{"id":660,"date":"2026-06-24T12:08:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T12:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=660"},"modified":"2026-06-24T12:08:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T12:08:08","slug":"secrets-of-the-magus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=660","title":{"rendered":"Secrets of the Magus"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The 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:<\/p>\n

Read more The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That\u2019s Taking Over the Internet<\/a><\/p>\n

Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher\u2019s 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, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThree of clubs,\u201d Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.<\/p>\n

He turned over the three of clubs.<\/p>\n

Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, \u201cRicky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.\u201d<\/p>\n

After an interval of silence, Jay said, \u201cThat\u2019s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mosher persisted: \u201cWell, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, \u201cThis is a distinct change of procedure.\u201d A longer pause. \u201cAll right\u2014what was the card?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo of spades.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.<\/p>\n

The deuce of spades.<\/p>\n

A small riot ensued.<\/p>\n

Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited him to a New Year\u2019s 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\u2019s request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, \u201cCome on, Ricky. Why don\u2019t you do something truly amazing?\u201d<\/p>\n

Baron recalls that at that moment \u201cthe look in Ricky\u2019s eyes was, like, \u2018Mort\u2014you have just fucked with the wrong person.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, \u201cThe three of hearts.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cO.K., Mort, what was your card again?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe three of hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLook inside the bottle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately.<\/p>\n

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 collar, and the colors seemed to match his mood. The most uplifting magic, Jay believes, 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, reluctantly, consented. Though I had no idea what was in store, I anticipated being completely fooled.<\/p>\n

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 practitioners 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\u2019s 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, \u201cCards as Weapons\u201d (1977) and \u201cLearned Pigs & Fireproof Women\u201d (1986). For the past several years, he has devoted his energies mainly to scholarship and to acting in and consulting on motion pictures. Though he loves to perform, he is extremely selective about venues and audiences. I\u2019ve attended lectures and demonstrations by him before gatherings of East Coast undergraduates, 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 \u201cRicky Jay does card tricks\u201d\u2014a characterization as inadequate as \u201cSonny Rollins plays tenor saxophone\u201d or \u201cDarci Kistler dances.\u201d None of my scrutinizing has yielded a shred of insight into how he does what he does. Every routine appears seamless, unparsable, simply magical.<\/p>\n

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 subjects 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\u2014presumptuously, it turned out\u2014had 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\u2019t feel right, however, so we headed upstairs to a lunchroom, found that it was unoccupied, and seated ourselves 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 imprinted with the logo of Harrah\u2019s Casino.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In \u201cCards as Weapons\u201d Jay refers to Dai Vernon, who died last year, at ninety-eight, as \u201cthe greatest living contributor to the magical art,\u201d and he quotes Vernon\u2019s belief that \u201ccards are like living, breathing human beings and should be treated accordingly.\u201d I was reminded of Vernon\u2019s dictum as Jay caressed the deck, as gently as if it were a newly hatched chick. He has small hands\u2014just 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. \u201cNot the hands of a man who has done a lot of hard labor,\u201d Jay said\u2014a completely disingenuous line, to which he added, \u201cOne of the best sleight-of-hand guys I know is a plumber.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jay\u2019s 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 various 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\u2014a 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\u2019s films\u2014\u201cHouse of Games,\u201d \u201cThings Change,\u201d and \u201cHomicide\u201d\u2014Jay has been cast to type as a confidence man, a gangster, and an Israeli terrorist, respectively. In one scene of the play within a play of \u201cHouse of Games,\u201d he portrays a menacing professional gambler.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m always saying there\u2019s no correlation between gambling and magic,\u201d Jay said as he shuffle-cut the cards. \u201cBut this is a routine of actual gamblers\u2019 techniques within the context of a theatrical magic presentation.\u201d<\/p>\n

He noticed me watching him shuffling, and asked softly, with deadpan sincerity, \u201cDoes that look fair?\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWas that fair?\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think so. Let\u2019s discuss the reason why that wasn\u2019t fair. Even though I shuffled openly and honestly, I didn\u2019t let you cut the cards. So let\u2019s do it again, and this time I\u2019ll let you cut the cards.\u201d<\/p>\n

He shuffled again, I cut the cards, he dealt, and this time I had three tens.<\/p>\n

\u201cReady to turn them over?\u201d<\/p>\n

My three-of-a-kind compared unfavorably with his diamond flush.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that fair?\u201d he said again. \u201cI don\u2019t think so. Let\u2019s talk about why that might not be fair. Even though I shuffled the cards\u201d\u2014he was now reshuffling the deck\u2014\u201cand 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\u2019ll shuffle the cards and you shuffle the cards.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Jay shuffled the deck, I riffle-shuffled the deck and handed it back to him, and he said, \u201cAnd I\u2019ll deal six hands of poker\u2014one for myself and five for you. I\u2019ll let you choose any one of the five. And I\u2019ll beat you.\u201d<\/p>\n

He dealt six hands. Instead of revealing only one of my five hands, I turned them all face up.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, oh,\u201d he said. \u201cI see you want to turn them all over. I only intended for you to pick one\u2014but, well, no, that\u2019s all right.\u201d<\/p>\n

The best of my five hands was two pair.<\/p>\n

Jay said, \u201cNow, did that seem fair?\u201d<\/p>\n

I said yes.<\/p>\n

Jay said, \u201cI don\u2019t think so,\u201d and showed me his cards\u2014four kings.<\/p>\n

I rested my elbows on the table and massaged my forehead.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, why might that be unfair?\u201d he continued. \u201cI\u2019ll 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014king-high nothing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that fair?\u201d Jay said, picking up his cards, waiting a beat, and returning them to the table, one by one\u2014the coup de gr\u00e2ce. \u201cI. Don\u2019t. Think. So.\u201d One, two, three, four aces.<\/p>\n

Jay has an anomalous memory, extraordinarily retentive but riddled with hard-to-account-for gaps. \u201cI\u2019m becoming quite worried about my memory,\u201d he said not long ago. \u201cNew information doesn\u2019t stay. I wonder if it\u2019s the NutraSweet.\u201d 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\u2014he 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 challenge from a group of friendly patrons. A numbered list of a hundred arbitrary objects was drawn up: No. 3 was \u201cpaintbrush,\u201d No. 18 was \u201cplush ottoman,\u201d No. 25 was \u201croaring lion,\u201d and so on. \u201cRicky! Sixty-five!\u201d 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: \u201cSee the magician; the fire \u2018manipulator\u2019; the girl with the yellow e-e-elastic tissue. See Adam and Eve, boy and girl, brother and sister, all in one, one of the world\u2019s three living \u2018morphrodites.\u2019 And the e-e-electrode lady\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d He can quote verse after verse of nineteenth-century Cockney rhyming slang. He says he cannot 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. \u201cIf you ask me for specific dates, we\u2019re in trouble,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Michael Weber, a fellow-magician and close friend, has said, \u201cBasically, Ricky remembers nothing that happened after 1900.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jay has many loyal friends, a protective circle that includes a lot of people with show-business and antiquarian-book-collecting connections and remarkably few with magic-world connections.<\/p>\n

Marcus McCorison, a former president of the American Antiquarian Society, where Jay has lectured and performed, describes him as \u201ca deeply serious scholar\u2014I think he knows more about the history of American conjuring than anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Nicolas Barker, who recently retired as one of the deputy keepers of the British Library, says, \u201cRicky would say you can\u2019t be a good conjurer without knowing the history of your profession, because there are no new tricks under the sun, only variations. He\u2019s a superbly gifted conjurer, and he\u2019s 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 knowledge of fields outside his own.\u201d<\/p>\n

The actor Steve Martin said not long ago, \u201cI sort of think of Ricky as the intellectual \u00e9lite of magicians. I\u2019ve had experience with magicians my whole life. He\u2019s expertly able to perform and yet he knows the theory, history, literature of the field. Ricky\u2019s a master of his craft. You know how there are those teachers of creative writing who can\u2019t necessarily write but can teach? Well, Ricky can actually do everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

A collector named Michael Zinman says, \u201cHe\u2019s instantly reachable, up to a limit.\u201d Those most familiar with his idiosyncrasies realize that there are at least three Ricky Jays: a public persona, a private persona, and a private persona within the private persona. Jay can remember his age\u2014somewhere in his forties\u2014but says that it is irrelevant. It is also irrelevant that Jay was not his surname at birth; it was his middle name. Janus Cercone, who wrote the screenplay for \u201cLeap of Faith,\u201d a recent film that stars Steve Martin as a flimflam faith healer and credits Jay as the \u201cCons and Frauds Consultant,\u201d told me, \u201cI talk to Ricky three times a day. Other than my husband, he\u2019s my best friend. I think I know him as well as just about anyone does, and I know less about his background and his childhood than about those of anyone else I know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mamet and Jay have been friends for several years\u2014a bond rooted, in part, in their shared fascination with the language, science, and art of cons and frauds.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll call Ricky on the phone,\u201d Mamet says. \u201cI\u2019ll ask him\u2014say, for something I\u2019m writing\u2014\u2018A guy\u2019s wandering through upstate New York in 1802 and he comes to a tavern and there\u2019s some sort of mountebank. What would the mountebank be doing?\u2019 And Ricky goes to his library and then sends me an entire description of what the mountebank would be doing. Or I\u2019ll tell him I\u2019m having a Fourth of July party and I want to do some sort of disappearance in the middle of the woods. He says, \u2018That\u2019s the most bizarre request I\u2019ve ever heard. You want to do a disappearing effect in the woods? There\u2019s nothing like that in the literature. I mean, there\u2019s this one 1760 pamphlet\u2014\u201cJokes, Tricks, Ghosts and Diversions by Woodland, Stream and Campfire.\u201d But, other than that, I can\u2019t think of a thing.\u2019 He\u2019s unbelievably generous. Ricky\u2019s one of the world\u2019s great people. He\u2019s my hero. I\u2019ve never seen anybody better at what he does.\u201d<\/p>\n

I once asked Mamet whether Jay had ever shared with him details of his childhood.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mamet replied, \u201cI can\u2019t remember.\u201d<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cYou can\u2019t remember whether you discussed it or you can\u2019t remember the details?\u201d<\/p>\n

He said, \u201cI can\u2019t remember whether or not I know a better way to dissuade you from your reiteration of that question without seeming impolite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jay\u2019s condensed version of his early life goes like this: \u201cI grew up like Athena\u2014covered with playing cards instead of armor\u2014and, at the age of seven, materialized on a TV show, doing magic.\u201d Confronted with questions about his parents, he suggests a different topic. Whatever injuries were inflicted, his mother and his father were apparently equally guilty. Any enthusiasm he ever expressed they managed not to share. \u201cI\u2019m probably the only kid in history whose parents made him stop taking music lessons,\u201d he says. \u201cThey made me stop studying the accordion. And, I suppose, thank God.\u201d He loved to play basketball. There was a backboard above the garage of the family house, which had aluminum siding. \u201cDon\u2019t dent the house!\u201d his mother routinely warned. His father oiled his hair with Brylcreem and brushed his teeth with Colgate. \u201cHe kept his toothpaste in the medicine cabinet and the Brylcreem in a closet about a foot away,\u201d Jay recalls. \u201cOnce, when I was ten, I switched the tubes. All you need to know about my father is that after he brushed his teeth with Brylcreem he put the toothpaste in his hair.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Jay first performed in public at the age of four, he rejects the notion that magic\u2014or, in any case, his mature style of magic\u2014is suitable entertainment for children. Nor does he apologize for his lack of susceptibility to the charms of children themselves. I once drove with him from central Massachusetts to my home, near New York City. We had to catch a plane together the next day, and I had invited him to spend the night in a spare room, on a floor above and beyond earshot of my three sons. While acknowledging that they were Ricky Jay fans, I promised him that they would all be in bed by the time we arrived and off to school before he awoke the next morning. As it turned out, we had no sooner entered the house than I heard one of my six-year-old twins announce \u201cI think Ricky\u2019s here!\u201d Before he could remove his coat, the three of them, all in their pajamas, had him cornered in the kitchen. My eleven-year-old son handed him a deck of cards. The other boys began parroting the monologue from one of his television appearances\u2014patter from a stunt in which he tosses a playing card like a boomerang and during its return flight bisects it with a pair of giant scissors. Jay gave me the same look I imagine he gave Mort, the unfortunate New Year\u2019s Eve party guest. I immediately reached for the phone directory and found the number of a nearby motel.<\/p>\n

Just as resolutely as he avoids children, Jay declines opportunities to perform for other magicians. This habit has earned him a reputation for aloofness, to which he pleads guilty-with-an-explanation. According to Michael Weber, he has a particular aversion to the \u201cmagic lumpen\u201d\u2014hoi polloi who congregate in magic clubs and at conventions, where they unabashedly seek to expropriate each other\u2019s secrets, meanwhile failing to grasp the critical distinction between doing tricks and creating a sense of wonder. One guy in a tuxedo producing doves can be magic, ten guys producing doves is a travesty. \u201cRicky won\u2019t perform for magicians at magic shows, because they\u2019re interested in things,\u201d Weber says. \u201cThey don\u2019t get it. They won\u2019t watch him and be inspired to make magic of their own. They\u2019ll be inspired to do that trick that belongs to Ricky. Magic is not about someone else sharing the newest secret. Magic is about working hard to discover a secret and making something out of it. You start with some small principle and you build a theatrical presentation out of it. You do something that\u2019s technically artistic that creates a small drama. There are two ways you can expand your knowledge\u2014through books and by gaining the confidence of fellow-magicians who will explain these things. Ricky to a large degree gets his information from books\u2014old books\u2014and then when he performs for magicians they want to know, \u2018Where did that come from?\u2019 And he\u2019s appalled that they haven\u2019t read this stuff. So there\u2019s this large body of magic lumpen who really don\u2019t understand Ricky\u2019s legacy\u2014his contribution to the art, his place in the art, his technical proficiency and creativity. They think he\u2019s an \u00e9litist and a snob.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Jay does not regard \u201camateur\u201d as a pejorative. His two most trusted magician confidants are Persi Diaconis, a professor of mathematics at Harvard, and Steve Freeman, a corporate comptroller who lives in Ventura, California. Both are world-class sleight-of-hand artists, and neither ever performs for pay. Jay extolls them as \u201cpure amateurs in the best sense.\u201d The distinction that matters to Jay is between \u201cgood\u201d magic and \u201cbad.\u201d Magic \u201cgives me more pleasure and more pain than anything else I\u2019ve ever dealt with,\u201d he says. \u201cThe pain is bad magicians ripping off good ones, doing magic badly, and making a mockery of the art.\u201d One specific locale that he steers clear of is the Hollywood Magic Castle, a club whose membership consists of both amateur and professional conjurers. On a given night, one can see a great performer at the Magic Castle, but all too often the club is a tepid swamp of gossip, self-congratulation, and artistic larceny\u2014a place where audiences who don\u2019t know better are frequently fed a bland diet of purloined ineptitude. Many years ago, Jay had an encounter there that he describes as typical.<\/p>\n

\u201cA guy comes up and starts telling me he\u2019s a fan,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI say thank you, that\u2019s nice to hear. He says he used to see me perform in Boulder, Colorado. That\u2019s nice, too, I say. Then he starts talking about this wonderful piece I did with a mechanical monkey\u2014really one of the most bizarre routines I ever worked out\u2014and I thank him, and he says, \u2018Yeah, I get a tremendous response when I do that. Audiences just love it.\u2019 And I say, \u2018Let me ask you something. Suppose I invite you over to my house for dinner. We have a pleasant meal, we talk about magic, it\u2019s an enjoyable evening. Then, as you\u2019re about to leave, you walk into my living room and you pick up my television and walk out with it. You steal my television set. Would you do that?\u2019 He says, \u2018Of course not.\u2019 And I say, \u2018But you already did.\u2019 He says, \u2018What are you talking about?\u2019 I say, \u2018You stole my television!\u2019 He says, \u2018How can you say that? I\u2019ve never even been to your house.\u2019 This guy doesn\u2019t even know what a metaphor is. People ask me why I don\u2019t do lectures at magic conventions, and I say, \u2018Because I\u2019m still learning.\u2019 Meanwhile, you\u2019ve got people who have been doing magic for ten months and they are actually out there pontificating. It\u2019s absurd.\u201d<\/p>\n

T. A. Waters, a mentalist and writer, who is the librarian at the Magic Castle, told me, \u201cSome magicians, once they learn how to do a trick without dropping the prop on their foot, go ahead and perform in public. Ricky will work on a routine a couple of years before even showing anyone. One of the things that I love about Ricky is his continued amazement at how little magicians seem to care about the art. Intellectually, Ricky seems to understand this, but emotionally he can\u2019t accept it. He gets as upset about this problem today as he did twenty years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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At some point within the past twenty years, Jay asked Dai Vernon\u2014a.k.a. the Professor\u2014how he coped with affronts of this sort, and Vernon replied, \u201cI forced myself not to care.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe that\u2019s how he lived to be ninety-eight years old,\u201d Jay says.<\/p>\n

Jay\u2019s admirers invariably dwell upon his technical mastery\u2014what is known in the trade as \u201cchops.\u201d According to Diaconis, he is, \u201csimply put, one of the half-dozen best card handlers in the world. Not maybe; everybody thinks so.\u201d Diaconis and Jay were casual acquaintances as kids on the New York magic scene during the fifties, then lost track of each other for several years, in part because Jay deliberately exiled himself from the mainstream magic world. They re\u00ebstablished contact twenty-odd years ago, after Diaconis caught one of Jay\u2019s appearances on the \u201cTonight Show.\u201d By then, Jay had honed an out-of-left-field brand of gonzo-hip comedy magic, a combination of chops and antic irreverence. Often, he would begin a performance by demonstrating a not easily marketable skill that eventually earned him a listing in the \u201cGuinness Book of World Records\u201d: throwing a playing card for distance. A properly launched card would go ninety miles an hour. Unobstructed, it could travel a hundred and ninety feet. From ten paces, it could pierce the outer rind of a watermelon. After impaling the flesh of a watermelon with a card, Jay would rifle one card after another into the exact same spot. He also used a plastic chicken and windup toys as props and targets, often inflicting disabling injuries. His patter was voluble, embroidered with orotund, baroque locutions; he would describe the watermelon rind, for instance, as the \u201cthick pachydermatous outer melon layer.\u201d In a memorable routine, the \u201cLaughing Card Trick,\u201d which involved no words at all, Jay showed his hands empty and then produced cards one at a time, along the way building suspense with cackling laughter. Each time he produced a card\u2014somehow, it was always a jack of spades\u2014he gripped it with his lips. After doing this maneuver four times, he removed the cards from his mouth and revealed that\u2014voil\u00e0!\u2014they had become the four aces. Next, he would do spirit-writing on a tortilla. Downshifting, he would segue to \u201cThe Four Queens,\u201d a minuetlike Victorian parable in which the four face cards representing \u201cthe feminine portion of the smart set\u201d were \u201cbesieged\u201d by \u201csuitors from the lower orders.\u201d In other words, each of the four queens was grouped with three numbered cards. \u201cLadies and gentlemen,\u201d he would announce, \u201cas you have seen, I have taken advantage of these tenderly nurtured and unsophisticated young ladies by placing them in positions extremely galling to their aristocratic sensibilities.\u201d Somehow, the queens must \u201cfind each other\u2019s company\u201d\u2014that is, transport themselves so that what remained would be three groups of four numbered cards and a quartet of queens. This Jay accomplished in a manner so simple, natural, and miraculous as to render prestidigitation invisible, thereby raising the strong possibility of divine intervention.<\/p>\n

Jules Fisher, the theatrical-lighting designer and a friend of Jay\u2019s, told me, \u201cRicky will look into any effect and find the side of it that is inherently magical. He doesn\u2019t present magic as a challenge\u2014as a matter of \u2018Look, I can make this disappear and you can\u2019t.\u2019 Rather, he wraps it in a dramatic plot. In many of his tricks, there are stories. In \u2018The Four Queens,\u2019 the cards take on personas, which is much more impressive than the question of how that card disappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Michael Weber has a vivid memory of seeing Jay execute \u201cThe Four Queens\u201d fifteen years ago on a network-television special with Doug Henning as host. \u201cIt was a transcendent moment in popular magic,\u201d he says. \u201cRicky had attitude, presentation, humor, and chops. Everybody was talking about that show. It was one of those times when all the elements of his talent were so self-evidently on display that even the people who could never before get it finally got it.\u201d Dai Vernon once saw Jay perform \u201cThe Four Queens\u201d live, during a lecture-demonstration at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, at the University of California at Los Angeles. Afterward, the Professor told his disciple that the entire performance \u201crestored dignity to the art of magic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe magical aspect of Ricky is very strong,\u201d Diaconis says. \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to see someone who is very skillful with cards and quite another to witness an effect and have just no idea what happens. With Ricky, it\u2019s very hard to isolate technique from performance. I can sense when a sleight has happened and how it happened, but I still don\u2019t see it. I just feel it intellectually. When Ricky is doing one of his poetical pieces, he\u2019s working in his own unique venue. He\u2019s mixing disparate things\u2014quirky scholarship, iconoclasm, technique, a good story\u2014into some soup that works. Because he picks good, strong tricks and makes them come to life, in the end there\u2019s this basic simplicity about what he does. Before Ricky came along, there had been comedy magicians, but never ones who really fooled people. And you can see the consequence\u2014there are a dozen people now working in night clubs doing Ricky Jay acts. But none of them are Ricky Jay.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cLearned Pigs & Fireproof Women\u201d Jay devotes a chapter to \u201cMax Malini: The Last of the Mountebanks.\u201d Malini, who was born in 1873, stood five feet two, had short arms and unusually small hands, dressed like a dandy, spoke English with a comically heavy Eastern European accent, and was celebrated as the most astonishing sleight-of-hand artist of his day. He performed all over the world, for Presidents, prime ministers, robber barons, emperors, kings, and Al Capone. Jay quotes Nate Leipzig, \u201ca master exponent of pure magic technique\u201d and a contemporary of Malini\u2019s: \u201cI would give up everything I know in magic just to get the reaction Malini does from vanishing a single coin.\u201d At a dinner party where Dai Vernon was present, Malini borrowed a female guest\u2019s hat, spun a half-dollar on the table, and covered it with the hat, which he then lifted to reveal not the coin but a block of ice. Though Vernon knew ahead of time that this effect would be performed, he later reported that Malini, who had remained at the table throughout the meal, \u201cfooled the hell out of me.\u201d Jay recounts this and other Malini anecdotes with a mixture of delight and wistfulness. In a just universe, he seems to imply, he himself would have been in Leipzig\u2019s and Vernon\u2019s shoes, playing to the same discerning audiences that witnessed Malini\u2019s exemplary talents. He writes, \u201cMalini was rarely featured on music hall or theatre stages, even though he performed in the heyday of the great illusionists. Yet far more than Malini\u2019s contemporaries, the famous conjurers Herrmann, Kellar, Thurston, and Houdini, Malini was the embodiment of what a magician should be\u2014not a performer who requires a fully equipped stage, elaborate apparatus, elephants, or handcuffs to accomplish his mysteries, but one who can stand a few inches from you and with a borrowed coin, a lemon, a knife, a tumbler, or a pack of cards convince you he performs miracles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jay feels connected to Malini not only out of veneration but by a strange coincidence. Malini, who was born in a small town on the Polish-Austrian border, had the given name of Max Katz (or, perhaps, Max Katz-Breit). Max Katz was also the name of Jay\u2019s maternal grandfather, a well-to-do accountant and, most important, the one member of the family who loved and appreciated Ricky and for whom Ricky in return felt love and gratitude. \u201cMy grandfather was an amateur acquisitor of skill and knowledge,\u201d Jay says. \u201cHe was interested in a lot of things\u2014pool, chess, checkers, calligraphy, cryptography, origami, magic. His philosophy was to take lessons from the best available people and then proceed on his own. He was really a terrific teacher. And his greatest contribution was to expose me to the best. Because of him, I was able to see on a regular basis the finest closeup-magic people in the world. Unlike me, he actually liked to fraternize with magicians.\u201d At one time, Katz was president of the Society of American Magicians. When, at the age of four, Ricky did his first trick in front of an audience\u2014he multiplied paper coffee creamers during a backyard barbecue for the Society of American Magicians\u2014Dai Vernon was a witness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Jay told me, \u201cWhen we watched Vernon, my grandfather would say, \u2018Look at the Professor and study the naturalness with which he handles objects.\u2019 He introduced me to Slydini and to Francis Carlyle, two other great closeup illusionists. These were guys who were capable of doing magic\u2014something beyond tricks\u2014and the fact that they were stylistically so different from each other fascinated me. With Slydini, it was important to understand that he was the master of misdirection\u2014drawing the spectator\u2019s attention away from the sleight. With Carlyle, the purpose was to absorb what my grandfather called the clarity of instruction\u2014how Carlyle subtly guided the spectator in a way that enhanced the clarity of the effect. There was a period of several years when I took formal lessons with Slydini. In his stage appearances, which were infrequent, he used to perform in a toreador suit, and he made one for me. I wore it with my hair slicked back, and I had these fake sideburns pencilled in. I performed with doves. I did a piece called \u2018The Floating Cane\u2019\u2014stage-illusion work, with no patter, that eventually made me realize I wanted to speak and I preferred closeup. An audition was arranged for me for \u2018The Ed Sullivan Show.\u2019 I wore my toreador suit and wanted to pretend I was Spanish, knowing it would increase my chances of getting on the show, but my parents wouldn\u2019t let me. By then, I had already done a lot of television. When I was five, I was supposed to appear on \u2018Startime Kids,\u2019 with Ed Herlihy, but I dozed during the dress rehearsal and slept through the show. I was on a program called \u2018Time for Pets\u2019 when I was seven. I was the youngest magician who had ever been on TV. I was awful. I was a kid. The only thing that\u2019s important is that I was very comfortable performing. I was supposed to produce a rabbit, but they couldn\u2019t find one, so I had to work with a guinea pig, which took a leak on my father\u2019s necktie. My father said, \u2018Perfect. You get all the glory and I get all the piss.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Weekends, Jay often made trips to Manhattan, first in the company of his grandfather and by adolescence often on his own. The cafeteria on the ground floor of the Wurlitzer Building, on West Forty-second Street, was to the magic demimonde what the White Horse Tavern was to literary pretenders. Jay also spent many contented hours at Al Flosso\u2019s magic shop, on West Thirty-fourth Street. He preferred Flosso\u2019s to the more popular Tannen\u2019s, which was then in Times Square, because, above all, he loved Flosso. Also, the marvellous clutter of old posters, handbills, and books appealed to him far more than the antiseptic ambience of Tannen\u2019s. \u201cEarly on, I knew I didn\u2019t want to do the kind of magic other people were doing,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I started buying old books to look for material.\u201d Flosso, in the guise of a sideshow pitchman from Coney Island, did wonderful comedy sleight of hand and had a flourishing career\u2014in the big rooms at Grossinger\u2019s and the Concord, on the Sullivan show. When Ricky\u2019s parents asked what kind of bar-mitzvah celebration he wanted, he said he wanted Flosso to perform. \u201cThe thing that\u2019s significant about that event is that it\u2019s literally the only warm memory I have of my parents,\u201d he has said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Prodded by Slydini and his grandfather, he entered several performing competitions at magic conventions. \u201cI always won,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the whole thing soured me on the idea of competitions within an art.\u201d By the time he was fifteen, he had had enough of living at home. He moved in with a friend\u2019s family, moved back home again, moved to the resort town of Lake George, in upstate New York (where he discovered what it was like to support himself as a pro), and, before he turned eighteen, had left home for good. He either did or did not officially complete high school\u2014another one of those elusive memories. Max Katz died around that time. At the funeral, Flosso ceremonially broke a wand and placed it in the casket\u2014\u201cthe single most frightening thing I ever saw,\u201d Jay says. His grandfather\u2019s death marked the end of his relationship with his parents. (He remains on good terms with his younger sister, whom he says he admires tremendously.) By then, he was living in Illinois, having begun a peripatetic college career. Over a period of ten years, he attended five different colleges and \u201cofficially was never anything other than a freshman.\u201d At Cornell, he enrolled in the School of Hotel Management. \u201cIn case I had my own joint in Vegas, I thought I might be the only guy in the business who would know how to get around in both the casino and the kitchen,\u201d he likes to say. He and several friends formed an a-cappella doo-wop group called Chico and the Deaf Tones. The Deaf Tones were five guys named Tony plus a girl named Laura. Their big number was \u201cTell Laura I Love Her.\u201d<\/p>\n

To pay tuition and otherwise make ends meet, he briefly sold encyclopedias, travelled with a carnival, worked on Wall Street as an accountant, tended bar, and, of course, did magic. From talking to Jay\u2019s friends, I gathered that there was a time when he played cards for a living. Boldly, I once raised this subject with him, and he pretended not to hear me.<\/p>\n

\u201cWould anybody play cards with you today?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cSure,\u201d he said. \u201cSilly people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Twice while he was still at Cornell, he appeared on the \u201cTonight Show.\u201d With Ithaca as his home base, he became nomadic. He performed frequently in Aspen and Lake George, did club and concert dates all over the country with various rock and jazz groups\u2014Ike and Tina Turner, the Chambers Brothers, Leon Redbone, Al Jarreau, Emmylou Harris, Herbie Hancock, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Sometimes he was the opening act, sometimes he was the headliner. Invitations to perform in Europe materialized. In the early seventies, he moved to Los Angeles and found plenty of work, first at a club in Santa Monica called McCabe\u2019s Guitar Shop and then at the Magic Castle. Tracy Newman, a television-comedy writer, who lived with him for a year, says she went to see him perform \u201cprobably seventeen times\u201d before they started dating. Not long ago, she told me, \u201cThe thing Ricky had that I\u2019d never before seen in a magician was charm. At McCabe\u2019s, he was doing improvisational patter. He had his stuff down so well he was just free. He had the guts to bring people onstage and really play with them, instead of having to be so careful that they might see something that would cause him to blow what he was trying to do. He was very casual, but his language had a Shakespearean feel. He was brutal with hecklers\u2014not because it would throw him off. He just didn\u2019t like hecklers. He vaporized them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In those days, Dai Vernon had a sinecure at the Magic Castle that entitled him to living quarters nearby. Vernon\u2019s presence was the main thing that had attracted Jay to Los Angeles. When he was not on the road, he sought out the Professor\u2019s company virtually every night. Wherever they started the evening\u2014at the Castle or somewhere else\u2014they would invariably wind up at Canter\u2019s Deli, on Fairfax Avenue, a shrine of vinyl and Formica and leaden matzo balls. There Vernon would hold forth until five or six in the morning. A few years ago, Jay wrote a magazine article in which he described one such session at Canter\u2019s, an occasion when he petitioned for practical counsel rather than the generous praise that Vernon typically dispensed:<\/p>\n

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\u201cProfessor,\u201d I protested, \u201cI really want to know how I can improve my technique and performance. I want to take lessons from you. I really want advice.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Vernon smiled his patented half smile, and with a delicate movement of his eyes beckoned me closer. I leaned forward with anticipation, almost unable to contain my excitement, about to receive my benediction from the master. \u201cYou want advice, Ricky,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ll give you advice. Fuck as many different women as you can. Not the same one. Not the same one. Fuck many different women. Many different women.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Persi Diaconis ran away from his unhappy home at the age of fourteen and spent two years travelling with Vernon\u2014an unsentimental education. \u201cLife with Vernon was a challenge,\u201d Diaconis says. \u201cVernon would use secrecy as a way of torturing you. When he and I were on the road, he woke up one morning and said, \u2018You know, I\u2019ve been thinking about sleight of hand my whole life, and I think I now know how to encapsulate it in one sentence.\u2019 And then, of course, he refused to tell me.\u201d Another friend of Vernon\u2019s once said, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have taken a million dollars not to have known him. But I\u2019d give a million not to know another one like him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vernon was extroverted, insouciant, a winning combination of gentleman and rake. Though he perfectly fitted the role of guru, he was not the paternal mentor that Jay\u2019s grandfather had been. To the extent that anyone could fill that void, Charlie Miller did. \u201cLearned Pigs & Fireproof Women,\u201d which Jay spent ten years writing, is dedicated \u201cto my wonderful friend Charles Earle Miller, a unique, eccentric, and remarkable entertainer.\u201d Had Miller not been Vernon\u2019s contemporary, Jay believes, he would have been regarded as the greatest sleight-of-hand figure of his time. \u201cFor fifty or sixty years, Charlie lived in Vernon\u2019s shadow,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd yet Vernon knew that Charlie was the best sleight-of-hand artist he\u2019d ever seen.\u201d Vernon once described Miller as \u201cunquestionably the most skillful exponent of the magic art it has ever been my pleasure to know.\u201d Miller was a shy, vulnerable man, for whom public performance was a bravura act. As a friend to Jay, Diaconis, Steve Freeman, and another accomplished magician, John Thompson\u2014his four most reverent acolytes\u2014he was emotionally much warmer than Vernon. \u201cVernon was very comfortable to be around,\u201d Freeman says. \u201cBut Charlie was your pal, Charlie was your uncle, Charlie cared about you.\u201d On the West Coast, he was the premier cruise-ship performer, and this arrangement suited his essentially rootless nature. (Jay himself worked very few cruise ships\u2014a merciful policy, he says, because \u201cthe people who went on cruises had saved up their entire lives just to get on a boat and be away from people who looked like me.\u201d) For Vernon, Jay says, \u201cmaking money was only a means of allowing him to sit in a hotel room and think about his art, about cups and balls and coins and cards.\u201d Charlie Miller was, if anything, more cerebral, even more obsessive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cCharlie and Vernon were both magicians for magicians,\u201d says Robert Lund, the founder of the American Museum of Magic, in Marshall, Michigan. \u201cOnly magicians truly appreciated what Charlie was doing. Charlie knew more about why you do it this way instead of that way than anyone I\u2019ve ever met in my life, including Ricky Jay. If there were a hundred ways of doing an effect\u2014a card trick or sawing a lady in half\u2014Charlie went through all hundred and analyzed each one, looking for the most natural way of doing it, the approach that would be the most palatable and acceptable to an audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than any other magician Jay has known, Miller had an orthodox devotion to preserving the secrets of the art\u2014a fundamental precept that Jay today shares with Diaconis and Freeman. To their dismay, Vernon wrote a series of instruction books. When these began to appear in print, Diaconis said to Vernon, \u201cWhy did you publish these, Professor? We don\u2019t want the animals using tools.\u201d As a palliative, they can speculate about the secrets that Miller took to the grave\u2014an absolutism that, while perhaps depriving him of mundane celebrity, at least made the secrets themselves immortal. \u201cCharlie would never tell anything to anybody who wasn\u2019t really on the inside,\u201d Diaconis says. \u201cThere\u2019s something called the Sprong shift. Sprong was a night watchman\u2014he did that for a living so that he could spend his days practicing card handling. The Sprong shift is a certain way of reversing the cards so that a card that would be in the middle will end up on top. It\u2019s a move that has been passed down only orally. It\u2019s never been described or even hinted at in writing that such a thing existed. It got disseminated to three or five of us, and the one who does it beautifully is Ricky. Charlie had the capacity to watch Ricky practice it for several hours non-stop. He\u2019d keep moving around the room to see it from every possible angle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Can Sonny, South Korea\u2019s Legendary Captain, Deliver in His Final World Cup?<\/a><\/p>\n

After both Vernon and Miller died, there were memorial services at the Magic Castle\u2014events that Jay refused to attend, because, he said to Freeman, \u201cmost of those people didn\u2019t know anything about Vernon and Charlie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI now say that keeping secrets is my single most important contribution to magic,\u201d Diaconis says. \u201cListen, I have lots of things I won\u2019t tell Ricky about. It\u2019s pretty hard for us to fool each other. Several years ago, he borrowed my deck and had me pick a card. Then he told me to reach into my left trousers pocket and there was the card I\u2019d picked. For half an hour, I was as badly fooled as I\u2019ve ever been. In order for him to bring that about, he had to take dead aim at me. That\u2019s a phrase we use in discussing the big con: taking dead aim\u2014deeply researching somebody\u2019s habits.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jay once subjected Freeman to an equally unsettling experience. \u201cI walked into Ricky\u2019s apartment one day, and I was wearing a shirt that Charlie Miller had given to Ricky and that Ricky had left at my house,\u201d Freeman says. \u201cI was returning it, but, just for fun, I had put it on. I took the shirt off, and Ricky said, \u2018Oh, just leave it on the back of that chair.\u2019 Then we started talking for a while and he said he wanted to show me a new trick. He spread the deck face up and told me to point to a card. I did, and then I gathered and shuffled and dealt them face up. There were only fifty-one. I didn\u2019t see my card. And he said, \u2018Oh, well, go over and look in the pocket of that shirt over there.\u2019 And the card was in the shirt pocket. It takes a lot of knowledge about people to be able to do something like that. Ricky was enormously satisfied. Did I figure it out? Well, I was very fooled at the time. I felt stupid, but it was nice to be fooled. That\u2019s not a feeling we get to have very often anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Victoria Dailey, who, along with her former husband, William Dailey, deals in rare books from a shop on Melrose Avenue, in Los Angeles, likes to refer to Jay as \u201cour worst customer.\u201d She hastens to point out, \u201cHe could be our best customer. He wants everything but can hardly buy anything.\u201d Both Daileys regard Jay as \u201ca true eccentric\u201d in the English sense\u2014part Bloomsbury, part Fawlty Towers. More than fifteen years ago, they sold Jay the first book for which he paid more than a hundred dollars. The first time he spent more than a thousand dollars for a book, and, again, when he reached the five-thousand-dollar threshold, the Daileys were also involved. The latter item was Jean Pr\u00e9vost\u2019s \u201cLa Premi\u00e8re Partie des Subtiles et Plaisantes Inventions,\u201d the earliest known important conjuring book, printed in Lyons in 1584.<\/p>\n

\u201cI bought it unhesitatingly,\u201d recalls Jay, for whom possession of the Pr\u00e9vost is a bittersweet memory; uncharacteristically, he parted with it during a fiscal crisis. \u201cI bought it and then, with remarkable rapidity, three particular jobs that I thought I had went sour. One was a Johnny Carson special on practical jokes that didn\u2019t pan out because of one of his divorces. Another was a tour of Australia that was cancelled by a natural disaster\u2014in other words, by an act of God. This book was so fucking rare that people in the magic world just didn\u2019t know about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is the Daileys\u2019 impression\u2014a perception shared by other dealers in rare books and incunabula\u2014that Jay spends a higher proportion of his disposable income on rare books and artifacts than anyone else they know. His friend Janus Cercone has described him as \u201can incunable romantic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cProbably, no matter how much money he had, he would be overextended bibliomaniacally\u2014or should the word be \u2018bibliographically\u2019? Anyway, he\u2019d be overextended,\u201d William Dailey has said. \u201cThe first time I met him, I recognized him as a complete bibliomaniac. He\u2019s not a complete monomaniac about books on magic, but within that field he is remarkably focussed. His connoisseurship is impeccable, in that he understands the entire context of a book\u2019s emergence. He\u2019s not just interested in the book\u2019s condition. He knows who printed it, and he knows the personal struggle the author went through to get it printed.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1971, during Jay\u2019s nomadic phase, he spent a lot of time in Boston hanging out with Diaconis, who had begun to assemble a library of rare magic books. Diaconis takes credit for explicating the rudiments of collecting to Jay and animating his academic interest. He now regards Jay as \u201cten standard deviations out, just the best in the world in his knowledge of the literature of conjuring.\u201d Jay\u2019s collection\u2014several thousand volumes, plus hundreds of lithographs, playbills, pamphlets, broadsides, and miscellaneous ephemera\u2014reflects his interest not only in magic but also in gambling, cheating, low life, and what he described in the subtitle of \u201cLearned Pigs & Fireproof Women\u201d as \u201cunique, eccentric and amazing entertainers: stone eaters, mind readers, poison resisters, daredevils, singing mice, etc., etc., etc., etc.\u201d Though Jay abhors the notion of buying books as investments, his own collection, while it is not for sale and is therefore technically priceless, more or less represents his net worth. There was a time, within the past decade, when he seriously considered becoming a bookdealer himself. The main thing that dissuaded him, he says, is that \u201cI wouldn\u2019t want to sell a book to a philistine, which is what every bookseller has to do.\u201d Unlike a lot of collectors, he actually reads and rereads the books and other materials he buys, and puts them to scholarly and performing use. Therefore, he has no trouble rationalizing why he, rather than someone else who might turn up at an auction or peruse a dealer\u2019s catalogue, is more worthy of owning, say, both variant editions of \u201cA Synopsis of the Butchery of the Late Sir Washington Irving Bishop (Kamilimilianalani), a most worthy Mason of the thirty-second degree, the Mind Reader and philanthropist, by Eleanor Fletcher Bishop, His Broken Hearted Mother,\u201d Philadelphia, 1889 and 1890.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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One day last spring, I got a phone call from Jay, who had just returned to Los Angeles from Florida, where he and Michael Weber spent several months doing \u201cpyromagical effects\u201d on a movie called \u201cWilder Napalm.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a pile of mail on my desk,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope there are a few checks in it,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, actually, there are. But, of course, I just spent it all on a book.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book in question was Thomas Ady\u2019s \u201cA Candle in the Dark: Or a Treatise Concerning the Nature of Witches and Witchcraft,\u201d which includes an important seventeenth-century account of an English magic performance. I had once heard Jay allude to \u201cA Candle in the Dark\u201d during a lecture at the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California. The Huntington owned a copy, and so did a few other institutions. Jay described it to me as \u201cexceedingly rare\u2014only one copy has been sold in my collecting lifetime,\u201d and said that he had acquired his from a New York dealer \u201cafter a long negotiation.\u201d On a subsequent visit to New York, he took me to meet the dealer, Steve Weissman, a preternaturally relaxed fellow, who was obviously quite fond of him.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a common interest,\u201d Weissman, who does business out of an office on the East Side, said. \u201cWe do like the same kinds of books. I don\u2019t specialize in Ricky\u2019s area of interest\u2014only Ricky does\u2014but I find that I gravitate toward it. My stock is dominantly literary. And I like oddball subjects: slang dictionaries, magic, gambling, con games. The advantage for me with Ricky is that he\u2019s an enthusiast for a wide range of subjects. Most customers arrive and they\u2019re entering the dealer\u2019s world, my world. He walks in and I enter his world. The next customer through the door might be a Byron fanatic and I\u2019ll have to enter his<\/em> world. It\u2019s not a unique situation, but with Ricky it\u2019s particularly gratifying, because of the kind of collector he is\u2014passionate and knowledgeable. Ideally, I would also include rich in that equation, but he doesn\u2019t qualify.\u201d<\/p>\n

Referring to \u201cA Candle in the Dark,\u201d Weissman added, \u201cI don\u2019t doubt that I could have sold it for more money to someone else. But it\u2019s more fun to sell it to Ricky.\u201d<\/p>\n

A young man with a ponytail and peach-fuzzy sideburns and wearing a herringbone-tweed topcoat entered the shop. As he closed the door behind him, the doorknob fell off. He picked it up and handed it to Weissman\u2019s assistant and said, \u201cI think this is yours.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sotto voce, Jay said, \u201cWho is that guy?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he\u2019s someone who\u2019s trying to swindle us into buying a Visa card, or something,\u201d Weissman said.<\/p>\n

When the young man was ready to leave, a few minutes later, the doorknob had been reattached but would not turn. Twenty minutes elapsed before we were finally rescued by an upstairs neighbor who was able to open the door from the outside. While we waited, before our liberation seemed certain, Jay gestured at the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling shelves of rare books and said, \u201cTo most people this would be hell. But to me it\u2019s just a holiday.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Several years ago, Weissman attended an auction at Christie\u2019s and, bidding on behalf of Jay and Nicolas Barker, of the British Library, bought a collection of rare engravings whose subject matter was calligraphy. Jay writes in a stylized calligraphic script, and Barker, having spent much of his professional life cataloguing and studying antiquarian manuscripts, confesses to being \u201cpassionately interested in the history of handwriting.\u201d There were more than thirty items in the auction lot, and Jay and Barker divided them according to a simple formula. \u201cI kept all the images related to armless calligraphers,\u201d Jay says, \u201cand Nicolas got all the calligraphers with arms.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a chapter of \u201cLearned Pigs\u201d entitled \u201cMore Than the Sum of Their Parts,\u201d Jay recounts the skills and accomplishments of various men and women, all celebrated figures between the sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries, who lacked the usual complement of appendages\u2014arms or legs or digits\u2014and compensated in inspiring ways. He dotes especially on Matthew Buchinger, \u201cThe Wonderful Little Man of Nuremberg,\u201d who was born in 1674, died around 1740, and, in between, married four times, sired fourteen children, and \u201cplayed more than a half dozen musical instruments, some of his own invention, and danced the hornpipe\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0amazed audiences with his skills at conjuring\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0was a marksman with the pistol and demonstrated trick shots at nine pins\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0was a fine penman; he drew portraits, landscapes, and coats of arms, and displayed remarkable calligraphic skills.\u201d Buchinger managed these transactions without the benefit of feet or thighs, and instead of arms he had \u201ctwo fin-like excrescences growing from his shoulder blades.\u201d He stood, so to speak, only twenty-nine inches high. The Christie\u2019s auction enabled Jay to add significantly to his trove of Buchingeriana\u2014playbills, engravings by and of the Wonderful Little Man, self-portraits, specimens of his calligraphy, and accounts of his performances as a conjurer.<\/p>\n

Segueing from a passage about Carl Herman Unthan, who was armless, played the violin with his feet, toured in vaudeville as \u201cUnthan, the Pedal Paganini,\u201d and \u201cfired the rifle\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0with enough skill and accuracy to be compared with the great trick shot artists Ira Paine and Doc Carver,\u201d Jay writes, \u201cWriters, scientists, and medical men have explored the psychologies and physiologies of these prodigies; they and the public alike are intrigued by the relationship between the horrific and miraculous.\u201d<\/p>\n

This last phrase concisely expresses Jay\u2019s central preoccupation as a scholar and a performer. \u201cLearned Pigs\u201d contains only passing references to Houdini, whose tirelessness as a self-promoter was concomitant with his gifts as an illusionist. Jay has attempted to rescue from the margins of history performers who in their day were no less determined than Houdini to please their audiences. Here is an echt-Jay paragraph:<\/p>\n

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As the novelty of fire-eating and -handling wore off, those performers not versatile enough to combine their talents into more diversified shows took to the streets. In 1861 Henry Mayhew, in Volume 3 of \u201cLondon Labour and the London Poor,\u201d described one such salamander. After a fascinating and detailed account of a fire king learning his trade and preparing his demonstrations, we find the poor fellow has been reduced to catching rats with his teeth to earn enough money to survive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The rest of the fire-handlers, geeks, acid-drinkers, bayonet-swallowers, mentalists, contortionists, illiterate savants, faith-healing charlatans, porcine-faced ladies, and noose-wearing high-divers who populate \u201cLearned Pigs\u201d routinely sacrifice their dignity, but they never lose their humanity. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be seen as somebody who just writes about freaks,\u201d Jay says. \u201cA lot of the people I write about were very famous in their day, and they were a great source of entertainment. Today, audiences are just as curious, just as willing to be amazed. But look at everything we\u2019re barraged with\u2014it just doesn\u2019t lodge in the imagination the same way.\u201d His mission, in sum, is to reignite our collective sense of wonder.<\/p>\n

Jay\u2019s fruitful combination of autodidacticism and freelance scholarship is itself a wonderful phenomenon. Reviewing \u201cLearned Pigs\u201d in the Times<\/em>, John Gross wrote, \u201cOne effect of Mr. Jay\u2019s scholarship is to make it clear that even among freaks and prodigies there is very little new under the sun. Show him a stone-eater or a human volcano or an enterologist and he will show you the same thing being done before, often hundreds of years earlier.\u201d In the Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em> Carlin Romano wrote, \u201c\u00a0\u2018Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women\u2019 is a book so magnificently entertaining that if a promoter booked it into theatres and simply distributed a copy to each patron to read, he\u2019d have the hit of the season.\u201d A blurb on the jacket from Penn and Teller says, \u201cIt\u2019s the coolest book\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0and probably the most brilliantly weird book ever.\u201d Jay wrote much of \u201cLearned Pigs\u201d while occupying a carrel in the rare-book stacks of the Clark Library, at U.C.L.A. At one point, Thomas Wright, a librarian at the Clark and a former professor of English literature, tried to persuade him to apply for a postdoctoral research fellowship. When Jay explained that he didn\u2019t have a doctorate, Wright said, \u201cMaybe a master\u2019s degree would be sufficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThomas, I don\u2019t even have a B.A.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wright replied, \u201cWell, you know, Ricky, a Ph.D. is just a sign of docility.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Jay was completing the writing of \u201cLearned Pigs,\u201d he received an offer, unexpected and irresistible, to become the curator of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts. John Mulholland, who died in 1970, was a distinguished magician, historian, and writer. He was also a close friend of Houdini, whom he befriended in his capacity as editor of The Sphinx<\/em>, the leading magic journal of its time. Above all, he was an obsessively thorough collector of printed materials and artifacts relating to magic and other unusual performing arts. In other words, if Jay and Mulholland had got to know each other they would have become soul mates. Mulholland\u2019s collection comprised some ten thousand volumes, in twenty languages. In 1966, he moved it to The Players Club, on Gramercy Park, and until his death he remained its curator. In 1984, the club put it up for sale. The auction gallery that was handling the sale enlisted Jay to help catalogue the collection and advise on its dispersal. Jay feared that it would be broken up or sold overseas, and either outcome seemed perilously likely. At a late hour, however, a young Los Angeles attorney, businessman, and novice magician named Carl Rheuban\u2014someone Jay had never heard of\u2014turned up and bought the library intact, for five hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Like a lot of promoters who floated extravagant fantasies during the profligate eighties, Rheuban knew friendly and indulgent bankers. As it happened, the friendliest of these bankers was Rheuban himself. In 1983, he founded the First Network Savings Bank, leased office space in Century City, offered high interest rates to attract deposits from all over the country, and started investing the funds in complex and wishful real-estate ventures. By the spring of 1985, Jay had an office on the bank premises, where the collection was housed. Soon, he also had a steady salary, a staff of three assistants, a healthy acquisitions allowance, friendlier-than-ever relationships with dealers all over the world, and control of a superb research library. Plans were drafted for what Jay anticipated would be \u201ca dream come true\u201d: the collection would be moved to a building in downtown Los Angeles, which would also accommodate a museum and a small theatre where he would regularly perform, as would other artists who appealed to his sensibilities. Edwin Dawes, a British historian of magic and a professor of biochemistry, who visited the library and regularly corresponded with Jay, has said, \u201cIt just seemed as if Ricky\u2019s fairy godmother had appeared to provide the environment in which to work and all the facilities to do the job.\u201d Even from the perspective of Jay, the inveterate skeptic, it was a nearly ideal situation. And, clearly, Rheuban, who was occupied with diverse enterprises, regarded him as the ideal overseer.<\/p>\n

In April of 1990, however, First Network was abruptly closed by California banking regulators, and the Resolution Trust Corporation (R.T.C.), the federal agency created to cope with the nationwide savings-and-loan crisis, moved in to liquidate its assets. Rheuban soon filed for personal bankruptcy, and was reported to be the subject of a criminal-fraud investigation. With no forewarning, Jay discovered that he could not even gain access to his own office without first receiving permission from self-important bureaucrats who didn\u2019t know Malini from minestrone. The irony of this was unbearable. Had Ricky Jay, of all people, been victimized by a high-stakes con game?<\/p>\n

If Rheuban did commit crimes, the government has yet to persuade a grand jury that they were transgressions worthy of an indictment. Nor does Jay at this point have a desire to know how, precisely, First Network came undone. Regardless of what was going on inside the bank, Jay had felt that his working arrangement with Rheuban was basically satisfactory. Though they have not spoken in almost two years, he expresses no bitterness toward his former employer and benefactor. For the functionaries of the R.T.C., however, he harbors deep contempt. Because Rheuban\u2019s personal insolvency was enmeshed with the bank\u2019s insolvency, the fate of the Mulholland Library was for many months suspended in legal limbo. Brian Walton, an attorney and friend of Jay\u2019s, who advised him during the fiasco, has said, \u201cWhen you look at the question of the ownership of the library, the moral ownership was clearly in Ricky\u2019s hands. The financial ownership was obviously elsewhere. But, of course, artists will often become divorced from what they create. Every day, there would be one yahoo or another messing with what were, in a moral sense, Ricky\u2019s treasures. One day, Ricky came by the library and there were some government people videotaping the collection for inventory purposes. And they\u2019d just placed their equipment wherever they felt like it. Ricky looked at one guy and said, \u2018Get your stuff off those posters.\u2019 And the guy said, \u2018I\u2019m So-and-So, from the F.B.I.\u2019 And Ricky said, \u2018I don\u2019t care who the fuck you are. Get your crap off those posters.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The outlandishness of the situation was compounded by the fact that the Mulholland Library proved to be a splendid investment\u2014the only asset in the First Network bankruptcy which had appreciated significantly. After a year and a half of what Jay regarded as neglect and mismanagement, the R.T.C. finally put it up for sale at auction. The day before the auction, which was to be presided over by a bankruptcy judge in a downtown courtroom, Jay gave me my first and last glimpse of the collection, which was still in Century City. In the building lobby, on our way to what had been First Network\u2019s offices, on the fifth floor, Jay pointed out that the bank\u2019s small retail operation was now occupied by a custom tailor shop. Upstairs, we walked through an empty anteroom that had once been lined with vitrines, then headed down a long beige-carpeted corridor. James Rust, a young R.T.C. employee, emerged from a corner office\u2014formerly Rheuban\u2019s\u2014and greeted us.<\/p>\n

Our first stop was a large storage room filled with material from the collection of a German physician named Peter Hackhofer. \u201cI bought different parts of this collection from Hackhofer in several crazy transactions,\u201d Jay said. \u201cHe used to lead me on incredible goose chases all over Germany. We\u2019d end up doing business at three in the morning on the Autobahn, halfway between Cologne and Frankfurt. We\u2019d be pulled over to the side of the road with theatrical posters spread out on the roof of his car. Once, I went all the way to Germany to buy a collection that Hackhofer was going to broker, only to find out that the owner refused to sell. Months later, in New York, I met Hackhofer at a hotel. He\u2019d brought with him a hundred posters, which, because his room was so small, he spread out in the hallway. He had to restrain me from attacking a bellboy who rolled over some of them with a luggage cart.\u201d The storage room contained hundreds of books, in German and French, as well as a silk pistol, a billiard-ball stand, a vanishing and appearing alarm clock, a cube-shaped metal carrying case for a spirit bell, and a paper box with a ribbon on it, which was about the size of a lady\u2019s handbag, and which Jay said was \u201ca Victorian production reticule.\u201d I knew that I could have happily occupied myself there for several hours, but he seemed eager to move on. We walked down another long corridor, past the erstwhile loan-servicing and accounting departments, and came to a locked door. As Rust unlocked it, Jay looked at me with a wry, I-will-now-have-my-liver-eaten-by-vultures sort of smile.<\/p>\n

We stepped into a square room, perhaps thirty by thirty. Bookshelves and glass-enclosed cabinets lined the walls, and tables and flat files filled the interior. Separated from this room by a glass partition was a ten-by-twelve cubicle that had been Jay\u2019s office. It contained a desk, a wall of bookshelves, and a side table. Two automatons stood on the table. One, called \u201cThe Singing Lesson,\u201d was the creation of Jean-Eug\u00e8ne Robert-Houdin, the nineteenth-century watchmaker-turned-conjurer, who is considered the father of modern magic. The other was a Chinese cups-and-balls conjurer built by Robert-Houdin\u2019s father-in-law, Jacques Houdin. A large, framed color poster of Malini, advertising his \u201cRound the World Tour,\u201d hung on the wall to the left of Jay\u2019s desk.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI heard that that poster holds some sort of special significance for you, Ricky,\u201d James Rust said.<\/p>\n

Jay responded with an opaque, querulous stare that said, in effect, \u201cHey, pal, everything in this place holds special significance for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along the back wall of the main room were shelved bound volumes of The Sphinx, The Wizard, The Conjurer\u2019s Monthly, The Linking Ring, The Magic Circular, Das Programm, La Prestidigitation, Ghost, The Magic Wand, The Gen, Mahatma<\/em>, and other periodicals. I spent an hour and a half in the main room, exploring the contents of the file drawers, staring into the glass display cases, pulling books from shelves, admiring framed lithographs, and listening to Jay. Ultimately, the experience was disquieting. Connected to virtually every item was a piquant vignette\u2014a comic oddity, a compilation of historical or biographical arcana\u2014but each digression inevitably led to a plaintive anticlimax, because the tangible artifacts had now passed from Jay\u2019s care. I paged through the scrapbook of Edward Maro, \u201ca Chautauqua-circuit magician who played the mandolin and did hand shadows.\u201d A Barnum & Bailey poster trumpeting automotive daredevils\u2014\u201cL\u2019Auto Bolide Thrilling Dip of Death\u201d\u2014had been used by Jay when he was \u201cwriting a piece about crazy car acts for an automotive magazine.\u201d There was a lithograph of Emil Naucke, a corpulent charmer in a flesh-colored tutu, of whom Jay said, \u201cHe was a German wrestler in drag, he was a famous strongman, he had a theatre of varieties, and as part of his act he danced with a midget.\u201d A lithograph of Martini-Szeny depicted \u201ca Hungarian Houdini imitator who wore chaps and a Mexican hat and used to have himself strapped to a cactus,\u201d Jay said. \u201cI was going to write a book on Houdini imitators that I would call \u2018Houdini: Howdini, Oudini, Martini-Szeny, and Zucchini, Pretenders to the Throne.\u2019 And with these reference books over here I could look up and see exactly where Martini-Szeny performed in, say, February of 1918. I bought this entire collection from an old circus artist in Atlanta who did a barrel act.\u201d<\/p>\n

We wandered back into Jay\u2019s former office at one point. To his obvious annoyance, Rust wound up the \u201cSinging Lesson\u201d automaton. While it was playing, Jay turned his attention to a book that had been sitting on his desk, a seventeenth-century copy of the first book on magic to be printed in Dutch. The front cover had become separated from the binding.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s nice,\u201d he said with sarcasm. \u201cThis was not detached.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rust nodded in acknowledgment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s creepy,\u201d Jay continued. \u201cThis was a really solid vellum binding. That\u2019s why I don\u2019t want people in here who don\u2019t know how to handle books.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you know how many hands have been here, Ricky?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, and it\u2019s really creepy.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Rust left the room, Jay said to me, \u201cYou know, I never had any agreement with Carl. At the outset, he asked me, \u2018What do you want?\u2019 And I said, \u2018I want access to this collection for the rest of my life.\u2019 And he said, \u2018Fine.\u2019 After we moved in here, I unpacked every single book. We catalogued what we could, but, as with any active collection, you can never really catch up. In the five years I was here, I almost doubled the size of the collection. This was the only thing I ever did that I spoke of myself as doing into the indefinite future.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Shortly after eight o\u2019clock the next morning, I picked Jay up in front of his apartment building, and we drove downtown to the courthouse, where the auction would take place. A couple of days earlier, he had said to me, \u201cI\u2019ve talked to a lot of people who say they might be bidding, and I can tell you that, without a single exception, they\u2019re utterly soulless. No one gets it, no one has a clue to what the collection is really about. There actually are people who are knowledgeable about this, but they\u2019re not the ones who are able to buy it.\u201d As it was, the disposition of the Mulholland Library now seemed a foregone conclusion. David Copperfield, a workaholic stage illusionist who spends several weeks each year performing in Las Vegas and the other weeks touring the world, had agreed to pay two million two hundred thousand dollars for it. The only thing that could alter this outcome would be a competing bidder\u2014bids would be allowed in minimum increments of fifty thousand dollars\u2014and none had materialized.<\/p>\n

At the courthouse, we discovered that the bankruptcy-court clerk had altered the docket and we were more than an hour early. Jay and I retreated to a cafeteria, where we were soon joined by William Dailey, the bookdealer, and by Steve Freeman, Michael Weber, and Brian Walton. When we finally entered the courtroom, Copperfield was already seated in the front row of the spectator gallery, along with two attorneys, a personal assistant, and a couple of advisers, who were also acquaintances of Jay\u2019s. Twenty or so other people, among them several lawyers representing creditors in the Rheuban bankruptcy, were also present. Copperfield is a slender, almost gaunt man in his mid-thirties with thick black eyebrows, brown eyes, aquiline features, and leonine dark hair. He was dressed all in black: double-breasted suit, Comme des Gar\u00e7ons T-shirt, su\u00e8de cowboy boots.<\/p>\n

John Gaughan, a designer of stage illusions, who was seated with Copperfield, said to Jay, \u201cDid you bring some cards?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, yes,\u201d Jay replied. \u201cWhen you feel your life threatened, you\u2019re always prepared.\u201d Then he asked Copperfield, \u201cWhere have you come from?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAtlantic City.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAh\u2014from one gambling arena to another.\u201d<\/p>\n

The judge, the Honorable Vincent P. Zurzolo, appeared briefly, only to learn that Katherine Warwick, the main lawyer for the R.T.C., had not yet arrived. Ten minutes later, she breezed in and, in a friendly, casual manner, distributed to the other lawyers present her reply to a motion objecting to the allocation of the proceeds. About half an hour of legalistic colloquy ensued\u2014a debate over whether the auction could even take place and, if so, when. At last, the Judge asked a fifty-thousand-dollar question: \u201cIs there anyone who is here to overbid the bidder who has made the initial offer?\u201d<\/p>\n

There was a minute of silence, broken in my corner of the spectator section by Jay muttering, \u201cUnbelievable. Unbelievable.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, with that, David Copperfield\u2014a man who owned neither a home nor an automobile but was reported to be looking for a warehouse; a man whose stage presentations were once described to me as \u201cresembling entertainment the way Velveeta resembles cheese\u201d\u2014had bought the Mulholland Library for two million two hundred thousand dollars. Katherine Warwick reminded Copperfield\u2019s attorneys that he had fifteen days\u2014until the end of the month\u2014to remove the collection from Century City, because the R.T.C. was shutting down its operation there. There were handshakes among the Copperfield entourage, and then Copperfield approached Jay.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThank you for everything,\u201d he said, extending his hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ll enjoy it,\u201d Jay said. \u201cI did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know you\u2019ll be welcome any time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll speak again in the future, I\u2019m sure,\u201d Jay said.<\/p>\n

A friend of Jay\u2019s who also knew Copperfield said to me later, \u201cDavid Copperfield buying the Mulholland Library is like an Elvis impersonator winding up with Graceland.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, Copperfield arranged for Jay to be flown to Las Vegas to discuss the collection. A driver met Jay at the airport and delivered him to a warehouse. In front was an enormous neon sign advertising bras and girdles. It was Copperfield\u2019s conceit that the ideal way for a visitor to view the Mulholland Library would be to pass first through a storefront filled with lingerie-clad mannequins and display cases of intimate feminine apparel. With enthusiasm, Copperfield escorted Jay around the premises, insisting that he read each of the single-entendre slogans posted on the walls\u2014\u201cWe Support Our Customers\u201d and \u201cOur Bras Will Never Let You Down\u201d\u2014and also the punning tributes inscribed on celebrity photographs from the likes of Debbie Reynolds, Jerry Lewis, and Buddy Hackett. When Copperfield pressed one of the red-nippled breasts of a nude mannequin, the electronic lock on a mirrored door deactivated, and he and Jay stepped into the main warehouse space. Construction work had recently been completed on an upper level. Jay followed Copperfield up a stairway and into a suite of rooms that included several offices, a bedroom, and a marble-tiled bathroom. The bathroom had two doors, one of which led to an unpartitioned expanse where the contents of the Mulholland Library\u2014much of it shelved exactly as it had been in Century City, some of it on tables, some of it not yet unpacked\u2014had been deposited.<\/p>\n

Jay stayed an hour\u2014long enough to register pleasure at seeing the collection once again and dismay at the context in which he was seeing it. When Copperfield asked whether he would be willing to work as a consultant on an occasional basis\u2014\u201cBasically, he wanted to know whether, whenever he needs me, I would drop whatever I\u2019m doing and tell him what he\u2019d bought\u201d\u2014Jay recognized an offer that he could easily resist.<\/p>\n

After Jay returned to Los Angeles, he said, \u201cAs much as I love this collection, I didn\u2019t think I could handle going through Copperfield\u2019s bra-and-girdle emporium every time I went to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clearly, Jay has been more interested in the craft of magic than in the practical exigencies of promoting himself as a performer. His friend T. A. Waters has said, \u201cRicky has turned down far more work than most magicians get in a lifetime.\u201d Though he earns high fees whenever he does work, a devotion to art rather than a devotion to popular success places him from time to time in tenuous circumstances. At the moment, he is mobilizing a project that should reward him both artistically and financially. What he has in mind is a one-man show, on a stage somewhere in New York, to be billed as \u201cRicky Jay and His 52 Assistants\u201d\u2014an evening\u2019s entertainment with a deck of cards. He envisions an intimate setting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAll I value as a performer is for people to want to see me,\u201d Jay says. \u201cI mean people who have come just to see me\u2014they\u2019re not going out to hear music, they\u2019re not out to get drunk or to pick up women. I\u2019d much rather perform in a small theatre in front of a few people than in an enormous Las Vegas night club.\u201d<\/p>\n

Provided that the right theatre and the right situation materialize, David Mamet has agreed to direct such a production. \u201cI\u2019m very honored to be asked,\u201d Mamet told me. \u201cI regard Ricky as an example of the \u2018superior man,\u2019 according to the I Ching definition. He\u2019s the paradigm of what a philosopher should be: someone who\u2019s devoted his life to both the study and the practice of his chosen field.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having directed Jay now in three films\u2014and they are collaborating on the screenplay of another\u2014Mamet holds him in high esteem as an actor. \u201cRicky\u2019s terrific,\u201d Mamet said. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t make anything up. He knows the difference between doing things and not doing things. The magician performs a task and the illusion is created in the mind of the audience. And that\u2019s what acting is about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jay now spends the greater part of his typical workdays alone in his Old Spanish-style Hollywood apartment. It is the repository of his collection, the research facility for his scholarly pursuits. Overloaded bookshelves line the living-room and bedroom walls, and stacks of books on the floors make navigation a challenge. Posters, playbills, and engravings decorate any available wall space\u2014several Buchingers, Toby the Learned Pig (the most gifted of the sapient swine), Madame Girardelli (the fireproof woman), Houdini suspended upside down in a water-torture cell, Erno Acosta balancing a piano on his head, a three-sheet poster of Cinquevalli (the most famous juggler at the turn of the century). Jay sleeps beneath a huge color lithograph of an Asian-looking man billed as Okito, whom he described to me as \u201cthe fifth of six generations or the fourth of five generations\u2014depending on whose story you want to believe\u2014of a family of Dutch Jewish magicians, a twentieth-century performer whose real name was Theodore Bamberg.\u201d Between two books on a shelf in the corner of his kitchen is a photograph of Steve Martin, inscribed \u201cTo Ricky, Without you there would be no Flydini. Think about it. Steve.\u201d This refers to a comedy magic routine that Jay helped Martin develop a few years ago, a dumb-show piece that he has performed at charity events and on television. As the Great Flydini, Martin appears onstage dressed in tails, unzips his trousers, and smiles uncomfortably as an egg emerges from his fly, followed by another egg, a third egg, a lit cigarette, a puff of smoke, two more eggs, a ringing telephone, a bouquet of flowers, a glass of wine, a silk handkerchief that a pretty girl walks off with and drops, whereupon it flies back inside his trousers, a Pavarotti hand puppet, and soap bubbles.<\/p>\n

The last time I visited Jay in his apartment, he was working simultaneously on more than half a dozen projects. Within the past year, he has begun to do his writing on a computer, rather than in longhand on a legal pad with a calligraphic pen. This has evidently not made the process any less daunting. \u201cWriting is the only thing in my life that hasn\u2019t got easier,\u201d he said. \u201cI can say that categorically. Right now, I\u2019m finishing a magazine article that was supposed to be about human ingenuity, but somehow I\u2019ve ended up writing about child prodigies. Here\u2019s my lead sentence: \u2018Solomon Stone, the midget lightning calculator, was an overachiever.\u2019 I go from Solomon Stone to the Infant Salambo. This was a child who was from a turn-of-the-century show-biz family. She was abandoned by them for several years, and when they turned up again they realized she had been neglected, had had absolutely no education. But within a year she was appearing onstage, having been reinvented as Salambo, the Infant Historian\u2014get this\u2014\u2018absolutely the most clever and best-informed child the world has ever seen.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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He showed me a prospectus for Jay\u2019s Journal of Anomalies<\/em>, a letterpress-printed broadside for \u201ca periodical devoted to the investigation of conjurers, cheats, hustlers, hoaxers, pranksters\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0arcana, esoterica, curiosa, varia\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0scholarly and entertaining\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0amusing and elucidating\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0iconographically stimulating\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI just finished a piece for Jay\u2019s Journal<\/em> on performing dogs who stole the acts of other dogs,\u201d he said. \u201cNext, I want to do a piece about crucifixion acts\u2014you know, real crucifixions that were done as entertainment. The idea for this came to me one Easter Sunday. Bob Lund, from the American Museum of Magic, has just sent me a little book on Billy Rose\u2019s Theatre that contained one sentence he knew would interest me\u2014about a woman who swung nude from a cross to the strains of Ravel\u2019s \u2018Bol\u00e9ro.\u2019 Her name was Faith Bacon. This was in the thirties. Unlike some of the other performers I\u2019ve turned up, in her act she only simulated crucifixion. Anyway, I\u2019m playing around with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the past few years, Jay has given a number of lectures on the origins of the confidence game, which he hopes to expand into a book-length history of cheating and deception. For the Whitney Museum\u2019s Artists and Writers series, he is writing a book to be illustrated by William Wegman and others. It is a history of trick magic books, which were first produced in the sixteenth century. \u201cI\u2019m really intrigued with the concept of the book as both a subject and an object of mystery,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Most afternoons, Jay spends a couple of hours in his office, on Sunset Boulevard, in a building owned by Andrew Solt, a television producer who three years ago collaborated with him on an hour-long CBS special entitled \u201cLearned Pigs & Fireproof Women,\u201d which is the only prime-time network special ever hosted by a sleight-of-hand artist. He decided now to drop by the office, where he had to attend to some business involving a new venture that he has begun with Michael Weber\u2014a consulting company called Deceptive Practices, Ltd., and offering \u201cArcane Knowledge on a Need to Know Basis.\u201d They are currently working on the new Mike Nichols film, \u201cWolf,\u201d starring Jack Nicholson. When Jay arrived at his office, he discovered that a parcel from a British dealer had been delivered in that day\u2019s mail.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh my. Oh my. This is wonderful,\u201d he said as he examined an early-nineteenth-century chapbook that included a hand-colored engraving of its subject\u2014Claude Seurat, the Living Skeleton. \u201cLook,\u201d he said, pointing to some scratched numerals on the verso of the title page. \u201cThis shelf mark means this was in the library of Thomas Phillips, the most obsessive book-and-manuscript collector of the nineteenth century.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mail had also brought a catalogue from another British dealer, who was offering, for a hundred and fifty pounds, an engraving and broadside of Ann Moore, the Fasting Woman of Tutbury. By the time we left the office, an idea for an issue of Jay\u2019s Journal<\/em> had begun to percolate.<\/p>\n

\u201cI could do fasting impostors and living skeletons,\u201d Jay said. \u201cOr what might really be interesting would be to do living skeletons and fat men. For instance, I could write about Seurat and Edward Bright, the Fat Man. Except I might prefer a contemporary of Seurat\u2019s, Daniel Lambert. He was even fatter than Bright, but he\u2019s been written about more. With Bright, the pleasure would be writing about the wager involving his waistcoat. When he died, the wager was that five men twenty-one years of age could fit into his waistcoat. As it happened, seven grown men could fit inside. I have an exquisite black-and-white engraving of Bright, from 1751. And I have a great hand-colored engraving of Bright and Lambert, from 1815, which has an inset of the seven men in the waistcoat.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Back at the apartment, Jay examined the Seurat book and brought out for comparison an 1827 eight-page French pamphlet on Seurat. I asked what other Seurat material he had, and he removed his shoes, stood on the arm of a sofa, and brought down from a shelf one of four volumes of the 1835 edition of \u201cHone\u2019s Every Day Book, and Table Book; or, Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements, Sports, Pastimes, Ceremonies, Manners, Customs, and Events, Incident to Each of the Three Hundred and Sixty-five Days, in Past and Present Times; forming a Complete History of the Year, Months, and Seasons, and a Perpetual Key to the Almanac.\u201d In it he immediately found two engravings of Seurat, alongside one of which he had written in pencil a page reference to a competing living skeleton. \u201cOh, yes, I remember this,\u201d he said. \u201cI have stuff on other living skeletons, too. I\u2019ve got to show you this George Anderson poster I bought at an auction in London in 1983.\u201d<\/p>\n

We moved into the dining room, where there was a flat-file cabinet. He opened the bottom drawer, which was filled to capacity with lithographs and engravings, each one a Ricky Jay divagation: \u201cT. Nelson Downs, the King of Koins\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0Samri S. Baldwin, the White Mahatma\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0Holton the Cannonball Catcher. I have a lot of stuff on cannonball catchers.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. The Freeze Brothers, blackfaced tambourine jugglers\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Sylvester Schaffer, a great variety artist\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Josefa and Rosa Blazek, the Bohemian violin-playing Siamese twins. And here are Daisy and Violet Hilton, the saxophone-playing Siamese twins from San Antonio.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. And here\u2019s Rastelli, perhaps the greatest juggler who ever lived.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. What\u2019s that? Oh, a poster for \u2018House of Games.\u2019\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I\u2019m just trying to get to the George Anderson piece that\u2019s sticking out at the end.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Oh, this is the Chevalier D\u2019Eon, a male fencer in drag. He used to be the French Ambassador to the Court of St. James\u2019s. It\u2019s a great story but it takes too long.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jay had reached and placed on the dining-room table the George Anderson poster, a postbellum piece printed in New Hampshire using wooden type and a large woodblock image of Anderson, who had made an art and livelihood of attenuation. He appeared to be five and a half feet tall and to weigh about sixty-five pounds.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know some people find this strange and weird,\u201d Jay said. \u201cActually, after this life I\u2019ve lived, I have no idea what is strange and weird and what isn\u2019t. I don\u2019t know who else waxes poetic about the virtues of skeleton men, fasting impostors, and cannonball catchers. And, to be honest, I don\u2019t really care. I just think they\u2019re wonderful. I really do.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more The Teen Believers in a Christian America<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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