Magician, actor, and scholar Ricky Jay, who passed away on Saturday, November 24, at age 72, was a one-of-a-kind entertainer who lived out of step with the modern age but managed regularly to evoke awe—genuine, gobsmacked awe—in an era beset by casual cynicism.
Jay was a prodigious polymath who achieved renown in at least four different areas: magic, card-throwing, acting, and scholarship on the history of trickery, peculiar people, and puzzling events—topics he sometimes called “anomalies.”
On stage, Jay was one of the greatest sleight-of-hand artists. He was also a first-class raconteur who delivered riveting performances filled with incredible tales and bawdy wisecracks. He combined his profound skills of prestidigitation, his gift of gab, and his wicked sense of humor with a deep knowledge of the history of conjuring and con artistry. He would unleash mind-boggling wizardry with playing cards while delivering a colorful, ribald patter about the history of magic and mountebanks, filled with charmingly antiquated terminology and sly double-entendres.
Richard Jay Potash began learning his craft at age 4, from his grandfather, Max Katz, a magic enthusiast who introduced Jay to many famous magicians of the era, including Slydini, Cardini, Al Flosso, and Francis Carlyle. By age 7, Jay was performing publicly.
By his twenties, he had begun to achieve renown under the stage name Ricky Jay, a long-haired, bell-bottom-wearing illusionist who performed at venues ranging from rock concerts with Ike and Tina Turner to television programs such as The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Saturday Night Live, and even his own TV specials. But unlike other famous magicians, who indulged in increasingly absurd grand stunts such as making a Learjet or the Statue of Liberty disappear, Jay continued to focus on performing close-up magic that was far more dependent on his dexterity than high-tech artifice.
After establishing himself on television as one of America’s leading magicians, Jay appeared in three live, one-man shows directed by David Mamet, including the brilliantly named Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants. His shows typically fused sublime soliloquies about famous charlatans and sideshow performers with an intimate performance featuring card effects, a cups-and-balls routine, and his famed card-throwing. Promotional images for Jay’s shows frequently featured him posed in the famed “Kubrick Stare,” with his head tilted down, glowering up over his sagging eyelids—quite effectively portraying him as a dark, menacing figure of mystery and danger.
Jay’s mystique was further enhanced by seemingly impossible yet apparently spontaneous conjuring stunts that he sometimes pulled off to satisfy impromptu dares by friends or merely his whimsy. Profiles of Jay—such as Mark Singer’s must-read 1993 New Yorker article “Secrets of the Magus”—are replete with mind-boggling tales of his legerdemain derring-do.
One such incident—recounted by British journalist Suzie Mackenzie in the documentary Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay—brought its viewer to tears (of amazement). On their way to an outdoor café for a lunch interview, Mackenzie and Jay spent over an hour stuck in Los Angeles traffic together on a hot summer day. When they finally arrived and were seated, Jay—who had been in plain view of Mackenzie the entire time—suddenly lifted his menu to reveal a large block of ice on the table in front of him. In the heat, the ice began melting immediately, but no tell-tale drips could be found under the table or nearby. Mackenzie was left wonderstruck.
Jay’s skills of dexterity were not limited to the dark arts of deception. The author of the strange-but-true Cards as Weapons, Jay could throw playing cards at up to 90 miles per hour to distances of nearly 200 feet, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. He could accurately hit a variety of targets with cards from across a room and was especially known for throwing cards so powerfully that they would penetrate a watermelon rind, which he memorably described as the “thick, pachydermatous outer melon layer.” He could also make thrown cards return to his hand like boomerangs, sometimes slicing them in half with scissors as he did so.
As an actor, Jay mostly played small roles—often gamblers, con men, and, of course, magicians—appearing in several films by Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson, including House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Heist, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia. Jay also had success with fictional roles on television programs, playing The Amazing Maleeni in a 2000 X-Files episode and card sharp Eddie Sawyer on the first season of HBO’s Deadwood, for which he also wrote an episode.
Jay’s deep, gritty voice was used to great effect as the narrator in Anderson’s Magnolia, in which he delivered a particularly powerful opening monologue about chance that neatly summarizes his interest in weird phenomena. After describing three increasingly unnerving coincidences, he intones that “it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that this is not just ‘Something That Happened.’ This cannot be ‘One of Those Things.’ This, please, cannot be that. And for what I would like to say, I can’t. This was not just a matter of chance.’ Noooo. These strange things happen all the time.”
Although he routinely played ominous underworld characters, his vulnerability as soft-hearted thief Don “Pinky” Pincus in Mamet’s Heist was particularly poignant. He plays a rueful criminal who likes to talk tough (“My motherf—er is so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him”) but wants to avoid any violence—a doting uncle who will do anything to protect his niece from harm. Jay’s watery eyes, soft features, and understated delivery of cryptic lines like “Cute as a pail full of kittens” make Pinky a believable, relatable, and endearing figure struggling to survive in a bleak, merciless world of backstabbing grifters.
Finally, as a scholar, Jay was a Renaissance man who relished raconteurs, rogues, and rapscallions. A bibliophile and collector of antique ephemera, magical props, and other curiosities, Jay assembled a massive private library filled with manuscripts on all sorts of bizarre topics related to magic, oddball entertainers, card sharps, and the like, sometimes loaning them out to museums for display. He also had a particular nostalgia for vaudeville performers and the carnies of Coney Island, many of whom served as his mentors and friends in his early years as a magician and whom he continued to associate and share research with for as long as they lived.
Jay himself authored nearly a dozen books on topics such as the history of conjuring, confidence games, card cheats, and outlandish people and amusements, including the classic Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women and Celebrations of Curious Characters. Four years of his brief-lived quarterly journal of such wonderments, Jay’s Journal of Anomalies, were collected in a volume of the same name. He also delivered lively, laugh-filled lectures on these and other esoteric topics at museums and universities.
Among the many ludicrous characters Jay chronicled was 29-inch-tall Matthias Buchinger, who was born without hands or lower legs. Despite his disabilities, Buchinger was an artist and calligrapher of tiny illustrations known as micrography, as well as a skilled magician and musician. Jay liked to note that Buchinger had been married four times and fathered at least 14 children. Jay’s final book, Matthias Buchinger: “The Greatest German Living,” was devoted to this subject.
There was substantial crossover between Jay’s scholarship and his magical performances. In one prominent example, Jay would take a break from card effects to recite “Villon’s Straight Tip to All Cross Coves,” a racy nineteenth-century poem about con men filled with evocative Victorian slang that features a refrain about how no matter how successful a grift may be, all the money will soon be blown on alcohol and women. The line appears in the final stanza, entitled The Moral: Until the squeezer nips your scrag / Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
In addition to his natural talents, Jay’s preeminence in his various fields of expertise can be credited to his obsessive devotion to his niche hobbies to the exclusion of virtually all else, as reflected in his relentless pursuit of perfection through thousands of hours of practice manipulating (and throwing) playing cards. In interviews, he talked about spending so many hours every day shuffling and playing with cards alone in a room that he considered the cards his friends. (He married quite late in life, in 2002.) He was so devoted to collecting and reading arcane tomes on the ancient history of magic, card play, confidence games, carnie acts, and many other obscure topics that he joked with a Harvard audience in 1999, “I know absolutely nothing about the twentieth century . . . and I’m not just talking about magic.”
This claim comes from the man who taught coin magic to Robert Redford for The Natural, appeared as a card dealer in a Bob Dylan music video, designed the wheelchair that hid Gary Sinise’s legs in Forrest Gump, played a Bond villain in Tomorrow Never Dies, and was involved in two high-profile feature films about magicians in the same year (2006), appearing as Milton the Magician in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, while creating magical effects for Neil Burger’s The Illusionist.
Fortunately for us, Jay enjoyed showing off his hard-earned skills. After performing a particularly difficult card-throwing trick to win a proposition bet with actor John C. Reilly at the end of Ricky Jay Plays Poker, Jay turns to the camera, beaming, and chortles, “Ain’t life grand?” Then the credits roll.
Sadly, the squeezer has finally nipped his scrag. There will never be another Ricky Jay.
