Ricky Jay Secrets Of The Magus.pdf

MARK SINGER

SECRETS OF THE MAGUS

he playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher

afﬁrm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton

Hotel in Chicago, this happened:

Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was per-

forming magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and

Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the

hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread

the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a

speciﬁc card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuf-

ﬂed, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and

name his card.

“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the

top card.

He turned over the three of clubs.

Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly an-

nounced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”

After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only

do this for one person at a time.”

Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”

Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of

procedure.” A longer pause. “All right—what was the card?”

“Two of spades.”

Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its

top card.

LIFE STORIES

The deuce of spades.

A small riot ensued.

Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited

him to a New Year’s Eve dinner party at her home. About a dozen other people

attended. Well past midnight, everyone gathered around a coffee table as Jay, at

Baron’s request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several daz-

zling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, “Come on,

Ricky. Why don’t you do something truly amazing?”

Baron recalls that at that moment “the look in Ricky’s eyes was, like, ‘Mort—

you have just fucked with the wrong person.’ ”

Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, “The three of hearts.”

After shufﬂing, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprung

it, cascading all ﬁfty-two cards so that they travelled the length of the table and

pelted an open wine bottle.

“O.K., Mort, what was your card again?”

“The three of hearts.”

“Look inside the bottle.”

Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke

up immediately.

ONE morning last December, a few days before Christmas, Jay came to see me

in my ofﬁce. He wore a dark-gray suit and a black shirt that was open at the col-

lar, and the colors seemed to match his mood. The most uplifting magic, Jay be-

lieves, has a spontaneous, improvisational vigor. Nevertheless, because he

happened to be in New York we had made a date to get together, and I, invoking

a journalistic imperative, had speciﬁcally requested that he come by my ofﬁce

and do some magic while I took notes. He hemmed and hawed and then, reluc-

tantly, consented. Though I had no idea what was in store, I anticipated being

completely fooled.

At that point, I had known Jay for two years, during which we had discussed

his theories of magic, his relationships with and opinions of other practition-

ers of the art, his rigid opposition to public revelations of the techniques of

magic, and his relentless passion for collecting rare books and manuscripts,

art, and other artifacts connected to the history of magic, gambling, unusual

entertainments, and frauds and conﬁdence games. He has a skeptically

friendly, mildly ironic conversational manner and a droll, ﬁligreed prose style.

Jay’s collection functions as a working research library. He is the author of

dozens of scholarly articles and also of two diverting and richly informative

books, “Cards as Weapons” (1977) and “Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women”

(1986). For the past several years, he has devoted his energies mainly to schol-

arship and to acting in and consulting on motion pictures. Though he loves to

perform, he is extremely selective about venues and audiences. I’ve attended

SECRETS OF THE MAGUS

lectures and demonstrations by him before gatherings of East Coast under-

graduates, West Coast students of the history of magic, and Midwestern

bunco-squad detectives. Studying videotapes of him and observing at ﬁrst

hand some of his serendipitous microbursts of legerdemain have taught me

how inappropriate it is to say that “Ricky Jay does card tricks”—a characteri-

zation as inadequate as “Sonny Rollins plays tenor saxophone” or “Darci

Kistler dances.” None of my scrutinizing has yielded a shred of insight into

how he does what he does. Every routine appears seamless, unparsable, sim-

ply magical.

Before getting down to business in my ofﬁce, we chatted about this and that:

water spouters and armless origami artists and equestrian bee trainers, all sub-

jects that Jay has written about. As we were talking, an editor friend and two

other colleagues dropped by. I had introduced Jay and the editor once before

and—presumptuously, it turned out—had mentioned earlier that morning

that he would be coming by for a private performance. Politely but ﬁrmly, Jay

made it plain that an audience of one was what he had in mind. There was an

awkward moment after the others left. I apologized for the intrusion, and he

apologized for not being more accommodating. He reassured me that he still

had something to show me. My cluttered ofﬁce didn’t feel right, however, so we

headed upstairs to a lunchroom, found that it was unoccupied, and seated our-

selves in a corner booth, facing each other. He unzipped a black leather clutch

that he had brought with him and removed a deck of red Bee playing cards im-

printed with the logo of Harrah’s Casino.

In “Cards as Weapons” Jay refers to Dai Vernon, who died last year, at ninety-

eight, as “the greatest living contributor to the magical art,” and he quotes

Vernon’s belief that “cards are like living, breathing human beings and should

be treated accordingly.” I was reminded of Vernon’s dictum as Jay caressed the

deck, as gently as if it were a newly hatched chick. He has small hands—just

large enough so that a playing card ﬁts within the plane of his palm. There is a

slightly raised pad of ﬂesh on the underside of the ﬁrst joint of each ﬁnger. “Not

the hands of a man who has done a lot of hard labor,” Jay said—a completely

disingenuous line, to which he added, “One of the best sleight-of-hand guys I

know is a plumber.”

Jay’s hands seem out of scale with the rest of him. He is of average height but

has a hefty, imposing build. During the seventies, he regularly toured with var-

ious rock groups as an opening act and could easily have passed as foreman of

the road crew; at the time, he had dark-brown hair that reached the middle of

his back, and a dense, ﬂowing beard. He now keeps his hair and beard neatly

trimmed. He has a ﬂeshy face, a high forehead, and dark eyes. His eyes light up

and then crinkle when he laughs—a burst of what might or might not indicate

pleasure, followed by a dry, wise-sounding chuckle that could mean anything.

His inﬂection is New York with a Flatbush edge. In three of Mamet’s ﬁlms—

“House of Games,” “Things Change,” and “Homicide”—Jay has been cast to

LIFE STORIES

type as a conﬁdence man, a gangster, and an Israeli terrorist, respectively. In

one scene of the play within a play of “House of Games,” he portrays a menac-

ing professional gambler.

“I’m always saying there’s no correlation between gambling and magic,” Jay

said as he shufﬂe-cut the cards. “But this is a routine of actual gamblers’ tech-

niques within the context of a theatrical magic presentation.”

He noticed me watching him shufﬂing, and asked softly, with deadpan sin-

cerity, “Does that look fair?”

When I said it looked fair, he dealt two hands of ﬁve-card draw and told me

to lay down my cards. Two pair. Then he laid down his. A straight.

“Was that fair?” he said. “I don’t think so. Let’s discuss the reason why that

wasn’t fair. Even though I shufﬂed openly and honestly, I didn’t let you cut the

cards. So let’s do it again, and this time I’ll let you cut the cards.”

He shufﬂed again, I cut the cards, he dealt, and this time I had three tens.

“Ready to turn them over?”

My three-of-a-kind compared unfavorably with his diamond ﬂush.

“Is that fair?” he said again. “I don’t think so. Let’s talk about why that might

not be fair. Even though I shufﬂed the cards”—he was now reshufﬂing the

deck—“and you cut the cards, you saw me pick up the cards after you cut

them, and maybe you think there was some way for me to nullify the cut by

sleight of hand. So this time I’ll shufﬂe the cards and you shufﬂe the cards.”

Jay shufﬂed the deck, I rifﬂe-shufﬂed the deck and handed it back to him, and

he said, “And I’ll deal six hands of poker—one for myself and ﬁve for you. I’ll let

you choose any one of the ﬁve. And I’ll beat you.”

He dealt six hands. Instead of revealing only one of my ﬁve hands, I turned

them all face up.

“Oh, oh,” he said. “I see you want to turn them all over. I only intended for

you to pick one—but, well, no, that’s all right.”

The best of my ﬁve hands was two pair.

Jay said, “Now, did that seem fair?”

I said yes.

Jay said, “I don’t think so,” and showed me his cards—four kings.

I rested my elbows on the table and massaged my forehead.

“Now, why might that be unfair?” he continued. “I’ll tell you why. Because,

even though you shufﬂed, I dealt the cards. That time, I also shufﬂed the cards.

Now, this time you shufﬂe the cards and you deal the cards. And you pick the

number of players. And you designate any hand for me and any hand for you.”

After shufﬂing, I dealt four hands, arranged as the points of a square. I chose

a hand for myself and selected one for him. My cards added up to nothing—

king-high nothing.

“Is that fair?” Jay said, picking up his cards, waiting a beat, and returning

them to the table, one by one—the coup de grâce. “I. Don’t. Think. So.” One,

two, three, four aces.

SECRETS OF THE MAGUS

...

JAY has an anomalous memory, extraordinarily retentive but riddled with

hard-to-account-for gaps. “I’m becoming quite worried about my memory,” he

said not long ago. “New information doesn’t stay. I wonder if it’s the Nutra-

Sweet.” As a child, he read avidly and could summon the title and the author of

every book that had passed through his hands. Now he gets lost driving in his

own neighborhood, where he has lived for several years—he has no idea how

many. He once had a summer job tending bar and doing magic at a place called

the Royal Palm, in Ithaca, New York. On a bet, he accepted a mnemonic chal-

lenge from a group of friendly patrons. A numbered list of a hundred arbitrary

objects was drawn up: No. 3 was “paintbrush,” No. 18 was “plush ottoman,” No.

25 was “roaring lion,” and so on. “Ricky! Sixty-ﬁve!” someone would demand,

and he had ten seconds to respond correctly or lose a buck. He always won, and,

to this day, still would. He is capable of leaving the house wearing his suit jacket

but forgetting his pants. He can recite verbatim the rapid-ﬁre spiel he delivered a

quarter of a century ago, when he was brieﬂy employed as a carnival barker:

“See the magician; the ﬁre ‘manipulator’; the girl with the yellow e-e-elastic tis-

sue. See Adam and Eve, boy and girl, brother and sister, all in one, one of the

world’s three living ‘morphrodites.’ And the e-e-electrode lady . . .” He can quote

verse after verse of nineteenth-century Cockney rhyming slang. He says he can-

not remember what age he was when his family moved from Brooklyn to the

New Jersey suburbs. He cannot recall the year he entered college or the year he

left. “If you ask me for speciﬁc dates, we’re in trouble,” he says.

Michael Weber, a fellow-magician and close friend, has said, “Basically,

Ricky remembers nothing that happened after 1900.”

Jay has many loyal friends, a protective circle that includes a lot of people

with show-business and antiquarian-book-collecting connections and re-

markably few with magic-world connections.

Marcus McCorison, a former president of the American Antiquarian Society,

where Jay has lectured and performed, describes him as “a deeply serious

scholar—I think he knows more about the history of American conjuring than

anyone else.”

Nicolas Barker, who recently retired as one of the deputy keepers of the

British Library, says, “Ricky would say you can’t be a good conjurer without

knowing the history of your profession, because there are no new tricks under

the sun, only variations. He’s a superbly gifted conjurer, and he’s an immensely

scholarly person whose knowledge in his chosen ﬁeld is gigantic, in a class by

itself. And, like any other scholarly person, he has a very good working knowl-

edge of ﬁelds outside his own.”

The actor Steve Martin said not long ago, “I sort of think of Ricky as the in-

tellectual élite of magicians. I’ve had experience with magicians my whole life.

He’s expertly able to perform and yet he knows the theory, history, literature of

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