Ricky Jay, by Neil A Grauer - Wizard of Odd.pdf - R - animga

Illusionist Ricky Jay, a keeper of magic’s secrets,

conjures up a dirty deal in TV’s “Deadwood”

by neil a. grauer photograph by theo westenberger

THE WIZARD

in the new tv western “Deadwood , ” Ricky Jay plays a

craps dealer and con man named Eddie Sawyer, and woe to

the greenhorn who bellies up to his table. Not since the

World War II hero Audie Murphy played a World War II

hero has a role been so cunningly cast. Jay is perhaps the

world’s greatest sleight-of-hand artist as well as a leading

scholar of prestidigitation and illusion. The latest of his four

books, published last year, is Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten

Luck . To write the history, Jay drew on his own collection of

thousands of dice, some centuries old and many loaded,

shaved or otherwise altered for cheating. That “Deadwood,”

set in an 1870s gold-mining camp in what is now South Dako-

ta, would make keen use of Jay’s arcane knowledge is no ac-

cident; he’s also one of the scriptwriters.

Jay has a devoted following, and if his fans thrill to him in

“Deadwood,” which wraps up its first season this month on

HBO , many also worry that the series and his movie career

might cut into his stage performances, which are already as

rare as a royal flush and usually the toughest ticket in town.

His breakthrough show in New York City, 1994’s Ricky Jay

and His 52 Assistants —it was a solo gig directed by David

Mamet, with the “assistants” being a deck of cards—sold out

all performances and won an Obie before he took it to cities

on five continents. Eight years later, his off-Broadway show

Ricky Jay: On the Stem , also directed by Mamet, played before

a packed house for six months. It was a paean to the old-time

confidence artists along Broadway, or the “stem,” in huckster

parlance, and in it Jay performed truly unbelievable feats of

card dealing, card throwing, mnemonics, pickpocketing and

many other lost or dying tricks of the bamboozler’s trade.

“The idea of crime based on wit is kind of wonderful,” Jay

told me. “There’s not much admirable in a guy who comes at

you with a gun and says, ‘Give me your money.’ But a guy who

makes you sign a piece of paper, and then you find out you’ve

bought the Brooklyn Bridge—the con is enormously ap-

pealing. And it’s theatrical. The con—the big con, especial-

ly—is an entire theatrical orchestration for an audience of

one. It’s both lovely and diabolical at the same time.”

While other magicians rely on smoke and mirrors or leggy

assistants or computerized pyrotechnics to distract, the essence

of Jay’s artistry is its disarming directness. In On the Stem , Jay

routinely invited an audience member onto the stage and asked

him for a credit card. Jay pulled out his own wallet and displayed

its contents—cash, theater tickets, a photograph—then placed

the credit card in a small yellow envelope, put the envelope in

his wallet, wrapped a rubber band around it and gave it to the

man, who put it in his pocket. Pause. Now check the wallet, Jay

would instruct. The man took out the wallet, removed the rub-

ber band and opened it: empty, except for the envelope. Jay

then reached into his own jacket and retrieved the cash, the-

ater tickets and photo. The man opened the envelope to find

that it contained only a “Brooklyn Bridge Ownership” card. Just

then, an associate of Jay’s would run from the back of the the-

ater toward the stage calling out the man’s name and shouting

“Telegram!” He would hand the man his credit card.

A friend of Jay’s, the cinematographer Caleb Deschanel

( The Passion of the Christ , The Black Stallion , The Right Stuff ),

People ìare fooled today by the same things that fooled them

500 years ago,î says Jay, maybe the worldís greatest conjurer.

THE WIZARD

of ODD

says Jay has perfected a kind of psychological subterfuge: “I

think a lot of why we are fooled by the things Ricky does is

that he’s able to use our natural instincts against us, so that

you look one way when you should be looking in another.”

Deschanel recalls the time Jay worked wonders with a piece

of paper. “As he folded and tore the paper, it took on the

shape of a butterfly—and then magically the butterfly flew

away. It was in fact a real butterfly. It is one of the most amaz-

ing things I have ever seen. His magic is like great storytelling

that brings life and reality to the level of myth. You don’t feel

it’s a trick well done. You feel he is operating on another level

that goes to the core of human instinct.”

Jay’s work is so astonishing that even magicians sometimes

can’t believe it. Responding to a magazine account of a poker

trick Jay performed privately, a magician wrote that the re-

porter must have been mistaken: the feat could not be car-

ried out. Jay, not one to shrink from a challenge, went on to

perform the trick every night in On the Stem . “This is the

funny thing with magicians,” Jay says. “At one level, it’s awful-

ly flattering to be able to create a piece that people just

thought was the result of some guy in the press being hood-

winked. But it’s also why I don’t spend a lot of time with ma-

gicians.” Professional magicians, anyway; among Jay’s friends

are many amateur magicians.

Jay, who appears to be in his late 50s or early 60s, recently

married his longtime partner, Chrisann Verges, a movie and

TV producer. They share a Los Angeles-area house and also a

New York apartment. He writes, including the Encyclopaedia

Britannica ’s entry on magic. He delves so deeply into the his-

tory of bizarre entertainments, like singing mice and mind-

reading pigs, that the New York Times once referred to Jay and

Mamet, his frequent collaborator, as the “wizards of odd.” He

does a weekly public radio show, “Jay’s Journal,” and his con-

sulting firm, Deceptive Practices, advises moviemakers on

ploys and special effects, such as Gary Sinise’s “amputated”

legs in Forrest Gump. He has acted in 16 movies in as many

years. He insists he can continue to do it all. Still, he did hint

to me that performing On the Stem , not to mention practic-

ing for it hours each day, was exhausting. “It’s a hard show to

do,” he said at the time. “It’s live theater. There is no televi-

sion editing here. Every night. Most people don’t have the lux-

ury of coming back. They’ve got one shot at seeing me do a

show. They’re coming because they’ve heard I do a good show.

I’ve got to give them a good show. Night after night. There’s

never a night to relax, never a night to let up. Never. Never.”

Such talk makes some Jay watchers anxious that the man

they say is the greatest conjurer of the last century may be

slowing down. In fact, admirers have for years been paying

him the ominous tribute of casting his performances as his-

toric. “Some people can tell their grandchildren that they saw

Muhammad Ali box,” political pundit Charles Krauthammer

wrote in a 1998 column that urged readers to catch Jay’s act.

“You’ll be able to tell yours that you saw Ricky Jay deal.”

jay’s early years are famously sketchy, and

one can only speculate whether it’s more natural for an illu-

sionist to be disinclined to discuss the mundanities of child-

hood or for a child with a difficult home life to become an il-

lusionist. He was born in Brooklyn, but won’t say when,

though some sources put it at 1948. He grew up in Elizabeth,

New Jersey, but won’t identify his parents and declines to di-

vulge his surname. “Ricky” and “Jay” are his given first and

middle names. He first left home at age 15 and broke with his

parents a few years later.

Jay says his greatest influence was his maternal grandfa-

ther, Max Katz, a native of Austria, who was an amateur ma-

gician and such a serious student of chess, billiards and other

games that he coaxed the finest players to teach him their

moves. “He was a guy who took his passions seriously,” Jay

recalls. “And so he had an influence on me far beyond just

magic.” When Jay was 4 years old, Katz introduced him to

Dai Vernon, a Canadian-born master magician and sleight-

of-hand artist (who would become Jay’s mentor). The setting

was a family barbecue, and little Jay performed for the great

conjurer—multiplying packets of coffee creamer.

Jay first performed magic on television at age 7. By 1962,

an adolescent “Tricky Ricky” was being touted in one magic

industry magazine as America’s youngest magician.

After leaving home, Jay attended four or five colleges, but

never graduated. A Cornell University classmate was quoted

in a 1993 article on Jay in the New Yorker as saying that Jay

“sat in his room and practiced card tricks” about ten hours a

day. Back then, Jay also worked as a bartender, sang in a doo-

wop group called the Deaf Tones, sold encyclopedias, did ac-

counting work on Wall Street and performed magic at re-

sorts in the Catskill Mountains. He performed twice on the

“Tonight Show” as a guest of Johnny Carson, himself an ac-

complished magician. On the road, Jay served as an opening

act for the likes of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

In Jay’s sort of magic, there are no shortcuts. “To succeed

as a conjurer,” said one of his heroes, Jean-Eugène Robert-

Houdin, the 19th-century French master of illusion from

whom Harry Houdini took his stage name, “three things are

essential: first, dexterity; second, dexterity; and third, dex-

terity.” Jay is best known for his uncanny way with playing

cards. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Jay

has thrown a card farther, higher and faster than anyone. He

captured the records one day in 1976; one card he threw trav-

NEIL A. GRAUER, a Baltimore-based writer and caricaturist, is

the author of Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber.

Photographer THEO WESTENBERGER is based in New York.

eled 135 feet; another sailed into a window several stories up;

another flew 90 miles an hour. He throws a card with such

deadly precision it can pierce a watermelon at 20 paces. In

one motion he can spray an entire deck of cards at an open

wine bottle, and all the cards splatter around it except a des-

ignated one, which, somehow, curls and slips into the bottle.

His first book, 1977’s Cards as Weapons , is a collector’s item.

It is unwise to play poker with this man, as he demonstrat-

ed in On the Stem when he invited an audience member to join

him for a few hands. Jay shuffled, dealt—and won. “Was that

fair?” he said. “I . . . don’t . . . think . . . so.” He let the man

cut the cards. Jay won. He let the man shuffle and cut. Jay dealt

and won. “Was that fair? I . . . don’t . . . think . . . so.” Fi-

nally, the man shuffled and cut the cards while Jay sat with his

hands flat on the table and said, “You pick a hand for me and a

hand for yourself.” The man did so, then turned over the four

cards he selected for himself—all losers. “Was that fair?” Jay

asked, and one by one turned over the cards he had been dealt.

“I”—ace—“don’t”—ace—“think”—ace —“so”—ace.

The only person I ever knew who saw both Houdini and

Jay perform was the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who died last

year at age 99. Hirschfeld marveled at a stunt of Jay’s in

which , sitting with his back to a giant chessboard, he called

out moves to make a knight land on each square while he also

recited Shakespeare, chanted snatches of field-holler songs

and calculated the cube root of six-figure numbers selected

by audience members from a stack of index cards. Hirschfeld

also recalled Houdini’s physical prowess, which enabled him

to, say, swell his wrists while being handcuffed, the better to

slip out later. Hirschfeld, whose particular gift was captur-

ing a personality with a stroke, offered this assessment:

“Ricky is mental and Houdini was muscular.”

Jay suggests that Houdini, best known as an escape artist,

isn’t in his league when it comes to illusions. “He was never a

good magician,” Jay says. “He was one of the most amazing ex-

ponents of bombast in the world, a shameless self-promoter.

He did some real inquiry into the history of magic and unusu-

al entertainers, which I find very appealing. But he treated

other magicians very badly. He is not my hero.” Closer to Jay’s

interests was Max Malini, who lived from 1873 to 1942 and per-

formed for luminaries worldwide, including presidents

Theodore Roosevelt and Warren Harding. Malini, Jay writes

in Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women , could “stand a few inches

from you with a borrowed coin, a lemon, a knife, a tumbler or

a pack of cards and convince you he performs miracles.”

The history of his secretive vocation remains something

of an obsession for Jay, who says magic is the second oldest of

all the arts, after music. His scholarly pursuits were dealt a

blow a decade ago. For five years he had served as the curator

of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and Allied Arts in

Los Angeles, doubling the collection and nearly quadrupling

its value. In 1990, the library was auctioned off and sold for

$2,200,000 to David Copperfield, who moved it to Las

Vegas. Copperfield has reportedly invited Jay to see the col-

lection, but Jay has declined and prefers not to discuss it.

Still, at Jay’s house near Los Angeles he has his own library

of some 5,000 books and tens of thousands of lithographs,

engravings, playbills and entertainment ephemera. “I’m very

comfortable in my home, with my wife, my dog and my col-

lection,” Jay says. “It’s where I read and write.”

Not so comfortable, fans might hope, that he gives up the

grueling work of making magic.

Ricky Jay, by Neil A Grauer - Wizard of Odd.pdf

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