Chapter 7 / Fame and Friction

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'I don't predict. Why don't you ask Uri Geller?' Prime Minister Golda Meir, asked at a 1970 press conference about Israel's future.

Renown and notoriety for Uri Geller were running almost neck and neck in the middle period of his celebrity in Israel, from the end of 1970 to 1972. He managed a spectacular feat of headline grabbing at the end of September 1970, when Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, died unexpectedly in Cairo of a heart attack. Nasser's death was one of the biggest news stories imaginable for Israel; his brand of Soviet-backed nationalistic socialism had been a thorn in Israel's side since 1954, when he became president.

The big news from Cairo occurred shortly after Miki Peled became Uri's manager, and upgraded the polish and theatricality of his act. The new partnership was going pretty well, and theatres across the country which had previously enjoyed typical 30 per cent occupancy rates were in some cases reporting full houses for Geller. But however much more dramatic Uri had become in his presentation, nothing quite prepared Peled for the display of sheer hamming Geller displayed on the night of September 28th in a small Tel Aviv auditorium. From his seat in the stalls, Peled truly believed the boat which had so recently come in for him was on its way back out - under full steam.

Some way into the show, Geller suddenly stopped in mid-act, looked ill, sat down and asked if there was a doctor in the house. As a doctor came up from the audience, Geller announced that he felt unwell and was unable to carry on because some enormous, historic event was about to happen. He elaborated, saying he believed Nasser had just died or was about to die, promptly stopped the show, and asked the 300 in the audience if they wouldn't mind leaving. As they were filing out, looking puzzled and murmuring, Miki Peled was not a happy impresario. 'I just thought, that's it. That's his last show. Saying Nasser is about to die, is not like saying it's going to rain tomorrow. There happened to be a journalist in the audience called Ruth Hefer, and I believe she went to the phone in the lobby and phoned the newsdesk at her newspaper, and the Israel Radio to ask what was going on. I think she came back and said there was nothing at all on the news wires about anything happening to Nasser.'

'I was really concentrating more on Uri. He was really not well. The doctor had taken his pulse and it was 160 or 170. If it was all an act, it was crazy. This wasn't something where he could say, "Oh sorry, I made a mistake." He was putting all his money on one number. If nothing had happened, people would have laughed for years. It would have been a grand finale.'

It is practically impossible to establish nearly thirty years after the event the exact timings involved, but the Israeli papers over the next few days were full of the story of Uri Geller predicting the death of Nasser twenty minutes, as they seem to have agreed, before it was announced in Cairo. There were, naturally, stories saying that someone backstage had happened to be listening to the radio and whispered to Geller while he was on stage that Nasser had died. The theatre director gave a well-reported statement in response to say there had been nobody backstage to tell Geller anything, and the story passed, as these things do, into a sort of uneasy mythology, with some people believing it, others deeply doubtful, and nothing really settled. A strike against the story's veracity is that Ruth Hefer, who would be most likely to recall the precise details, admits to being hazy about them. Since 1970, she has dropped out of journalism, split up with her husband, Chaim, a well-known Tel Aviv columnist, become a fashion designer, and now runs a stall in the flea market in Old Jaffa. 'I was certainly in the audience, and I certainly remember Uri Geller saying Nasser was dead and hearing the news later that he had died,' she says. 'But what I remember most was the shock. So I can't be absolutely sure that I went all the way and made the phone calls. It's very possible, as I was writing for papers then, and the feeling I have at this distance is that, yes, he was well ahead of the news breaking.'

Geller, as might be expected, maintains that it was just an inexplicable feeling he got, and a cool analysis of the whisperer-behind-the-curtain theory does not exactly make it seem more plausible. Geller did not pretend to be a clairvoyant, so why would some backstage person, in the unlikely event that he was listening to the radio, tell a man in the middle of a spoon bending, watch-starting, telepathic demonstration about the news from Egypt? Doing so might just as likely bring about a balling-out from the star after the show for putting him off his stride. Occam's Razor (the theory that the simplest explanation for any phenomenon is the most likely) aside, the whisperer theory becomes less plausible still if we accept for a moment the dubious idea that Geller always had someone on standby listening to the news in case some world-shattering event occurred during the act, which he could then capitalise on. The risk of making such a drastic intervention as pretending to faint and throwing the audience out because he had heard a faint message about Nasser would seem too great even for a rash performer to take. What if someone in the front row heard the whisperer? What if the news, or indications of its imminence, had already been on the radio before the show, and somehow Geller had missed it? Short of being able to quiz his informant through the curtain like a journalist would - Was the news confirmed? How could he be sure this was the very first inkling and hadn't been mentioned on any radio or TV station earlier? - it is hard to imagine how Geller could possibly have been confident enough to gamble his entire reputation and career on this one long shot. For it to be a fraud and succeed, Geller needed more than just for the audience to leave the theatre and hear on their car radios that Nasser was dead. There had to be a reasonable interval before anyone heard the news; there had to be no possibility of a credible witness coming forward to say they had heard someone tell Uri the news. Apart from anything else, Geller had no need to take such a chance. His star was in the ascendant anyway.

But whether it was a genuine psychic premonition, a mad guess, or an outrageously reckless piece of opportunism (and perhaps you would need to be psychic anyway to know if such a risk would pay off) the Nasser incident finally turned Uri Geller into a nationwide celebrity. For anyone who had somehow not heard the showbusiness buzz and also missed the Nasser story, the Prime Minister, Golda Meir finally ensured Uri's elevation to stardom. Asked by a radio journalist at a Jewish New Year's press conference a few weeks later to speculate on how the next year would work out for Israel, Meir, probably delighted at the chance both to avoid giving an answer and to manage to sound clued-up, said, 'I don't predict. Why don't you ask Uri Geller?' Geller responded later by saying that, in fact, he wasn't in the habit of predicting either. Perhaps Meir's comment was even crafted by the old vixen to be an ironic put-down to Geller for public consumption, and she meant that only a fraud pretends to be able to predict the future. But it didn't matter; it was taken as a de facto acknowledgement that Israel had its own psychic superstar, and Geller was able to bask in the glow of it for years afterwards. 'There was absolutely no question about it,' says Miki Peled. 'From the moment of the Nasser incident, he was the most famous guy in this country, and even now in a way, he still is. It was from this point that he became a phenomenon.'

Being increasingly busy and famous, Uri's social life and love life were rather neglected. Iris, still almost a child, was virtually his shadow, following him and showing a neediness and dependence which was getting him down. She wanted to know everything he was doing and where he was at all times, and, partly because his true love was still Yaffa, and partly just because he was a man of 24, he found this constant pressure increasingly wearing. Whenever he saw Yaffa, which was rarely, he re-affirmed that he loved her, and told her all about Iris, without ever telling Iris about Yaffa. The imbalance between the story each girlfriend was receiving (forgetting Hanna Shtrang's background girlfriend role for the moment) was the kind of moral conflict many a young man can cope with for a while, but the relationship with Iris was nevertheless petering out. Uri eventually finished with her, a blow from which she never quite recovered, ending her days lonely and drug addicted and dying on his birthday many years later.

Uri was unhappy about leaving Iris, and deeply saddened when he discovered she had fallen on hard times and died; he still felt tenderly for her. Yet, her clinginess aside, it is easy to understand how for someone in Uri's extraordinary - and so rapidly attained - position, a love affair with a teenager he had met in a cafe, and which seemed a good idea at the time, must have come to feel increasingly unsuitable. It would, perhaps, have been asking too much of him not to feel that he had moved on. The elite of Israeli society, right up to the prime minister, were flocking to him for private audiences after meeting him socially. 'I was now getting invited to really important parties, with lawyers and judges and generals. That's where I met Golda Meir. She did a hidden drawing, and I read her mind. But the only problem was that she did a Star of David - so I didn't really have to be very psychic to know what she'd drawn. I always laugh at that.'

There was a story in the newspapers that Shimon Peres, later to be prime minister, had experienced his pen breaking in Geller's presence without Uri having touched it, and that Moshe Dayan, coming to the end of his time as Defence Minister, had been meeting Geller secretly. 'I did meet Golda Meir after she mentioned me, but on a very confidential basis,' Uri says. 'She and Moshe Dayan wanted me very much to work for the Israeli secret service, and to see how they could utilise my powers. Then, putting aside the secret stuff, Moshe Dayan utilised my powers to find him archaeological finds - illegally. I was really young and naive and I didn't know - here you are talking to the Moshe Dayan, the national hero, and he asked me to locate things for him. I used to spend hours over maps, and I know his garden and his house were just riddled with antiquities.' Dayan had initiated the contact by inviting Geller for lunch at a steakhouse called the White Elephant at Zahala, where he lived. Geller did telepathy with him, both the routine way, and the 'reverse' method which 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.

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 relates that he 'dowsed' for the photo, using his hands, and pointed 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?'

'Golda believed in these things,' Geller continues, 'and she wanted to know the overall pictures 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 singing peace treaties with all our Arab neighbours. I actually I predicted - 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 three times. Once in the Beit Sokhalov, which is the press centre, once 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 after the telepathy, at that little party. (Conspiracy theorists may well conclude from this anxiety of politicians to talk to Uri that they know more than they let on about his powers; non conspiracy theorists may conclude simply that politicians are deeply superstitious people. Interestingly, his political connections in Israel seem to have been maintained - and to transcend left/right differences. While all the above, and Amnon Rubinstein too, were of the Israeli left, Geller says he has friendly contact and occasional meetings today with the current Defence Minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, and with Ariel Sharon, the old war hero and now Infrastructure Minister. Interviews about Uri Geller were requested with both, and declined - but in neither case did the minister deny knowing Geller.)

In October 1970, following closely on the Nasser 'prediction' and Meir's comment about Uri on national radio, Haolam Hazeh, the popular magazine which had already been warning about Uri Geller being a national menace, carried an unsigned attack on Geller, quoting mostly from the ubiquitous magician, Eytan Ayalon. Ayalon was openly promising a witch-hunt against Geller - his phrase. Geller's transgressions were, a) claiming to be a psychic, b) poking his nose into Israeli politics and, c) 'He started to hurt our earnings. That is why we decided to hit back..' It was nearly four years before Haolam Hazeh launched its big and widely-quoted investigation into Geller, which we will look at later - along with evidence that this investigation was itself a fraud.

Another unconventional circuit besides the military which Uri started working early in his career and was still playing after Miki Peled came on the scene was the universities. Here he often found himself causing great rifts between students who believed in him and others who refused to. Ygal Goren, who had last seen him on that final day in the army and been baffled by Geller's confident announcement that he was going to become rich and famous, caught up with him at the Hebrew University, en route to his own career as a political journalist. 'We were shocked,' Goren says. 'It was very impressive. I remember people saying he was a sophisticated magician, but it didn't matter to me, because he was going to become the biggest magician in the world, and I was very happy for him. I saw him a lot after that. He's a nice guy, a good guy. I like his energy and happiness, and he helps people. Jealousy is a big thing in Israel, and people were always going to try to damage him'

A student event which went less well, in retrospect, for Uri, and gives a further impression of the depth of feeling which was developing against him, occurred at an engineering outpost of Haifa's Technion, Israel's M.I.T., in Beersheba, down in the south of the country. A student called Sam Volner booked Geller as a pre-disco entertainer. He did his usual act in front of 300 engineering students, and, as Volner (now a diamond dealer in Los Angeles) recalls, it went very well. 'The paranormal was a new phenomenon in those days,' says Volner. 'This was something out of the blue. It wasn't a regular magician with pigeons and rabbits. It was somebody from another world, right down to the casual clothes he wore for a performance. It was weird, and amazing to watch. There were big arguments for weeks afterwards among us, but I'd say the majority of the students thought he was real. However, one guy, a mechanical engineering student called Uri Goldstein, wasn't happy. He didn't believe, so he found a lawyer who was interested in some publicity and sued the promoters for his money back.'

The following year, in July 1971, the case came before the civil court in Beersheba. Goldstein alleged breach of contract, the Jerusalem Post reported in a single paragraph item, 'In that he promised to perform feats of telepathy, parapsychology, hypnotism and telekinesis, while in fact he merely employed sleight of hand and stage tricks.' With Geller absent from the court to defend himself, the summons having been sent to Miki Peled's office and either lost or ignored as trivial, Goldstein was awarded by default 27.5 lira for breach of contract. The money - around £3 - was apparently paid into the court anonymously and the case settled. 'I think Uri Goldstein's case began seriously, but it was really a student joke,' Volner says. 'I remember Uri Geller, when he heard about the judgement, wrote a very funny letter to a newspaper. He used a phrase I still remember. He said, "Why should I argue with a horse?". Trivial as the case seems - the ruling can hardly be said to have been the product of a sustained argument by one side or the other - it is seized on even now as the definitive debunking of Geller, and the reason he left Israel a few years later for Europe and America. Various publications over the years have stated that Geller was 'convicted in a court of law for pretending to have paranormal powers', and have accorded great significance to the Beersheba ruling. This seems a fairly substantial exaggeration, even if based on indisputable fact.

A curious insight into the case now, particularly in the light of the airline captain Dov Yarom's belief that the Israeli air force had decided at a high level to use magicians to debunk Geller, comes from Uri Goldstein, who today works as an air-conditioning engineer in Petah Tikva, a town to the east of Tel Aviv. Goldstein rejects the idea that his legal case was a student joke. He says that he had decided to bring it as soon as he saw the posters announcing Geller's forthcoming appearance, and admits having bought his ticket with every intention of saying afterwards that he had been swindled. 'I didn't believe in all this nonsense about telekinesis, so I talked with my lawyer and said we would go and see the show and ask for the price of the tickets back. It wasn't a question of the few lira. It was the principle.' A week or two after the Geller show, Goldstein recalls, another show was announced in a hall in Beersheba by Eytan Ayalon, the magician Yarom believes was used by the military as the spearhead of its surreptitious campaign to discredit Geller in case he started turning airmen into paranormal believers. Goldstein took a group of fellow science students to the hall, and went up to see Ayalon at the end of the show. 'Ayalon said, "OK, why don't I come to your house. Bring some of your friends, and I'll show you all Uri Geller's tricks." And he did. He came back with about 20 students and showed them everything. It was very interesting. It proved that Geller was just a magician.'

All this could be tossed off lightly as good, publicity-attracting hurly burly, but subsequent events were to be much more damaging for Geller. Rather quietly, before Uri teamed up with Peled, he had been doing some performances in Italy. They had not been a success, and were to lead to a near catastrophe. All the indications from the start were that Italy was going to be bad news. The interpreter had not been able to translate him understandably into Italian, and the audience gave every impression of being unmoved by the effects.

He had, naturally, been depressed by this first foreign venture, and decided that, confrontational and argumentative though Israelis were, he should never try to work outside Israel. One man in the Rome audience was, however impressed, and asked to meet Uri for lunch the next day. He picked him up in a Rolls-Royce, gave him a tour of the city, and explained that he was very keen to get Uri to America - especially to Las Vegas. Not unnaturally, and again not really needing psychic powers, Uri had enough imagination to smell Mafia. He was scared, and politely explained that he had a lot of engagements coming up in Israel, and that if he ever got back to Italy, he would, of course, look the man up. Uri was already having problems trying to disengage himself from his current manager, and start working exclusively for Peled. He was sure the manager, who had arranged the Italian trip, was cheating him, and Geller was terrified at getting sucked into some Mafia operation based around using his powers to fleece Las Vegas casinos.

The following morning, when Geller was checking out of his hotel, the desk clerk handed him an envelope someone had left for him. It contained the keys to a car, and papers registering it in his name. Outside the hotel was a brand new Alfa Romeo Spyder. Even more paranoid now about the Mafia, he gave the envelope back to the receptionist, and asked him if he wouldn't mind later that morning - preferably well after the flight to Tel Aviv had left - phoning the number on the papers and asking for them to take the car back with his most gracious thanks, but no thanks. He heard nothing more from Rolls-Royce man. (On a subsequent visit with Miki Peled to Venice, Uri couldn't resist a session in the casino, which led to yet more Mafia fears. Gambling was a anomalous area for Geller. He had always, or so he says, had an instinctive belief, perhaps merely superstitious in nature, that he was not 'supposed' to use his abilities to make money; yet he was now making a good living using little else, with no deleterious effect on the powers, so he kept being drawn to casinos in spite of himself. 'A casino is a most dangerous place to try tricks,' says Peled who was with Geller. 'He made a lot of money on roulette. I remember it was $36,000. Whatever number he said would come up came up. But I advised him not to go back. It could have been very dangerous to win any more. The Mafia would find out about him again, and come to ask if Uri could help them. I was with my wife, and she said she would leave Italy if he went back. But it was difficult to tell Uri, because he liked money very much.'

Geller's undoing in Italy, however, came not from Mafia threats genuine or imagined, but from a very real piece of amateurish stupidity on behalf of a young Israeli, Rany Hirsch, who was with Uri as representative of his pre-Peled manager. It was well into Geller's Peled heyday back home, but Uri was in the country again fulfilling some previously agreed dates. 'Rany had all kinds of bizarre publicity stunt ideas,' Geller explains. 'He said it would be great if Uri Geller could meet Sophia Loren, which he actually pulled off. I went to her villa and met her and it was all fine. But stupid Rany, because she wouldn't allow us to take a photograph with her, stayed in Rome when I went back to Israel, went to some photographer had a photomontage forged of me and her. It was so obvious, a fool could tell it was a montage. I woke up one morning in Tel Aviv and as usual, went down to buy the morning papers and there was I with Sophia Loren on the front page and a headline shouting, FORGED!'

The newspapers, naturally, fed off the scandal for days. Hirsch, years later, wrote a cringing acknowledgement and apology that the whole mess had been his doing, but it was a gift to the sceptics in Israel, and a bad blow to Uri's credibility. 'He was not psychologically prepared for such a blow,' says Amnon Rubinstein. 'I said again that the only way he could repair all the damage that had been done was by going overseas, to an American or English university and have scientists examine him.'

Geller, characteristically, put on a brave face over the Loren fiasco. 'I was shocked because it wasn't my doing, but funnily, it just shows you again that all publicity is good publicity, as long as you are not some kind of murderer or have done something really bad. Because being on the cover of the paper actually led to more interest, more bookings. there wasn't really any damage - but what Amnon was saying again about trying to get some kind of scientific study was making me start to think very hard about the nature of these powers, about what I really was.'

Uri's experience to date of scientists had not encouraged him to see them as his salvation. Professor Kelson, the physicists who had been quoted rubbishing him in the Israeli newspapers, even Uri Goldstein, the mechanical engineering student and his £3 lawsuit. So on the one, hand he wondered if maybe Amnon was right, and on the other, whether he should simply phase out his showbusiness career and go back to regular employment and a normal life.

Although university scientists had been universally dismissive of him so far, Uri was not totally sucked in by the spiritual world of ghosts, seances and unexplained powers, and consequently removed from the world of practicality. Oddly perhaps (although not to those who suspect him of being a regular magician, with the considerable mechanical aptitude that requires) Uri Geller was a bit of a backyard mechanic. Going right back to childhood, he had done such things as remove an electric motor from a ventilating unit to help power up his mother's old, pedalled Singer sewing machine, and fit an ungainly outboard motor to his bike in an (unsuccessful) attempt to make cycling up the hill to Terra Santa College in Nicosia a bit less arduous. Even when his performing career was developing, he retained an affection for mechanical tinkering, and therefore had a natural affinity with a slightly older chap called Meir Gitlis, whom he met at a party right back in his teenage years. Meir was an electronics wizard, who had his own little workshop at his parents house, close to Margaret and Uri's flat, and a neighbourhood-wide reputation for repairing almost anything electrical. Meir saw something of Uri's paranormal abilities, and was immediately fascinated by them.

It was Meir, indeed, who became the first scientist ever to examine Uri's strange aptitudes. Their informal experiments had two lasting results; the first was that Uri was not a complete laboratory virgin when the first started being tested seriously by professional scientists; the second was that Uri Geller and Meir Gitlis continue to be partners in an electronics business, Nachshol, which Meir and his sons run from his combined home, laboratory and factory in a pretty rural village a few miles east of Tel Aviv. Meir Gitlis, who is now 54, is a gadget fanatic, his shelves heaving with his 30 inventions, most of which are in production. There's a thermal diamond tester, an electronic dollar bill tester, a gold tester and a cellular phone radiation shield, all manufactured under the Uri Geller Enterprises label. The company is currently selling a Gitlis-designed earthquake early warning gadget in California, a sensitive metronome-like device which detects micro tremors and could give up to 20 minutes warning of a coming quake.

'At the beginning, I refused to believe in what he was doing,' Gitlis says. 'When he was young, Uri was always very naive and excited when something he tried to do worked out, but I was still very suspicious. So, just after he went into the army, I asked him if I could do some tests on him. The result of this was that I measured a voltage from Uri's body of about ten times more than average. What was more surprising was that he could make the needle of a compass move, even if it was your compass, and you put it where you wanted it. The compass could be on the table and Uri half a metre away from it and he could still make the needle move. It was unbelievable. I checked him carefully for metal and for magnetic fields, in case he had some magnet hidden, but there was nothing. And anyway, he was too far from the compass for a magnet to affect it. I often photographed the spoon bending. I was looking for the trick; but there wasn't one. I saw the spoon bend on it own many, many times.'
'I told Uri always, "Look, I am a technical man. I believe only in what can be tested and seen. I often asked him when we were young, OK, how do you do it? It took me a long time until I believed that he was really doing it. I've seen magicians on TV saying they can do the same as Uri, but I can always see the trick. It's easy. But not when Uri does it. If you tested Uri and the magicians side by side, there would be no competition. My older son was very suspicious of Uri just like I was, and he did a telepathy test with him where he controlled all the conditions. He went into another room, and although the door was closed, surrounded himself with books so Uri wouldn't even be able to see if he was in the same room. Then he drew a car with a certain number of windows and lights and antennas. Then he went back to where Uri was and gave him paper and a pen. And Uri drew the identical car, with all the same antennas, the exact same length, only higher. Uri was on his own, without Shipi. These people who say he can't do it without Shipi are liars. They're just jealous.'
'A lot of other things have happened to me with Uri,' Meir continues. 'We went to see our accountant only a little while ago to talk about something Uri wanted to do, which was to give all the royalties from our cellular phone shield, a lead protection from mobile phone radiation, to a children's charity. We were sitting in the accountant's office and Uri was under a light fitting high up on the ceiling, which was held up by a chain. And as he was sitting there, one of the links of the chain snapped. The accountant said the light had been there for 20 years without a problem. Uri also always phones when we're talking about him. we're very used to that now.'
'I once asked a neurologist I know what he thought the mechanism might be, how Uri works,' Meir Gitlis says. 'He told me that he believed the two halves of our brain transmit to one another on a certain frequency of some kind, and than Uri may have the ability to tune in to frequencies that are not his own, that his brain is like a scanner for these brain transmissions. He believes a very small number of people have this ability.'

It was, then, with Meir's small-scale, informal scientific experiments in mind as an example of how such work might not be too terrible, that Uri spent much of his time in 1970 considering whether and how he might give a part of himself to science. He mulled in particular over how this might affect his performing career and his bank balance. Even with Miki doing very well financially out of him, Uri had by now bought a penthouse apartment for himself and his mother on Yesha'yahu Street, in the swanky north of Tel Aviv, and was driving his dream car of the time. (This transport of delight, oddly enough was a Peugeot 404, more a Third World idea of a luxury limo than an ostentatiously smart vehicle of the sort one might expect a young star like Geller to opt for. 'I don't know what made me buy a 404.' he laughs. 'I think it was the nice ads in the newspaper. When you opened the door you were supposed to get hit with a burst of the fragrance of leather, but it was the worst car in the world. It hardly had the power to climb up the long, slow road to Jerusalem. I used to stop for hitchhikers, and the car would struggle up the hills.)

The Peugeot was not the most psychically inspired choice of car Uri could have made, but then these were dog days for him in many more important ways too. There is something quite melodramatic in the decline of Uri Geller at this time. 'I started ebbing away in Israel,' he acknowledges. 'My performances had a limit - I could do telepathy, I could bend a spoon, I could warp rings, I could hypnotise, and that's where it ended. A magician could write new acts, get new magic, do new tricks. I couldn't because I wasn't a magician. I was amazed when I started seeing the auditoriums emptying on me. 1971 was as incredible for me as 1970 had been, but already I was being attacked and questioned. 1972 was when I was over and out. People had seen me over and over, they were shouting, "Hey, Uri, we've seen that." Managers could no longer put me up in big theatres, so I started being booked into discotheques and night-clubs, underground, smoky places, with dancing and striptease and clowns, jugglers and acrobats. I was suddenly just another act. No-one would pay attention to me, and I really felt the pits.'