Optical Illusions : Los Angeles Magician Ricky Jay, Who Disingenuously Claims to Be Heir of a Bengal Lancer, in His World of ‘Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women’

IT IS EIGHT in the morning at Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale, where every Wednesday the people who design Disney’s theme parks, among other things, gather for a “Concept Breakfast”: free coffee and Danish and inspirational talks by architects or business planners, each a master of “environmental illusion.” But this week, the “talk” is a demonstration of real illusion: old-time magic arranged, ostensibly, in honor of Houdini’s birthday. The small theater, which usually has about 20 or 30 people for the breakfasts, is crammed with more than 85, while about 25 others watch a video monitor in the next room. Another crowd will attend a 9 a.m. show.

The stage is lined with giant posters of Harry Houdini and Robert Houdin, the legendary 17th-Century French magician who inspired Hungarian-born Erich Weiss to change his name to Harry Houdini. We hear Houdini’s voice on a scratchy metal cylinder provided by the curator of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts--Ricky Jay, the star of this show.

Jay’s book, “Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women” was the surprise literary hit of 1987, climbing at least two best-seller charts. In its second printing, with 71,000 paperback copies in print, “Pigs” is an affectionate chronicle of several bizarre, once-famous performers: armless men and women who sketched or played musical instruments with their mouths or feet; horses, pigs and geese whose “intelligence” amazed their audiences; mind readers, fire swallowers and even Le Petomane, whose talent was controlled flatulence: He blew out candles and matches and ignited gases by breaking wind.

The magician is currently in the studio, working on a prime-time CBS special based on “Learned Pigs” that is scheduled to air in the new TV season beginning this fall. On this morning, however, Jay will take his audience through a simple history of conjuring. And it is very early for him to do magic.

He starts out slowly, his patter subdued as he demonstrates, with a running historical commentary, perhaps the oldest magic trick in the world--cups and balls, dating back to Roman times--and a card trick from the 18th Century.

Cups and balls are familiar; over the centuries they have evolved into the shell game, perhaps the only magic effect associated with gambling. Jay, using copper cups about three inches in diameter, makes little red balls appear, disappear and reappear where they have no right to be. But we are a sophisticated audience, and we know, even though we can’t see , that Jay must be palming the little balls. Somehow. He climaxes his demonstration by raising one copper cup at a time to reveal, not the little red balls, but a large lime, an average onion and a medium-small potato. How did he palm those ?

Jay, now wide awake, is in baroque-patter overdrive. Re-enacting an effect of Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser, an Austrian magician during the 1800s, Jay asks a man in the audience to shuffle a deck of cards. Then he asks a woman to choose a card from the deck and hold it up for the audience--but not Jay--to see. It is the three of spades. Jay, eyebrows wiggling in a caricature of concentration, chooses three cards from the deck and props them face down against the copper cups. He asks a second woman to stare at one of the three cards; her concentration, he says, will make that card become the card the first woman has chosen. He turns the card over. The three of spades. Then he asks the same woman to look at one of the two remaining cards. Sure enough: the three of spades, and the same with the remaining card. Then, as casually as snapping his fingers, Jay turns each three of spades into another card entirely, whips a black silk handkerchief from his pocket, whisks it over a wineglass that holds a photograph of Hofzinser--and Hofzinser becomes the three of spades. Impressive.

THIS PAST year, Jay launched a more conventional career: He appeared in David Mamet’s film “House of Games” as a sinister card shark, and he will play a Mafia chieftain in Mamet’s “Things Change,” to be released this fall.

“I always thought that I probably could act,” Jay says. “The standard Robert Houdin definition of a magician is that he’s an actor playing the part of a magician.”

And then there is the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts. Jay is the curator of this curious collection that is tucked away in four rented rooms in a Century City high-rise. The shelves are stacked with more than 10,000 books and thousands more prints, playbills, periodicals, posters and automatons, with Houdini’s wallet sharing space with photographs.

Named after New York magician John Mulholland (no relation to Los Angeles’ famous water czar), who amassed the collection over a 50-year period, the library, formerly housed at the Players Club in New York, is not open to the public. Scholars and researchers may examine the material only by appointment. Jay--and the anonymous benefactor who bought the collection and moved it to Los Angeles--has plans for the library, but these are still just dreams: a building of its own, with a gallery for exhibits and performances that would be open to the public.

Jay began his exploration of the past when he was a kid. “I thought it would make more sense to look at something older, that nobody else was looking at. I always wanted to do something different, and in the process of looking for older and older material, I became interested in the history. And after that I became interested in the objects.” The Mulholland and his personal collections allow him “the pleasure of holding a book in your hand that was the same edition the inventor or the writer had.”

The Mulholland Library also contains a huge collection of magic magazines in which generations of magicians, young and old, amateur and professional, have written about their techniques and “discoveries,” a kind of informal trade-journal patenting process. Jay has never contributed a word to a book or magazine about how he achieves his magic.

“I’m one of the last holdouts for secrecy,” he says, so he must depend on audiences’ memories and, all too rarely, television, to document his accomplishments. He appeared on “That’s Incredible” several years ago, in fact, just to establish an effect as his own: Facing the camera, Jay held a white cigarette paper. He tore it into the shape of a butterfly, and as the camera held tight on his hands, the pieces of paper become a live, fluttering butterfly. It didn’t just fly away; it flew around the edge of the television screen as if trying to escape into our living rooms. Done without special effects or camera trickery, that butterfly remains Jay’s most dazzling achievement.

JAY IS AS reticent about his past as he is about revealing his magic. He will not talk about his person al life or family, except for his grandfather, Max Katz, an amateur magician who introduced young Jay to the great practitioners of the art. When a reporter recently insisted that Jay say something about his parents, the magician told him that his mother was the daughter of a Bengal lancer and his father was the Formica king of Long Island. This was duly printed. Aside from that (untrue) heritage, Jay has admitted that he was born in Brooklyn and attended high school in Elizabeth, N.J., and that’s about it.

Jay, 39, has been performing magic since he was 4; he did his first television show when he was 7. In the late ‘60s, he started playing rock clubs coast to coast with a combination of stream-of-consciousness storytelling, weird windup toys and astounding sleight-of-hand. He wore ill-fitting corduroy jackets, loped about the stage stroking his chest-length hair and talked nonstop while cards and other objects disappeared and then reappeared in audience pockets or were found inside other objects that seemed completely unrelated to the action at hand.

Once, drawing on a news story of the day--about a Mrs. Rubio in New Mexico who claimed to have seen the face of Jesus on a tortilla--Jay caused a happy face to appear on a tortilla. The effect was accompanied by Jay’s reminiscences about the Borscht Belt song “Mazel Means Good Luck,” as performed by the black group Jimmy Ricks and the Ravens, and punctuated by a tiny windup football player kicking imaginary touchdowns. “I don’t understand how that works,” he says of his creative process. “There’s no logical way any of this would come about.”

There is a certain logic in his career, though--one interest flowing into another. His delight in the history of magic--and the magic of history--has led him to yet another career: discussing rare conjuring literature and demonstrating period magic, such as at the Imagineering breakfast gig and even at universities, including Cornell, where he was “a freshman for 10 years.”

When not working, Jay says he is “overwhelmed by everything. I have no semblance of feeling for real life. I’m amazingly responsible in terms of business and very intolerant of people who aren’t, but in terms of going to the dry cleaners or bank, I’m utterly helpless.”

His West Hollywood apartment does not look like the home of a helpless bachelor; the walls have just been painted and his many framed posters are leaning against furniture, waiting to be rehung. His books are shelved, his rare papers filed in map drawers in the dining room. But there are some lingering clues of his helplessness. Next to the file is a video camera with a yellow note stuck on the side.

“I had to call somebody and ask how to turn the camera on,” Jay says, laughing. “These are operating instructions. See,” he says, pointing to the note: ‘Turn on power.’ ”

His career needs no such help. After Jay finishes preparing a one-man theater show and taping the “Learned Pigs” TV special, he wants to write another book about weird performers. “I mean, look at this,” Jay says, pointing to a large poster in his living room. “Martini-Szeny, a Hungarian escape artist in a cowboy outfit strapped to a cactus with Indians in the background. What were they doing ?

“I just love this material,” he says, “and I haven’t come close to exhausting it.”