponderously goes through his story the way old men do, hitting the highlights to emphasize how successful he's been in his 84 years, first as a nobody salesman and then in a second career with its asterisk of fame. He'll end his story with that secret he's selling in his book, the one about living forever.
He begins back during World War II, when the Army rejected him because of a bad back and he ended up making some quick money taking pictures of servicemen. He'd approach the GIs in Baltimore parks, making as much as $1,000 a week just snapping photos for a buck. He'd mail the pictures to the soldiers' sweethearts and parents. The snapshots often arrived not long after word came that the men had been gunned down. "I'd get letters saying 'Thank you, thank you. This is the last picture I have of my son,'" Mordes recalls, his eyes widening behind large bifocals. But business slumped after the war, so Mordes started selling Venetian blinds to the ex-GIs. The work made him a living into the 1960s, when Mordes wanted something more. He doesn't say things so bluntly, but, really, judging by the story he tells, Irv Mordes wanted immortality.
In 1963, he opened a business that promised clients they could lose ten pounds with little effort. He simply hypnotized them, gave them subconscious messages to lose weight, and sent them off with a newfound ability to refuse food. It sounds simple now, but back then, hypnotism was a field akin to carnival sideshows. When his female clients started losing pounds, though, Mordes became popular. "Women would go to their friend and say, 'Oh my god, what happened?' And they'd say, 'I went to Mr. Mordes,'" he reminisces, using a high-pitched female voice to imitate his clients. "Next thing I know, I've got 12 offices all over Baltimore, then Pennsylvania, then Texas. I couldn't believe it."
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/2003-08-21/feature.html/1/index.html
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