The Secret Life of Uri Geller (15 page)

Uri’s account of the soupspoon affair is in tune with his mother’s. He recalls initially dipping some white bread in the soup, and then placing the spoon in his left hand – he is left-handed – and taking a few sips before any paranormal activity. But then, as Uri was lifting a spoonful of soup to his mouth, the bowl of the spoon spontaneously bent downwards, depositing hot soup in his lap, and then fell off, leaving Uri holding the spoon handle. He remembers calling to his mother to say, ‘Look what’s happened’. She replied with one of those things flustered mothers say; ‘Well, it must be a loose spoon or something. ‘I knew that was silly,’ Uri says now. ‘You don’t get “loose spoons”.’

Uri Geller had been born in a small hospital in Tel Aviv at two in the morning on 20 December 1946. The birth was entirely normal other than in one significant and disturbing respect. Margaret Geller had already been pregnant eight times, and on each occasion had had an abortion because her soldier husband, Tibor, did not want children, despite his apparent disregard for contraception. Uri would not find out about the extraordinary number of abortions his mother had undergone – and that he might easily have been terminated foetus number nine – until he was nearly 40, and his mother quietly slipped it into the middle of an unrelated conversation.

As an adult who believed firmly in life after death and reincarnation, it was as great a shock to Uri as it might have been to discover he was adopted. He had always felt he had some kind of guardian angel, and when he learned that he might have had eight brothers and sisters, the news made him wonder whether there was possibly more than one invisible protector there for him. Uri discovered on quizzing his mother that it had been her decision to say that this time she was going to have the baby: it was her strength and determination to stand up to Tibor that had brought him into existence.

Uri was named after a boy who would have been his cousin, who had been killed in a trolley-bus accident in Budapest. He says today he is not angry with his parents about the abortions. He argues that these were turbulent war-torn days, and people did things they might not otherwise have considered. He also feels that if the terminations had not happened, and his mother already had children when she became pregnant with him, it is most likely that he would have been aborted himself.

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 little 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.