The Secret Life of Uri Geller

by Jonathan Margolis

  Tibor and Margaret had married in the still-operational main synagogue in Budapest in 1938. Unlike Tibor’s, Margaret’s family was not religious. She had been born in Berlin, to Viennese parents. Her family name was Freud, and if the Hungarian Gellers boasted that gypsy blood ran through their veins, giving them a touch of exotica, the Austrian Freuds could point out that her Margaret was a distant relative of the great Sigmund Freud.

  Uri had nearly been killed as a baby by shard of glass caused by a stray British bullet fired in the sporadic street fighting and sniping in Tel Aviv that was common in the lead-up to Israeli independence in 1948. Even today, the stairway of the apartment block has bullet scars in its light-blue painted walls. The British squaddie’s bullet came through a living-room window, under which Uri was in his pram. ‘I remember the two shots, and I remember the glass falling almost in slow motion. My mother had put a little teddy bear next to me in the pram, and somehow it rolled over my face and it saved me. Maybe I would have been cut up, perhaps even killed.’

  Uri Geller was something of a street urchin, given a lot of latitude to do his own thing outside by his parents, whose relationship had become distant and tenuous. His devastatingly handsome and always impeccably uniformed father was seen publicly with a variety of girlfriends. Margaret worked tirelessly as a seamstress to earn the little family enough to live on. At the same time as being resilient and streetwise, Uri was, by his own admission, a little strange.

  He was fixated by space, almost, he speculates today, ‘as if something was implanted in my mind’ during his Joan of Arc experience. He had started to draw detailed space pictures, with astronauts sitting in rockets surrounded by controls and screens. ‘Across our street was a junkyard full of huge old water tanks, and there, too, I used to fantasize. I used to crawl into one which was covered in big rivets, and pretend I was in some kind of capsule, floating in space.’

  This was, it might be said, at a time when space flight was considered as an impractical absurdity, and the idea of a space capsule existed only in science fiction. It’s an idea anyone who thinks Uri may really have been contacted by aliens might care to run with.

  Uri recalls other strange phenomena crowding into his little world. The spoon bending was occurring only occasionally, and apparently at random, but was frequent enough for his parents to become accustomed to it; their minds were so full of wartime worries about survival that they seem to have look upon its significance as some sort of scientific oddity.

  The first post spoon-bending phenomenon to affect Uri would make him a playground sensation at the kindergarten he attended around the corner on Achad Ha’am Street. Being the centre of attention immediately appealed to the boy, and a new and curious ability to affect the working of watches and clocks in odd ways was now manifesting itself.

  Uri’s facility with timepieces, he maintains, had appeared as spontaneously as his spoon bending. Shortly after Uri began school, Tibor bought his son a watch, of which the little boy was, naturally, very proud. Uri Geller grew bored by school almost immediately, and the watch, with its slow-moving hands, in some way acted as an externalization of his boredom. One day, he recalls looking at the watch and seeing it was time for the class to be over. But a glance at the wall clock showed there was still half and hour to go. Disappointed and assuming his watch was running fast, he set it back 30 minutes and forgot about it – until the same thing started to happen day after day.

  Achad Ha’am primary school, Tel Aviv, 1954. Uri appears far right, second row from top, check shirt.

  One day, he actually saw his watch shoot forward and shouted out in class, ‘Look at this watch!’ He immediately wished he hadn’t, because everyone laughed at him. He does not remember whether the watch was actually still racing ahead when he held it up, but he does know that the incident served as an early lesson that people could be very hard and sceptical, would not simply accept his word, and would not necessarily even believe what they saw what was literally staring them in the face. He decided he just had a weird watch, and wouldn’t wear it again. His mother said she would buy him a better one, and after a few months, she did.

  But the new watch was soon behaving as curiously as the first. One day, when the bell rang for the end of recess, Uri looked at his watch, and saw that the hands had bent, first upwards, so they hit the glass, then sideways. The same thing, with the hands of the watch bending up under the glass, would happen again nearly 20 years later when Uri appeared on a BBC TV show hosted by David Dimbleby, and instantly made a name for himself in the UK. Back in those early school days, convinced, now, that this was the spoon thing in another guise, Uri’s response was to keep it a secret. When he got home, his father was there on one of his infrequent visits and asked sharply, ‘Did you open this watch?’ Uri swore that he had not, and Margaret told Tibor about the peculiar things that had happened with the first one.

  Uri recalls Tibor and Margaret giving each other a look, before his father suggested taking Uri to see a psychiatrist to get to the bottom of what he called vandalism first against cutlery, and now watches. Tibor was openly angry about Uri’s odd behaviour, but Margaret said that whatever it was Uri was displaying seemed like a talent to her. The visit to a psychiatrist never happened – probably a good thing for some unfortunate psychiatrist, who might have ended up, when his watch started going crazy, thinking it was he who needed help.

  The weird, haunting thing in the garden, the spoons, the intense fascination with space, the watches and even the embarrassment of being laughed at in class all combined to convince Uri even at this early stage in his life that he was special, possibly even on some kind of mission for a superior power. ‘It was real; it was vivid in my mind. I know to this day it was no childhood fantasy,’ he insists.

  While he knew that demonstrating his abilities to people could lead to humiliation, something was itching in him – understandably – to show them what he could do. But he developed what has been a lifelong characteristic of revealing himself in different ways to different people. And it was not nearly as simple as targeting gullible of suggestible audiences. From childhood, it was almost the opposite, and even today, some of his closest friends, who are absolutely convinced of his abilities being natural and not faked, have hardly ever – never in some cases – seen him in action. Nor have they particularly wanted to.

  Somehow, he has always seemed to get more pleasure and nourishment from showing people who are suspicious but intellectually willing to be impressed. When, however, he senses people who will refuse dogmatically to believe, whatever they have witnessed, and insist there it is all trickery, he either fails to perform – embarrassingly on occasion – or refuses to. This is seen by some as proof that he does, after all, rely on credulous audiences.

  To others, a key question comes to mind; does he rely on some kind of ‘energy’ (that great, misused word) from his watchers to make his seemingly impossible effects occur? This may sound like the worst kind of hippy-talk, but remember what the aeronautical engineer, Jack Houck, concluded decades after the first spoon had bent itself in Uri’s hand about emotional positivity – happiness, in fact – being a factor in anomalous metal bending.

  Consider, too, the words of William A. Tiller, Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University and a Physics Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. After seeing an especially on-form Uri at a conference in Seattle, Tiller developed the idea that Uri is a ‘coherer’ who, ‘absorbs energy unconsciously given by others, and transforms it into the form needed to produce such spectacular psychoenergetic displays’. Tiller became convinced that this explained why Uri was consistently less successful with negative audiences from whom Uri is ‘unable to tap their collective energy fields.’ Throughout history, Tiller adds, ‘charismatic individuals have been coherers and had a great effect on crowds of people.’

  Back in the Tel Aviv of the early 1950s, Uri seemed to have found a coherer in the form of a littl
e pal called Mordechai. A few weeks after the showdown with his parents over the second broken watch, Uri was eating school lunch, when Mordechai looked down at his watch and exclaimed that it had just moved an hour ahead. Prepared to risk all since he now had an independent witness with his own watch, Uri uttered what for him was a fateful short statement: ‘I did that’.

  Mordechai, naturally, argued that he couldn’t have done – the watch had never left his wrist. Uri asked if he could take it in his hand, and, he says, just looked at it and shouted, ‘Move.’ He made it jump two or three times, and by the end of the lunch break, had a crowd of excited boys proclaiming that Uri Geller had the most wonderful trick he could perform with a watch. The memory of Uri proclaiming in class that something had happened that only he had seen was forgotten. The boys could see this with their own eyes, and couldn’t have been more impressed. Uri, of course, would like to have explained that, actually, as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t a trick; it was something far simpler. But he knew that might be going too far.

  Uri rocketed in his peers’ estimation. Yechiel Teitelbaum, who was in Uri’s class and now runs a Tel Aviv cosmetics marketing company employing 300 people, confirms this. ‘He was always different from other kids, very strange,’ says Teitelbaum. ‘He did a lot of things not every child can do, things beyond understanding; he left the impression of someone amazing, very sharp, very strong, very, very popular. He was always the leader, even in kindergarten.’

  ‘We were together from four or five years old,’ Yechiel Teitelbaum continued. ‘He was always doing incredible things in the playground with wristwatches. I also remember there were stories about him stopping the big classroom clock, but in my memory it was the big clock in the teachers’ room that Uri stopped. I don’t remember him bending metal, but what left the biggest impression on me was something different. It was Uri’s telepathia – how he would tell me exact things I was thinking about.’

  This human telepathy first manifested for Uri’s mother, as it did for Yechiel at kindergarten, with the boy’s uncanny knack of saying things just before she was about to. It became yet another of the oddities Margaret learned to shrug off. ‘She was accustomed to the idea of me being unusual,’ Uri says. Among the premonitions he would have that went down in family history as accurate was one that apparently came to him on a visit to the zoo during which Uri felt uneasy and asked to leave. A few minutes after he and Margaret had gone, mother and son maintain, a lion escaped and spent some minutes running about terrorizing the visitors. For the first time, having a telepathic young son began to have its practical uses.

  Oddly, spoon bending, even though it was happening with increasing regularity and was seemingly coming under his control, was something Uri avoided doing with his friends. But with adults, he was unstoppable. Margaret’s main pastime was drinking coffee and eating cake with her girlfriends. Uri would often accompany her, to the distress of many Tel Aviv café owners. He would be quietly eating a piece of cake when spoons on the café table would start curling up. The waiters would whisk them away, not wanting to give the impression the cafe used bent spoons – or indeed attracted naughty little boys as customers. Margaret would explain to her friends and the staff that such things sometimes happened when Uri was around.

  One of Margaret’s Hungarian friends was a younger woman, Shoshana Korn, who was at that time working in a hotel in Tel Aviv. Shoshana, or Juji as she was known, became Uri’s godmother.

  ‘We were in a café on the corner of Pinsker and Allenby one day when Uri started to play with the spoons,’ Juji recalls. ‘He was five or six, and bent four or five coffee spoons double. ‘I said, “Manci, I hope you have plenty of money to pay the café owner.” Fortunately, the owner was amused. I said, “Uri, you’re going to ruin your mother.” He said, in Hebrew, that it just came to his head how to do this, but his mother wouldn’t let him do it in the house. All the other people were amazed. And as well as being able to do these incredible things, Uri was very smart, too. He’d stop clocks and watches, too, but then he’d always start them again.

  ‘Another friend of ours, Anush, said to Manci, “You know one day you won’t have to work all night, because he’s going to make a lot of money.” Uri used to spend a lot of time with Anush and her husband, Miklos. I remember her saying you had to hide everything made of metal from Uri, because he’d bend it. Miklos was a handbag maker, and he would sometimes get angry with Uri because he would bend his tools and the clasps he used. But then he’d say, “I don’t know what to do with this Uri. He’s a genius.”’

  The final disintegration of the Gellers’ marriage ended Uri’s days as a city street kid. He was moved temporarily, to avoid the chaos of the breakup, to a kibbutz called Hatzor, far to the south of Tel Aviv near Ashdod, that specialized in taking in children from broken homes. Here, they would be lovingly looked after within a settled, nuclear family, perhaps start to mend psychologically, and maybe even develop a taste for the simple, healthy country lifestyle.

  A Hungarian-Jewish family, the Shomrons, took Uri in just before he was ten, in 1956, and the family’s son, Eytan, became his close friend. Yet, oddly, he did almost nothing paranormal to try to impress Eytan.

  There were odd incidents, nonetheless. Eytan – who saw Uri bend a spoon only when they were both 40 – recalls Uri accurately predicting a crash at the neighbouring air force base.

  ‘My brother Ilan remembers Uri telling him that an airplane was going to crash tomorrow, and it did,’ says Eytan. Uri, curiously, remembers saying in class one afternoon only that he thought ‘something’ terrible was going to happen, not that it was a crash at the air base, just beyond the wheat fields. ‘I suddenly felt something very powerful in me, almost like a feeling of running out of the classroom. A very short time afterwards, we heard this huge bang. We all ran out of the studying bungalow and across the cornfields we saw smoke and we all started running towards this jet on the end of the runway embedded in the ground and the pilot inside with blood all over his face. It was quite something, the first time in my life that I encountered someone dead or dying. Actually, he survived and months later, he came over to see us and tell us about it.’

  One former kibbutz child, however, has a very vivid memory of Uri giving him a brief glimpse of what he could do. Avi Seton, who became a management consultant in Portland, Oregon, was walking with Uri from the dining hall to the swimming pool one day when Uri suddenly said to him, ‘Hey, look what I can do.

  ‘Uri took off his watch and held it, and the hands just moved without him doing anything. I’m not sure if he was sophisticated enough at ten years old for some kind of sleight of hand to be involved, and I clearly saw them move. For some reason, I got the feeling then and now that it wasn’t something he could really do, but rather something that was happening to him. But the funny thing was that all I said when I saw this was, “Hey, so what.” I think it was always going to be like that for him when he showed these things to kids. “Hey, that’s good, but you want to see how high I can jump.”’

  Eytan Shomron believes all the time they were together back in the mid-50s, Uri was thinking of giving his friend some indication that there was more to him than met the eye. ‘I remember once walking on a dirt road in a field of wheat when Uri asked me, if I had the ability to know where the snakes are hidden in the grass, would it make me feel better. There were a lot of snakes, and they were extremely frightening, but I said, “No, I wouldn’t want to know.” It was such a strange question. Years later, I thought it was an attempt to hint at what he could do, to signal to me that he was sitting on a secret.’

  When Uri’s mother remarried and moved to Cyprus with her new husband, Ladislas, a former concert pianist, new vistas opened for the young Geller. He could see his mother was happy for the first time in a long while. He could leave the kibbutz, which he wasn’t keen on. And as Ladislas was quite well off, an end to the family’s poverty seemed within sight. But there were other, more subtle, benefits.


  Cyprus was a British colony, so the boy would learn English to near perfection, which would be of huge benefit to his subsequent career. He would also become familiar with American culture. He had an American girlfriend for a while, hung out at the American club, got to love hot dogs, played in a baseball team and very much took on board the idea that the streets in America were paved with gold. At the suggestion of the Greek Cypriot customs man Uri was processed by when he arrived by ship at Larnaca to settle on the island, he even adopted the English (but also Greek) name George, which he used for all the years he was to live there, from the age of 11 to 17.

  Uri was developing a yearning to show other adults, independent of his family and more sophisticated than his mother’s coffee shop friends, the strange things he could do. Among the staff at Terra Santa College, his Catholic boarding school outside Nicosia, he would find such adults. Among the more significant of them were Brother Mark and Brother Bernard, both former Navy SEALs and a certain Major Elton, an ex-French Foreign legionnaire who taught maths at the college. These were the kind of people he wanted to show what he could do – if only to be reassured that he wasn’t a freak. (Among other important influences in his life that he met in Cyprus was, of course, the Mossad agent Yoav Shacham, the story of which appears in Chapter 3.

  Establishing through third parties, preferably unrelated, that Uri Geller had special abilities as a child is crucially important in unravelling his life story. His major critics would one day assert that Geller’s powers mysteriously manifested only in his early 20s, after he happened upon a magicians’ manual with a teenage friend [Shipi] and the two together sensed the makings of a wonderful scam. But it is in Uri’s Cyprus period, from 1957 to 1963, that we begin to encounter strong indications that he was fully formed long before his critics believe. The list of children, teachers and others who attest to having seen and experienced his abilities so early in his life, before he had met Shipi and before he had supposedly learned mental magic from a book is so long, and their memories so precise, that the much-touted argument that Geller invented his ‘powers’ in league with Shipi a decade later starts to look distinctly threadbare – ridiculous, in fact.