By Steve Garbarino

His kindly wide orbs, pita pockets of pathos, are unavoidable. They tell you he cares. They tell you he worries. They tell you he won’t quit you. They tell you that you are getting sleepy. Meet Kerry Gaynor, the certified hypnotist to whom actors such as Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Anthony LaPaglia, and Aaron Eckhart (Thank You for Smoking)—among many others in their line of work —have turned to quit smoking. It’s a wonder, though, that such illustrious clients don’t turn away and press in the car lighter when their chauffeured rides arrive at his home office, just off commercial Pico Boulevard on a middle-class residential street right out of a Todd Solondz film. Inside Gaynor’s two-story residence, it gets dodgier still. The office space adjoining the ’70s-contemporary house is floored with cold squares of white tile. Piles of paperwork are everywhere. Two purplish-blue La-Z-Boys—twin suburban Barneys—are the focal points. (The chairs are where his clients recline, after being handed a bottle of water.)

And there he is, with his shellacked Ken Doll–like helmet of hair, deep tan, and on my visit, blue windbreaker zipped to the neckline with matching blue chinos and white sneakers. He could be a UPS man, or a soap opera actor, or one of the fallen leading men he has helped make healthier.

In an occupation that one finds “Magician” and “Face-Painter” also included in the mix when one searches the category of “Hypnotist” online, Gaynor has earned ample respect. He does not advertise, he practices six days a week, and all of his business comes from referrals. Most of them are from bold-faced names, at least within the Industry, including agents, studio executives, directors, screenwriters, and sports figures.

Gaynor, who is 54, says he has clocked 35,000 hours over the course of 28 years, providing hypnosis with what he calls a “90-percent success rate,” ever since a practitioner gave a demonstration at his alma mater, UCLA, and he found his calling. “Generally, I don’t turn people away,” he says in a folksy, laid-back tone. “I realized that I care about people. My passion knows no boundaries. I care about each person because I believe that if they don’t quit smoking they are going to die—which motivates me to work hard for each person.”

Heavy stuff. But Gaynor does not believe that addiction is an insurmountable monster. “In most support groups, the focus is generally upon the addiction, but I don’t believe that is where the power is,” he says. The power that keeps them locked in is the denial. It’s the denial of what it is doing to them.” Gaynor does not want to know, then, when or why one of his clients began smoking. He is not a shrink. “It’s completely irrelevant,” he says, “since 90 percent of smokers start before their teens, to be cool, for rebellion, for experimentation. As adults, none of that becomes relevant.”

He calls his three one-hour sessions—conducted over the course of three consecutive weeks—easy. “Most of my clients have no withdrawal, but some do if a connection isn’t made. Most say, ‘It’s a miracle! I haven’t had any difficulty quitting.’ But not everybody.” Smokers, he says, are “stuck in a loop. Addictions are profoundly misunderstood. This is about becoming a nonsmoker. It is about alleviating the fear of quitting by administering the truth to smokers. It is about the addict gaining enlightenment.” Gaynor says that the reason people continue smoking is because “they don’t believe they are going to die from it.”

In the introductory session, he says, “I try to get them to shift, to understand that it’s not OK to smoke. Then I have them confront something they have not confronted, to make them think about cigarettes and addiction. Get them off their spot. I’m trying to create a paradigm shift. For example, and this is one of 50 I might use, I say that if I snuck into their house and put the 350 poisons that are in cigarettes into their food and they caught me, then they would call the police and I would be arrested for attempted murder. And obviously, the next day they wouldn’t let me back into their house to do it again.” He pauses to clarify. “I mean, what else do we do that deliberately kills half a million people a year?”

Then there is the show-and-tell—which could be titled “Lungs of Terror” if it were a snuff film. Here, as well, are cancer-eaten faces, mouths, and tongues. And he lays down the facts. There are 50 million smokers in America alone, according to stats, but Gaynor says all of the numbers are dated, and much higher. In the U.S., cigarette smoking is responsible for an estimated 438,000 deaths per year, or one of every five deaths. A thousand people a day die from it. “And many of them die from it in their twenties,” he says. “So many people think it’s an old-age disease, that happens in their sixties or seventies.”

In the second session, he continues, “they quit. They walk out of the room no longer smokers, and I teach them how to do it. I am talking through a large part of it, but they are hypnotized. Their eyes are closed. The point of the second is that it’s a teaching session, teaching them to beat their addiction. The primary idea is to assure that they don’t get sucked into the debate. Once another addict sucks them into debate, they have power over you. We don’t debate with a small child. I teach them the instinct of survival.”

And in his third session, he says, “I reinforce what we have done, and address any problems or concerns that have arisen since the second one. We focus upon the future, so they don’t go back and smoke.”

As is evident by his modest surroundings, Gaynor—who charges the famous and civilians the same rate ($175 per session)—is not getting rich from his profession. “There is very rapid turnover,” he says. In other words, if they have quit, then why come back? “It’s hard to sustain a business out of the field.”

Three out of four ex-clients that I interviewed for this story—all requesting anonymity—swear by his technique, and his results. (One of them went to him for ulcer troubles.) The uncured fourth says, “He makes sense about not smoking, but so does everyone else, and I wouldn’t say that I was hypnotized unless you stretch the definition of hypnosis to essentially include not being hypnotized. I think that the subject has to want to please the hypnotist or accept him as the alpha dog, which for certain types of personalities is probably impossible. I was never responsive to suggestion.”

Contests Gaynor, “This client just doesn’t understand what hypnosis really is. The reality is that I can’t help everyone. I certainly would like to. But it’s not about the desire to please the hypnotist—which is a misnomer—nor is it about relinquishing control. It’s about facing what cigarettes are doing to them, and maturing to a place where they can deal with that and respond to it in a protective way. It is not about willpower, quitting smoking. It’s this oh-my-god place, this, my heart-is-being-destroyed place.”

Another one of Gaynor’s converted attests, “Kerry is unique in more ways than one could imagine. No one in this town would trust anything less. Despite my saying that, he’s the epitome of the non-Hollywood type. Bottom line: it works. So who cares if you have to say you went to a hypnotist?” Photography by Stephen Zeigler