Several days ago, the young blond fashion plate Becka Diamond, also a Leo, read in her forecast that Feb. 16 was a great day for her to be in the public eye. “So I look at my calendar and it turns out I’m hosting a huge party that day!” Ms. Diamond marveled. “It’s things like that where I’m like, ‘That can’t be a coincidence’.”
Ms. Miller explained that astrology is “practically like engineering. It’s all mathematical cycles, some that will repeat and some that don’t.” For example: “Pluto has not been in Capricorn since the time of the American Revolution, and when it gets to 7 degrees”—which she predicted would happen by 2012—“it will be in the same place as it was when Britain passed the stamp act, and we got so mad we started a country! Ha-ha-ha!” Ms. Miller is an avid watcher of the television news, which she keeps on “for company” while she writes in her Upper East Side apartment. “All the people in the news right now are Capricorns or Cancers,” she said. Tiger Woods, for example, who was born Dec. 30. “I could have helped him if he would’ve seen me,” she said. “I would’ve said, ‘I’m worried about this December 31 eclipse.’ It wasn’t altogether friendly to his planets.
“The U.S. is a Cancer,” she continued, on a roll. “We absolutely have to keep the defense budget up. Especially this summer. Especially around June 26. I’m so glad we are not having those trials in Chinatown, what were they thinking? Ha-ha-ha!” Ms. Miller sometimes generates full charts for people in the news, just to better understand how events will resolve themselves. Timothy Geithner—now there was a man with an impressive chart. “He has Uranus conjunct the sun,” said the astrologer. “He’s truly a genius.”
Ms. Miller herself was born with a “very tough” chart—the planets “all squared off”—but she feels strongly that it has made her the person she is today. “People with calm, beautiful, gorgeous charts, they don’t try as hard,” she said. She will not reveal her age, though she told The Times in 1998 that she was in her “mid-forties.” She is a third-generation Manhattanite whose grandfather came over from Sicily in 1905 and settled on Elizabeth Street with a pushcart. “But it was getting expensive, so they went uptown,” she said.
A fruit and vegetable stand begot an Italian specialty food store on 75th and Second, which Ms. Miller’s father eventually took over and ran until 1981. The store delivered prosciutto and fresh produce and olive oils to famous New Yorkers like Diane von Furstenberg, John Chancellor and Richard Rodgers, who lived outside the family’s delivery zone, at the Pierre, but got delivery anyway, because her father “was so proud that Richard Rodgers was buying from him,” said Ms. Miller. She attended P.S. 82 until internal bleeding in her leg confined her to bed for most of her teenage years. She spent one year of high school in the hospital, and two bedridden above her father’s store, receiving a tutor sent by the Board of Education for two hours a week. She described her condition as a hamartoma, a benign tumor made of “veins, arteries, nerves and muscles that totally deformed the circulatory system in my left leg from the knee to the hip.” She said that only 47 other people in medical history have suffered a similar diagnosis.
MS. MILLER FOUND comfort in her mother’s astrology books. “Nobody had a computer, so you learned to do the algorithms by hand,” she said. (Now, software engineers take the calibration of the planets, distributed by NASA, and “drop them into a program.” )
Eventually young Susan consulted Horoscope magazine via letter, asking if she’d ever walk again (her mother, skilled though she was, could never be impartial on such a question). Her letter was printed, and the answer was “Yes.” Ms. Miller was hooked. “Anything that separates you from normal society lets you look through a different window and opens your heart,” she said.
Her first career was as a photography agent, but she kept up her study of the planets and eventually started AstrologyZone on the side in 1995, after giving birth to two daughters—the eldest, Chrissie, is a fashion designer herself, of the label Sophomore; the younger daughter, Diana, is now a talent executive at The Carson Daly Show—and divorcing her husband, a Scorpio and doubting Thomas (the two are still friendly, and he lives nearby). She had 17 transfusions during a 1992 operation to insert a steel rod. The steel seems to have infused her other limbs as well: Ms Miller had gone to bed at 3 a.m. nearly every night of late preparing for her seminars and writing February’s forecasts for AstrologyZone.com. (The site started as a licensing deal with Time Warner, gained an audience and eventually moved on to Ms. Miller’s own servers; she has hired ten people to help manage all her projects and her writing.) Her forecasts which can run 3,000 words, take her seven hours to write per sign. The Elle horoscopes take four days. And then there are her iPhone and BlackBerry apps, horoscope columns in Korean W, Japanese Vogue and a Turkish glossy called Tempo, plus horoscopes for 10 Japanese Web sites and a self-publishing division (a calendar and 4,000 to 5,000 personalized books per year).
Ms. Miller writes in her apartment or at a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m., seven days a week. She has so little time for private clients that she charges $500 for personalized readings. Her dream is to have a show, like her ido Martha Stewart (a Leo). “All my phone calls right now are from network TV,” she sighed. “Every single station except CBS has had an executive call me. NBC, Disney, ABC … CEOs love, love, love this!”
Ms. Miller herself said she doesn’t know why astrology works, just that it does, though she admits that she’ll always be competing with others in her field who are “not serious.” “Modern man is uncomfortable with ambiguity,” she said. “I’m completely comfortable with it. The Dalai Lama says that Western man feels they have to solve every mystery in his lifetime. That’s our nature, and it’s so sweet, because it’s what makes us study and do research. But we can’t say something doesn’t exist just because we don’t know why.”
Or, as Ms. Erickson, the fashion publicist, put it: “New Yorkers, in order to improve their quality of life, have to fill in with other things, like a great astrologer, so we don’t lose our minds. New Yorkers have Central Park, and we have Susan. It’s our escape.”
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