As Mark Malkoff’s illuminating new book Love Johnny Carson quickly points out, the iconic late night talk show host rarely “hated” any of the guests he brought onto his hit program.

But one notable exception to this rule took the form of famed mentalist Uri Geller, who Malkoff claimed Carson ardently despised.

According to Malkoff’s book, Carson, an accomplished amateur magician in his own right, hated most psychics and so-called mediums for intentionally fooling easily-cowed audiences.

Furious at Geller’s increasingly popular mystic act, Carson plotted out ways he might expose the psychic live on The Tonight Show.

“Carson hated mentalists (like Geller) who claimed to have psychic and supernatural powers, for gullible people,” Malkoff writes in his book. “And he secretly planned to use his platform to expose Geller as a fake.”

As per Love Johnny Carson, Geller’s scheduled act for The Tonight Show was to involve the mentalist bending an array of metal objects using only “his mind,” a fairly straightforward trick that, Carson believed, most amateur magicians like himself could perform.

Prior to Geller’s performance, however, Carson instructed his staff to ensure that no one (especially Geller) touch any of the items for the act ahead of time, forcing Geller to perform the feat without any means of preparation.

Due to the last-minute change, Geller’s act wound up being a catastrophe, with the mentalist only able to slightly bend one spoon over the course of five segments spread over the course of 28 minutes.

“I didn’t know at that time that [Carson] was an amateur magician,” Geller told Malkoff years later. “I also didn’t know that he was a total skeptic. I was humiliated. It was my first major TV show in America. By the end of the show, I was devastated. I thought to myself, ‘Uri Geller, you are finished.”

Fortunately, Geller wound up quickly finding his way back to the mainstream spotlight, leading to his successful magical act on The Merv Griffin Show a short time later.