№ 4
Ricky Jay
“It’s very hard to get behind somebody who’s going to run through the room and shoot people. But someone who outthinks them is remarkably appealing.”
—The Believer
*
A proposed philosophy of life:
Never turn down a chance to meet a one-hundred-year-old man
Ricky Jay, a dear friend of his once observed, can’t remember anything that’s happened after 1900. This isn’t a commonly noted problem for someone born in 1948 (or someone born around 1948, since, like so many of the basic facts of Jay’s life, it’s not entirely clear what is true and what isn’t). The sleight-of-hand artist, author, actor, and curator isn’t just conversant in the minutiae of earlier eras. In an ideal universe, he admits, he might have inhabited the eighteenth century — although he doesn’t see it as dreadful that he’s found himself straddling the twentieth and twenty-first.
Ricky Jay’s natural home is the world of deception — of conjurers and con men, of illusion and the art of the confidence game. With a simple deck of cards, he can perform unparalleled acts of prestidigitation. He is a direct descendant of sleight-of-hand masters Dai Vernon and Charlie Miller. Early on, however, his fame grew out of a wild signature pose: wielding cards as weapons. Jay could throw cards for speed (90 miles per hour) and distance (190 feet) and, up close, could pierce watermelons. He was also an obsessive collector of arcana from the history of magic, weaving long-forgotten tricks and patter into his act, then writing about his discoveries at length, in one-of-a-kind volumes such as Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women (1986) and, more recently, Celebrations of Curious Characters, a collection of forty-five short essays he first produced for NPR.
Jay’s more recent renown, however, might come from film and television. Thanks largely to David Mamet, a longtime friend and collaborator who first cast him in House of Games (1987), Jay developed a parallel career as an actor. His roles have included a classic James Bond villain (techno-terrorist Henry Gupta in Tomorrow Never Dies), a PI schooled in magic lore (Last Days), and a narrator whose syntax and style seem lifted straight out of a Ricky Jay tale (Magnolia). He was, for its inaugural season, a central part of the HBO series Deadwood, both as a writer and an actor (in the role of card dealer Eddie Sawyer).
In person, Jay seems immune to an interviewer’s workaday concerns. He’s hopeless with dates. He’s hazy on personal details. When we met in Los Angeles last year — early spring, at a small Japanese restaurant in the Bel Air hills near his home — there was always the sense that the facts were only part of the point. Listen to his stories, about gamblers and magicians and cheats, and you’re led into a world where true fictions feel like the way things might really be.
THE BELIEVER: With your enormous range as a magician, actor, author, and curator, how are you most commonly identified these days?
RICKY JAY: It’s still probably most with sleight of hand. But the thing that’s exciting is when someone approaches me and says, “I like your work,” and I wonder: What work are you talking about? It’s really nice. I think it’s always most gratifying to be recognized for some- thing that’s furthest away from what you do. In high school, my fantasies were to write for the New Yorker and to be in a James Bond movie. It’s much more surprising to me that those two things have happened than the success with my one-man shows in New York.
BLVR: You always wanted to be in a Bond film?
RJ: As a high-school kid growing up in New Jersey, sure. It was right in that period when what could be cooler? But the dream was specifically to throw cards in a James Bond movie. That’s what I wanted to do. I just don’t understand how all this happened. I just don’t understand how I became friendly with Joe Mitchell at the New Yorker, for instance. Those are the things that are really baffling and wonderful.
But we can’t pretend any of this has been easy. I had a very tough time making a living for a lot of years. But I’ve been one of these people, my whole life, where I’ve turned down work when I really couldn’t afford to. I just take the jobs that seem satisfying and interesting, rather than being on some goofy series playing some wand-wielding magician. I guess I’ve always had a lot of interests, and I’m fortunate in the fact that I’ve been able to pursue them. somehow I was able to scrape enough money together. but I stayed on people’s couches for years — for years I lived on people’s couches.
BLVR: You were never just a sleight-of-hand artist. Your career has nurtured many of the things that have fascinated you since you were a kid. If the six-year-old you could have seen how it would all turn out, he’d probably have said, “That’s right. That makes sense. That’s what I wanted to do.”
RJ: I suppose it makes sense. but, of course, my grandfather was the reason I got into it so young. He was a wonderful amateur magician, but he was also a really good three-cushion and balkline billiard player. and a really good chess player. And a really good checkers player. And a calligrapher. Many of the interests I have came from him. He came over from Austria-Hungary as an immigrant when he was young, and he got fairly successful in business.
BLVR: He was an accountant.
RJ: Right. a CPA — without going to college, from an act of Congress, which is a pretty bizarre thing in itself. He was an interesting guy. And what he did was he took lessons in the things that interested him — origami, so many things. By the time I was a kid he was finished taking lessons. He certainly was doing magic. But when he took billiard lessons he took them from Willie Hoppe. He found the people, the wonderful people.
BLVR: You met the magician Dai Vernon through him.
RJ: When I was four. So that’s sort of the point. My grandfather enjoyed life. By the time I met him, my grandfather was really into magic. He had finished these other phases. And maybe because I had some interest in cryptography and calligraphy, he talked to me about them, but he wasn’t actively taking lessons in any of these other areas.
BLVR: Physically, you took to sleight of hand immediately.
RJ: Yeah. When I was in junior high school, I remember my parents had me take some battery of tests. A research institution gave one of those “think what you’d be good at in the future” kind of tests. Some were physical and some were mental. There was a test about moving pins into — it looked like a piece of plastic with recessed holes in it. And then a pile of pins. You were supposed to put exactly three pins into every hole.
BLVR: This wasn’t a problem.
RJ: As it turned out, this was no problem, obviously. I was in the hundredth percentile. Of course, based on this, my parents’ determination was that I should be a surgeon. But how much of this was natural inclination and how much was from all those years of diligent practice? I just don’t know. But here’s another thing you have to understand. When I was that age, I was awful. It wasn’t like I was some precocious kid. I was interested, eager. But I’ve seen footage of me when I was seven — it’s silly, it’s ridiculous.
BLVR: How many hours were you practicing every day?
RJ: It wasn’t until I was twelve or thirteen that I really started paying attention. The early stuff is — things with apparatus. Silly things. When I was thirteen I did an act for quite a while producing doves. The difference was that Slydini [the magician] made me a costume for it, completely by hand. He was a wonderful tailor. He sewed the costume — basically every seam had a flower on it — and worked on the magic.
BLVR: You first performed on TV when you were seven. What was your act?
RJ: Oh, some awful apparatus crap. Terrible.
BLVR: Over the years, you’ve written about the importance of the “gifted amateur.”
RJ: Vernon talked about it, too. In the art of magic, and it’s true to this day, some of the absolute, unquestionably best things are invented by or developed by amateurs, not by professionals, who often make use of things invented by amateurs in their acts. These purists who have no interest in it other than their appreciation of the art — it’s lovely.
BLVR: As a kid, you must have been trying to figure out what you’d like to do for a living. Did you see a career in magic? Or did you think you needed to do something altogether different — to make sure you had a living, so you could do magic?
RJ: The odd thing is that most of the people I was spending my time with were professionals. That’s, again, part of what made my experiences different. There weren’t many kids who were nine or ten hanging out with Vernon and Slydini. These guys were professionals. That’s incredibly different. Usually it’s groups of kids hanging out together working on things. Although my childhood friend in New York Persi Diaconis became a legendary sleight-of-hand performer and mathematician.
But I think you’re implying there were specific decisions. There wasn’t much of a plan in any of this. There really wasn’t. I mean, once I was in L.A. I realized that I wanted to be with Vernon — that he was an old man and I wanted to be with him. And that’s absolutely the reason I moved here. The story that I tell in Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants is that he was in his seventies and I would get to spend a couple of years with him. He was seventy-eight, but he lived to be ninety-eight! I didn’t move to L.A. because of the business, to be in television or acting or any of that stuff. I came here to be with Vernon and to learn sleight of hand. And then I was so lucky to meet Charlie Miller, who was just as remarkable and perhaps an even more important figure in my life.
So a lot of that happened when I moved to California. I got to go out with Vernon almost every night, sitting in Cantor’s and talking about magic. I was still certainly developing at that time — of course I’m still developing. Even now I think of myself as a student of the art.
But I think we’re making too much of this as a series of fixed choices. I was a voracious reader. I was a lot of things. but the thing that I certainly grew up around was magic and that world. I just didn’t think about making a living. I didn’t have a credit card until I was in my thirties. I kinda did what I did. And the same was true when I was in college. I wasn’t particularly interested in classes.
BLVR: Where did the card-throwing come from?
RJ: Oh, it probably came from throwing baseball cards as a kid in Brooklyn.
BLVR: Really?
RJ: Yeah, that’s another thing that’s changed so much. For kids they’re now collectible objects that they put in Mylar and special books. I mean, we collected cards, but we threw them. You threw them against the wall. You matched them heads and tails. You had fun with them. I’m a guy who’s a serious collector, and I understand the difference. But I also love the idea of having fun. so I think it was the combination of having cards in my hand all the time and also being madly interested in baseball, until the Dodgers moved out of Brooklyn.
There is some history of magicians throwing cards. Then I got this crazy idea of using them as weapons. I don’t know where that came from. I guess that was the fresh idea: the idea of using cards as weapons. And in my act I started talking about a book called Cards as Weapons that didn’t exist: “I’m the author of Cards as Weapons, the Leading Hurler of Martial Projectiles.” One day I said to myself, “Hey, that would be fun to write this book.” So I wrote the book. But it’s really, I suppose, peculiar that I spoke about the book for years before it ever existed.
BLVR: How many hours were you practicing in those days?
RJ: [Hesitates] Oh, I don’t know, certainly six or seven. Other times in my life, probably ten. But I thought about that, too. People would say, “How can you do that?” Well, people go to jobs they don’t like for eight hours a day. I love this stuff. So practice, for me, was never a burden. It was lovely. And I like the fact that it was satisfying, it was rewarding. I didn’t know as much about practice then as I do now. so I’m sure I wasn’t practicing as constructively as I could have been.
BLVR: Just with a deck of cards in your hand.
RJ: Yeah. so you could do it going to a film. It was just part of my life. I wasn’t anywhere without a deck of cards.
[My full interview with Ricky Jay appeared in the May 2012 issue of the Believer.]