Editor’s Note: On November 24, 2018, Ricky Jay—who, in addition to being a noted actor and writer, was probably the foremost prestidigitator of his era and certainly its greatest expert on the history of magic—died at the age of seventy-two. A group of his friends and colleagues, convened by his wife Chrisann Verges, assembled at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles to celebrate his memory on Sunday, January 20, 2019. The Threepenny Review has reproduced a small selection of the many speeches given on that day.
Everyone here, I believe, came to know and be astonished by Ricky in a particular way. I met him first as a reader of Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women and thought: This is someone I need to learn more about. A few years later, I heard about his woes with the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts from our mutual friend May Castleberry, who had commissioned Ricky’s magnificent Magic Magic Book as part of the Whitney Museum’s “Artists and Writers Series.” I went to Los Angeles hoping to persuade Ricky to let me write about him at length for The New Yorker. If you’re of the view that a journalist is a con artist who seduces a subject, then renders him or her on the page however he chooses, remorselessly—mazel tov, you’re entitled to your opinion. That wasn’t at all how it felt with Ricky. Throughout, he held all the cards, figuratively and otherwise, and allowed me to tag along, selectively. I didn’t anticipate that, in the end, he would become one of my closest friends—that happens rarely—but I’ll be forever grateful that he did.
The first living creature Ricky and Chrisann nurtured together was a beloved Bernese mountain dog named Boswell. To write my profile, I hung out with Ricky, on and off, for more than two years. When I later included the profile in a book, I inscribed his copy “from your other Boswell.”
The last time I was together with Ricky and Chrisann, the last day of September, we went to see our friend Michael Kimmelman play chamber music at Bargemusic, in Brooklyn. I remember the gleaming Sunday afternoon, the view of the harbor, Michael’s sublime rendering of the Mozart Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat Major, the gentle motion of the tide, and Ricky’s unflattering commentary about my driving, a series of “oy”s and “Jee-zus”es, going and coming. He tested you without necessarily knowing he was doing so. For all his genius as a prestidigitator, in friendship Ricky was never manipulative. He expected honesty and gave loyalty. You keep up your end; he kept up his.
More than once, while seated next to Ricky, I remarked publicly that he was not my lowest-maintenance friend. Shortly after he died, I used that phrase in an email to Steve Freeman, a brilliant sleight-of-hand artist and confidante of Ricky and Michael Weber. Steve wrote back:
“We once both lived in Venice only a mile from each other. One day Ricky called and said, ‘I have some important company coming tomorrow, and I need to straighten up my place. Can I borrow your vacuum cleaner?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘Great! What time can you bring it by?’”
My public references to this particular trait of Ricky’s would occur during the Q&A after screenings of a documentary, Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay, directed by Molly Bernstein, in collaboration with Alan Edelstein. Nominally I was a co-executive producer, and my sole contribution was to perform shuttle diplomacy between Ricky and the filmmakers. From conception to fruition this took fifteen years. As I say, testing…
Leading up to one scene in the film that, no matter how many times I’ve watched it, still gives me chills, Ricky states that for an effect to be truly magical, “it has to be spontaneous. It has to be something that just happened. Not in a stage show that’s carefully plotted from beginning to end but, rather, in a moment.” The witness to one such moment, a British journalist named Suzie Mackenzie, recounts an effect he performed for her alone in 1995—a miracle (no other word seems apt) originated by Ricky’s artistic forebear Max Malini. It was the only time Ricky performed this. For anyone, ever. Watch it for yourself—free with Amazon Prime.
When it happened, Suzie Mackenzie burst into tears. In the film, she says, “It’s a moment I’ll never have again. I’ll never forget it. It was a kind of supreme piece of artistry that I witnessed, that was done for me.”
What she doesn’t say is what Ricky told me, years ago, about her reaction. After she had regained her composure, he asked her what she felt.
“Love,” she said.
Mark Singer is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His 1993 profile of Ricky Jay is included in his book Character Studies.
