The Secret Life of Uri Geller

by Jonathan Margolis

  Uri on the steps of Pension Ritz, Nicosia, Cyprus, aged 17, just before his return to Israel.

  Cyprus was also, inevitably, the scene for other major influences to come into his life. One of these was sex – his first, and also enjoyable and successful, experiences occurred here. Another was show business. He met theatricals at his stepfather’s motel, a 14-bedroom establishment at 12 Pantheon Street in Nicosia, bearing an ambitious name for a little place: Pension Ritz. The Ritz was frequented by visiting performers working Nicosia’s busy nightlife scene – and Uri developed an affinity with them and their lifestyle. He says he showed some his spoon bending and watch-disturbing abilities, and they were duly impressed.

  Another, odder characteristic he evolved was a fascination for the ghoulish. Cyprus was war-torn and dangerous for his entire time there, as an ongoing war between terrorists, both Greek and Turkish, and the British Army was being fought. Uri frequently witnessed dead and mutilated bodies and the aftermath of bombings, all of which had its effect on the psychology of a young boy.

  Just a year after Uri arrived on the island, Ladslas died, leaving Uri’s mother alone for the second time. Even so, he still looks on his time on the island as one of the best of his life. For him, it was mostly a time of ranging about on his bike, taking the bus with his beloved fox terrier, Joker, to deserted beaches, swimming, snorkelling and getting to know about girls.

  Uri was first sent to board at the American School in Larnaca, where he was not happy, but he quickly picked up English there. His second school, Terra Santa, was in a safe part of Cyprus, in the hills around Nicosia. It was strict, run by monks and had fairly primitive facilities – but provided an education well up to highly demanding, 1950s’ British standards, something that came as a shock to many of the pupils, especially the Americans. Yet Uri was content there almost from the start.

  Characteristically, he didn’t show much of his paranormal ability to the other boys there. One contemporary, Ardash Melemendjian, now living in York, remembers only certain little things that happened around the new boy, George Geller. ‘The college was built in an area they called the Acropolis, all stone quarries and caves. We used to go down to these caves. They were quite dangerous, and we were told at school that some boys had got lost and died down there once. One time when we were trying to get out of the deepest caves we got badly lost. We were faced with three ways to go in the pitch black. Someone started to say something and suddenly Uri said “Shhh!” and everyone hushed. He thought for a minute and then say, “This way!” and we went straight on or to the left, whichever the case was, and then we walked a long way before anything happened. But suddenly, we saw a little circle of light, and it got bigger and bigger, and that was the exit. I’m sure the rest of us would have chosen another way. I don’t how he did it.

  ‘There were other oddities which when you put them together, even back then, just made you wonder what was this guy,’ Melemendjian continues. ‘He never once got a puncture on his bike, and yet we used to ride through the same fields, the same thorn hedges. I’d get them all the time, and end up sat on the back of his bike, holding my bike while he was peddling. We’d go to the cinema to see X-rated films. I’d go to buy my ticket and get told, “No! You’re too young! Out!” He’d go to buy his ticket – and would be perfectly all right for him even though we are the same age and looked it.

  ‘Another thing that we used to take for granted, never give a second thought to – he never revised for anything. You’d find him sat down with a textbook that we were supposed to be studying and he’d have a comic inside it. But when it came to overall results at the end of the term, you could bet your boots that he’d be top.’

  Uri also became a basketball star, not just because he was tall and athletic. He had an ability, clearly remembered by Melemendjian, other boys and staff, to move the hoops to help them meet the ball.

  ‘It looked as if it was vibrating without anybody at all touching it. You could see it move, I believe, a couple of inches when George was shooting at it,’ recalls Andreas Christodoulou, who is still in Nicosia and working as a heating contractor.

  One Terra Santa teacher, Joy Philipou, now in retirement in the London suburbs, remembers of Uri: ‘He stood out. You can’t have gifts like that and remain anonymous.’ Of the basketball prowess, she says, ‘He guided the ball. He could shoot from almost anywhere. It never, ever missed the basket. Now that is a feat for an 11-year-old. From one end of the court to another, over and over again. I thought it must be my imagination, but several people began to talk about it.

  We all saw the ball sway when there was no one near it, or sometimes the post would sway a few inches to the left or the right, whichever way he wanted it for the ball to go in. In truth, it was really scary. There’s been a great deal of talk and argument. People would say, “Ah, no, it’s just a fluke, someone must have pushed it.” But then you’d see it happen over and over again.’

  Joy also remembers him pulling off pranks in the classroom. ‘For example,’ she says, ‘he did this clock-moving thing, not just on me but on other teachers. But for me, it took a long, long time before I put two and two together and realized that it was him that was doing it. I wasn’t into the supernatural or anything like that, and I couldn’t make out what it was. But whenever it was my turn to ring the 12 o’clock bell, I would have Uri fidgeting in the class, wanting to get out for lunch.

  ‘The clock was behind me, an electric wall clock, about a foot in diameter. The class was in front of me, Uri sitting among them and he would be looking at the clock. I would check with my watch to make sure it was 12 o’clock, and it said the same. But as soon as I got into the staff room, they would say, “Why have you rung 20 minutes early?” I would say, “I can’t have, look, my watch says 12 o’clock. But all theirs would be a quarter of an hour earlier than mine. It wasn’t until I began to hear stories from other teachers that I began to find that Uri had something to do with this. One teacher had made him stay half an hour after every one else. She said, “You won’t go home until the clock says 4.30. So he started to get up and leave, and she said, ‘What are you doing? I told you 4.30.” And he said, “But it is 4.30,” and she looked at the clock, and it was.’

  The young Mrs Philipou’s fascination with Uri was probably exceeded by that of the more senior Julie Agrotis, an Englishwoman in her 40s married to a Greek, and who taught English at Terra Santa. Mrs Agrotis’s interest was sparked when a story was going round the staffroom that Uri’s test papers in maths bore a striking resemblance – mistakes and all – to those of a German boy, Gunther Konig, whom Uri sat behind.

  Uri says he simply saw Gunther’s answers ‘on this greyish TV screen in my mind’ by looking at the back of the blond boy’s head. Uri had first noticed this ‘TV screen’ back in Tel Aviv; it continues to be his description of how he senses the conventionally unseeable and unknowable. He says images tend to ‘draw themselves’ on the screen rather than appear in a flash. The teachers, naturally, assumed he was copying by normal means, and made him sit in a far corner for exams, under individual guard.

  But the copying continued; whoever was top in a particular subject Uri was weak in would find his answers mirrored in Uri’s. Mrs Agrotis was a popular teacher, renowned as a softie who never punished children. She, nevertheless, had to do her turn of guarding the habitual exam ‘cheat’. It was while she was doing so that Uri forgot himself one day and asked her about some incident in the market in Nicosia that was troubling her from the day before. She was alarmed, as she happened to have been thinking about it at that moment. On another occasion, he says, he saw the word ‘doctor’ on his screen and for a fleeting moment, saw her in a doctor’s surgery. He asked cheekily if everything had been OK at the doctor’s.

  Mrs Agrotis and Uri started to have long talks together after class. It was some while before he felt confident enough to do it, but eventually, he showed her how he could bend a key and a spoon. Naturally, she was astonished. She did a seri
es of telepathy experiments with him. He would confide all his secrets in her, going right back to his early astronaut fantasies. He told her about the episode in the Arabic garden, and insisted, with a conviction that she may well have found oddly eerie and disturbing, that he knew instinctively there was life on worlds far beyond our solar system.

  Occasionally, when Uri was sent to the stationery supply room on some errand, he would hear the teachers discussing him in the staffroom. One, he recalls, would say he was supernatural. Another would insist that whatever happened was pure coincidence. Others would say it was all trickery. He got a huge kick out of listening to them arguing and asking, ‘What is he?’, since, he says, he hardly knew himself. ‘I was just a normal boy with friends, except I had a bizarre weird energy coming from me which seemed really to be mainly for entertainment purposes.’

  As with all Israelis, as Uri approached 18 there was no doubt what the next three years would bring for him – army service. He was more than happy about this. Although he had only been to Israel to see his father three times during the seven years in Cyprus, father and son were still close, and Uri’s twin male role models were now his father and Yoav Shacham, both men of action. Uri’s immediate ambition, therefore, was to be a combat soldier, and then serve Israel as a spy. Margaret hoped he would become either a piano tuner or an architect. But would the Israeli secret service be too covert, too low profile for a boy whose biggest thrills came from hearing himself talked about in the school staffroom? His excitement since childhood at performing in front of an audience, his naturally extrovert personality and his contact with show business types at Pension Ritz combined to give him a strong impetus, incongruous alongside the desire to be a secret agent, to be a performer when he grew up.

  Uri with his mother and Joker at the Pension Ritz Nicosia, Cyprus.

  Having left Israel as a confused and unhappy little boy, he came home a confident young man. He was in the unusual position of having no particular old friends to look up, and had the rather tempting option – something a lot of people dream about at this time of their life – of reinventing himself as anything he wanted to be. He was a fully fledged Israeli, but still an outsider for a variety of reasons, the perplexing supernatural powers being just one of them. So the idea of being in the Israeli Secret Service seemed oddly more suitable than ever.

  That’s why, in the winter of 1965, Uri couldn’t wait to get into uniform and put into action Yoav’s master plan to turn him into Israel’s version of 007. November, the month before Uri’s birthday, came. He went by bus to the processing centre in Jaffa, was allocated service number 9711 71, and by the end of the day, was settling into a tent at a boot camp with seven strangers. He volunteered immediately for the paratroops and a couple of days later, was on the back of a truck heading north for a location near Netanya and the paratroops’ training camp there.

  Weeks of running around the base at the double with an 18-kilogram kitbag (walking anywhere for the first three months on duty was forbidden), of obstacle courses and of lengthy marches (which Uri particularly hated) led to the purpose of it all – the first parachute jump from an aircraft. Paratroopers had to make seven jumps before they could wear the coveted red beret. Recruit Geller’s first jump, on a hot day at a nearby airfield, went perfectly. But things went downhill from then on. On his second, he panicked and fell clumsily, jarring himself. A subsequent jump, at 4am in the Negev desert almost killed him. He was already edgy; he’d had a dream the night before that he was going to die that morning. It looked as if it were about to come true when he bumped into the aircraft after he jumped and his main ‘chute got into a tangle. Then his second one stayed firmly unopened. Only at the last instant, with Uri plummeting towards the ground, did it open, and he landed, praying that he would never go through such an experience again.

  Uri in his paratrooper fatigues on a training manoeuvre.

  Immediately after he got his wings, along with the maroon crepe-soled boots and red beret that were part of the paras’ uniform, something incredible happened that only Uri witnessed. A shame, because it is such a shockingly bizarre story that if just one independent voice could have corroborated it, many of the doubts that surround Uri might have been scotched there and then, or at least become more muted, even though the story contains elements which sceptical minds could seize on. Why? Because, to be honest, Uri cheated ….

  Practically nothing supernatural had happened to him or around him since he had come back to Israel. That part of his life almost seemed to be behind him, left in adolescence, as if the things that had been happening to him since he was three were, maybe, the type of poltergeist phenomena that occasionally occur around disturbed, unhappy children and vanish in adulthood.

  Uri puts the quiescence of his powers at this period down to pressure of time. ‘You are constantly occupied and busy in the army. You wake up at 4.30 in the morning, you have to clean your gun, you have to shine your boots, you have to quickly have breakfast and get off to manoeuvres. It’s a nonstop three years. There is time for nothing except, maybe, to write a letter. My big moment of freedom was when I was able to dive into the canteen and buy myself the equivalent of a Mars Bar and take off the thin silver foil wrapper and just indulge in the taste of that chocolate melting in my mouth. That was my pleasure. There was no time for thinking.’

  Uri’s first assignment as a para, he says, was a 110km march into the Negev as a heavy machine gunner, carrying with two other men a Browning machine gun some 36 kilograms in weight. The gun was broken into three parts – body, legs and ammunition – for transport. The heaviest was the body, and it was Geller’s responsibility to carry it. Worse still, to gain his corporal’s stripes, Uri was going to have to parachute out of a plane with the gun’s body, something that army tradition maintained was the hardest task in existence. Once down in the Negev, the team would be taken by truck further out into the desert with kit bags, then make the jump with the Browning equipment and march back 10km to their base camp carrying it.

  It is, perhaps, almost part of the typical young man’s makeup to get round rules, and as he prepared for the exercise, Uri hatched a plan to avoid the worst part of it. It turned out that in getting off with the deception he practised to do so, he experienced what he regards as the second most profound paranormal occurrence of his life, to be topped only by a staggering (and in this case semi-witnessed) event many years later in New York.

  The Browning gun’s heavy body could actually be broken down itself. If the heavy tube inside the gun barrel and the mechanism which fed the ammunition through were removed, the shell of the gun could be placed in its canvas bag so as it looked from the outside like the full body, but weighed 4.5kg lighter. Since the exercise of dropping with the full body of the gun was purely a fitness test, and they were not going to need to use the Browning after they landed, and since he was still edgy about parachuting after his near-lethal tangle of a few days previously, why not, he figured, remove the innards of the gun and leave them safely in his kitbag back at base camp?

  He could then carry the canvas bag at a stroll on the 10km hike after the jump. He ran through the physical reality of this tempting plan as carefully as any magician plotting a complex stage event. He would have to make certain that none of his comrades got to carry the bag, as they would almost certainly feel it was underweight, and he daren’t risk anyone discovering his secret. But – significantly again, for critics of Geller – he calculated that he could get away with it.

  The jump passed safely. The case, which was heavy enough even without most of its essential contents, was strapped to Uri for the jump, and let loose on a five-metre cable for the landing, to avoid him being injured by it on impact. He packed up his’chute and slung the useless Browning innards over his shoulder for the march. Soon came the first prospective hitch. Seeing Uri striding robustly ahead, even though he was supposedly carrying the lion’s share of the Browning, one of his pals said, ‘Look at poor Geller. He’s carrying that b
loody thing on his own,’ and insisted on helping him.

  Wary of protesting too much, Uri let his friend carry the bag up a hill. But far from realizing that Geller had cheated and wasn’t carrying a full load, the young man misperceived the situation, and marvelled that he had never been able to carry this part of the gun further than a few hundred metres without a rest, but now could. He must, he puffed as he handed the gun back to Uri at the top of the hill, be getting stronger. Uri now recalls that he was having to try hard to stop himself from bursting out laughing when something made him practically throw up in fear.

  A Jeep scrunched up alongside the group of men as they rested on a cliff edge. In it was a general and some staff officers. Uri knew at once that the game was up. Very occasionally on such a dummy run, the commanders would spring a surprise on a random bunch of soldiers, and put them through a full-blooded manoeuvre, in which they would have to shoot with live ammunition at an imaginary enemy ambush. It was an excellent way of keeping the men on their mettle even during a relatively harmless training routine, as well as giving them a chance to try their skills against the kind of danger that very well might face them at any time. It was 1966 and Israel had not been at war since the Suez campaign, ten years before, but a well-armed and angry enemy was never more than a few kilometres away, even in the heart of the country, down in its southern desert.

  The staff officers ordered Uri’s platoon to spread out and set up the guns, ready to fire. He was so petrified that he began to shake. He did not want to take the empty gun case, minus its barrel and firing parts, out of the canvas, but he had to. As he did so, his mind racing to think of some way out of his appalling predicament, he could see daylight through the thing. His companion handed him the ammunition belt, which he fed it into the useless shell of the gun before cocking the non-existent mechanism.