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Chapter 19 / Home, Home on the Thames

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'I seem only like a boy, playing on the seashore and diverting myself in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great oceans of truth lay undiscovered before me.' (Sir Isaac Newton, father of modern science - and practising occultist)

There were as many reasons why Uri Geller effectively retired in his early thirties as there were methods by which conjurors had by then invented to bend spoons by sleight of hand. His principle mission was accomplished - the accumulation of enough cash to keep him happy, settle down at last with Hanna, perhaps have some kids. His mother was settled in Connecticut, in a house which sceptical investigators - an example of how obsessive they were becoming - claim to have discovered belonged technically to the wife of the president of Mexico.

Then there were the additional factors. Uri had achieved as much respectability as was ever likely to come his way - the Nature article, the recognition by dozens of serious scientists, by showbusiness stars, by maverick elements within the CIA and Mossad, the briefings he unquestionably gave President Carter in the Oval Office. All this had happened, and still he was doubted and called a fraud; this made him aware that he would never win with some people. There was also the question of his powers naturally fading with age. Most children grow out of their psychic abilities; they become embarrassed by them, stop practising, the poltergeists move on. Uri seemed, and still seems, to maintain the majority of his powers by remaining in many ways a teenager. But performing psychically, even at small scale charity events, began increasingly to make him physically tired - something which has impressed many people as the crowning proof that he is no fake. And while there is no evidence that the public had become bored with Uri Geller - despite his limited repertoire, seeing him is still a profound personal experience for millions of people - I am also certain that a further element contributed to his winding down. It is Geller's secret, but it was as impossible for someone in his position not to know a few magicians' tricks for emergency use as it is for a professional athlete, a cook, a comedian, a lawyer or an actor not to know a few ways to keep the public happy on an off day, and to keep ahead of the game. But, I believe, Geller hated the idea of trickery, and barely, if ever, resorted to it.

'There definitely was a phase of semi-retirement,' he says. 'It was my choice. I just got fed up with airports, with hotel rooms and the stress of appearing in front of thousands of people. I was fed up with driving to colleges and being interviewed by newspapers. And when you are famous in every country you can live in, say, England and for six years not hear about Uri Geller, but meanwhile I'm in every newspaper and magazine in South Africa or in Norway. When I was not on American television I was probably on Danish or Swedish TV. Every country had its heyday. There comes a point where I didn't break down, but I had had enough. I identified myself so much with rock stars that go haywire in hotel rooms because the pressure is so immense on them. No wonder they turn to drugs and alcohol. I was in hotel rooms where suddenly there was no meaning to my life any more. I woke up there was an emptiness, a slight depression, but there were still people standing downstairs in the lobby waiting for my signature. I was ever so famous. I was a celebrity, I was a super psychic I was unique. You have got a Mick Jagger, an Elton John, a Peter Gabriel, but only one Uri Geller. I didn't see a way out of fame and fortune. It was like so what else, is that there? I've got the Cadillac, the two apartments, a magnificent house in Connecticut. I had to break that pattern. That's when a major change happened in my life and I became a vegetarian, I started exercising and I started reading books about health and well-being.'

What does an obsessive workaholic do when he retires? In Geller's case, in the States between the late 1970s and the mid to late 1980s, he made himself almost as busy banging his head like a wasp against the windows of government, power and influence - and pursuing legal cases. The teenage drive and energy, combined with a child-like desire for justice and a wealthy adult's bank account combined to make Geller a law junkie, even though to the present day, he has never been in a courtroom, most cases either being settled to his satisfaction, or fizzling out due to a variety of factors.

Geller's power games were far more important and interesting than his legal side-shows. He is anxious to play down his White House connection, which may indicate there was more - or less - to it than meets the eye, but regards two specific episodes as the summit of his years of what might be called political influence. One, in February 1987, was attending a reception given by the US Mission to the Geneva arms negotiations with the Soviets; the second, a fortnight later, was briefing a gathering of senior senators and congressmen, plus 40 Capitol staffers, Defense Department and Pentagon aides in a room in the Capitol Building sealed for the occasion from possible Soviet eavesdropping.

He was not at the Geneva reception as the cabaret, either, although the Soviet delegates may have thought he was. He was invited by Senator Claiborne Pell, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in the hope that he could telepathically influence the Soviet negotiating team, especially its head, Yuri Vorontsov, into making some serious concessions to the West, preferably, as a first step, reducing Russian missiles in Europe. Pell had been introduced to Geller, who now lived in Britain, by Princess Michael of Kent. So impressed was Pell, that he arranged a three way meeting at the Cavendish Hotel in London with Geller, himself and Max Kampelman, the chief US negotiator. The day after the reception, according to a full page report in Newsweek, Mikhail Gorbachev made an unexpected new offer - the removal within five years of all medium-range nuclear missiles based in Europe. Geller was quoted as saying he was convinced Vorontsov had called Gorbachev straight after the reception, having received his ESP message.

It all sounded, even with the Newsweek story, like the kind of tale which would fall apart when investigated a decade later. Apart from anything else, the Newsweek photo appeared to show Uri Geller in a suit and tie, a near impossibility for an Israeli. I took a train out to Rhode Island, therefore, to see Claiborne Pell, now a retired six-term senator. His simple, elegant home, on the ocean in Newport, is the fulfilment of every romantic vision of those brought up on images of John F, Kennedy's Camelot. A black and white picture of Pell with his friend, JFK, another with Lyndon B. Johnson, another with the Queen. In a corner, a chair from the investiture of the Prince of Wales. Pell had not been well lately, so on the coffee table was a letter from Bill Clinton, wishing his senior Democrat colleague well, and adding Hillary's best wishes too to Nuala, Pell's wife. Had JFK ever been here, in this house, I wondered, as we sipped tea from fine china? The elderly senator looked shocked; 'Oh, no ... I mean not often. He might stop his boat out there and drop by, but not formally, no. Only at our home in Washington. All very wonderful, but, getting down to business, I had to ask, was this Uri Geller story really true?

'Well, yes, actually. I was interested in parapsychology, telepathy and life after death. I had no ability or experience in this area, but I believed in it, and I would love to have had the experience. So I thought it would be fun for Uri to bring his dog and pony show to some of the American and Russian delegates at a cocktail party. I was interested in seeing what impression Uri might be able to make on the Russians, and I think they were mystified. I'll never forget the Russian ambassador, Vorontsov, now the ambassador to Washington. Uri bent his spoon. Then he put the spoon into the ambassador's hand, and the spoon continued to move in his hand. Everybody saw that. It was a key moment for me.' Whether Uri really influenced Vorontsov, Pell reasonably says he can't know, and that it would be highly unlikely for Vorontsov to know, either.

Nuala Pell also remembers Vorontsov refusing to give Uri his watch. 'What I remember was Uri putting the grass seeds in the palm of his hand and they grew. He did it in front of us all. We just couldn't believe it. Everybody was floored. I truly believe in Uri, and I think everyone did. The Russians just looked stunned. They didn't know whether to believe or not to believe. I know Claiborne's colleagues in the Senate who were on that trip never got over that. They couldn't believe that Claiborne got him there, and then he performed, and they were so impressed. It was the talk of the Summit for some time. But Claiborne was very determined; he believed in Uri and was determined that other people should have the chance to see him too.

'I'd seen that kind of thing before,' the senator explained, 'and thought it might be a conjuror's trick. I talked with that guy Randi once, and he said it was a trick, and he could do too. There's a great depth of feeling there against Uri, you know. It's almost vicious. But Uri was far more impressive as a person. I think Uri is a very likeable, decent sort. I never felt he was at all dubious. I respect him. I think he has good ideas, and is genuine. I also remember how unless he was in full vigour, he couldn't make things happen, which I found most interesting.'

It was Pell who also arranged the meeting at the Capitol, for which the official agenda, for the benefit of any Soviet spies, was to talk about the plight of Soviet Jews. The meeting was held in the Capitol's only SCIF - a Superior Compartmentalised Intelligence Facility. Col John Alexander, was invited to by a general friend of his. 'He talked about the stuff the Soviets were doing psychically,' Alexander recalls, 'But everyone wanted him to bend something. There wasn't a spoon around, so someone went outside and found one in the guard's coffee cup.
'I was in the front row watching very closely. I had been trained by magicians by now, and I had watched Randi do it frame by frame and I could catch him at it. Uri took the spoon, stroked it lightly, and the thing bent up quite noticeably. He put it down on the top of this chair and he continued talking, and I watched this spoon continue to bend until it fell off the chair. There was never a time when Uri could have applied force. And even if the touch, were strong it would have bent down not bent upwards.' Although Pell says he did not think the meeting was a huge success, at least one senator there did, according to Newsweek. Representative Dante Fascell, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, rushed directly to the library to read up on Geller.'

'I saw Uri do that several more times after that,' John Alexander added. I introduced him to Steven Seagal, and we did it there in Seagal's house, the inner sanctum of his bedroom, with all these old ancient Tibetan tapestries on the wall. [Seagal, the macho actor, it is who has been described by the Dalai Lama as 'a sacred vessel'] I don't think Steven has any doubt. His belief system is that these things can happen, although it goes without saying that this is not totally unique to Uri Geller.'

Uri and Uri-related legal cases trundled on through the 1980s and beyond, their greatest benefit to him, I suspect, being to gather a team of very committed lawyers in the US and Britain, who understand him and have become wise counsel to him in both the legal and the personal sense. In the States, there's a Baltimore attorney, Richard Winelander, who unwillingly took over the Geller file by accident when an ex-colleague, Don Katz, was disbarred. 'I'm a criminal attorney,' says Winelander. 'I don't even believe witnesses. But I believe strongly in Uri. He's a genius, and he's my buddy. He managed to stop me smoking 50 a day, and the spoon bending is real. It is totally unbelievable.' In New York, Geller has Ruth Liebesman, who was on the defence team for the Mafia godfather, John Gotti. Liebesman, was born in England, where her father was a US Air Force doctor, and is every inch the tough, big-time attorney - the Manhattan apartment, the vintage Porsche - except in one slightly unusual regard. Liebesman is convinced she has been seeing UFOs since she was 18, and has been abducted by them more than once. The most dramatic abduction, she told me when we met in a New York coffee shop, occurred when she was staying in the Gellers' guest cottage outside Reading, on the night Andrija Puharich died. She awoke from what she thought was a nightmare with a row of painful blisters on her stomach. Two days later, back in New York, she took the scarring to her doctor. 'He said to me , "All I can see is your laparoscopy tracks, which are at least three years old." I said, "Jack, I've never had a laparoscopy. Never when I signed a consent form, anyway."' In London, Geller's barrister is the eminent QC, Jonathan Caplan, another classic high flyer with a difference; Caplan is a strong believer in the paranormal and UFOs, too.

The most - and only - important thing about the cases as far as 'the big picture' is concerned is that none of them have involved any proof or disproof of the paranormal, and all have involved James Randi's excitable
turn of phrase. In 1990, Geller sued Randi and a Japanese publisher for a claim by Randi in a Japanese magazine that Dr. Wilbur Franklin of Kent State University committed suicide because he was so ashamed when Randi discredited Geller. Franklin had, in fact, died of natural causes. Randi was ordered by the court in Tokyo to pay half a million yen (£2,500) for the insult. Geller successfully sued Randi in Hungary, where Randi had accused him and Shipi of being swindlers; there was no significant money to be won in an action in Hungary, but Geller explained he was embarrassed that his Hungarian relatives might have read the comments. The newspaper had to publish a retraction and pay nominal damages and costs. Geller sued Randi and CSICOP for a comment in the International Herald Tribune that Geller's 'tricks' were 'the kind of thing that used to be on the back of cereal boxes when I was a kid.' In the US, he sued Timex for featuring a metal bending performer in an advertisement' claiming this effect was his trademark. In London, Florida and Hawaii, Geller sued Victor Stenger, a sceptical scientist living in Hawaii, and Prometheus Books and for repeating a false Randi claim that Geller had been arrested in Israel for misrepresenting himself as a psychic.

The Timex case failed. In the Prometheus case, over the alleged arrest in Israel, Geller gained a written apologies and acknowledgements of error from both the American and British branches. Mike Hutchinson of Prometheus still complains about the action as being over 'just one silly word'. In the States, the Herald Tribune case was ruled out of time, and had to be dropped, while the argument that Randi was an agent of CSICOP was rejected. This led Geller, ironically, since it was he who was complaining, into having to pay CSICOP a total of $210,000 as part of a global settlement of all the cases, although in the long run, both CSICOP and Randi seem to have been more damaged than Geller by the six-year legal morass. Randi continues to maintain that he won all the cases Geller brought. A lot of Geller's out-of-time errors in the cases were the fault of Katz, the original Baltimore attorney, who seems to have a good case for having been almost psychotically stressed-out when he made the error for which he was briefly disbarred. It is a very Uri Geller touch, Winelander laughs, that Geller remains friendly with Katz, even retaining him as a stockbroker, which is his profession today.

A case not directly involving Geller, but which would not have happened without him, came to court in 1993. Five years earlier, Randi referred in an interview to Eldon Byrd being 'in jail as a convicted child molester'. Byrd sued in Baltimore, with Winelander as his attorney. The 1993 trial was wonderfully discursive high comedy at times, the court transcript records. Geller was accused in passing by Randi of blackmailing him with a transcript of a tape which appeared to be of Randi having an intimate sexual conversation with a young man. Randi said in explanation that he had been working on behalf of the telephone company in its attempt to track down the reason his number appeared on a men's room under the name 'Donald'. (Mr. Winelander: 'Did there come a time when you actually took your number off the wall in the men's room?'). The question of Randi's height, which is about five foot four, was aired. Winelander asked him directly how tall he was. Randi answered five seven and a half; Winelander asked him to step down to show the folks. The judge told the attorney, he was stepping on the line, and to be careful not to go over it. At other times, Randi admitted not having made any attempt to check his facts. The jury found Randi guilty of libel with malice, although awarded no money to Byrd, the jury apparently not caring much for either Byrd or Randi, having discovered that Byrd did in fact have a past conviction for possession of pornography. Randi has since repeatedly claimed he won this case too.

If Uri Geller's 'semi-retirement' in the States looks on paper more like a whirl of activity, it has taken a somewhat hyperactive form in Britain too, where he lives in a state of permanent re-invention. He came to Britain at a time when crime and shootings in the States were beginning to make him and Hanna doubt if this was the right place to bring up Daniel and Natalie. He met Clement Freud, a distant relative through the Freud line, now a British MP, on a flight, and Freud suggested he settle in England; the Gellers needed little persuading.

Although Uri gives the impression over the past 15 years of having been pretty much quiescent, his own account of his activity - prompted, as ever, by Randi and his claims that 'Geller is finished' - does rather belie the retirement idea. 'In the past ten years,' he says, 'I've written seven books, which have been translated a dozen languages in as many as 33 countries. I am working on five more books. I write eight different columns for magazines and newspapers, including The Times. My Website had received as many as 400,000 hits in one day. A full-length motion picture about me by Ken Russell and distributed by Disney was sold to 60 countries in three days at the American Film Market. I have starred in countless TV specials and commercials, been written up in recent months in Newsweek and Sports Illustrated. And the latest Nieman Marcus catalogue in the States uses my name - without having asked me - to advertise a new range of silver cutlery. I don't mean to brag, but it's a damned funny kind of "finished".

It's certainly the case that Geller is rarely out of the media. There have been two major TV documentaries on him since he came to Britain. The first, a BBC QED programme, was unfortunate for Uri, especially as the director, Tony Edwards, believed in him, had to fight hard to get the slot, and admits he would have loved the film to be more positive to Uri. Part of the film was made in Madison, Wisconsin, at a psychic event Uri was lecturing at. The great problem was that the scrupulously ethical Edwards, who also made a brilliant and positive series for the BBC on 'heretical' scientists, invited Randi to the Madison event in disguise, in a high risk attempt to provide some balance to the documentary. Randi was un-persuadable, and duly insisted that the spoon bending Uri did was fraudulent. A spoon broken by Uri at the Madison event was also taken to a metallurgist at Leeds University, who reported on the film that as far as he could see, it was a routine fracture. 'It was a shame,' Tony Edwards says today. 'Even though Randi was in an excellent disguise, and I don't think had even arrived yet, Uri was in an elevator with me at the hotel, and said, "I can smell Randi." I do think Uri has some special powers.'

A 1997 British documentary, in Channel 4's Equinox series, Secrets of the Psychics was a standard and unsurprising trot through the usual sceptical routine, with a clear anti-paranormal agenda, and soundbites from Richard Dawkins, John Taylor, Ray Hyman, Randi, Mike Hutchinson, Susan Blackmore, George Lawrence, Ian Rowland and Professor David Marks, a New Zealander who holds the chair in Psychology at the University of Middlesex, in Enfield. Marks, who has written books on conjuring, said on the Equinox film: 'As far as I am aware, from my observation, Geller has no psychic ability whatsoever. However, he's a very clever, well-practised magician'. (David Berglas, President of the Magic Circle, who agrees on the psychic question, nevertheless disputes Marks' knowledge of magicianship). Also in the documentary were Marcello Truzzi and Russell Targ. His clips, Truzzi says, were clearly selected to maintain the editorial slant of the show. Uri complained to the Broadcasting Standards Commission about Secrets of the Psychics. His complaint was rejected.

Although he does no laboratory testing today, Uri still meets scientists and doctors in more gentle settings, and is keen to garner their support. He recently spent some time demonstrating his abilities to Brian Josephson, Professor of Physics at Cambridge and winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics. Geller and Josephson sat cross legged on the floor at a conference to talk. Josephson was enigmatic, albeit in a positive sort of way, when I asked him a few months later for his view on Geller. 'I think Uri is a magician, but I don't particularly believe that he is using trickery in his demonstrations,' he said. 'I believe there are psychic abilities. They don't accord with any science we have at the moment, but maybe some future science will back them up with theories.'

Uri also met a London consultant psychiatrist, Dr. Lawrence Ratna, by chance, who reported favourably on him. 'I am a Psychiatrist with 30 years clinical experience, a conjurer with a wide knowledge of magic and someone who has investigated paranormal phenomena and found them wanting in the past,' Ratna says. 'Uri Geller gave me demonstration of spoon bending. I could find no evidence of trickery nor the use of gimmicks . The fact that the spoon continued bending after he had handed it to me, for my mind, puts the event beyond rational explanation be it scientific or a feat of conjuring. He also demonstrated two examples of thought transference first accurately reproducing a geometric figure I had drawn and second and perhaps more significantly transmitting to me a figure and a colour. As a life long sceptic I must record my total astonishment at these feats and testify my witness to a truly inexplicable and unique phenomenon.'

Sometimes, the media coverage the Fiftysomething Geller gets in Britain is over-the-top even by his standards. In 1996, The Sunday Telegraph carried the large and startling headline, Uri Geller vindicated as historic sub is found. The story told how a sceptical radio producer, William Scanlan-Murphy, had wasted £1m over eight years in his search off the Scottish coast for a sunken submarine, only to find that it was lying at a spot Geller had marked for him on a map. The submarine, it turned out, was not the only thing which was lying. Over a year later, Mr. Scanlan-Murphy wrote to Uri from his home in the Peak District saying he had made the entire story up, and that, owing to a 'financial reversal' he was now planning to sell the story of his 'hoax' to the press. 'I shall not do anything with the story before Wednesday,' he concluded. Whatever it was he hoped to sell, which was not at all clear, did not evidently find a market. Uri ignored the letter, and nothing subsequently appeared.

He does attract very odd people at times, not all malicious. Every post brings letters from people who regard him as a guru. A woman in San Francisco changed her name to Uria; another writes to him as 'Golden Uri'. 'Can you imagine, if I wanted to pursue the idea of being a guru, how much money I could have made then,' he says. 'I could have been like the Bhagwan. But I've never even been tempted. I'm an entertainer.'

Even as such, he still manages to keep a steady stream of celebrities and politicians through the house. The Israeli defence minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, who has visited, represents one extreme, perhaps, the Duchess of York the other. 'She came over to my house with a policewoman one morning, and she really poured out her heart to me about her love affairs and about a certain tennis player, and, basically, how the Royalty let her down in a very brutal way, how there is almost a conspiracy against her and so on,' Uri said. 'She is very intuitive. I bent a spoon for her and her husband for their wedding at their request. But then I really can't talk about other Royalty I have met because it would be a breach of confidence. Fergie wouldn't mind me saying this because it is positive.'

'She is very much into being positive. She writes down positive phrases. She spent a few hours with me, and she met Natalie and Hanna We stay in touch via the telephone . I call her about twice a month, and try to give her confidence to continue and to shut out all the negative abuse that is thrown at her, and the way she is treated by the Royalty. I told her go for it as far as her business ventures were concerned. If you can do a commercial do a commercial, if you can get another book, get another book out there, just pay back your debts. She really listened to my advice, I think.'

As if to emphasise his commitment to being a strictly earthbound non-guru, Uri has developed a passion for football - which he is probably better known for in Britain currently than anything else. Even loving football, however, gets him into trouble. His support for his local team, Reading, ended in October 1997 in an argument with the club chairman, who decided to stop giving free tickets to the Geller family in return for their hands-on support. In the subsequent season, Reading, who had done quite well in the English First Division during their year of Geller positing the team up on a weekly basis, dropped through the division like a brick, and were relegated in May 1998. Sports commentators continued to laugh at Reading's decline, citing it as a Geller failure, unaware that he had abandoned the club. Uri's reasonable point, though not overstated, case that it was, if anything, an extremely minor vindication of his powers was somehow never reported. Neither has the fact that the family now supports still more lowly Exeter City, on the basis that Daniel Geller believes he had a past life in Exeter.

The strange Glenn Hoddle affair was less of a joke. Hoddle, the England manager, is currently suing the News of the World newspaper over a claim by Geller that the manager visited him two years before the 1998 World Cup, and took part, along with his friend and faith healer, Eileen Drewery, in an exorcism of Uri's 'evil spirits'. Hoddle, even in the frantic midst of the Cup preparations, issued a writ against the newspaper, which is still outstanding. One of the mysteries of the case is that Hoddle said at a widely reported press conference that he had met Geller only once, four years earlier, and had not seen him or had any association with him since. The week after that, the News of the World published itemised phone bills which Shipi had found in the cellar which seemed to show several calls, including one of 13 minutes, from Uri's house to Hoddle's. When the libel writ arrived, it did not contest Hoddle having been to the Geller home, only that he had taken part in an exorcism. The case continues.

The Gellers have been lucky to steer clear of tragedy, apart from in one sad instance - the death of what would have been their third child. 'We were going to name him Gaby,' Uri says, 'but he died like two months before he should have been born. We didn't have a funeral. And we let Daniel and Natalie hold him at the hospital. It is interesting; that is something that I totally want to shut away in my mind, not only place it in a box and close the lid, but I also took this box out of my head and to send it into space. I don't want to remember; it is just too painful. We do have a sonar picture of the baby, but we keep it behind a frame.'

The Gellers' is an extremely unusual household, as might be expected. Hanna, as Uri says, 'Doesn't really want to involve herself with me paranormally. She prays to God. She wants to keep it very Holy, very spiritual, very religious, whereas sometimes, paranormal or psychic phenomena don't go hand in hand with religion. So most of my everyday life and activities, Shipi knows more about than Hanna.

Although it is perfectly possible, of course, that the younger Natalie will be as powerful a psychic one day as Uri Geller, the young man a lot of eyes are inevitably on is Daniel. Will he or won't he inherit his father's powers? 'He has a very powerful telepathic link with me,' Uri says. When Daniel was six or seven, he developed the odd ability, which he no longer has, to be able to put a day of the week to any number. Daniel says: 'When I'm with my father, I feel I may have the power in very small amounts, but if I try to do something alone, it doesn't really work. It's a bit disappointing, but there is an extraordinary connection between us. I think the most amazing thing he ever did was to stop Big Ben. He went out to his gazebo one morning, where he prays, and concentrated very hard, willing it to stop. Later that day, mum ran screaming from the house. She's heard on the news that it had stopped, but no one could work out why. Unfortunately, he couldn't prove he'd done it, but I knew because I saw it.'

' I never tell people my name straight away because they immediately form an opinion,' Daniel continues. 'I'd rather just be myself, but it's difficult because my name is Geller and either they're going to say, 'Can you bend something?' or they are going to start rebutting my dad. I was teased at school at first because a lot of the kids thought what my dad did on TV was a trick. It made it harder for me to make friends because there would be a chain reaction. One person would start saying, 'He's a fraud', and the rest would follow. I found it very hurtful because I couldn't understand why they didn't believe in him. I try to explain, but if they won't listen I just choose to ignore it.'

'My father has an incredible aura, a presence that I still find amazing. No matter what anyone says, I get to see the happenings and phenomena and it's fun. I'm never embarrassed by him. When I have exams, he goes out to his gazebo and concentrates very hard and I can usually tell he is helping me. I've always felt different, and sometimes I wouldn't mind being ordinary. I'd quite like to live in a medium-sized house, but my friends love coming over here because we have tennis courts and a swimming pool. They're always asking Abba to bend spoons. I don't mind, but he can't do too many because it drains his powers.'

Daniel and Natalie's only uncle, Shipi, lives in his own house on the estate, and, like his sister, Hanna, is as private as Uri is public. In his twenties, he was briefly married (as it happened, to Eldon Byrd's ex-wife, June), but it did not work out. He has girlfriends now, but still has no plans to marry again. 'If he does, and decides to start his own business or whatever, I will certainly miss him because he has a great way of protecting me,' Uri says. 'Remember, it's a family thing. We've been together, and our families have been friends, for almost 30 years. It happens a lot in Israel to be united like that. It's the same as in Arabic cultures, where the family is one unit and you would rather have your family run your business affairs than a stranger. If you let someone else deal with your life, you are bound to fall out.'
What Uri would do without Shipi confounds most friends of the family. It had occurred to me that, as Puharich had believed, Shipi was a powerful part of the Geller effect. I asked Uri whether he could perform without Shipi. He was adamant he could, and subsequent inquiries in Israel confirmed that he had bent metal and read minds for years without Shipi, while he was still a schoolboy. But could he, I asked, bend metal when he was entirely on his own?
Uri blushed for the only time since I had met him. 'I am not often on my own,' he said after some thought. 'I have built this thing psychologically that I can't act alone. I'm sure I must have bent a spoon on my own once, but I can't think of a moment when I would have had the opportunity. Partly it is because I refuse to touch money, I don't have a wallet, I don't carry credit cards. I haven't written a cheque in the past 25 years. If I buy something, Hanna pays for it, or Shipi. I have driving licenses for everything, even a tank. But I don't drive. Come to think of it, you know, I am exactly like the Queen.'