Even Now, I Know What You're Thinking

Remembering The Amazing Kreskin

When the 89-year-old mentalist The Amazing Kreskin died on December 10th of this year, I had a little meltdown.

TA Kreskin, with crystal ball.

Long ago, I asked him to read a draft of my work-in-progress, the biography of a jazz-age stage psychic. His lengthy feedback which, in retrospect, was the splash of cold water my 600-page manuscript needed, was thorough, fair, and for a space of time, intensely demoralizing.

This year, there will be no Christmas card from Kreskin. I won’t be mailing him the final version of my manuscript: Years after receiving his input, I’m still writing it. Hence, the meltdown.

Kreskin performed and made public predictions right up until the end of his life, but his heyday was the 1970s and 1980s. A regular on Steve Allen, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, and Johnny Carson, Kreskin’s venue of choice was the television talk show.

Watch Kreskin use his mind, and a deck of cards, to make an audience member faint!

A purveyor of mental magic who could render volunteers powerless over their own limbs, via mental suggestion, Kreskin’s signature move was enlisting a committee to hide his paycheck in the theater. If he failed to locate it, by leading a committee member around the theater by the wrist or the end of a handkerchief (the better to read their involuntary muscle contractions), he would forfeit his pay.

Because I had a bedtime, I missed all of this.

If you, too, had a bedtime, perhaps you caught The Great Buck Howard, a melancholy 2008 film about a mentalist fallen on hard times. That’s Kreskin, incognito. The movie was written and directed by the mentalist’s former road manager.

Kreskin was of another era. An era when magicians and mentalists labelled themselves “amazing” without irony. An era when everyone (but my mother) referred to grown women as girls.

Watch four girls lift Regis Philbin—with their fingertips!

One of Kreskin’s contemporaries was James Randi, aka The Amazing Randi, a magician and de-mystifier, remembered for his tireless crusade to unmask psychic fakery—and his surprising tear-jerker of a biopic, An Honest Liar, which I heartily recommend.

As far as I know, Kreskin was the only “Amazing” to have his first name legally changed to “The Amazing.”

Johnny Carson just called him “Amazing.”

See Kreskin demystify the Ouija Board on Carson! Hear Carson call Kreskin by his first name!

As an adjective, amazing fails to hook me. Whether it’s a magician or a mentalist, I assume they’re overselling it—and whatever they’re doing is 100% fake. Yet, with his spot-on mind reading, card forcing tricks, and predictions, Kreskin was so practiced he could make you believe it was all, well, genuine.

Unlike The Amazing Randi, Kreskin was an entertainer, not a crusader. But he let everyone know that there was no trick, magic, or special powers involved in any of his displays of mental ability.

Fortified by his degree in psychology, Kreskin wrote countless books on the power of the mind, consulted with law enforcement, and had a deep curiosity about the power of mental suggestion to sway crowds and sow chaos. In 2002 he infamously predicted the appearance of a fleet of UFOs over Las Vegas. The result of this “suggestion,” according to Kreskin, was at least one reported sighting.

The Las Vegas experiment, as Kreskin called it, was in ingenious display of just how easy it is to seed a conspiracy theory or sow fake news. And get people to bite.

In a similar vein, Kreskin announced that he’d appear to us once again—ten days after he died.

Whereas the UFOs-over-Vegas experiment produced news coverage and hundreds of anxious sky watchers, I have yet to read of a mop-haired Kreskin appearing to Howard Stern with a prediction for Superbowl LIX.

Perhaps Kreskin’s failure to show is merely a sign of our communal distraction. Or the death of network television. We aren’t all watching Johnny Carson together anymore. Maybe we never were.

Carson as Carnac the Magnificent, billet reader.

When I think of magicians and mentalists, I think of the single-minded devotion to craft. The millions of solitary hours of practice, the willingness to say no to friends, to fun. The compulsive repetition of the same small actions over and over, until the hard-won focus begins to look an awful lot like mania.

Are writers any different?

“Even Now,” Kreskin’s letterhead proclaimed, “I Know What You’re Thinking.”

In fact, I imagined him tuning into my brainwaves as I read through his feedback, slept on it, felt bad about it.

What was I thinking? I can’t write.

Ultimately, Kreskin showed me how little faith I had in my project. Or, if you like, myself. Eventually, I got back to work. I won’t tell you how many years of Kreskin’s Christmas cards this has taken.

These days, like a card sharp honing her grift, I repeat the same small tedious actions over and over again. Remembering that each word, each sentence, no matter how much polish it needs, is still taking me closer to completing a draft. The only thing stopping me, as ever, is me.

How will I remember The Amazing Kreskin? By rereading his feedback. Channeling his single-minded devotion to craft. Maybe rewatching The Great Buck Howard. And finishing my damn book.