Table Of ContentIllusionist Ricky Jay, a keeper of magic’s secrets,
conjures up a dirty deal in TV’s “Deadwood”
b y n e i l a . g r a u e r
photograph by theo westenberger
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in the newtvwestern“Deadwood,”Ricky Jay plays a parlance, and in it Jay performed truly unbelievable feats of
craps dealer and con man named Eddie Sawyer, and woe to card dealing, card throwing, mnemonics, pickpocketing and
the greenhorn who bellies up to his table. Not since the many other lost or dying tricks of the bamboozler’s trade.
World War IIhero Audie Murphy played a World War II “The idea of crime based on wit is kind of wonderful,” Jay
hero has a role been so cunningly cast. Jay is perhaps the told me. “There’s not much admirable in a guy who comes at
world’s greatest sleight-of-hand artist as well as a leading you with a gun and says, ‘Give me your money.’ But a guy who
scholar of prestidigitation and illusion. The latest of his four makes you sign a piece of paper, and then you find out you’ve
books, published last year, is Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten bought the Brooklyn Bridge—the con is enormously ap-
Luck. To write the history, Jay drew on his own collection of pealing. And it’s theatrical. The con—the big con, especial-
thousands of dice, some centuries old and many loaded, ly—is an entire theatrical orchestration for an audience of
shaved or otherwise altered for cheating. That “Deadwood,” one. It’s both lovely and diabolical at the same time.”
set in an 1870s gold-mining camp in what is now South Dako- While other magicians rely on smoke and mirrors or leggy
ta, would make keen use of Jay’s arcane knowledge is no ac- assistants or computerized pyrotechnics to distract, the essence
cident; he’s also one of the scriptwriters. of Jay’s artistry is its disarming directness. In On the Stem, Jay
Jay has a devoted following, and if his fans thrill to him in routinely invited an audience member onto the stage and asked
“Deadwood,” which wraps up its first season this month on him for a credit card. Jay pulled out his own wallet and displayed
HBO, many also worry that the series and his movie career its contents—cash, theater tickets, a photograph—then placed
might cut into his stage performances, which are already as the credit card in a small yellow envelope, put the envelope in
rare as a royal flush and usually the toughest ticket in town. his wallet, wrapped a rubber band around it and gave it to the
His breakthrough show in New York City, 1994’s Ricky Jay man, who put it in his pocket. Pause. Now check the wallet, Jay
and His 52 Assistants—it was a solo gig directed by David would instruct. The man took out the wallet, removed the rub-
Mamet, with the “assistants” being a deck of cards—sold out ber band and opened it:empty, except for the envelope. Jay
allperformancesand won an Obie before he took it to cities then reached into his own jacket and retrieved the cash, the-
on five continents. Eight years later, his off-Broadway show ater tickets and photo. The man opened the envelope to find
Ricky Jay:On the Stem, also directed by Mamet, played before that it contained only a “Brooklyn Bridge Ownership” card. Just
a packed house for six months. It was a paean to the old-time then, an associate of Jay’s would run from the back of the the-
confidence artists along Broadway, or the “stem,”in huckster ater toward the stage calling out the man’s name and shouting
“Telegram!” He would hand the man his credit card.
People ìare fooled today by the same things that fooled them Afriend of Jay’s, the cinematographer Caleb Deschanel
500 years ago,îsays Jay, maybe the worldís greatest conjurer. (The Passion of the Christ, The Black Stallion, The Right Stuff),
says Jay has perfected a kind of psychological subterfuge: “I slowing down. In fact, admirers have for years been paying
think a lot of why we are fooled by the things Ricky does is him the ominous tribute of casting his performances as his-
that he’s able to use our natural instincts against us, so that toric. “Some people can tell their grandchildren that they saw
you look one way when you should be looking in another.” Muhammad Ali box,” political pundit Charles Krauthammer
Deschanel recalls the time Jay worked wonders with a piece wrote in a 1998 column that urged readers to catch Jay’s act.
of paper. “As he folded and tore the paper, it took on the “You’ll be able to tell yours that you saw Ricky Jay deal.”
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- jay’s early years are famously sketchy, and
ing things I have ever seen. His magic is like great storytelling one can only speculate whether it’s more natural for an illu-
that brings life and reality to the level of myth. You don’t feel sionist to be disinclined to discuss the mundanities of child-
it’s a trick well done. You feel he is operating on another level hood or for a child with a difficult home life to become an il-
that goes to the core of human instinct.” lusionist. He was born in Brooklyn, but won’t say when,
Jay’s work is so astonishing that even magicians sometimes though some sources put it at 1948. He grew up in Elizabeth,
can’t believe it. Responding to a magazine account of a poker New Jersey, but won’t identify his parentsand declines to di-
trick Jay performed privately, a magician wrote that the re- vulge his surname. “Ricky” and “Jay” are his given first and
porter must have been mistaken:the feat could not be car- middle names. He first left home at age 15 and broke with his
ried out. Jay, not one to shrink from a challenge, went on to parents a few years later.
perform the trick every night in On the Stem. “This is the Jay says his greatest influence was his maternal grandfa-
funny thing with magicians,”Jay says. “At one level, it’s awful- ther, Max Katz, a native of Austria, who was an amateur ma-
ly flattering to be able to create a piece that people just gician and such a serious student of chess, billiards and other
thought was the result of some guy in the press being hood- games that he coaxed the finest players to teach him their
winked. But it’s also why I don’t spend a lot of time with ma- moves. “He was a guy who took his passions seriously,” Jay
gicians.” Professionalmagicians, anyway; among Jay’s friends recalls. “And so he had an influence on me far beyond just
are many amateur magicians. magic.” When Jay was 4 years old, Katz introduced him to
Jay, who appears to be in his late 50s or early 60s, recently Dai Vernon, a Canadian-born master magician and sleight-
married his longtime partner, Chrisann Verges, a movie and of-hand artist (who would become Jay’s mentor). The setting
TVproducer. They share a Los Angeles-area house and also a was a family barbecue, and little Jay performed for the great
New York apartment. He writes, including the Encyclopaedia conjurer—multiplying packets of coffee creamer.
Britannica’s entry on magic. He delves so deeply into the his- Jay first performed magicon television at age 7. By 1962,
tory of bizarre entertainments, like singing mice and mind- an adolescent “Tricky Ricky” was being touted in one magic
reading pigs, that the New York Timesonce referred to Jay and industry magazine as America’s youngest magician.
Mamet, his frequent collaborator, as the “wizards of odd.” He After leaving home, Jay attended four or five colleges, but
does a weekly public radio show, “Jay’s Journal,” and his con- never graduated. ACornell University classmate was quoted
sulting firm, Deceptive Practices, advises moviemakers on in a 1993 article on Jay in theNew Yorkeras saying that Jay
ploys and special effects, such as Gary Sinise’s “amputated” “sat in his room and practiced card tricks” about ten hours a
legs in Forrest Gump. He has acted in 16 movies in as many day. Back then, Jay also worked as a bartender, sang in a doo-
years. He insists he can continue to do it all. Still, he did hint wop group called the Deaf Tones, sold encyclopedias, did ac-
to me that performing On the Stem, not to mention practic- counting work on Wall Street and performed magic at re-
ing for it hours each day, was exhausting. “It’s a hard show to sorts in the Catskill Mountains. He performed twice on the
do,” he said at the time. “It’s live theater. There is no televi- “Tonight Show” as a guest of Johnny Carson, himself an ac-
sion editing here. Every night. Most people don’t have the lux- complished magician. On the road, Jay served as an opening
ury of coming back. They’ve got one shot at seeing me do a act for the likes of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
show. They’re coming because they’ve heard I do a good show. In Jay’s sort of magic, there are no shortcuts. “To succeed
I’ve got to give them a good show. Night after night. There’s as a conjurer,” said one of his heroes, Jean-Eugène Robert-
never a night to relax, never a night to let up. Never. Never.” Houdin, the 19th-century French master of illusion from
Such talk makes some Jay watchers anxious that the man whom Harry Houdini took his stage name, “three things are
they say is the greatest conjurer of the last century may be essential: first, dexterity; second, dexterity; and third, dex-
terity.”Jay is best known for his uncanny way with playing
NEIL A. GRAUER, a Baltimore-based writer and caricaturist, is cards. According to the Guinness Book of World Records,Jay
the author of Remember Laughter: ALife of James Thurber. has thrown a card farther, higher and faster than anyone. He
Photographer THEO WESTENBERGERis based in New York. captured the records one day in 1976; one card he threw trav-
eled 135 feet; another sailed into a window several stories up; Still, at Jay’s house near Los Angeles he has his own library
another flew 90 miles an hour. He throws a card with such of some 5,000 books and tens of thousands of lithographs,
deadly precision it can pierce a watermelon at 20 paces. In engravings, playbills and entertainment ephemera. “I’m very
one motion he can spray an entire deck of cards at an open comfortable in my home, with my wife, my dog and my col-
wine bottle, and all the cards splatter around it except a des- lection,” Jay says. “It’s where I read and write.”
ignated one, which, somehow, curls and slips into the bottle. Not so comfortable, fans might hope, that he gives up the
His first book, 1977’s Cards as Weapons, is a collector’s item. grueling work of making magic.
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 andcut. 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.
