Ricky Jay

• Born: June 26, 1946
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: November 24, 2018
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Magician and actor

An accomplished sleight-of-hand artist, Jay was a film and television actor and a technical consultant on feature films. He was a scholar and collector of ephemera (posters and other paper advertisements) on magicians, vaudeville-style entertainments, and novelty acts.

Early Life

Ricky Jay was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1948, and grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Jay typically declined to discuss his childhood, indicating that his parents discouraged his interests, though they did allow him to have a favorite magician perform at his Bar Mitzvah. Jay was close to his maternal grandfather, accountant Max Katz, an accomplished amateur magician and member of the Society of American Magicians. Jay performed a magic trick informally for society members at the age of four; at seven he made his first television appearance as a magician; by his teenage years he was known professionally as “Tricky Ricky.”

Jay left home at fifteen, and by eighteen he was supporting himself in a variety of jobs. He appeared twice on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, while attending several colleges, including Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, but he spent most of his time learning and practicing magic. In the 1970s, he moved to California to study with sleight-of-hand expert Charlie Miller and magician Dai Vernon, known as “The Professor.”

Life’s Work

In the 1980s, Jay appeared as an opening act for musicians ranging from the new-wave B-52s to jazz singer Anita O’Day. He became known for his expertise at close-up magic and sleight-of-hand card tricks and for his devotion to the idea of magic as a source of wonder. He could win endless hands of poker, even when audience volunteers shuffled and dealt the cards; change a torn piece of paper into a butterfly; or throw a playing card hard enough from ten paces away to pierce the outer rind of a watermelon. Jay was once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for throwing (“scaling”) a card 195 feet. He could also perform mental feats, such as reciting the works of William Shakespeare while simultaneously playing chess and calculating cube roots of numbers called out by audience members. He would not reveal the secrets behind illusions and preferred the company of amateur magicians to professional showmen.

In 1994, Jay performed a one-man Off-Broadway show, Ricky Jay and His Fifty-Two Assistants, directed by playwright and filmmaker David Mamet. The show consistently sold out and was revived for a ten-week run in 1998. Mamet also directed Ricky Jay: On the Stem (2002), in which Jay told stories about early con artists while performing a range of close-up illusions.

As an actor, Jay appeared in several films and television programs, often playing some type of con artist. He served as technical adviser on films involving gambling and cons, including Ocean’s Thirteen (2007), The Prestige (2006), and The Illusionist (2006). He designed a wheelchair to make an actor appear legless in Forrest Gump (1994) and developed a bit for comedian Steve Martin, in which Martin pulls a series of improbable items from the fly of his pants. Jay acted in seven films directed by Mamet, serving as a consultant on three, and Jay appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson’s films Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999). In 2004, Jay wrote an episode for the television series Deadwood, in which he had a recurring role as card sharp Eddie Sawyer. From late 2009 to early 2010, he returned to the stage for a show, titled Ricky Jay: A Rogue's Gallery, at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles that combined more personal conversation with heavily improvisational performances.

While studying magic, Jay became fascinated with the history of entertainment and the books he consulted. His personal collection included thousands of books, ephemera (posters, tickets, and playbills), and objects related to historical and novelty entertainments. He wrote several books, among them Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (1986) and Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (2001), and in them he collected stories about unusual entertainers throughout history, including vaudeville acts based on physical deformities, a mind-reading horse that entertained Shakespeare, and performers who sang happily while crucified or appeared to amputate their own noses.

Into the second decade of the twenty-first century, Jay continued to write and act. In addition to publishing such books as Celebrations of Curious Characters (2011) and the well-received Matthias Buchinger: "The Greatest German Living" (2016), he appeared in the dramatic comedy The Automatic Hate (2015) and had a recurring role as the character T. H. Vignetti in the third and final season of the Amazon original series Sneaky Pete, which was released in 2019. Meanwhile, in 2012 a documentary about his life and career, Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, had been released.

Jay died at his home in Los Angeles on November 24, 2018, at the age of seventy-two.

Significance

In addition to his accomplishments as a magician and his successful one-man shows, Jay both acted in and consulted on many notable film and television projects. He is noted for his wide-ranging scholarship and ability to speak with erudition and warmth on the history of entertainment, magic, illusion, novelty acts, and con games. Because he was not merely a performer but a historian with stringent scruples about preservation of artifacts and arcane knowledge, Jay’s lectures, exhibits, and publications taught and perpetuated his reverence for the illusionist’s skill and the timeless, unquenchable human desire to entertain.

Bibliography

Gates, Anita. "Ricky Jay, Gifted Magician, Actor and Author, Is Dead at 72." The New York Times, 25 Nov. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/obituaries/ricky-jay-dead.html. Accessed 28 Sept. 2020.

Grauer, Neil A. “The Wizard of Odd.” Smithsonian 35, no. 3 (June, 2004): 109–111. Compares Jay to the escape artist Harry Houdini.

Jay, Ricky. Extraordinary Exhibitions: The Wonderful Remains of an Enormous Head, the Whimsiphusicon, and Death to the Savage Unitarians, Broadsides from the Collection of Ricky Jay. New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2005. Selections from Jay’s personal collection of advertisements for strange and unusual acts dating back to the 1600s, with his explanatory comments.

Jay, Ricky. Jay’s Journal of Anomalies: Conjurers, Cheats, Hustlers, Hoaxsters, Pranksters, Jokesters, Pretenders, Sideshow Showmen, Armless Calligraphers, Mechanical Marvels, Popular Entertainments. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Collects all sixteen issues of the quarterly journal, with Jay’s savvy, humorous articles about eccentric nineteenth-century entertainments.

Singer, Mark. “Secrets of the Magus.” In Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick. New York: Random House, 2000. Portrait of Jay as a magician, collector, and scholar. Discusses Jay’s involvement with the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts and his views on performing.