THE
PALACE MAGICIAN THE
PALACE MAGICIAN
"If that's the four of diamonds, I will jump out the window!"
The dapper guest in a tuxedo takes a look around the Palace Court and then rivets a determined, skeptic's eye on magician Jimmy Grippo.
Grippo chuckles softly, shakes his head, then continues to slowly pull a card from his vest pocket. He lays it on the fine linen tablecloth next to a silver tray filled with caviar. It's the four of diamonds.
Fortunately, the man declines to make good on his promise. He chooses instead to simply gasp in disbelief along with his entourage gathered around the table. "Mon Dieu! C'est impossible!" exclaims a French jeune fille in the dinner party. Indeed. Jimmy Grippo never even touched the deck - as far as anyone could see - after the man replaced it and set the deck back in front of him.
The erstwhile window-jumper grabs the deck and rifles through its contents. He finds only 51 cards; no four of diamonds. As hushed murmurs cascade around the table like a "wave" at a football stadium, Jimmy Grippo chuckles and cracks open a new deck.
He shuffles, then slaps the cards down in front of another lady at the table. "I left a card out of this deck," he says. "Close your eyes and tell me what it is. I will mentally transfer that card into your mind. Tell me the first card you think of."
The woman concentrates for a moment. "The jack of hearts," she says. Jimmy smiles as he reaches into his vest pocket and pulls out a sealed envelope. He asks her to open it.
Yeah, the jack of hearts.
The woman scours through the deck. No jack. Jimmy continues to baffle his audience, pulling silver dollars from thin air, making rings and watches vanish and reappear...
The host of this dinner party, a well-known doctor, comments on the proceedings with droll yet mystified aplomb."I've been around the world - a number of times," he says. "But I've never seen anything like Jimmy Grippo."
For five decades, notables world-wide have uttered similar sentiments. Presidents, kings, shahs, dukes, prime ministers, sports heroes and other celebrities have all fallen under the spell of Jimmy Grippo. President Jimmy Carter, enthralled by Grippo's performance at a White House dinner party, was admonished by an aide for allowing his gourmet meal to turn cold. "I can always eat a hot meal," Carter said, "but I can't always watch Jimmy Grippo."
Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill called him "the greatest entertainer I've ever met."
"This man has to be the world's greatest magician - just like I'm the world's greatest fighter." was Muhammed Ali's characteristic appraisal of Mr. Jimmy Grippo.
FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, the Shah of Iran, the King of Siam, Winston Churchill, King George, the Duke of Windsor, Walter Winchell, Damon Runyon, Rocky Graziano, Aristotle Onassis, Jimmy Hoffa - and every show biz celebrity extant over the past half century, from Pearl Bailey to Billy Rose, Frank Sinatra to Joan Rivers...
Jimmy Grippo has held court for them all. And, he's still a dynamo. He works almost nightly by request only for diners at Caesars Bacchannal and Palace Court restaurants. He is also whisked off regularly by private jet to stupefy guests at parties around the world.
In addition to being a master of "close-up" magic, Grippo is a world renowned mentalist and hypnotist who has worked with many professional athletes, including the likes of Jimmy Connors and Muhammad Ali. (Grippo, back in the 1930s, was one of the top boxing managers in the country. He had seven fighters, including Melio Bettina, the worlds light-heavyweight champion, in his stable.)
It is said that a computer at Columbia University once registered Jimmy's sleight-of-hand movement at one-thousandth of a second, but the talent that most baffles audiences, is his apparent ability to "read" minds and mentally transmit information. He's also capable of memorizing every card in the deck after a quick thumb flip - an uncanny skill he demonstrates to close his show for the diners at The Palace Court.
"King of diamonds, two of clubs, ace of hearts, six of diamonds...," Jimmy intones, as he correctly calls each card before he flips it over, running through the entire deck.
"These cards are not marked," he emphasizes. "They are casino cards. If I had them marked, the inspectors would close this joint up. Nobody in the whole world can do this. Even after I show them how to do it they still can't because they haven't perfected the memory. This is not a trick."
Jimmy walks over and joins a party which includes sports handicapper Lem Banker. Banker, who grew up in the East, shares memories of Jimmy Grippo that go back to his childhood. "I was just a kid back when Jimmy was managing Melio Bettina," says Banker." "Back then there were so many papers in New York. There must have been 15 newspapers. And all the writers wrote about Jimmy - about how he hypnotized Bettina and made champs through hypnosis, Jimmy was a star. He was world renowned."
"Hey Lem," says Jimmy, "did I ever tell you the story about how I performed for Rocky Graziano in the nude?"
This ought to be good.
"One night there was a knock at my hotel room door in New York at about 4 in the morning," Jimmy relates. "It was Rocky Graziano and about six other guys. Well, you know how Rocky used to mumble. Rocky says, `Hey Jimmy, deeze hoodlums, dey don't believe youse can do it. I told dem how great youse are. Do some magic.' I said, `But Rock, it's 4 in the morning, what are you, crazy?' `Please,' he says, `I told dem youse could do it.' So I started doing some tricks for them but Rocky says, `Wait a minute, Jimmy, youse gotta take off yer pajamas.' `Why?' I asked. `Because dey figures if youse got clothes on you're hidin' somethin',' he says. `Youse gotta do it inna nude: So, as a favor for Rocky, I spent the next two hours doing card tricks in the nude."
Lem Banker smiles fondly as he shakes his head. "What can I say?
Pancho Gonzalez, Johnny Weissmuller, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston - all the greats hung around with Jimmy."
Who was the greatest fighter of all time?
"Fighters nowadays are all sluggers," says Jimmy. "They're like bricklayers or longshoremen. They just get their heads down and punch, There's no science to boxing anymore. Can you imagine what a guy like Jack Delaney would do today with his jab? He would jab these fighters to death.
"The greatest fighter ever, though," says Jimmy, "was Rocky Marciano - and I'll tell you why. It was something nobody noticed. If Rocky couldn't hit you in the head or the stomach, he'd hit your arms. You hit a guy in the arm muscles for three or four rounds and he's hurtin'. You've got him. Nobody knows how to do that today. I don't think even Ali could beat Marciano. I think Marciano woulda broke his arms."
Jimmy says he's 89, but according to his own book, The Magic Of Jimmy Grippo, he was born to a peasant family in southern Italy in 1892, which would make him 94. "The reason I don't like to reveal my age is because I don't want people to sympathize with me because they think I'm old." says Jimmy. "I don't consider myself old."
Indeed, with his soft, youthful skin and sparkling coal-black eyes, he could pass for a man in his 50s. The key to his zest and youthful appearance, he says, is a strict regimen of exercise, autosuggestion and self hypnosis, which he has been practicing all of his life. Jimmy learned these techniques back in Italy from an Albanian mystic named Alfredo Manero who purportedly lived to be 118. "Manero probably would have lived a lot longer," Jimmy says, "but he died from injuries he sustained in an accident."
Jimmy emigrated to New York in the late 1920s and before long he was the toast of the town. Famed hostess Elsa Maxwell took him into her camp, hiring him to perform his magic at parties for the famous and the great. She also wrote about Jimmy regularly in her daily newspaper column, as did Walter Winchell, who became a devoted friend of Jimmy's. "I used to hypnotize Winchell every Sunday night before he did his famous roadcasts, Mr and Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea," Jimmy explains. "Winchell's stomach would swell up from nerves but hypnosis calmed him down. I used to meet Winchell every night at midnight to make the rounds of all the late-night hangouts in New York to gather information for his daily newspaper column."
The way he describes it, Jimmy's life was right out of Guys and Dolls. Damon Runyon, in fact, was one of his good buddies, and when Jimmy wasn't performing at high society parties, he hung out with all the colorful characters at Lindy's. One of his clients was the famous Conover Agency, which handled over 100 beautiful models. Conover hired Jimmy to help keep the girls slim through hypnosis. "Dieting is easy with hypnosis," Jimmy attests. "It's simply a matter of controlling the taste buds.
"One time I was with this guy who didn't believe in hypnotism. I spotted this girl I'd been working with, so I told the guy I could hypnotize her on the spot - right on the street. I said the code word to her, psychoanalysis, and when she heard my voice saying that word she immediately stiffened up. I had her doing somersaults, dancing on Broadway - and this wise guy finally believed. But, meanwhile, a huge crowd gathered and we were blocking traffic. A couple of cops came by to arrest me. `Oh, so you're the Houdini I've been readin' about, are ya?' this cop says, and he slaps a pair of handcuffs on me. He says, `If you can get out of these cuffs I'II let you go.' Well, it took me about five seconds. The cop looks at his partner and said, `You direct traffic, I'm gonna watch Grippo finish his show.'"
Jimmy's expertise with hypnosis eventually served as his entree into the boxing world. "This lady came to me one day and asked me to help her out. Her son was afraid to go to school because bullies kept beating him up. I said, `Send him over.' The kid came over, he had a cap over his eyes, he was very bashful and shy. I hypnotized him and gave him the courage to defend himself."
That kid's name was Melio Bettina, and not only did he learn to defend himself, he took on all comers. Bettina went on to win the Golden Gloves and became the light-heavyweight champion of the world - with Jimmy Grippo as his manager. "We'd signed a contract to fight Joe Louis, but two weeks before the armistice, Melio accidentally shot himself while examining a gun at boot camp. They had to remove half his stomach.
"I had seven fighters in those days and they were all good. Three of my fighters won Golden Gloves championships on the same night at Madison Square Garden in 1934. That was the night Bettina decisioned Tony Zale. Eventually, four of my fighters were killed and three were injured during the war. I lost my whole stable, so I got out of it."
Jimmy was also a frequent visitor to Franklin Roosevelt's Hyde Park home in New York. One time at the White House, Jimmy pickpocketed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover - much to the merriment of FDR. "The President asked Hoover to give him back some papers he had signed the day before. `I want to make some changes,' he told him. Hoover looked through all his pockets. He couldn't find anything. He was all flustered, his face was turning red...."
During the '40s Jimmy performed on makeshift stages for thousands of GI's in Italy. During one performance, he and his audience were attacked by German planes. Jimmy fell into a huge crater left by a bomb and was stranded there for six days, where he had plenty of time to concentrate on his hypnotism. During the war his most memorable performance occurred at 10 Downing Street in London, where he entertained Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden. "I had them select a card and put it back in the deck," says Jimmy. "Then I threw the pack out an open window in Churchill's office. All the cards went out the window, but it was raining, and one card, the 10 of spades - the card they selected - stuck to the outside of the window and settled right in the middle where they could see it."
Jimmy's performances for notables and heads of state continued through the decades. He spent two months in Iran entertaining the late Shah. He performed for Fidel Castro and a troop of machine-gun-toting body guards in Havana. One of his most memorable performances was a trick he pulled on Aristotle Onassis. It almost gave the late shipping tycoon a heart attack.
Jimmy took a million-dollar gold ring Onassis was wearing and "melted" it into a glob of gold on a plate in a fancy restaurant where they were having dinner. Onassis was beside himself. Jimmy told the captain to bring out 12 loaves of freshly baked bread. When the bread arrived, Jimmy had Onassis pick one of the loaves and cut into it sideways. There, of course, Onassis found his ring, wrapped in a blue ribbon with a thank you note attached.
Over the years, Jimmy has hypnotized all types of athletes. "They tell me what their weaknesses are and, under hypnosis, I tell them how to overcome them. Through hypnosis I also help them to be more alert, tougher, to have more energy and vitality, to figure out their opponents - all of that is affected by the subconscious mind."
"One thing about Jimmy, he really knows how to pick the winners in a fight," Lem Banker says. "Over the years, he's probably been right 90 percent of the time. I remember after the Spinks brothers won the Olympics in Montreal, Jimmy told me that both of them would become champs one day. `They can take a punch, throw a punch and they both have a lot of heart,' he said. And he was right. Leon defeated Ali to become the heavyweight champ. Michael became the light-heavyweight champ and then won the heavyweight crown from Larry Holmes, and he's still undefeated. "I remember before the George Foreman - Muhammad Ali fight, Foreman looked like a cinch after he knocked out Norton and Frazier. It looked like nobody could beat him. But Jimmy knew better. `Ali will find a way to beat him,' he told me. `He's not going to exchange punches with him. He's gonna come up with some gimmick.' Sure enough, Ali came up with the rope-a-dope and beat him.
"But probably the greatest thing about Jimmy," Banker continues, "aside from his talents as a magician and everything else, is his knack for living. He keeps his body and his mind sharp by using them all the time. I've watched him closely, I've watched him eat, how he chews his food... Remember that movie Shangri-la? I think Jimmy is probably from Tibet."
Asked about the secret to his vitality, Jimmy scoffs at modern-day panaceas. "I do everything," he says. "I eat foods I like. I take a drink now and then. You gotta exercise a little bit. And the other important thing is to try not to hate anybody. When you hate people you get sick over it. You manufacture chemicals that harm your body. The thing to do - if you don't like somebody - is just stay away from them, ignore them, but don't hate them."
Jimmy practices what he preaches. Most of today's "high-profile" stage magicians, he says, are practitioners of the type of "magic" that is done with mirrors, trap doors and specially-made devices. "They've got engineers, carpenters and all types of paraphernalia," he says. "A real magician, like me, is a guy who can do something with just his hands and his mind - alone - with no assistance from anybody."
It all leads to the inevitable question: How come Jimmy's not a well known superstar? How come he's not on Johnny Carson or David Letterman regularly?
"The simple reason I'm not as famous as I used to be," he says, "is because most of the people who knew me are gone. Nobody's as old as I am. I've been around a long time."
Jimmy lived five more years after this article was written. He once told me that magic was his life. True to his word, without magic to keep him going, he passed away just two weeks after retiring from Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.
I will miss him. We all will.
I would like to thank Caesar's Palace for allowing me to reproduce this article. It was originally published in the January/February 1987 issue of "Seven" magazine.