The Geller Phenomenon by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson [Wilson, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-04-11T16:00:00+00:00

5—Getting to Know Geller

“He bent a spoon, broke one of my keys, made my watch go back several hours ... ”

“How do you feel about the idea of doing a biography of Uri Geller?”

The author and the enigma: Colin Wilson and Uri Geller in the course of their conversations during a visit to Barcelona, Spain. The question was put to me by my literary agent in the spring of 1974. I said I thought it was a lousy idea. I had just read Puharich’s book, and found it baffling and infuriating. But he seemed to have picked the bones pretty clean. Anyway, how much of a biography can you write of someone in his mid-20s?

Geller, it seemed, was under some kind of contract to the business tycoon Robert Stigwood, who was responsible for such shows as Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. And Stigwood, it seemed, had decided to produce a film based on Uri’s autobiography. Since I had written novels, biographies, and a book on the occult, I was apparently high on the list of possible biographers.

The film business is like a game of tennis, in which the original idea is batted back and forth 100 times or so, and the rules are changed every five minutes. While I was still brooding on the question of whether I could afford to turn down so much money, somebody else was asked to write the biography, and I was asked to turn in my own ideas for the film script. As a preliminary step, I was to meet Uri Geller for lunch.

I had no fixed ideas about Geller. I had seen him on television and thought him a personable young man, although hampered by a kind of exuberant immodesty. I also felt a certain sympathy for his struggles against the anti-success mechanism, which was already gathering force. I had been through the same kind of thing myself in the mid-1950s, when my first book earned me the misleading label “Angry Young Man,” and all the zany publicity that went with it. Within weeks, the same journalists who had launched myself and other “AYMs” (such as playwrights John Osborne and Brendan Behan) were tearing us to pieces. Now, as I heard Geller described as a materialist, a publicity-hound, and a downright fraud, my sympathies naturally tended to be on his side. As to whether he cheated or not, that was a matter on which I kept an open mind. But I had no doubt whatsoever that such powers as he had demonstrated on TV could be genuine; researching a massive book on the occult had convinced me of that.

That first lunch with Uri was an oddly disappointing and inconclusive affair. Mark Twain has a story about an inventor who asks a millionaire to finance an invention. Within five minutes, the millionaire is convinced, and takes out his checkbook. The inventor goes on to describe the benefits his invention will bring to society, and the millionaire begins to wilt and puts away his checkbook.

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