Ricky Jay: Sleight of hand, abundant of secrets

A magician never reveals his secrets.

Magicians get the deal about secrets the way baseball players know the score on crying, the way members of Fight Club know never to talk about Fight Club.

(Jamie McCarthy/GETTY IMAGES) - Actor and magician Ricky Jay.

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So I am prepared to have a somewhat fruitless conversation with Ricky Jay, the master sleight-of-hand artist. Jay is a world-famous magician and multitasker: he’s also an actor, writer, historian and consultant. A documentary about him, “Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay,” premiered last month at the New York Film Festival. When the folks at Encyclopaedia Britannica needed someone to write the entry on “conjuring,” they called Jay.

Jay has been elusive regarding the subject of his upcoming speaking engagement at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The only hint I get as to the night’s theme is “deception,” and it’s this word I have in mind when Jay’s phone call comes in — from a blocked number, of course.

Jay is speaking in conjunction with the Folger’s exhibition “Very Like a Whale,” an historical exploration of misleading appearances and transformations. He is a voracious collector of rare books on magic and loaned about a half-dozen items from his personal collection to the exhibition.

“ ‘Very Like a Whale’ [is about how] things are not what they seem,” said Jay. “[That] certainly lends itself to my field, which is deception. I’m interested in the idea of deceivers influencing or manipulating people to see what they want them to see.”

Deception is a malicious-sounding word, though Jay said deception used in the name of magic is, in fact, honest: “You tell people you’re going to deceive them, and you deceive them.”

There are videos on YouTube of Jay doing exactly that. In one, he walks a small audience through the steps of a seemingly straightforward card trick, telling the room that he’s going to deal from the middle or bottom of the deck so he winds up with all the aces.

You watch it happen, the patterned red backs of the cards sliding silently across the green mat of the table. You watch Jay’s hands — they’re pretty small, he says, not ideal in his profession, but clearly they suffice. You could swear, on your life, on the lives of all your loved ones, that he dealt from the top like an honest man.

Then he flips over his cards. Four aces. Heart, spade, diamond, club, all in a row.

Jay is enamored of deception. He lingers over this favorite word like food that tastes too good to swallow quickly. His primary interest in deception is its use in magic.

“But,” he added. “I also have an enormous interest in the use of deception in crime.”

Conjuring, also called magic, prestidigitation, or sleight of hand, the theatrical representation of the defiance of natural law.

— Encyclopaedia Britannica

This may be a logical progression of Jay’s passion: having learned to defy the laws of nature, one graduates to defying the laws of man — or, in Jay’s case, to studying law-defying men.

Jay has consulted on con films, once inventing a con for David Mamet’s “House of Games.” It was a twist on a real con that Jay wouldn’t share because, contrary to the belief that there’s no honor among thieves, “I knew people who did it and felt very unwilling to expose the methods of con-men friends of mine.”