10
Gellermania and After
On 10 September
1983, the West German newspaper Bild ran a headline on its front page in
letters an inch high: NEUES URI-GELLER-FIEBER. 1000 GABELN KRUMM.
It went on
to give details of the 'new Uri Geller fever' during which 'a thousand forks
twisted'. The story began: 'Has your best dinner service become bent since
Thursday evening? Uri Geller has been on German television again . . .'
The
first outbreak of what the British press called Gellermania had been on my visit
to West Germany early in 1972, before my arrival in the USA. Then, I had been
given the credit for performing a number of unusual feats, such as bringing a
department store escalator to a halt and stopping a cable car in mid-air. In
January 1974 there had been another epidemic of Geller fever when I appeared on
Wim Thoelke's Drei Mal Neun television show and caused all kinds of odd
things to happen in viewers' homes, as I had done a couple of months earlier in
London and was eventually to do in at least twenty other countries.
The
epidemic was said to have been eradicated as early as 1978, when a writer in the
New Scientist (6 April 1978), basing his claim on some evidence which
will be mentioned later, announced that 'the Geller myth finally disintegrates'.
It seems to have put itself together again, however. Although my show
business career was diverted in a number of directions from 1975 onwards, as I
have already described, it flourishes intact to this day. I may have chosen to
make fewer public appearances over the past five or six years, but to judge from
my files of press cuttings, they have all proved as infectious as my early ones.
My 1983 appearance on the Thomas Gottschalk Show on West German TV was
fairly typical. A student in Heilbronn held her mother's wrist-watch in front of
her television screen while I was appearing on it, whereupon the watch began
ticking after thirteen years of total paralysis. In Freiburg, an even older
watch came back to life when held by its owner at my suggestion. He had been
wearing it when he was wounded in a battle against Soviet troops during the
Second World War, and he had kept it ever since as a lucky charm. Now it was
ticking for the first time in forty years.
There was one German, however,
who probably wished he had missed my show. This was the Berliner who went along
to the police to complain that I had bent fifty-one of his knives and forks -
and his birdcage. 'I want compensation,' he said.
There is no need for me to
appear on television or on a stage to produce results like these. A public
appeal through a newspaper has much the same effect, as I have shown more times
than I can remember. For example, in its issue dated 14 April 1981, the New York
Star invited its readers to 'Find out if you share the amazing powers of
the most baffling man in the world'. It would have been slightly more accurate
to have said 'Find out that your own powers are just the same as Uri Geller's'.
For this is true. My powers are no more amazing than anybody else's. I simply
use them more, and whenever I can I show others how to use them too.
Readers
were invited to test their powers in three ways. First, they were to place any
broken watches, clocks or battery-driven appliances on top of the picture of me
in the newspapers, and concentrate on them for fifteen minutes beginning at 3
P.M. on the following Sunday. They could also put some keys or cutlery beside
them if they liked. At the same time, they should hold a pencil and try to draw
in the coupon provided by the paper the telepathic image I would be projecting
to them.
'It will be your mind and your power of concentration that will
create the energy to make things happen,' I told the Star readers. I also
told them where I would be at the appointed time: in a commercial jet flying at
30,000 feet from coast to coast. Here is a typical response from a reader:
My family thought I was crazy, because they don't believe in psychic power.
So I went upstairs to my bedroom to do the experiment. I put two wrist-watches
that hadn't worked for some time and a spoon on Uri's picture. While I was
watching, one watch started ticking and the hands of the other started moving
after my 15-minute experiment had finished. I looked at the spoon and it had
bent in the middle. Now my family doesn't know what to think.
A group in
Pennsylvania put no less than fifteen broken watches on my picture, and managed
to get four of them going, bending a couple of spoons and breaking a fork in
half at the same time. A lady from Texas revived her cuckoo clock, while a
California reader's electric grandfather clock started up although it was not
plugged in. In North Carolina, a seventy-year-old lady restarted six watches-out
of eleven, one of which had been out of action for thirty-five years.
One
or-two readers did particularly well: a psychologist from Florida reported that
the hands of all eleven of her old watches moved during the experiment, and a
key bent at the same time. One family psychically repaired a radio, a tape
recorder and a clock, all at once. Another fixed four watches, an illuminated
make-up mirror and a toaster.
The newspaper followed up this nationwide
experiment by inviting three readers from the New York and-New Jersey areas to
come along to their office to meet me and try their skills on the spoons in
front of witnesses. All three managed to bend their spoons into near right
angles, and reporter Toni Reinhold testified that I had not handled any of the
cutlery, which was provided by the newspaper. Two of the spoons went on bending
by themselves after they had been put down on the table.
Mrs Bonnie Harnden
gave us an interesting description of her impressions during the first
experiment:
I felt a surge of energy and tingling that came from my head
down through my arms and body and then I just knew I would do it. The bowl of
the spoon I was holding actually folded up. I just sat there looking at it- I
couldn't believe that it had actually happened.
As this 1975 cartoon shows,
Uri Geller had become
a household name in the United States
[Text reads:
Well I think that's rotten!: After she left here mother had to wait over an hour
in the pouring rain for the bus!: Someone moved the hands forward on this
clock.: ...and it wasn't Uri Geller!]
The telepathy part of the experiment
produced equally interesting results. The picture I drew up in the sky was of a
simple sailing boat, with a mast and triangular sail. Out of 855 readers who
sent their drawings in, sixty-four had drawn a boat, while a total of 195 drew
parts of boats or something related to them. A sixteen-year-old girl from La
Miranda, California, produced an almost exact replica of my drawing, and had
this to say about how she did it:
I was in the kitchen alone and opened the
paper to Geller's picture. I was just clearing my mind when the boat popped into
it. I didn't believe it at first. It took a couple of days for me to send in the
drawing. The image of a boat just kept coming back to me, so I sent it in.
My most recent mass experiment of this kind was carried out in England, with
the help of readers of the News of the World. They were invited to 'tune
in' at 3.30 P.M. on 3 February 1985 with their cutlery and broken possessions in
front of them as they concentrated on my picture. On this occasion, instead of
trying to transmit a drawing, I was to be at a well-known landmark and readers
were asked to say where they thought this was.
The place I chose was
Stonehenge, the ancient stone circle thought by many to have been built by
Druids 3,000 years ago. It is probably the best-known landmark in England after
Big Ben, so perhaps it was not so surprising that 1,500 readers guessed
correctly. However, reporter Stuart White and I were in for a surprise of our
own. Here is how he described it in his paper on 10 February:
The Geller
Effect started at Stonehenge itself. As Geller began to concentrate at precisely
3.30, three girls walked along the perimeter fence.
One, 25-year-old Donna
Smith . . . told me: 'I had a feeling Uri would be here.'
Holding out her
News of the World, she showed me two broken watches placed on Geller's
picture. Donna said: 'I thought I'd try this, but as you can see, it's not
working.' A minute later she cried out: 'Oh my God, I don't believe it, it's not
possible.'
Both her watches had started ticking. She assured us they had
been out of order for 'ages'.
Similar repairs were being carried out all
over Britain. One rather unusual one took place in a train, the passenger being
the well-known disc jockey Anne Nightingale. In her version of events, given to
Stuart White before my secret location was revealed, she began by saying, 'I
feel sure Uri was at Stonehenge.' She went on:
I have an old watch which,
even after being repaired, would only go if you wound it up fully and shook it a
lot. But after a couple of hours it would stop.
I read the News of the
World and decided to do the experiment. The watch was fully wound but wasn't
going when I got on the train. I checked the time with the man sitting opposite
in the buffet car and when he said it was exactly 3.30, I concentrated.
I
thought about Uri's picture, holding the watch, and suddenly it started. I'm
looking forward to telling my listeners this Sunday that the watch is still
keeping perfect time. It's incredible.
Things do go wrong now and then
during experiments of this kind. Mr and Mrs Holt, from Hyde, Cheshire, reported
success with some knife-bending, but unfortunately at the same time their
washing machine flooded and water poured out of it. It had been working
perfectly until half-past three, but refused to work thereafter. Reporter Stuart
White had some bad luck himself:
My tape recorder and that of another
reporter both played inexplicable tricks. Mine switched itself off when its
control buttons suddenly rose of their own accord. The tape in the other
recorder burst out of its cassette.
He concluded, 'It seems anything is
possible with Uri around.'
It is not always destructive, I am glad to say.
During a BBC Radio Oxford interview in November 1986, my host David Freeman
produced a small transistor radio which he said had not worked for almost twenty
years. Although he had put a new battery in, it made no sound apart from a low
crackle. I told him I would try to fix it for him, and as listeners to the
programme clearly heard, I did.
That old Geller myth was still holding
together, eight years after its final disintegration had been announced. I
should mention that it has never depended entirely on the popular press, for a
good many of the 'quality' publications of the world's press have made their
contributions to it over the years. There have been cover stories on me in
Science News, Science Digest, Popular Photography, New Scientist and
Der Spiegel, and major features in Business-Week, Forbes, Esquire,
Physics Today, Nature and the American Medical Association's journal
Today's Health. My activities have even been described in the defence
technology journal Combat Arms, the Australian business journal
Rydges, and Computer World, in addition to most of the world's
leading newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to the Financial
Times. At least ten books have been written about me, and I have been
mentioned in more than 200 others.
I became controversial on my very first
trip as an entertainer outside Israel, when I went to Italy in 1971. This was
largely due to a widely-distributed photograph that apparently showed me in the
company of Sophia Loren, although most people saw at once that it was a fake. I
gave a full account of this episode in My Story, but it continued to be
quoted by the witch-hunters as an example of my supposed dishonesty. Therefore I
am grateful to the person who was really responsible for it for setting the
record straight, which he did in this statement:
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
20 December
1985
I, Rany Hirsch, who once acted as Uri Geller's
part-time nonexclusive promoter, was fully responsible for creating a
photomontage of Uri Geller and Sophia Loren, and releasing it to the Israeli
press.
Uri had absolutely no knowledge of this until seeing the photograph
on the front page of a newspaper. I did this after Sophia Loren refused to be
photographed at our meeting [with Uri], which indeed took place.
Knowing
Uri, he would have certainly objected and disapproved of such a foolish
promotional stunt.
I am fully aware of the damage I caused Uri in the early
seventies, and I regret it very much.
(signed)
Rany Hirsch
Thank
you, Rany, for scraping a little more of the mud off the Geller myth. I
certainly did meet Sophia Loren, who received me very graciously in her home,
but refused to be photographed by anybody except her personal photographer, who
was not available at the time. Any actress of her standing would have done the
same.
It was on that occasion that I realized for the first time that I had
an entry to the world of the beautiful people, thanks to my unusual talents and
background. Soon after my arrival in West Germany in 1972, I exploited that
entry-permit to the full. You do not come across many jet-setters in Israel, and
I only knew of their world from the glossy magazines and the James Bond films,
all of which I had seen and loved.
Before I had been in Germany very long, I
found that I was not only welcomed by the beautiful people set, but that I was
enjoying an affair with a prominent member of it. It was one that was to teach
me a lesson.
She had everything. She was extremely rich, very beautiful, and
very well connected. She was fascinated by my strange powers, and I was
fascinated by everything about her. I lost no time finding out how top people in
Western Europe have fun: we cruised around in her vintage Ferrari from one
glittering event to another where I met all kinds of famous people including two
of my heroes, the footballers Muller and Beckenbauer. She took me to expensive
restaurants, where she would order whole cans of caviar as casually as I would
ask for a glass of water, and then she would slip me wads of banknotes under the
table so that I could be seen to be paying the bill.
Lying in her swimming
pool, with the sound of the Moody Blues to keep us company and the servants
preparing another delicious meal, I felt like a new member of a very exclusive
club. Yet I had hardly begun to enjoy its amenities and privileges when I
resigned my membership. This is how it came about:
One day, she took me to
the family castle, which was straight from a story book. I had no idea people
actually lived in such places except in Disney films, but her family did, and
had done for ages. It should have been the perfect setting for another scene in
our romance. Instead, it led to the final curtain.
It was all because of my
love of physical exercise. There was no pool at the castle, but there was a
dusty old ping-pong table. I set it up with the help of one of the maids, but we
could not find the bats. The maid said they were up in the attic, so I offered
to go and fetch them while she gave the table a wipe.
Torch in hand, I
clambered up the stairs to find what you would expect in the attic of a castle:
piles of boxes all over the place, pitch darkness and a good deal of accumulated
dust. I shone the torch in all directions, but saw no sign of any ping-pong
bats.
One corner of the huge attic caught my attention. There were all kinds
of military regalia: medals, uniforms, trophies, and a number of framed
photographs. I found that I had stumbled across a miniature museum of the Third
Reich. I took a closer look at one of the photographs, and saw two men with a
little girl sitting in the lap of one of them. She looked about the right age
for the present daughter of the house, and one of the men, I assume, was her
father. There was no doubt as to who the other one was.
How does one
describe the feelings of an Israeli sabra who finds himself living under
the same roof as somebody with a connection like this? I could not blame her for
anything, and I could not punish her for whatever her father had done to earn
all those medals from his good friend, the Fuhrer. She belonged to a new
generation of a country that had welcomed me and helped me make a name for
myself. I did not want to rake up the past, but it was time to move on.
I
put through a transatlantic call to Edgar Mitchell, and told him I was ready to
come to the United States. It was he and Andrija Puharich who were mainly
responsible for my going there, but it was the discovery of the photograph that
had much to do with the timing.
This episode taught me that there are
skeletons to be found in the attics of even the most respected members of
society, however rich and famous they may be. It made me somewhat wary of the
beautiful people. All the same, I have to confess that as soon as I began to
amass a respectable fortune of my own, I wanted everybody to know it. For a
time, I became as compulsive a spender as I had been an eater. For a start I had
to have a custom-built Cadillac, of course, to show my friends that I had made
it. I had to have a gold Rolex watch, Gucci wallets and suitcases, silk shirts
costing £100 each, about 200 Hermes ties which I never wore, and so on all the
way down to my handmade socks. I was cramming every comer of my apartment with
expensive presents to myself and to Hanna, just as I was to gobble up bar after
bar of Swiss chocolate during my period of bulimia. Fortunately, my overspending
ended as abruptly as my overeating, although in this case the initiative did not
come from me.
In 1979 I finally married Hanna, whom I had known for more
than ten years since we first met while I was convalescing from the wounds I
received during the Six Day War of 1967. I suppose we had been engaged ever
since, in a subconscious kind of way, although neither of us had ever brought up
the subject of marriage. It just seemed to happen naturally, and it happened at
precisely the right time. I was getting worn out by all the rushing from airport
to hotel to television studio or theatre, and then back to the hotel and then
the airport to fly somewhere else and do it all again. I had begun to lose touch
with ordinary life, and with the simple things that mattered to me. I was also
losing touch with myself, and I needed a period of withdrawal and quiet.
It
was a very simple ceremony, with no publicity and no guests, and I knew at once
that I had the greatest wife in the world.
One day, when we were in the
south of France, we walked past one of those fashionable boutiques full of
'name' items Pierre Cardin this, Yves Saint-Laurent that, and so on. I suddenly
decided we needed a suitcase, so in we went. I ordered a gorgeous Gucci
creation, then another, then one more, until we had one of every single size in
stock.
Hanna looked at me in her honest and down-to-earth way. 'Why are we
buying all this, Uri?' she asked. 'Just so that everybody will see us carting
Gucci bags around at airports? What are you trying to prove?'
I looked at
her, and suddenly we both burst out laughing. There was no more to be said, and
from then on there were no more buying sprees. We gave each other simple and
inexpensive birthday presents. I wore my favourite T-shirts until they literally
fell apart. There was no more need for me to prove anything. I still have my
1976 Cadillac today, ten years later, with only 26,000 miles on its clock. (I
have run more than that over the same period.)
Ten years of performing to
people had left me with an immense tiredness by the end of the seventies. I
wanted to disconnect myself from the whole rat-race and disappear into my own
world, where Hanna and I could settle down and start our family. I was well off
enough to spend the rest of my life without working again, and I wanted to get
back into my shell and experience some spiritual peace for once.
I had
already acquired a number of home bases: a maisonette in Mexico City, an
apartment in Tel Aviv, a country house (more of a log cabin than a stately home)
in Japan, and a secret hideaway in Europe, in addition to the apartment and
house I had bought for my mother in New York and Connecticut. Hanna and I
divided our time between them, living comfortably but very simply. My daily
regime of running, swimming, and good home cooking worked wonders for both my
body and my soul. I tried a strict vegetarian diet, and found that it made such
a difference to my psychic powers that I vowed to stay with it. As Hanna soon
showed herself to be the world's best vegetarian cook, this was an easy
resolution to keep.
When Colin Wilson was with me in Spain, doing research
for his book The Geller Phenomenon, which was published in 1976, he told
me that the next stage of my career would be one of self-exploration. This was
the last thing I had in mind at the time, but he proved to be absolutely right.
I did not become a total hermit. I did the occasional television show,
newspaper promotion and business assignment, some of which I have already
described. If they were fewer and farther between, that was the way I liked it.
I cannot understand how some entertainers, such as the Rolling Stones, can go on
for twenty years or more - after only five or six years as a celebrity I was
more than ready for the quiet life.
I was certain that Hanna would give me a
son and a daughter, in that order. The New York hospital technician who carried
out a sonographic scan when Hanna was pregnant for the first time told us that
the outline looked to him like that of a girl, but I knew he was wrong, and said
so. When the time came to take Hanna to hospital, I drove her there and switched
on the car radio and heard Elton John singing his song 'Daniel'. We took that as
a good omen.
It was a difficult birth, however. As Shipi and I waited
anxiously in the hospital corridor, a doctor came up to me and said he would
have to perform a Caesarean section if Hanna did not begin to dilate soon.
Later, I learned that the reason for the difficulty was that there was what is
called a Rhesus factor problem, meaning that Hanna's blood was not compatible
with Daniel's. This, I have been told, can lead to a baby's sickness and
sometimes even death.
'If there's any chance that your powers can help,' the
doctor said, 'now's the time to use them!'
I concentrated as hard as I could
and shouted, 'Open! Open! Open!'
Heads peered round doors, wondering what on
earth was going on. Just another anxious father-to-be, they must have thought.
They can act rather strangely . . .
About five minutes later Dr Masood
Khatamee, the gynaecologist who made the delivery, came up to me and said, 'My
God, you did it.'
'Most babies would have been affected by the Rh-factor,'
he told a reporter from the New York Star (31 March 1981), 'but Daniel
was in fine shape. It really surprised me.' He was not prepared to say that my
powers had influenced the course of events, but he did admit 'It was rather
unusual', adding that 'we do see surprises in medicine'. He saw another one a
couple of hours later, when Hanna walked out of the hospital carrying her baby,
after signing a form releasing the hospital from any responsibility for her
unusually early departure.
Later, Hanna recalled a curious incident that had
taken place in Israel long before our marriage. She had been on her way to a
party with some friends in her home town of Givataim. It was raining hard, and
she had to jump over a large puddle that had grown around the grille of the
drain. One of her friends caught sight of a black object that had become stuck
in the grille and told Hanna to see what it was.
She fished it out. It was a
copy of Elton John's 'Daniel'.
Coincidences will happen, of course. They
seem to happen around me more often than could be expected by pure chance,
however, and some of them have been fairly trivial. In 1985, for instance, I
went on two separate occasions to take care of the sale of my mother's apartment
and house. The buyer of the apartment was a lady of Korean descent named Hong,
while the house was sold by a different agent to a gentleman of the same unusual
name.
Other coincidences, or synchronicities as some people call them, are
more meaningful. Take the case of Peter Sterling, the Australian businessman who
flew to London in April 1985 to discuss the business deal I described in the
previous chapter.
He told his secretary to make hotel reservations for him,
his wife Merlene, and their three children. She had done this before many times,
and telephoned the usual hotel. It was full up, so she tried another. Booked
solid. Apparently, there was a big conference in London.
She kept trying,
and had made more than twenty long-distance calls before she managed to find
accommodation for the Sterling family, in a hotel where they had never stayed
before. She did not have my address, incidentally.
A few days later, Peter
rang to say he was in town and would be right over. I gave him the address of my
apartment building, the entrance of which was in a side street that was
unfamiliar to him. I assured him that London taxi-drivers knew their way around
and would find it for him.
My doorbell rang about five minutes later. Peter
had walked out of his hotel, gone to the corner of the block, hailed a cruising
taxi and climbed in, giving the driver my address after he had driven off. The
driver promptly made a U-turn and deposited Peter exactly opposite the spot at
which he had picked him up.
There are more than 850 hotels listed in the
London telephone directory, and it may have been pure chance that led Peter's
secretary to find rooms for him in the one nearest to my apartment block, which
not only has a different street address but is on a different telephone
exchange.
One way and another, the Sterlings' visit was quite a memorable
one. Here is Merlene Sterling's account of one incident which is rather hard to
explain by pure chance:
Peter decided to ask Uri to bend a large coin so
he could put it on his desk at work to show to the sceptics back home. So we
shopped around, and came up with a magnificent silver sovereign dated 1890. The
coin cost £25, and has a picture of Queen Victoria on one side and St George and
the dragon on the other. It is about three millimetres thick and four
centimetres wide. Eldon [Byrd], an ex-coin collector, said he thought it was too
beautiful to bend. This did not deter Peter, who gave it to Uri, who said he
would try it when he was in the right frame of mind or something similar.
Merlene went on to describe how we all went out to an Indian restaurant,
where we discussed psychic matters, and how she and Peter came along to my
apartment to say goodbye the day before they were due to fly out.
As we
were about to leave, Peter asked Uri if he had managed to bend the coin yet. Uri
said, 'No. Where is it? I will do it now.' The three of us began searching for
it . . .Uri was looking concerned, and we gave up the search and returned to the
hall. He picked up his jacket and looked in both pockets. He then remembered
that he had left the coin in the restaurant the other night. We were all
standing in the hallway discussing the loss of the coin when we were startled by
a loud noise in the kitchen, like the sound of breaking glass.
We
rushed in to see what it was. The room was empty and the hallway was the only
entry, so we would have seen anyone coming or going . . . Peter and Uri ventured
briefly into the room and did not see anything unusual, so they retreated,
puzzled.
I felt guided by an unseen force and moved directly to the
bench (that is, the worktop around the sink) and there was the coin in the sink
- bent!
The other two rushed over, and we all jumped up and down with
excitement at the sudden return of the coin. I can remember Uri looking at it
and saying, 'Good, it is bent. Now I won't have to do it!'
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