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.
Well, I was looking at a clip of Heist and it was a scene where Becky Pidgeon and Ricky and Sam Rockwell and Gene Hackman had just robbed a whole bunch of gold, a big shipment of gold from the Swiss, and Ricky’s line is “Go sell chocolate, you motherfuckers, go sell cuckoo clocks, I got your gold.” So we’re just about to roll and I say, “Wait wait wait, Rick, say it this way, say, ‘Go sell chocolate, you Heidi motherfuckers, go sell cuckoo clocks, I got your gold.’” So Ricky says that and he’s dancing around with glee. I say cut. I say, “It’s great, huh?” He says, “Great, it’s historical. This is the first time anyone’s ever used ‘Heidi’ as an adjective!”
So that’s what I remembered from looking at him in that film.
I was looking around at Ricky and Chrisann’s house and there’s a bunch of tchotckes, a lot of these collections of tchotckes, right—trinkets—that I’d given him over the years. There was a pair of really great brass knuckles that I’d found in a shop in Vermont and a Chicago-brand palm pistol, a squeeze palm pistol, a hide-out gun for nineteenth-century gamblers; and a hollow die, a magician’s papier-mâché prop that I found him at a flea market in Paris.
One of the few joys for me in traveling was wherever I was I’d go around to the thrift stores and the flea markets and I’d always be looking for something to send back or bring back to Ricky, and I know many of you felt similarly.
The gifts were all of course connected to his very very wide ranging interests. Such that the tchotcke would elicit a story and let him know also that wherever we were, we were thinking of him. I found at a gun show way up in northern Nevada a great accordion-style hold-out machine, a cheating device—you squoze it under your arm and the accordion thing, scissors-like, put a card into your palm. And so I brought it to him, I said, “This is great, Rick, but the goddamn thing weighs like five pounds and the risk of getting caught is so great, who in the world would do that?” He said, “Junkies.” He said all of the great hold-out machines were used by junkies, because if they didn’t get a fix they were dead anyway. How superb to know a guy who knew that.
So why did we bring him things? Why was he beloved? For many are gifted and some, indeed, are genius, but many of each, indeed, are also despised. But Ricky was beloved by all who felt honored to know him.
This is a term we often hear in the news today, bandied about. “I’m honored to do this, I’m honored to do that, I feel humbly honored to be chosen.”
In this shithole or fur-lined pisspot in which we live, an actual honorable act is treated as demonic possession; and there is no book called Ethical Masters of Hollywood. In addition to being revered and respected, Ricky was honored because he was an honorable man. He was true to the tenets of his profession. He never betrayed a secret, he never betrayed a friend or a confidence, and he always as a matter of course acted so as to reflect credit upon his craft and upon his teachers. These included not only Dai and Charlie, but also Malini, Buchinger, and Hofsinzer, who were as real to him as anybody in this room and probably more real to him than anyone who’s not here.
We spoke about five times a week, exchanged gags and gifts and cartoons. I loved to call him with a particularly stupid gag because it was the greatest joy in my life to elicit from him those three magic words, “Hee hee hee.”
So a year ago I was in London and I went into a bookstore and I came across a book called Faking Palmistry. I thought, “This is heaven.” So I got it and I brought it back and I gave it to him. And then I was in London just a couple of days ago and I went into the same bookstore looking for another gift for Ricky and I remembered that he was gone.
I went browsing through the bookstore anyway and I found a copy of Theatrical Reviews from Punch, the British humor magazine. So I’m leafing through Theatrical Reviews from Punch and I’m thinking about Ricky and the character he brought to us in Learned Pigs called Le Pétomane. Remember him? He was the Belle-Epoch French music hall performer, and his act was to come onstage and fart. He would fart the Marseilles, he would fart a steamboat exploding, he would fart a train pulling into a station, he would take suggestions from the audience, he’d fart the fucking overture to Tannhäuser. That’s what he did.
So I thought, Oh great, here’s a gag. I want to share this gag with Ricky. “How did Punch review Le Pétomane?” One word. “How did Punch review Le Pétomane?” “Astute.”
I can’t share it with him now. I’ll share it with him later. Thank you.
David Mamet was a friend of Ricky Jay.
