Richard Jay Potash (c. 1946 – November 24, 2018), known professionally as Ricky Jay, was an American stage magician, actor, and writer.

In a profile for the New Yorker, Mark Singer called Jay "perhaps the most gifted sleight of hand artist alive".

In addition to sleight of hand, Jay was known for his card tricks, card throwing, memory feats, and stage patter. He also wrote extensively on magic and its history. His acting credits included the films The Prestige, The Spanish Prisoner, Mystery Men, Heist, Boogie Nights, Tomorrow Never Dies, House of Games, and Magnolia, and the HBO series Deadwood. In 2015 he was the subject of an episode of PBS' American Masters, making him the first (and to this date only) magician to have ever been profiled in that series.

Contents

Early life

Jay prefered not to discuss the details of his childhood. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, on an unspecified date, probably in 1946, to Samuel Potash and Shirley Katz. A member of a middle-class Jewish family, he grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He never spoke publicly about his parents, with the exception of a single anecdote: "My father oiled his hair with Brylcreem and brushed his teeth with Colgate," he recalled. “He kept his toothpaste in the medicine cabinet and the Brylcreem in a closet about a foot away. Once, 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.” His grandfather, Max Katz, was a certified public accountant and amateur magician who introduced Jay to magic.

Career

Jay first performed in public at the age of four, in 1953, when he appeared on the television program Time For Pets. He is most likely the youngest magician to perform a full magic act on TV, the first magician to ever play comedy clubs, and probably the first magician to open for a rock and roll band. At New York's The Electric Circus in the 1960s, he performed on a bill between Ike and Tina Turner and Timothy Leary, who lectured about LSD.

He quickly developed a "cult" following among magic aficionados, and a reputation for sleight-of-hand feats that baffle even his colleagues. In his 1993 New Yorker profile of Jay, Mark Singer related the following story from playwright David Mamet and theatre director Gregory Mosher:

Some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, [Jay] was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s 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. “Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card. He turned over the three of clubs. Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.” After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.” Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.” Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right—what was the card?” “Two of spades.” Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card. The deuce of spades. A small riot ensued.

Three of Jay's one-man shows, Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, Ricky Jay: On the Stem, and Ricky Jay: A Rogue's Gallery, were directed by Mamet, who has also cast him in a number of his films. Jay played Gupta, a henchman to villain Elliot Carver, in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, and also appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights and Magnolia, as well as Christopher Nolan's The Prestige.

A collector and historian of note, he was a student and friend of Dai Vernon, whom he called "the greatest living contributor to the magical art." He is an avid collector of rare books and manuscripts, art, and other artifacts connected to the history of magic, gambling, unusual entertainments, and frauds and confidence games. He opposes any public revelations of the techniques of magic.

Jay joined the cast of the HBO western drama Deadwood as a recurring character and writer for the first season in 2004, playing card sharp Eddie Sawyer. He wrote the episode "Jewel's Boot Is Made for Walking". He left the series at the end of the first season.

Until recently, Jay was listed in the Guinness Book of Records for throwing a playing card 190 ft at 90 miles per hour (140 km/h) (the current record is 216 feet (66 m) by Rick Smith, Jr.). He can throw a playing card into a watermelon rind (which he refers to as the "thick, pachydermatous outer melon layer" of "the most prodigious of household fruits") from ten paces. In addition, he is able to throw a card into the air like a boomerang and cut it cleanly in half with a pair of "giant scissors" upon its return. In his shows, he often attacks plastic animals with thrown cards in "self defense."

As an expert on magic, gambling, con games and unusual entertainment, Jay had long been a go-to consultant on Hollywood projects, beginning with his work on Francis Ford Coppola's production of Caleb Deschanel's The Escape Artist.[11] Other early work included teaching Robert Redford how to manipulate coins for The Natural, and working with Douglas Trumbull on his groundbreaking Showscan project, New Magic (1983).

In the early 1990s, Jay and Michael Weber created a firm, Deceptive Practices, providing "Arcane Knowledge on a Need-to-Know Basis" to film, television and stage productions. By offering both vast historical expertise and creative invention, they have been able to provide surprisingly practical solutions to real production challenges. Among many accomplishments, they designed the wheelchair that "magically" hid Gary Sinise's legs in Forrest Gump, as well as the glass that "drinks itself" used by the gorilla in Congo. For the Broadway production of Angels in America: Perestroika, they designed an illusion "in which a man climbs to the top of a ladder of light and vanishes in midair."

Other projects they worked on include: The Prestige, The Illusionist, Sneakers, Leap of Faith, Wolf, The Parent Trap, I Love Trouble, The Great Buck Howard, Heartbreakers, and Ocean's Thirteen.

Additionally, he worked with libraries and museums on their collections, including the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California.

Jay authored numerous articles and delivered many lecture/demonstrations on such subjects as conjuring literature, con games, sense perception, and unusual entertainments. Among his presentations:

• "Sleight and Shadow", at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art
• "Belknap Visitor in the Humanities" lecture on the relationship between magicians and mediums, at Princeton University
• "Doing Likewise: Imitation, Emulation, and Mimesis", at the New York Institute of Humanities, hosted by Jonathan Miller.
• "Hocus Pocus in Perfection: Four Hundred Years of Conjuring and Conjuring Literature," the Harold Smith Memorial Lecture at Brown University.
• "Splendors of Decaying Celluloid", with Errol Morris, Rosamond Purcell and Bill Morrison at the New York Institute for the Humanities.
• "The Origins of the Confidence Game", at the conference of Police Against Confidence Crime.
• "Chirosophi: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Conjuring Literature," at the Henry E. Huntington Libraryin San Marino, California.
• "Fast and Loose: The Techniques and Literature of Cheating", at the William Andrew Clark Memorial Library, UCLA.
• "The Mystery of Fasting Impostors," and "The Avant Garde Art of Armless Calligraphers", at Amherst College.
• "Sense, Perception, & Nonsense" at the University of Rhode Island Festival of the Arts.
• "Illusion as Truth", at the International Design Conference in Aspen (keynote address).
• "Prose & Cons: The Early Literature of Cheating", at the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Lecture Series) and the Chicago Humanities Festival.
• "Magic & Science", at the TED Conference in Monterey, California.

Jay also lectured at Harvard University, USC, the Grolier Club, the Hammer Museum, Getty Center, and Town Hall Theatre in New York City. In 1999 he guest-curated an exhibit at the Harvard Theater Collection entitled "The Imagery of Illusion: Nineteenth Century Magic and Deception."

Exhibitions of material from his collections have been mounted at The Hammer Museum,[15] The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, UC Davis, Christine Burgin Gallery, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and UCLA's Clark Library. He has loaned material to the Getty Center (for their exhibit "Devices of Wonder"), the Skirball Museum, the Huntington Library, and the Whitney Museum of Art.

He loaned parts of his collection for an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled “Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger’s Drawings From the Collection of Ricky Jay" through April 11, 2016.

Film

Jay is the subject of the feature documentary Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay.

Death

Jay died on November 24, 2018, aged 72. His attorney Stan Coleman confirmed his death. Further details were not immediately available.

Credits

• The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (October 26, 1970)
• Saturday Night Live (1977)
• The Ricky Jay Magic Show – BBC special (1978)
• Dinah! (July 11, 1979)
• The John Davidson Show (November 28, 1980)
• Simon & Simon – Bird (1983)
• The Paul Daniels Magic Show (1985)
• Arsenio (1988)
• Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women – 1 hour special for American TV (1989)
• The Secret Cabaret (two series made by Open Mediafor Channel 4, UK)
• D.L. Hughley Breaks the News (January 10, 1990)
• Civil Wars – Lenny NiCastro (November 11, 1991)
• Late Show with David Letterman (1994, 2013)
• The Ranger, the Cook and a Hole in the Sky – Hawkes (1995)
• Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants – 1 hour version of his Off-Broadway show, taped for HBO (1996)
• Hustlers, Hoaxsters, Pranksters, Jokesters and Ricky Jay (1996)
• American Masters – "Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light" (1996)
• Late Night with Conan O'Brian (1998, 2002)
• The X-Files – The Amazing Maleeni / Herman Pinchbeck / Albert Pinchbeck in "The Amazing Maleeni" (2000)
• MythBusters – Episode 20, "Exploding Jawbreaker, Static Cannon, Deadly Playing Cards." Jay demonstrated card throwing, and the speed of his throws was clocked. (2003)
• Deadwood – Eddie Sawyer (2004), Season 1
• Kidnapped – Roger Prince (2006–07)
• The Unit – Agent Kern (2007–09)
• Lie to Me – Mason Brock (2009)
• FlashForward – Man in Warehouse / Ted Flosso (2009–10)
• 60 Minutes – Interviewed by Morley Safer for segment, "Pigeon Fever"[24] (2010)
• The Simpsons – plays himself in episode "The Great Simpsina" (2011)
• Teen Titans Go! – plays voice in Robin's head in episode "The Date" (2013)
• The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (March 31, 2014)
• Getting On – Thoracic Surgeon (2014)

• House of Games (1987) – George / Vegas Man
• Things Change (1988) – Mr. Silver
• Homicide (1991) – Aaron
• Leap of Faith (1992) – Cons and Frauds Consultant
• The Spanish Prisoner (1997) – George Lang
• Boogie Nights (1997) – Kurt Longjohn
• Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) – Henry Gupta
• Mystery Men (1999) – Vic Weems
• Magnolia (1999) – Burt Ramsey / Narrator
• State and Main (2000) – Jack
• Heartbreakers (2001) – Dawson's Auctioneer
• Heist (2001) – Don "Pinky" Pincus
• Incident at Loch Ness (2004) – Party Guest
• Last Days (2005) – Detective
• The Prestige (2006) – Milton
• The Great Buck Howard (2008) – Gil Bellamy
• Redbelt (2008) – Marty Brown
• The Brothers Bloom (2009) – Narrator
• The Automatic Hate (2015) – Uncle Josh

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1982); produced by Joseph Papp for The New York Shakespeare Festival.
• Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants (1994)
• Ricky Jay: On The Stem (2002)
• Ricky Jay: A Rogue’s Gallery (2009)

He also performed on the 2005 BBC Radio adaptation of David Mamet's Faustus.

Jay is the author of a number of books:

• Cards as Weapons. Image Graphiques (1977). ISBN 0882010174.
• Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women. Villard (1986). ISBN 0394537505.
• Many Mysteries Unraveled: Conjuring Literature in America 1786–1874. Antiquarian Society (1990). ASIN B00FFJ0402.
• The Magic Magic Book. Whitney Museum Library Associates (1994). ASIN B004ONUJP0.
• Jay's Journal of Anomalies. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2001). ISBN 0374178674.
• Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck. Quantuck Lane Press (2002). ISBN 0971454817.
• Extraordinary Exhibitions: Broadsides from the Collection of Ricky Jay. Quantuck Lane Press (2005). ISBN 1593720122.
• Ricky Jay Plays Poker (Audio CD). Sony Legacy (2007). ASIN B000HT2MB4.
• Magic: 1400s–1950s (with Mike Caveney, Jim Steinmeyer) Taschen (2009). ISBN 383652807X.
• Celebrations of Curious Characters. McSweeney (2010). ISBN 1936365030.
• Matthias Buchinger: "The Greatest German Living". Siglio (2016).

Ricky Jay has contributed to several projects in the music world, most notably the 2007 Sony release Ricky Jay Plays Poker, a box set containing a CD of poker-related songs (by Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson, Townes Van Zandt, Patsy Cline, Lorne Greene, Howard Da Silva, O.V. Wright, and several others), a DVD featuring Ricky Jay discussing and performing notable feats of card table deception, and a box of Ricky Jay playing cards.

He performed "The Fiddler" with Richard Greene on Hal Willner's sea shanty-compilation Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys (2006), as well as "The Chantey of Noah and his Ark (Old School Song)" on its follow-up Son of Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys (2013).

He appeared in the music video for Bob Dylan's "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum," from the album Love and Theft. During the production of the video, a screwdriver reportedly fell from the rafters and lodged in Jay's hand.

He also appeared in the video for the Jerry Garcia/David Grisman single "The Thrill Is Gone," which is available on the DVD of the Grateful Dawg documentary.