What to call Sally Morgan? Psychic? Sexpert? Unusual late-life role model? Certainly she is a woman who has spent her life capturing the zeitgeist.
From her earliest ‘career’ as spiritual medium to Princess Diana – with whom she’d meet regularly at Kensington Palace, whisked through the gates in a car with blacked-out windows – to her current incarnation as a sex coach on, of all platforms, OnlyFans, she has made a career out of latching onto the anxieties and fantasies of generations of Brits.
Hers is one of the most extraordinary transformations I have ever come across – at 74, standing at just 5ft, she has lost a remarkable 18st.
Sex, death, dieting – Sally’s got tips on them all.
‘I’ve been giving sex and relationship advice to clients through my work as a psychic medium for over 40 years,’ she says, waving a hand airily.
‘People consult me saying they want to make contact with a parent who has passed but, so often, it turns out that what they really want to talk about are issues relating to current sexual relationships.
‘They open up to me because they know I have a sense of their whole history.’ Her chief skill in terms of sex coaching, she says, is the Extra Sensory Perception that allows her to ‘see’ into someone’s mind and life and access information about them – but, yes, she will also be asking the dead for advice to give to the living.
It was in the late 1980s that Sally became famous for reaching out to ‘the other side’. Princess Diana’s interest in all matters spiritual was well known and Morgan became her go-to psychic.
An oft-repeated story of questionable taste has it that during one of her readings she forecast the crash which killed Diana – but somehow got her psychic wires crossed and predicted it was Queen Elizabeth, rather than the Queen Of Hearts, who would die.
Showbiz A-listers were soon seeking her services, too, among them Robert De Niro and Uma Thurman, though the latter apparently took umbrage when Sally forecast the end of her marriage to fellow actor Ethan Hawke in 2003. The couple did indeed split up, divorcing in 2005 – but that was Thurman’s last reading with Morgan.
She is still on the circuit, still filling theatres with devotees keen to make contact with loved ones, though these days in Hartlepool and Huntingdon rather than Hollywood.
But if Sally is part of a peculiarly British showbiz tradition – her direct predecessors the popular female mediums of London’s 19th-century salons – today she is reinventing herself for the digital age.
With more than a million followers on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, the challenge has been monetizing her act online. Enter OnlyFans.
Yes, OnlyFans, the site that primarily hosts decidedly adult content and has a reputation for sleaze.
She is its first ‘psychic sex adviser’, she believes. ‘A friend I haven’t seen in a while said to me: “Oh Sally, you look amazing, you should get on OnlyFans,” she tells me. ‘Like most people, I thought it was a soft porn site and said: “That’s very kind of you, but I’m not stripping off for anyone”.’
It turned out her friend wasn’t talking about that sort of exposure, but instead using the site’s subscription model to reinvent herself as a sex agony aunt. ‘Joining [the site] just feels like an excellent business decision,’ she tells me. The site allows for more explicit advice, she says, not least because of its strict 18+ viewer policies.
Subscribers can now pay for one-on-one consultations with her and ask questions of loved ones from beyond the grave. ‘There are two reasons most relationships go wrong,’ she says. ‘Money and sex. However, there aren’t many places where people feel comfortable talking about these things. I’ve always been very open-minded, so I’m happy to listen and advise.’
She gives me an eye-popping example involving a British actress, whose identity she won’t share, but who consulted her a few years ago. Ostensibly, the woman wanted to connect with her grandmother, but it quickly transpired she was in fact distressed about her husband’s strange bedroom ritual.
‘He would only make love to his wife if she had sex with a surgeon friend of his first, while he sat watching from the end of their bed,’ says Sally. ‘Then he’d insist on re-enacting whatever his friend had done with her.’
Bizarre though this sounds – and much about Sally’s life sounds bizarre – it had become ‘the norm’ for this actress.
What she was seeking from Sally, it seemed, wasn’t psychic insight but no-nonsense marriage guidance.
‘Although I’d never been to her house, I could see her bedroom in my mind’s eye, right down to what she had on her dressing table and described it to her,’ says Sally.
‘But the main message I had for her was: “You’ve got real issues in your marriage and need to tell your husband that either he stops involving his friend in your sex life or you’ll divorce him”.’
Sally says she will be equally forthright in her new role online. And she’s certainly got one part right. Well-groomed, with a sleek blonde bob, she has more than a passing resemblance to renowned relationship therapist Esther Perel.
Indeed, I imagine few of the clients she had at the height of her fame would recognise her now. When she regularly visited Kensington Palace – charging Diana £35 an hour – Sally weighed an extraordinary 27st.
The weight began piling on when she was 32, she says – the age at which she gave up her job as a dental nurse to become a full-time medium. Back then, people would come to her door asking for readings in exchange for a home-made cake or a bunch of flowers.
Later, as her ‘business’ exploded and she began charging a fee, she was seeing clients back to back.
‘I was sat at a desk, at home all day long, barely moving other than to go to the fridge, seeing client after client and John [her late husband and manager] would bring me McDonald’s and KFCs to keep my energy up,’ she recalls. ‘Crazy though it sounds, I didn’t realise I was morbidly obese. If I had I’d have stopped eating.
You don’t have to be a psychotherapist to wonder what feelings Sally might have been self-medicating with food to reach a BMI of 73.8 (anything over 30 is classed as obese). ‘At the time, I didn’t think I looked awful either, but when I look back at photographs, I realise I looked dreadful.
‘Not only was I very large, the pallor of my skin was so unhealthy. Not surprising, really, because it was taking a huge toll on my heart.’
In 2008, at the age of 56, she did indeed have a heart attack. In the wake of it, a cardiologist told her: “If you don’t lose weight now, you’re going to die,’ and so a year later – well before the arrival of weight-loss drugs – she had a gastric bypass, where the stomach is effectively stapled and shrunk. Hers is now the size of an egg, she tells me. Within two years, Sally had lost 18st and was down to 9st and a size 10, a weight she has maintained since.
Today, she can only manage minute quantities of food – two eggs, scrambled, for breakfast, a quarter of a croissant for lunch and toddler-sized portions for dinner.
Although she could have had the bypass on the NHS, Sally paid for the surgery privately, at a cost of £12,000. Such enormous weight loss required further surgery to remove excess skin and, in 2012, she underwent a tummy tuck plus a breast lift and augmentation, at a further cost of £15,000.
Although much happier with her body, she felt she still needed more work and, in 2020, spent £9,000 on a neck lift and blepharoplasty, where excess skin was removed from her eyelids. Every three months for the past 16 year, she has also had Botox injections in her forehead and around her eyes, which has set her back a further £9,600.
Sally has also spent more than £1,000 on cosmetic tattooing – on her eyebrows and lip line. In all, there’s been little change from £50,000, she thinks. And it shows – you’d easily take her for a woman in her 50s, not her mid-70s.
Maintaining an image of relative youth is clearly part of the job for her, just as it is nowadays for an actress or TV presenter.
Along with her online re-launch, she is embracing the possibility of romantic renewal, too.
Sally’s husband of 46 years, John, died of Covid in 2021.
‘I was in shock for two years after John died and living on automatic pilot,’ she says now from her home in Reigate, Surrey.
‘I spent the two years after that coming to terms with it.’
And yet: ‘He’s still very much around. The figure I see is him aged 27 – the age he was when we married – and I speak to him most evenings, especially about business matters.’
Today, her 46-year-old daughter Fern has taken over the role of manager. ‘I don’t ever want to marry again but now I’m ready to move forward. I had the best marriage with John but I’d like someone my own age, to laugh and watch TV with, someone who also enjoys listening to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.’
Interested men might be forgiven for feeling daunted by the prospect of the ghost of Sally’s husband turning up on dates – and she’s conscious her psychic gifts do put some suitors off.
‘When men don’t know what I do, they’re like bees around a honeypot and we have a laugh,’ she says.
‘However, as soon as I mention I’m a medium, the majority of them walk away because, all of a sudden, I know too much. They think I’m reading their minds. And I am, in a way. Or at least reading them, using my psychic powers.’
And that’s before she’s told them she’s on OnlyFans.
A mother to three daughters, with four grandsons, can this septuagenarian really make it on such a site?
You can’t help but feel it might grind down even determinedly positive Sally. Her act is hugely popular, of that there’s no doubt – but it’s not the kind of venture people go to the grimly transactional OnlyFans to watch.
Goodness knows what all the deceased grandmothers will make of it.
