The Amazing Kreskin, the renowned mentalist who had his own TV program, inspired a John Malkovich movie and (perhaps) a Johnny Carson character and performed hundreds of live shows a year, died Tuesday. He was 89.
Kreskin died at his home in Caldwell, New Jersey, his manager, Ryan Galway, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Just what was Kreskin’s talent? “I am not a psychic, an occultist or fortune-teller. I am not a mind-reader, medium or hypnotist. There is nothing supernatural about anything that I do,” he explained in 1991’s Secrets of the Amazing Kreskin, one of 20 books he wrote. “I am a scientist, a researcher in the field of suggestion and ‘extrasensory’ perceptions. I perform what I discover.”
One staple of his stage act was finding the paycheck, hidden by members of the audience, that he was to receive for his performance. If he couldn’t locate the check, he said, he wouldn’t get paid (that happened about a dozen times during his long career). He found checks in some of the oddest places, like in the stuffing of a turkey, in a fire hose and under the upper bridge inside a man’s mouth.
A true pop culture phenomenon back in the day, the enthusiastic Kreskin was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 88 times, and the host was the one who gave him “The Amazing” part of his name. Kreskin also claimed that Carson based his turban-wearing clairvoyant Carnac the Magnificent character on him, though others think the idea came from an old Steve Allen sketch.
The New Jersey native also appeared in the neighborhood of 100 times each on The Mike Douglas Show, The Merv Griffin Show and Regis and Kathie Lee Live, and he was a regular on programs hosted by David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon and Howard Stern as well.
Kreskin came on TV every New Year’s Day to make predictions about the coming year — a Newsweek columnist once dubbed him “America’s flesh and blood Magic 8-Ball” — and said he was asked to assist on dozens of criminal cases.
He knew his way around a deck of cards and even had his own Milton Bradley board game: Kreskin’s ESP, which arrived in stores in 1966, employed a “Mystery Pendulum” to test the psychic powers of players (ages 10 to adult).
Sean McGinly, who worked briefly as Kreskin’s road manager, wrote and directed the 2008 film The Great Buck Howard, which starred Malkovich as the title character, a mentalist. Kreskin’s trick of finding the check figures prominently in the plot.
“The job lasted about four months, but the experience always stuck with me,” McGinly said in 2009. “Years later I decided to write about it. So the first 10 minutes or so of The Great Buck Howard is straight from my life.”
Meanwhile, Zach Galifianakis’ character in the 2010 Jay Roach-directed Dinner for Schmucks idolizes the real Kreskin.
Before he legally changed his name to The Amazing Kreskin, he was born George Joseph Kresge Jr. on Jan. 12, 1935, in Montclair, New Jersey. A copy of a comic book that featured the crime-fighting Mandrake the Magician made a big impact on him, and he began to exploit his mental acumen in the third grade.
”One day, we played ‘Hot and Cold’ in class — you know, ‘You’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder’ — and I became obsessed with figuring out who was ‘it’ without anyone telling me,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1991. “So I started getting my family to hide a penny, and I’d try to find it. Nothing worked until one afternoon, my brother hid a penny, and I climbed up on a chair and reached up behind the curtain rod in my grandparents’ bedroom, and there it was.”
When he appeared on television for the first time on The Steve Allen Show in 1964, he walked over to shake hands with the host and, blinded by the stage lights, tripped.
“I fell on my face on national TV,” Kreskin told the New Jersey Herald in 2012. “Well, Johnny [Carson] happened to be watching the show. Seven weeks later, he created Carnac, the psychic that falls over the desk.”
From 1970-75, he hosted The Amazing World of Kreskin, which aired on CTV in Canada and was syndicated in the U.S. On his show, “we investigate man’s greatest enigma, the mystery of the human mind,” he said.
In his Tribune interview, he explained that he was “unable to penetrate the process of the human brain, but I am able, on many occasions, to perceive a single thought or a series of simple thoughts, if the subject is tuned to me and willing to open up their imagination. I am helpless if they refuse. Basically, I apply the power of positive thinking.”
He also was proud to have proved that hypnosis is a joke. “There is no such thing on the face of the Earth,” he said in 2018. “Nobody has ever gotten into a hypnotic trance. And by the way, because of my findings, you cannot offer hypnosis evidence into any courtroom case in the United States.”
His other books included 2012’s Conversations With Kreskin, which included a foreword by late Fox News founder Roger Ailes, who booked the mentalist as a guest on Douglas show in the ’60s.
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