Uri Geller's Articles
You’ll have to excuse me if I dash away in the middle of this column.
I’m tapping away at my laptop in my dressing room, in a gap during the dress rehearsals. It’s frantic, a maelstrom of make-up artists, script editors, technical advisers, production assistants and messengers... and that’s just the people in my room.
Step into the corridor outside, and it’s like walking into the middle of a military operation, with people firing orders instead of guns. I find it exhilarating. This must be how Mick Jagger foreclosure a Stones concert.
The dress rehearsal for a live television show on a national American network is no different from the actual broadcast. There’s a real audience, and the performers are wracked with nerves. So far, the performances have been smooth with no glitches... I just hope we’re not saving up the disasters for the big night itself.
The potential for something to go wrong is major, because some of the acts on Phenomenon are literally mind-blowing. One guy hands a nail-gun to a guest star, the stunning actress and presenter Carmen Electra. She loads it with six lethal lumps of needle-sharp steel, before the performer raises it to his head and pulls the trigger.
If that doesn’t go exactly to plan, we won’t have to ask the viewers to vote a contender off the show this week. We have paramedics and ambulances waiting outside the studio, in case of an accident.
My co-presenter Criss Angel and I oversee the proceedings from a pair of magnificent thrones. We’re an interesting match: Criss is deeply sceptical about the paranormal, and any performer who claims to be using unexplained powers is going to get a battering from him.
I’ve found there are two kinds of professional magician — the ones who believe their abilities sometimes blur into the supernatural, and the ones who scoff at any claims of paranormal power.
Houdini was in the first category: he felt that sometimes his mind performed real magic, beyond mere trickery.
Criss Angel is in the other category — he can conjure miracles, and he doesn’t believe that anything is truly beyond explanation.
I’ve long since learned that people make up their own minds, whatever the evidence — I lived through that controversy in the Seventies and I have no wish to revive it. With Phenomenon, my aim is to generate entertainment that mystifies, thrills and bewilders the audience.
I was deeply touched when one of the ten contestants, Jerry, approached me before the dress rehearsal to confide, “We feel like we’re your children, Uri. You inspired us.”
My first experience of major-league US television was humiliating, when my abilities failed me on the Johnny Carson show. To be back in Los Angeles, at the helm of a series as huge as Phenomenon, and to know that I’ve inspired all these extraordinary young performers, is humbling in a completely different way — it brings a lump to my throat.
We’re running on adrenaline now, after a bout of publicity which exceeds anything I have ever experienced. The difference between US media frenzy now and 35 years ago is the internet: I know that anything I tell a radio interviewer will be podcast around the planet within hours.
I’ve done dozens of radio shows since flying back to LA from Japan, and the weird thing is knowing that my listeners are just as likely to be in Tokyo as they are in California.
Add to that the impact of the astonishing website devised by NBC for the show and it’s clear that this is a very different business to the one that first made me famous. I still love the old-fashioned media, though, and it was a buzz to be interviewed for People magazine.
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There’s nothing like the intimate attentions of a live camera feed and an audience numbering tens of millions to make you aware of your appearance. Before this dress rehearsal, I knew I had to get my hair trimmed, but there was a problem: I haven’t been home for a week or two, and I don’t have time to fly to London for my usual wash-and-cut.
But who could I trust in Los Angeles to get it right? There was only one man, I realised — my namesake and The King’s personal hairdresser, Larry Geller.
He’s retired these days, though his book “Leaves of Elvis’ Garden” is something of a bestseller. “For you,” Larry assured me, “I’m happy to come out of retirement!”
Larry has a fund of stories like no other to entertain his clients. “You know, when Elvis was lying in his coffin,” he told me as the scissors snicked, “his wife Priscilla realised she could see one grey hair. Just one, above his temple.
“She was horrified at the thought of letting him go to his grave with a grey hair, and she summoned me — but of course I wasn’t expecting to be working on a dead man and I didn’t have my colouring tools.
“So we improvised. I dashed out, found a girl with a make-up bag and borrowed her mascara. And that’s what I used to touch up the King’s coiffure for the very last time.
“Before they closed the coffin lid, I was able to brush my hand against Elvis’s face, to say goodbye. That meant a lot to me.”
It was a moving story. I won’t repeat it on the TV set, though. The competition between all ten contestants on Phenomenon is so intense, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone gets the idea to resurrect the King...
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