TOWER OF PSYCHOBABBLE

By ELIZABETH GLEICK/MILL VALLEY

Pay attention, folks, because there's going to be a quiz later. Here's how to give a woman a compliment: you tell her she looks nice. Or better yet, you say, "You look so nice." Or, "You really look so nice." Or, "You look very, very nice." Got it? But did you need a book to tell you how to mix those adverbs and adjectives so very creatively?

For the millions of devotees of John Gray (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus), the answer is apparently yes. This week 300,000 copies of the newest addition to Gray's oeuvre, Mars and Venus on a Date, will hit bookstores, and it will tell all sorts of people all sorts of things they already know. Remember that old baseball euphemism from make-out parties in junior high school? Gray, writing as if he invented the metaphor, explains how to get to first base and so on, ending with "sliding into home." More to the point, Mars and Venus on a Date will rehash some of the very same anecdotes and concepts--men are like blowtorches, women are like ovens--that can be found in Gray's other six books. Such criticism fazes Gray--a man who must have left his humility on Mars when he fell to Earth--not at all. He announces proudly that the new book took him a grand total of seven weeks to do and that it is "without a doubt in my mind the greatest book I've ever written." Relaxing in the living room of one of two houses he owns in Mill Valley, Calif., Gray sounds awestruck by his own wizardry: "I'm sitting there writing, and these beautiful ideas come out."

The sourdough starter here, the mold from which all other efforts have grown, is the 1992 Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and that, at least, seems to have been a beautiful idea. It has sold a staggering 6 million copies--making it, according to publisher HarperCollins, the best-selling hard-cover nonfiction book ever--and has been published in 38 languages. The book has earned Gray somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 million. And that's not counting the spin-offs. So far Gray has produced Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, Mars and Venus in Love, Mars and Venus Together Forever. Ask about future books, and his answer is, frankly, a little scary: Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, Kids Are from Heaven, a parenting book due out in 1998; Daddy's from Mars, Mommy's from Venus; MAFM, WAFV over 50; MAFM, WAFV over 50 Together Forever; MAFM, WAFV over 50 in the Bedroom; Mars and Venus in the Boardroom; Mars and Venus in the Counseling Room; Mars and Venus Single Again. (Why not Mars and Venus for Dummies?)

In addition to the books, there's an infomercial, sets of audiotapes and videotapes, weekend seminars, a CD-ROM, Mars and Venus vacations and a one-man show that began with a Broadway appearance last February and will continue at arenas across the country this summer. Gray also has a movie deal with 20th Century Fox and a planned sitcom. His new CD features a Mars and Venus song co-written by that Renaissance man Gray himself and performed as a sort of call and response by his-and-her vocalists. (Sample lyrics: Her: "Every time I try to tell you something, you get mad and run off to your cave." Him: "You're so up and down with your emotions.")

These works all have a very simple message at their heart: men and women are so different, they might as well come from different planets--and can't we all just get along? But it is a message with enough of a truthful core that it struck a popular nerve at a very particular time: the early '90s, when it again became permissible for people to discuss gender difference. For this, thanks must be given to Georgetown University linguistics professor Deborah Tannen's groundbreaking You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which perched on the New York Times best-seller list for close to two years before Mars and Venus came out (and for two years after).

The books could not be more different in many ways; in the back, for instance, where Tannen has placed footnotes, Gray has 800-numbers for ordering his products. But both are about the frustrations of male-female communication--how men hate to ask for directions when driving, say, or how women need to talk to feel closer. Says Tannen: "I suppose if I had wanted to build an empire I would be resentful, but I didn't." Gray acknowledges the similarities between his work and Tannen's--up to a point. "I do tend to skim all the best sellers," he admits. "I've heard criticism that I'm just a watered-down version of Deborah Tannen. [But] I was teaching those ideas before I'd heard of her."

Gray insists that the growth of his empire is merely a response to the outpouring of interest in his work--hey, if people want a book for singles, he'll oblige. But though his intentions may be honorable and though any number of people swear by his methods, his sketchy credentials and entrepreneurial energies have some mental-health professionals more than a little concerned. "Couples relationships are incredibly complex," says Anna Beth Benningfield, president-elect of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. "To tell a couple to go read this book and do this one thing and you'll be fine is very misleading."

Gray's latest foray into the for-profit world is his new Mars & Venus Counseling Centers, in which therapists pay $2,500 for training in the Mars & Venus "technique," an initial licensing fee of $1,900 for the right to hang out a shingle (and use the logo) as a Mars & Venus counselor, and then a $300-a-month "royalty" payment. Gray says he has acquired his special love insights after years of counseling couples and hearing anecdotes from his fans at book signings and lectures. But he is not a licensed anything other than driver, to which some mental-health professionals would say, Caveat emptor. Dorothy Cantor, immediate past president of the American Psychological Association, questions the ethics of essentially franchising a form of therapeutic practice. "B.F. Skinner did not say, 'I discovered behaviorism. Now you can have it only if you pay me for it,'" she points out.

In a sense, it hardly matters what the naysayers think of Gray's work, which may explain why Gray will say things to journalists that others might consider ill-advised. About his limited run on Broadway, during which he performed to savage critics but sellout crowds at New York City's 1,900-seat Gershwin Theater, he says, "I have no preparation before I go onstage, and I don't do any thinking." When asked how he arrived at the Mars and Venus concept, he says it was from seeing the movie E.T. For Gray, it is easy to come up with such popular blends of fact and fiction, even when talking about extraterrestrials. In fact, he says, "I've seen a spaceship. I was traveling north on the California coast and I saw a ball of light that was traveling alongside my car, and it shot off in a Z pattern." He adds, "I certainly believe in extraterrestrial life, but I am definitely from Earth."

It is just such guilelessness, or what the Gray acolytes persist in referring to as "sharing," that has helped win Gray an almost cultlike following. Many of the people who work for Gray are true believers who have dropped everything to spread his message of marital harmony. Phoenix businessman Michael Najarian took one of Gray's seminars 10 years ago in Santa Cruz, Calif., when he was fresh from a divorce. "When the student is ready, the teacher appears," he says. "My whole life really changed after that weekend." Najarian, who is now president of Personal Growth Productions, which produces Gray's tapes, acts as a sort of surrogate John Gray, giving the occasional seminar or talking to business groups at $10,000 a pop (Gray charges $35,000), even, a little creepily, using the same mannerisms. Ellen Coren says that when she and her husband took their first workshop with Gray 12 years ago, "it was an incredible experience for both of us." Coren eventually trained to become a therapist and is now clinical director of the counseling centers. Eric Smith, an Orange County, Calif., computer consultant who hopes to become a Mars & Venus "facilitator," which would entitle him to run weekend workshops, says Gray "has a remarkable gift for healing."

Gray developed this gift with extraordinary energy. Born in Houston in 1951, he is one of seven children of a well-to-do oil executive who died in 1985 after hitchhikers robbed him and locked him in the trunk of his car; his mother ran a spiritual bookshop and knew Heaven's Gate cultist Marshall Applewhite. Both parents went to Stanford, and John was expected to do so as well. But in 1969, when he was a high school senior, he went to a Transcendental Meditation seminar, threw himself into this new way to find a natural high, and quickly caught the eye of TM's founder and leader, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who in the late 1960s was guru to the Beatles and other celebrities. "I think he saw a little bit of himself in me," Gray says, "and I wanted to be like him when I grew up."

For the next nine years, Gray traveled everywhere with Maharishi, eventually becoming the guru's personal assistant. Along the way he picked up a bachelor's degree and an M.A.--in the Science of Creative Intelligence--at Maharishi International University; most of the credits came from such "projects" as helping Maharishi set up his teacher-training programs. (Wonder how he earned the right to call himself "Doctor"? He earned his Ph.D. in a correspondence course in psychology and counseling offered by Columbia Pacific University in San Rafael, Calif.) He was a meditator par excellence, he recalls, and would hear angels singing and have "visuals." When Maharishi began promising that TM practitioners could learn to "fly," photos of Gray flying were posted in TM centers throughout the world. Gray now says the flying thing was a crock; what he was doing was more like "bouncing." But most important, Gray learned how to build an international organization. "All that was very helpful for me--to see what's possible, to know the ropes," he says.

Gray maintains that he also learned from Maharishi's mistakes. "His movement became all about him," he says. "What I try to do when I'm onstage and my gift is shining--and it is very impressive to people--[is to] reveal parts of me that aren't so shiny and impressive." This is, in part, his justification for spreading his seed, as it were--for selling his name and methods to others.

Though Gray says Maharishi told him, "In 10 years you will own this movement," Gray eventually left TM and moved to California. By then, as Gray is fond of saying, he had been a "celibate monk" for nine years. "Sex became my new ecstasy," he says. After a few months of sleeping with a lot of women, including the woman who is now his wife Bonnie, he married his first wife, Barbara De Angelis, who has herself become a self-help guru, the author of How to Make Love All the Time, among other books. The two began giving sex and relationship workshops together, long weekends full of "forgiveness, tears, catharsis."

But Gray was not healing people as quickly as he wanted to. "Fifteen years ago," he explains, "I prayed to God, 'Is there something I could teach that wouldn't take 40 hours to get results, that would literally help the quality of life for the people who came?'" A month later, De Angelis left him for another man. Gray says he was "devastated" by the failure of both his marriage and his career as a relationship guru. But soon after, he pulled himself together and returned to Bonnie, with whom he says he had been in love all along. In addition to Bonnie's two daughters from a previous marriage, the Grays have an 11-year-old daughter together.

Though John Gray is now rich beyond even his dreams, he believes he has won this wealth for a reason--"so that I can understand how money is made and managed" and eventually help redistribute it. For Gray is just getting rolling with his master plan. "I feel it's in me to help negotiate peace in the world," he announces. "I know it will happen one day." And now it's time for that quiz. Where, exactly, is John Gray from?