At one point in his life, Uri Geller decided to found a country, with an anthem and even a soccer team. He bought an uninhabited island in Scotland for £30,000 and offered people the chance to become citizens of his new country for just one dollar. All the money was meant to be donated to Wolfson Medical Center.
He did not stop there. Geller says he even appointed U.S. President Donald Trump as president of the island he owns, a decision he now regrets. “He is unpredictable,” Geller says in an interview with ynet. “Even I can’t read his mind.”
Geller says he negotiated hard for the island. “I saw an ad in the newspaper saying the island was for sale. The price was around £60,000 or £70,000. I offered £30,000 and said, ‘Take it or leave it.’ They said no. They wanted more. I hung up and said that if they changed their minds, they knew how to find me.”
And did they?
“Yes, after a few months they came back to me and said the seller had agreed. Believe it or not, the owner of the island was an Israeli-Brazilian Jew.”
The plot only became more tangled. “It turned out there was treasure buried underground on the island by the Egyptians. I read several books that confirmed the treasure story, but the Scottish government did not allow me to dig there.”
‘I am the king of public relations’
Geller will celebrate his 80th birthday in December, and he is not resting for a moment. Soon, visitors will be able to see another side of him, one that has nothing to do with bending spoons. Beginning June 25, he will lead tours of an exhibition of his paintings at the Ramla Museum, in cooperation with the municipality and under the curation of Dr. Lior Alon.
“I started painting at a very young age,” he says of his beloved hobby. “When I paint, I fantasize. I think about things like flying into space and put them on paper. My first painting, when I was 10 or 11, and I know I’m bragging, won a prize. Later, when I began bending spoons, I met some of the most famous painters in the world, like Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí.”
How were your relations with Dalí?
“We met in the mid-1970s. He didn’t believe there was some young guy from Israel who could bend a spoon with the power of thought. He contacted me, we met at a hotel in New York, and I entered the room. I bent a spoon and he was in shock. That’s where our friendship began. What he painted in surrealism, I proved to him for real.”
8 View gallery
From 'Uri Geller: The Exhibition' at the Ramla Museum. 'When I paint, I fantasize'
(Photo: Ron Peled)
Did you show him your works?
“Of course! We painted together. The entrance door to my museum is a painting by the two of us together.”
Even after decades in the entertainment industry, Geller still has the same intense passion and the ability to tell stories about events that happened, or did not happen, in an entertaining way.
“Today I don’t have agents or managers. I do everything myself,” he says. “I stay relevant because I am the king of public relations.”
Geller is indeed skilled in the art of marketing. In the past, he flew especially to Rome for a photo with Sophia Loren that he could distribute to the media.
“Sophia was waiting for me at her villa. She wanted to see how I bend a spoon,” he recalls. “Her husband was sitting next to her and said, ‘No photos!’ And I thought, ‘What do you mean no photos? That’s why I came to Rome.’ My publicist Miki Peled suggested we do a photomontage. We would photograph Sophia separately, photograph me separately and paste the picture together. After we did it, I went down to a kiosk in Tel Aviv and what did I see? On the front page of Yedioth Ahronoth: Uri Geller faked a photograph from a meeting with Sophia Loren.”
What did you do at that moment?
“I called my manager and told him, ‘My career is over.’ I was supposed to perform that evening at Shavit Cinema in Haifa and told him to cancel. He said he couldn’t, even if it meant I would perform in front of 10 people. I arrived in Haifa and couldn’t believe what I saw: 500 people were standing outside because they couldn’t get tickets. That’s when I understood there is no such thing as bad publicity. I measure publicity about me with a ruler. If they wrote about me, say, one centimeter, then as far as I’m concerned, an ad that size in The New York Times would have cost me $10,000. I made a profit. The controversies around me always lifted me.”
Tell me, Uri, hand on heart, could it be that you make things up?
“No, I take cases and polish them. For example, I did an activity on Twitter around my island in Scotland, and I told my followers that if they did it, the Scotland national team would win, and it won!”
And if it had not won?
“Then after two days they would have forgotten about it. People forget things quickly. Why? Because we are bombarded with news nonstop, especially now with social media, Instagram, TikTok. But you should know, most of the time I am not wrong. I am also a marketing genius, and I also have something, no matter how much the skeptics tried to invent all kinds of answers to my powers.”
So why have you never filled out a lottery ticket?
“Because I always felt that if I filled out a lottery ticket and won, I would lose my powers. In the 1970s, I was once at a casino in London. I sat at roulette and knew the whole time where the ball would land. That night I won £17,000. Right after the casino I had a show in Newcastle, and I drove there in a big limousine. Suddenly I heard voices in my head. I thought I was going crazy. The voice asked me, ‘Why did you do that?’ I was so frightened. I told the driver to stop, opened the window, threw £17,000 outside and told him to keep driving. Since that strange thing happened to me, I don’t gamble with my powers.”
How will I know if the story is true or if you made it up?
“You will never know.”
‘I hope to die of a heart attack’
Geller had a long friendship with the late King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Although Jackson died in 2009, in recent years he has remained at the center of public controversy after documentaries revived allegations of sexual offenses and pedophilia against him.
Did you know Michael Jackson’s dark side?
“I read about it.”
While you were friends?
“Yes.”
Did it not bother you?
“I’ll tell you what happened. Michael was working on a record and we were in his studio in New York. We went downstairs to where the recording machines were, and suddenly he asked me, ‘Can you hypnotize me?’ I told him yes, but asked him why he wanted it. He said to me, ‘I eat a lot of junk food. I want to stop.’ I took a shoelace and hypnotized him. I put him into a deep trance, and I asked him, really violating the ethical rule, ‘Michael, do you touch children inappropriately?’ He said, ‘No.’ I asked him, ‘Why did you pay hush money?’ He told me, ‘Because I couldn’t bear it anymore.’”
And you believed him?
“Yes. That confirmed to me that Michael Jackson was innocent, that he was naive and everyone wanted his money. I never believed the rumors. Despite everything, I still believe him. The film about him is the most successful in the world. People don’t believe those claims.”
There are harsh testimonies.
“I don’t believe it.”
Although he claims to possess supernatural powers, and despite his personal acquaintance with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Geller refuses to make political predictions. He also says little about his alleged past in the Mossad.
“I can’t reveal what I did there,” he says. “I can say that it is true that I was a Mossad agent. That is also why I can’t say what I did.”
You said you have no more dreams for the future.
“Listen, I love what I do very much and only want to keep going. Anyone who reaches 80 and is alive should thank God. I did what I had to do. The most important things to me now are my wife, my granddaughters and spiritual things. I don’t know what to expect. I can say that I hope to die of a heart attack. I want to die quickly, without suffering, but I don’t know how to predict how I will die, and the truth is I also don’t want to know.”