Jay Marshall

Frances & Jay Marshall, Esq. Cover of Genii, The Conjurors’ Magazine, January 1960. Via Magicpedia, Genii Magazine’s history wiki.

Some acts need a truck. Jay Marshall needed a deck of cards and a glove. That's not a figure of speech. Entertaining troops across the Pacific during World War Two, he got tired of hauling a big carved dummy from island to island, so he cut his whole kit down to almost nothing: playing cards, finger rings, some folded newspaper for a trick called Troublewit, and a plain white glove.^[1] He put two black button eyes and a pair of long white ears on that glove and started talking to it on stage. It talked back. He called it Lefty, and by the time he was done, Lefty had shared a bill with Frank Sinatra, gone on the Ed Sullivan Show fourteen times, and landed in the Smithsonian.^[1][2] Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about the magician who could carry his whole act in a coat pocket.

A kid who fell asleep on Houdini

He was born James Ward Marshall in Abington, Massachusetts, on August 29, 1919.^[3] As a boy he went to a vaudeville bill in Boston and watched two of the biggest names in the business work the same stage: Howard Thurston and Harry Houdini.^[4] He was seven years old, it was 1926, and he fell asleep during Houdini's act. Houdini was dead within the year.^[1] Make of that what you will. The kid who slept through Houdini went on to spend the next six decades wide awake on stages of his own.

He started with magic, then added ventriloquism, working up a routine for the neighborhood kids with a dummy he built himself.^[3] He enrolled at Bluefield College in West Virginia and never finished. Turned pro instead.^[3] By the late 1930s he was touring vaudeville, and a photograph survives from 1939: a tuxedoed young Marshall, a hard figure on each arm, a Marshall on one side and a Pinxy on the other, years before Lefty ever existed.^[5] Whatever else that photograph proves, it proves this: the man hadn't found his signature yet. He was still working with wood and cloth, same as everybody else in the business.

The war made the act

The Army sent him island hopping across the Pacific doing USO shows, and carrying a full-sized figure through that circuit got old fast.^[3][1] So he stopped doing it. Cards, rings, folded newspaper, and a plain white glove on his left hand became the whole show, and the conversation he had with that glove became the climax of the act.^[1] A blogger who has handled the details put it plainly: two black button eyes, a pair of long white ears, no mechanism of any kind.^[6] Señor Wences was doing something similar around those same years, drawing a face straight onto his own fist. Marshall's version makes the same point in fewer words: with practically no investment and a little bit of work, a performer can build a whole character out of almost nothing.^[6]

He didn't keep quiet about it once he got home. By May 1951 he was billed at the IBM/SAM convention as "The Funny Bunny Man."^[7] In November 1955 he was touring with the June Taylor Dancers off the Jackie Gleason Show, working his rabbit into that act too.^[8] Somewhere in there, the name Lefty stuck for good and never let go.

Before Lefty, 1939

A young Marshall, still working hard figures, a Marshall on one arm and a Pinxy on the other. The glove and the rabbit were still years away.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Lefty, in later years

The glove that started as Army-issue kit, out working a room decades later, in front of the sparkle curtain.

Photograph contributed to Find a Grave by Andrew

Second to last, nine times

In this business second-to-last is the star's spot, the position right before the closer, and Jay Marshall and Lefty held it at The Palace nine separate times.^[1] Add Radio City Music Hall to the résumé, then the Ed Sullivan Show, where he appeared fourteen times.^[1][9] By January 1955 a columnist had already caught him twice on Sullivan's Toast of the Town, calling his comedy among the best on the show, with a trip to Europe already booked for the new year.^[10] He made that trip, toured England and France, and got back just in time for the Pittsburgh convention that summer.^[11] He also opened for Liberace and for Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas. More than one obituary, including his own memorial, credits him as the first entertainer ever to open a Sinatra engagement there.^[2]

He worked Broadway three times: Love Life in 1948, Great to Be Alive in 1950, and the Ziegfeld Follies golden jubilee revival in 1957.^[1] The Love Life job is the best story of the three. Kurt Weill's production hired him to train an actor to play a magician's role in the show. Watching him work, the producers realized the actor didn't need the lessons. Marshall needed the part.^[1] He took it, sawed Nanette Fabray in half in four and a half minutes flat, then got special permission to skip his own curtain call so he could run across town and work up to three shows a night at the Blue Angel or the Diamond Horseshoe.^[1]

In 1958 he crossed the ocean, playing the London Palladium and a BBC broadcast linked by Eurovision to the Scala Theatre.^[12] A British columnist called him "one of the finest vents ever to visit our shores" that season, in the same breath as Señor Wences and Shari Lewis, both touring England while Terry Hall and Lenny the Lion crossed the other way for Ed Sullivan's stage. Bouchier's own joke in print: it looked like the two countries were running an exchange-vents scheme.^[12]

The family business

Marshall showed up at the conventions. He attended the 1954 IBM/IBV gathering in Louisville,^[13] and by 1956 he was more than a guest: at the Miami convention he worked both the IBM banquet show and the public show at the Miami Beach Auditorium, then compered the whole IBV program himself. Association president W.S. Berger called it "a study in voices, showmanship, accurate timing and technique."^[14] The following year, his "Lefty, the precocious rabbit" routine, complete with a song and a belching gag, got called a masterpiece in the club's own newsletter.^[15] In between, during a fortnight engagement at the Beverly Hills Country Club in 1955, he made time to visit an Oracle columnist in person, wife on his arm and a friend from Cincinnati in tow.^[16]

He was generous with other performers' problems, too. In 1958, working a month in Las Vegas, he still found time to give "unstintingly of his time and technical knowledge" helping fix another vent's ailing figure, nicknamed Joe Flip.^[17] In December 1956, Berger visited the Ireland Magic Company shop on a day Jay happened to be there doing printing work for Frances, and while the visit was going on, the figure maker Frank Marshall, no relation, just a shared last name and a shared trade, repaired a Jerry Mahoney figure with a jammed jaw right there in the shop.^[18] It was Jay who talked convention president W.S. Berger into publishing his own bibliography, a small favor that outlived them both.^[18] In 1959, waiting on a flight out of Cincinnati, he phoned Berger just to say the coming Chicago convention would "outshine them all."^[19] He used that same Cincinnati trip to swing by and check on Vent Haven and its keepers.^[20]

For five years in the 1950s he edited The New Phoenix, a magic magazine, and used its pages the way you'd expect. When comedian Fred Allen died, Marshall's own tribute recalled Allen's dummy Jake doing a bit lifted straight from the Great Lester's playbook, the old voice-in-the-basement joke about shoveling coal.^[21]

Magic, Inc. and the shop

In 1955 he married Frances Ireland, a magician in her own right who had inherited a shop, the Ireland Magic Company, at her first husband's death.^[1] By the early 1960s the two of them had turned it into Magic, Inc. on Chicago's north side, and it grew into a real hub of the city's magic culture, not just a counter selling tricks but a gathering place.^[1][3] Marshall wrote two books along the way, TV, Magic, and You in 1955 and Parakeet Magic,^[1] and later sold his personal collection of magic books, programs, and posters to David Copperfield, a protégé of his and a longtime friend.^[1] In 1992 the Society of American Magicians elected him Dean, and when he turned eighty, the city of Chicago proclaimed a Jay Marshall Day in his honor.^[1]

The figure he kept for sixty years

Marshall didn't only perform with a glove. He also owned and worked a Ken Spencer figure, a proper carved dummy, forty inches tall, with side-to-side moving eyes, independent rolling winker-blinker eyes, and a slot jaw.^[22] When the paint needed refreshing he didn't send it out. He repainted the face himself, gave him painted hair instead of a wig, a very pale complexion, and dressed him in formal tuxedo, and it stayed exactly that way for the better part of sixty years.^[28][22] Collector Dan Willinger, who assembled one of the largest Ken Spencer collections anywhere, called it the prize of the whole group, because, in his words, "this figure was owned and used by the late great Jay Marshall."^[23]

The figure carries its own paper trail. Marshall's collection went under the hammer at Leslie Hindman Galleries in Chicago in 2007, two years after he died. A magic dealer bought this figure there, Willinger bought it from that dealer, and it crossed the block again in Willinger's own 2015 sale.^[22] Four owners and two auctions in less than a decade, and the market didn't share Willinger's sentiment: no Ken Spencer figure in that 2015 sale sold for more than $1,200, and most brought $600 to $700.^[24] The figure the collector prized above all his others didn't bring the premium in the room. That gap, between what a performer's own hand is worth to the people who love this art and what it's worth on an auction floor, shows up again and again in this business. Marshall's figure is as clean an example of it as you'll find.

The Ken Spencer figure

Marshall's own repaint, kept exactly as he left it for the better part of sixty years. Painted hair, pale face, formal tuxedo: a performer's decisions, not the maker's.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central, the Dan Willinger Collection

The last cover

Al Hirschfeld's own drawing of Marshall and Lefty, nose to nose, glasses catching the rabbit's button eyes. Genii's tribute cover, two months after he died.

Al Hirschfeld, via Magicpedia, Genii Magazine's history wiki

The last joke

Marshall died in Chicago on May 10, 2005, at Swedish Covenant Hospital after a series of heart attacks, eighty-five years old.^[2][3] Tom Ladshaw, drawing on the New York Times obituary for a tribute in Distant Voices, wrote that Marshall was the Society of American Magicians' official Dean, "as well as perhaps the foremost comedy magician of his generation," a man who worked with "no more props than he could carry in his deceptively fitting tuxedo."^[1] Distant Voices' own editorial that same season mourned him in the same breath as Paul Winchell, noting that "the final curtain has fallen for two giants in the business."^[25] Genii, whose cover he'd shared with Frances back in January 1960, put him on the cover once more that July: a spare Al Hirschfeld cartoon of Marshall and Lefty, nose to nose.^[26]

His son Sandy got the last laugh on the record. Near the end, after eye surgery, the song that had followed Marshall and Lefty their whole career, "If I Had My Way," turned into "If I Had Eye Way." And when a friend visited him in the hospital and said, let's get out of here, Marshall didn't miss a beat: "How about Drake's Funeral Home?" That's where they buried him.^[1]

Lefty didn't go in the ground with him. Two gloves survive: one at the Smithsonian Institution, and the original wartime Lefty, the one that talked its way across the Pacific, at Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky.^[1] Eleven years after he died, the community was still counting him among its own: in 2016 his name went up on the tentative sixteen-name list for the Cybervent Legends Collectors Cards, the kind of pantheon a community only builds for the ones it isn't ready to let go of.^[27]

A rabbit made from an Army glove and two button eyes outdrew fellas hauling full-sized carved figures through the jungle. Us wooden ones ought to take notes on traveling light.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy