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Ricky Jay, Magician Who Mastered Sleight of Hand, Dies at 72 Ricky Jay, Gifted Magician, Actor and Author, Is Dead at 70
(about 17 hours later)
Ricky Jay, a revered sleight-of-hand magician who shined light on centuries of illusionists and consulted with Hollywood to make the impossible seem real, died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 72. Ricky Jay, the master-showman magician, actor, scholar, special effects consultant and author who was called “the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive” by writers for the most prestigious publications of his time, died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was believed to be 70, although some sources said he was 72.
His longtime manager, Winston Simone, confirmed his death. Winston Simone, his manager, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.
Mr. Jay was known for his command of cards, whether conjuring them with precision or flinging them into the rind of a watermelon. He frequented talk shows and performed in several one-man shows directed by the playwright David Mamet, including “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants.” Mr. Jay could hit a target with a single playing card at 190 feet and could aim multiple cards at a fresh watermelon, piercing its flesh time after time. But even moviegoers and television viewers who had little interest in magic had opportunities to see Mr. Jay in his 40 or so film and TV roles.
The consulting company Mr. Jay founded with Michael Weber in the 1990s, Deceptive Practices, worked with directors in Hollywood and on Broadway to create illusions. He also appeared in movies like “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” “Tomorrow Never Dies” and “The Prestige,” as well as the television series “Deadwood.” They included “Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997), the James Bond film (starring Pierce Brosnan) in which he played a cyberterrorist, and “Boogie Nights” (1997), as a porn-film camera operator. He narrated the 1999 anthology film “Magnolia,” whose ensemble cast included Jason Robards, Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman. He played a cardsharp, Eddie Sawyer, on the first season (2004) of HBO’s notably dark Wild West series “Deadwood.”
A student of his craft, Mr. Jay collected artifacts from magic’s history and often wrote about magicians who might otherwise have been forgotten. There was a limit to what he would share, however. Mr. Jay was adamant about preserving the mystery behind his tricks. In his first film, David Mamet’s thriller “House of Cards” (1987), Mr. Jay portrayed the obviously superior poker player who stuns Joe Mantegna’s cocky character by beating his three aces. “Club flush,” his character announces calmly. “You owe me $6,000. Thank you very much. Next case.” He had roles in other Mamet films, including “The Spanish Prisoner,” “Redbelt” and “State and Main.”
“Most people realize that magical powers are not being invoked and that it’s someone who’s created a way to mystify and entertain you,” Mr. Jay told The New York Times in 2002. “The key to that is surprise. If you’re giving away the method, you’re denying someone the surprise.” From the beginning of his show-business career, Mr. Jay was a colorful character, with chest-length dark hair in his youth and a bushy matching beard. A large man, he could have been mistaken for a roadie in the years he was opening for rock groups. In later years, he cut his hair but kept the beard; eventually, both were tinged with gray.
Richard Jay Potash was born in Brooklyn before his family moved to the New Jersey suburbs, according to a 1993 profile in The New Yorker. But Mr. Jay did not like to reveal his age or discuss his childhood, telling the magazine, “I grew up like Athena — covered with playing cards instead of armor — and, at the age of 7, materialized on a TV show, doing magic.” Over the decades, he was a regular on talk shows hosted by Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore, Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Conan O’Brien and on various incarnations of “The Tonight Show,” beginning in the Carson era.
And Mr. Jay kept doing it, developing into a magician many considered the greatest sleight-of-hand artist in the world. He “defined the terms of his art” for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, according to a biography on his website. He and a partner, Michael Weber, founded Deceptive Practices, a consulting firm, in the 1990s. Their film-industry projects included a wheelchair that made Gary Sinise’s Vietnam War-veteran character in “Forrest Gump” appear to be a double amputee. A 2012 documentary about Mr. Jay’s life and career was titled “Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay.”
Audiences were often flummoxed by Mr. Jay’s card tricks. When pressured to impress at a dinner party, he told a guest to pick a card. After the guest named the three of hearts, Mr. Jay shuffled, gripped the deck and flung it across the table, causing the cards to strike an open wine bottle, according to The New Yorker. To the guest’s dismay, the three of hearts appeared inside the bottle’s neck. As an author of 11 books, Mr. Jay earned enthusiastic reviews. His last, titled (in part) “Matthias Buchinger: ‘The Greatest German Living’” (2016), was pronounced awe-inspiring by The Los Angeles Times, beguiling by The New York Review of Books and tantalizing by Bookforum. Writing in The New York Times, Charles McGrath described Mr. Jay as the “master of a prose style that qualifies him as perhaps the last of the great 19th-century authors.”
Mr. Jay also frequently wrote and spoke on odd and varied subjects that were adjacent to magic, such as con games and sense perception. He was once the curator of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts and had been elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society, his online biography said. Richard Jay Potash was born in 1948 (or 1946) in Brooklyn, the older of two children of Samuel Potash and Shirley (Katz) Potash and the grandson of Max Katz, a Hungarian-born accountant who was also an accomplished amateur magician. The family soon moved to Elizabeth, N.J.
Among the overlooked showmen he brought back to life with his research and writing: Matthias Buchinger, an 18th-century German with no hands or feet, and Max Malini, who turned coins into ice in the early 20th century. Ricky first performed magic in public at a magicians’ association picnic in Sheepshead Bay, at the age of 4. At 7, he appeared on a television show called “Time for Pets,” plopping a guinea pig into a top hat and appearing to turn it into a chicken. The sign behind him said “world’s youngest magician.”
“I sort of think of Ricky as the intellectual elite of magicians,” the actor Steve Martin told The New Yorker. “Ricky’s a master of his craft.” “It’s safe to say that my parents just didn’t get it or didn’t get me, and we had no rapport,” he recalled in the film documentary and similarly in a 1993 profile in The New Yorker, explaining why he deliberately refused to talk about them or his childhood in any detail. His one warm memory of his mother and father, he said, was their agreeing to hire Al Flosso, a magician who was a hit on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” to perform at his bar mitzvah.
Asked by The Times about duplicity for a 2013 article, Mr. Jay, who is survived by his wife, Chrisann Verges, argued: “You wouldn’t want to live in a world where you couldn’t be conned. Because it would mean you’re living in a world where you never trusted anyone or anything.” And then, thanks to “the audacity of youth,” he said in the documentary, he was gone. “I left home very early and basically never returned,” Mr. Jay said.
As a teenager, he ran away to work in Lake George, the upstate New York resort area. Later he was booked at the Electric Circus, the East Village hippie-era temple, doing his act between Ike and Tina Turner’s music and Timothy Leary’s lectures on LSD. Eventually he enrolled in five different colleges but never, he recalled later, advanced past freshman status at any of them.
“Early on, I knew I didn’t want to do the kind of magic other people were doing,” he said in the New Yorker profile. “So I started buying old books” to research the history of the form.
He built his fame with what The New Yorker called an “out-of-left-field brand of gonzo-hip comedy magic, a combination of chops and artistic irreverence.” His Off Broadway productions included “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants,” directed by Mr. Mamet.
His other books included “Cards as Weapons” (1977), “Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women” (1986) and “Celebrations of Curious Characters” (2011).
In 2002 Mr. Jay married Chrisann Verges, an Emmy-winning producer and location manager, and she survives him.
He was often asked to reveal at least some of the secrets of his magic acts, but he considered that sort of thing grossly counterproductive.
“Most people realize that magical powers are not being invoked and that it’s someone who’s created a way to mystify and entertain you,” Mr. Jay told The Times in 2002. “The key to that is surprise. If you’re giving away the method, you’re denying someone the surprise.”