Uri’s shows in Israel brought him an enthusiastic following. Seen here mending broken watches, brought to him by audience members.
His first fully professional stage show was in Eilat in December 1969, when he was approaching his 23rd birthday. Uri continued to insist that it was all ‘real’, but understandably, most people disbelieved him, assuming this was simply part of his patter. Importantly though, even the sceptics were fascinated by his act despite their belief that it was based on trickery. He was managing, he estimates, a success rate with the bending, telepathy and watch stopping and starting of 70 to 80 per cent. Who had ever heard of a magician, part of whose success was based on his tricks only working some of the time? Even the cynics had to admit, it was a devastatingly clever idea.
Uri next to poster for one of his very first shows: ‘An Evening of Amazing Cultural Entertainment of Telepathy and Parapsychology’, Eilat, 1969.
But the most significant development, even if Uri didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, was the interest in him from the country’s professional and military elite. One unlikely new friend he made at exclusive social gatherings was the dean of the law school at Tel Aviv University, Dr Amnon Rubinstein, who was an academic with a flair for the media. He wrote for a number of newspapers and hosted a popular TV show called Boomerang, which covered the arts, science and intellectual matters. Rubinstein was not only convinced by what he saw with Uri, but went on to become one of his great champions, writing articles about him widely and inviting him on to his show.
Rubinstein became a prominent left-wing member of the Knesset, eventually serving as Minister of Education in Yitzhak Rabin’s Labour government. He was introduced to Uri at a party by his friend Efraim Kishon, a respected newspaper columnist, who had been deeply impressed by what he had seen of Uri’s abilities. ‘Everyone was sceptical in the beginning, but these were amazing things we were seeing,’ Rubinstein recalls. He speaks with great passion about Geller.
Like a lot of older, more experienced, better educated and, perhaps, wiser and more intuitive people who have been in contact with Uri over the years, Rubinstein felt deeply that the explanations, often backed by angry scientists, that the ever more voluble professional magicians were putting forward to counter any claims that Uri had ‘special powers’ were fanciful and smacked more of emotion than rationality.
‘I had no specific interest in psychic things. I am a totally rational, sceptical person. So I am not a fall guy, but I am open-minded, and I saw things that I couldn’t explain. I first saw him at Kishon’s place and I immediately saw that there was something in it, that this was not mere conjuring,’ says Rubinstein. ‘He was not a trickster. I imagine the spoon bending is some sort of strange energy that we haven’t even begun to measure, but I suspect it’s subject to rational terms. I have since seen Uri do it hundreds of times. It has become almost routine. A magician told me that Uri supplies his own spoon, which is not true, but anyway, that wasn’t what interested me so much.
‘The thing that amazed me more than anything else is that he could write something ahead of time on a piece of paper and hide it, and would then tell me, my wife or my children or my friends to write whatever we wanted. It started with a very limited scope – any number, any name or any capital city – and without exception he was right. He could somehow plant a thought right in our minds. Then he moved on to drawings, and again, was right in detail, every time. To me this is much more significant than spoon bending. This was one single phenomenon, which cast doubt on many of the foundations of our rational world.
‘There are things which cannot be repeated by any trick. It’s one thing to be a David Copperfield, but here was something that was done in my own home, not in another environment, on a stage, which was organized and controlled as someone like that would require. There was nothing there that could deceive me, and it happened so often. We invited him time and time again. He came into my office once, and one of the professors came in and said, “You’re Uri Geller, but I know your tricks.” So Uri said, “OK. Think of a number,” and he said ‘Ten thousand three hundred and something,” and Uri opened up his palm and it was written there. My colleague was staggered.’
Amnon Rubinstein in 1998, then a prominent member of the Israeli parliament.
The power and vehemence of the reactions of the coalition of magicians and scientists against Geller were remarkable, considering that a year into his professional career, he was not a household name, but was fast becoming one. Even so, the man who would soon become his first serious manager, for example, Tel Aviv impresario Miki Peled, had as late as 1970 never heard of Uri Geller. Yet the word was getting round among Israeli magicians that a fraud was at large, claiming that he had paranormal powers. Spoon bending was a completely novel trick, but for skilled sleight-of-hand conjurors, replicating it was really no great feat. Uri’s supporters would say that replication by itself meant next to nothing – that just because there are wigs doesn’t mean there’s no hair. And it remains the case today, all these decades on – and something that still frustrates many magicians – that still nobody does it like Geller does.
Uri’s appearance on Rubinstein’s Boomerang programme, in accord with the show’s name, came back on him. In the interests of balance, Rubinstein had invited a number of voluble sceptics into the audience. Uri, assuming a civilized discussion would ensue, started the show only to find the anti-Geller people howling him down. ‘It was the first TV show I had ever done, and it would have been OK if they just didn’t believe me,’ Uri says. ‘But they were attacking me, really violently, with personal abuse. It was the first time I’d had direct, physical contact with these people, and I was really scared. Then I realized it was in my power just to walk off, so I did. Amnon followed me out of the building and he actually started crying, because he believed in me so much and it totally devastated him.’ The taped show was abandoned and never aired.
As he was cutting his unlikely swathe through Israel’s intelligentsia however, Geller’s relationship with Amnon Rubinstein almost hit the rocks in private. One of the agents Uri was working for at the time made the observation that if there wasn’t soon more substance to his routine, people were going to get bored with it. He suggested that Uri ‘fatten up the act’, as he put it, by including a trick he had devised. Uri claims that he balked at the suggestion on the grounds that the very basis of his act was that it was genuine.
The agent, however, appealed to Uri’s desire to make more money. His plan was to watch audience members as they got out of their cars outside the theatre, write down their licence plate numbers, and pass these to Uri, having shepherded the stooges to specially reserved seats. It was not a sophisticated scam. Uri began to use the licence-plate trick in his act, and it seemed to go down well.
The fraud was not discovered even by his detractors, but – and this surely says a lot about Uri – he confessed his guilt to Dr Rubinstein. It is likely that one of the many things troubling the young man was that by this stage he was starting to be taken seriously by elements in the Mossad and the Israeli military. To be unmasked as a fraud who had fooled them could be more than embarrassing; it could be dangerous. Uri says he went disconsolately to the law professor’s office and told him to forget Uri Geller: that Uri Geller was no damned good. He explained what the agent had pressurized him into doing. Rubinstein then took Uri by the shoulders and said, part menace, part disappointment, ‘Uri, you’ve done things neither you nor I can explain. You don’t need to add tricks to it. All right, that’s a trick. But how did you do all the other things? The spoons, the keys, the numbers and drawings you beamed into my head?’ Uri replied with what many people regard as his strongest, least challengeable explanation: ‘I don’t know’.
Rubinstein confirms this account: ‘I was very mad at him for this. I gave him a piece of my mind. I said he had deceived me. Even before that I began to suspect that he was using trickery, maybe mixing it in with the other things. There were a few things that I tho
ught were foolproof, which couldn’t be done by trickery, and now he was admitting to one. But then he was a young boy. To me the pre-cognition is much, much more important. I asked him how he did it. “Why is it so accurate? Why can you predict what I will be doing in two minutes?” He said, “Because I see. It is very disturbing.” He said this is not a trick. He was adamant about that.’ Rubinstein suggested to Uri that, in the light of this mistake he had made and the uproar his paranormal claims were clearly capable of making, he must sooner or later legitimize himself by having his powers tested by scientists. Uri took the message on board, although it would be a while before he did anything about it.’
His first brush with scientists was odd. In 1970, Miki Peled, his agent, was called by a man called Kelson, a physicist at Tel Aviv University. ‘He told me he could prove to me that Uri was a liar,’ says Peled. ‘He invited me to come and see him in his house, and he was really angry with me. He said because of me, people might believe in Uri Geller, this liar, this trickster. He was a very strong personality and I was convinced that Kelson was right and Uri was a liar.’
Peled admits to being devastated. That evening, Uri was performing in Gdera. ‘I phoned the theatre and said, “Uri after the show, please come to my house.” When he came, he realized I was upset, and I told him the professor had said exactly what he does. I said, “I’m your friend, I’m your agent. I expect you to tell me, at least, the truth. I don’t want to get the information from other people. I don’t care if it’s a supernatural power or a trick. For me it’s good business. But I feel insulted that you don’t behave to me as a friend, as a brother, as a father.” And he said, “Miki, this Professor Kelson is talking nonsense. I’ll meet him and convince him he’s mistaken.” So now I was confused. “Ten minutes before, I felt you were a liar. Now I don’t know. Please tell me how do you do it.” He said, “I don’t know how I do it. Sometimes I don’t do it. I can never explain to anybody how I do it. My mother doesn’t know how I do it.”
‘Two weeks later,’ Peled says, ‘we had a show in Jerusalem, and this Kelson came with all his colleagues from the university. They told Uri that they would be in the first row and would take pictures and tape the show, and make a big story in the newspapers about how he cheated. Uri said, “Please do.” And some of them went on the balcony with a telescope. After the show I said to Kelson, “Do you still think the same as two weeks ago?” He said, “No, I think maybe it’s a different trick. But our theories of physics don’t accept his apparent abilities.” We never heard another word from him.’
Itzhak Kelson, now Professor Itzhak Kelson, was anxious to distance himself from the business decades later. Like many of the scientists who pitted themselves against Geller, he was a lover of magic and had learned to do some tricks himself. But as keen as he was to spread the word against Geller in 1970, he was more reticent later. ‘At one time, I believed it was important to persuade people that this was nonsense,’ he said warily at his office at the university. ‘Now, I try to disengage myself in a totally neutral manner… My energies are not channelled in that direction any more. It’s obviously fraudulent, and that’s it.’ It was a strange reaction. One can only speculate on what caused his change of mind. Uri’s stock with the country’s elite, far above a young academic’s standing, was rising vertically.
Indeed, among the ranks of Geller advocates and admirers were the country’s defence minister, the war hero Moshe Dayan, with his distinctive eye patch; the just-resigned, but still-active and influential head of the Mossad, Meir Amit; the head of military intelligence, Brigadier General Aharon Yariv; General Ariel ‘Arik’ Sharon, later to be prime minister; the up-and-coming Benjamin Netanyahu, at the time of writing Israel’s prime minister; the legendary foreign minister Abba Eban; the IDF chief of staff, Major General Rafael Eitan; and Brigadier General Ran Peker, a former Mirage jet fighter pilot and later commander of the country’s air academy – not to forget the then-prime minister herself, Golda Meir. Even the newspapers were aware of Geller’s dizzyingly lofty connections. They reported how Shimon Peres, then transport minister, later to be prime minister, had experienced his pen breaking in Geller’s presence without Uri having touched it, and that Dayan had been meeting Geller secretly.
‘Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan wanted me very much to work for the Israeli secret service, and to see how they could utilize my powers,’ Uri says, and Meir even referred to Uri publicly, as we will see. Dayan also illegally used Uri to locate archaeological finds. Dyan, by now defence minister, had initiated the contact by inviting Geller for lunch at a steakhouse called the White Elephant at Zahala, where he lived. Geller did some telepathy with him, both the routine way, and the ‘reverse’ method that had so bowled over Amnon Rubinstein. Geller remembers both Dayan’s single eye ‘flickering and gleaming’ – and that the defence minister let him pay the bill for lunch.
A couple of weeks later, Dayan asked Geller to come to his house for a more private meeting. This time, as a test, Dayan said he had hidden a photograph somewhere in the room, and asked Uri firstly to indicate where it was, and secondly to describe the photo before he had looked at it. Geller recalls pointing to one book in a row on a shelf. Dayan confirmed that he had the right spot and asked Geller what the photo showed. He asked Dayan to ‘project’ the image to him, and Uri duly described an Israeli flag. Dayan laughed, which caused Uri to wonder if he had blundered. Dayan then turned to page 201 of the book, in which was placed a small snapshot of a flag flying over the control tower at Lod Airport. As Geller tells it, Dayan said, ‘You’ve proved yourself, Uri. I don’t want to see any more. There’s no need for you to bend anything. Now what can you do for Israel?’
As for Golda Meir, Uri met her three times. ‘Golda believed in these things,’ Geller says, ‘and she wanted to know the overall picture of Israel’s future, and how many more wars were in store. She was very much for peace, and I told her I could see Israel signing peace treaties with all our Arab neighbours. I actually predicted it – but I don’t know if it was a logical conclusion – that we were going to sign a peace treaty with Egypt first. I met Golda once in the Beit Sokhalov, which is the press centre, once at a party at the house of a friend, a general, and once on an army base, in a conference room in the barracks. I never visited her home. And the only time I bent a spoon for her was at the party.’
Just as Elvis Presley had to do his army service despite his world fame, Uri, as a minor celebrity and friend of the great and good of the little state of Israel, was required every year to serve in the army reserve. As he was still unable to extend his damaged arm, he would have been put on fairly dull duties, had not the Israel Defense Forces decided to exploit his unusual abilities and place him in a unit that entertained troops all over the country. This was a godsend for three reasons; it helped Uri become better known to people in captive audiences, who ordinarily might not have been interested in seeing him; it gave him a chance to bypass the conventionalities of rank and hobnob with still more high-flying officers and generals, thereby extending his networking still further; and it showed that he could perform without Shipi nearby.
Among the new friends he gained were two Israeli air force pilots, Gideon Peleg and Dov Yarom, both of whom went on to fly 747s for the Israeli national airline, El Al. They remain strong supporters of Geller. Peleg was a lieutenant colonel in the air force when he first met Uri in 1969. ‘I met him at a party and later flew him to a show at an air force base at Sharm el Sheikh in the Sinai,’ Peleg says. ‘There were 200 or so of us there, a mix of soldiers and pilots. I remember they were very impressed by him. As a pilot, you have to watch maybe 200 instruments for the slightest deviation or change, so I think I see pretty well. And in all the hundreds of things I have very carefully watched Uri do, I have never seen anything underhand. Nothing.
‘Privately, he did many things like driving a car blindfolded. He told me that he could see the road through my eyes and asked me to concentrate on the road. Things would move on the sh
elves in our apartment when he was there. When we were staying at a friend’s apartment, there was a big old clock that hadn’t worked for a few years and he made it move – he didn’t touch it, but just put his hands close to it. One day, I remember, somebody showed him a picture of a group of people, and he pointed to some of them and said that this one has an injury on his left foot, that this one was very ill a few years ago, that this one broke his left hand. They were all correct. The guy that showed him the picture was amazed. Uri didn’t know anybody there. Of course, I have seen the spoon bending on its own many times – these are the simple things that he does. But once, when we were talking about Uri in the kitchen when he was hundreds of kilometres away, a fork started bending, right there in front of us. I still have it. It was amazing. It was on the counter and suddenly we saw one of the tines just bend forward, several centimetres, completely on its own. But it wasn’t scary, because we were used to these things after a while.’
Dov Yarom, then an air force major, had heard about Uri and came to see him at his mother’s apartment to ask if he could do a Friday night party on his base. Uri was happy to. Yarom explained that the only issue might be a security problem. But Uri explained that he was already security cleared. This surprised the young pilot, but he was not in a position to know quite what inroads Uri had already made into the military establishment.
‘I said, OK, so can you show me something? We were sitting head to head, and I didn’t know about the guy. He told me a lot about himself, and was very confident, very persuasive, but I had to see. So he took a piece of paper and he tore it with his hands into a few pieces, put them on the table in front of us, and started concentrating. He put his hands 20-25cm above the pieces, and they started to float above the table, not very high, but moving. That was good enough for me. There was no fake involved. They really moved. I am very sceptical, I am very fond of magicians, but I always keep in mind that they create illusions. It didn’t matter to me at the time if it was an illusion or a fake or the real thing. But as far as I was concerned, it was a real power. The same things have happened to me with a magician, but it’s definitely not the same experience that I had personally with Uri.
The Secret Life of Uri Geller Page 14