While researching an article on Las Vegas magic in the late 1990s, I asked my friend Looy Simonoff about the colorful close-up magician Jimmy Grippo (1898–1992).

For the next two hours, Looy told me one Grippo story after another, each more extraordinary than the last. What follows are my notes from that conversation. They’ve been lightly edited for clarity and order, not substance. The stories, opinions, and judgments are Looy’s as I recorded and remember them. Any errors are mine.

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Grippo had an unusual look about him. He had a glass eye, and he’d tell exotic stories about how he lost the real one. In truth, it happened when he was a kid, from a firecracker.

When Grippo was in his twenties, he had a fancy glass eye made, with diamonds around the iris. He’d take the eye out and ask someone to stare at it while he was trying to hypnotize them. As strange as that sounds, the eye wasn’t the most curious thing about his appearance. That was his hair.

Grippo always wore an obvious wig. It was jet black, thick, and combed into bangs all around his head. He wore this jet black wig even when he was very old. When I went to visit him in the hospital after his stroke, I saw the wig hanging on a hook by the bed. The funny thing was that his real hair looked almost exactly like the wig, only a little thinner on top.

That same stroke left Grippo’s left hand paralyzed, at least for a while. When he eventually regained movement in the hand, he didn’t tell anyone. Instead, he continued doing tricks with his good right hand, while his supposedly paralyzed left hand stole things and helped with secret loads.

Grippo’s reputation was built largely on challenges. He’d start a trick, look at the spectator, and say, “Now how do you want this to end?” The spectator would challenge him with something like, “Make it come out of my pocket,” or “out of my necktie.” And Grippo would do it.

I remember hearing about one time when Grippo and his friend Joe Condon walked into a jewelry store just as it was closing. The proprietor was on his knees by the open safe, counting the day’s receipts. Without hesitating, Grippo secretly scaled a playing card over the man’s head and into the safe just as it was being closed.

Condon then introduced Grippo to the proprietor, who said, “I hear you do great card magic.”

“Well, I try,” Grippo said.

Grippo then forced a duplicate of the card he’d already tossed into the safe. After that, he said, “Challenge me. Make me produce your card in some hard place.”

The proprietor said, “My pocket?”

“No,” Grippo said. “Real hard.”

The proprietor thought for a moment and said, “Can you make it appear in that safe?”

Grippo replied, “Well, I don’t know about that . . . ”

Grippo also used to do a challenge involving money. He always carried large amounts of cash and would bet people that he was carrying more money than they were. He always won.

One day, though, a big-shot gambler decided he was going to beat Grippo. The gambler had about twenty thousand dollars on him and went looking for Grippo. Unfortunately for the gambler, he bragged about it beforehand to Dai Vernon. Vernon tipped off Grippo, which gave Grippo time to prepare.

When the gambler finally found Grippo, he said, “Beat this,” and pulled out the twenty thousand dollars.

Grippo looked perplexed, then slowly began pulling crumpled bills and coins out of his pockets. About half an hour later, he finished by producing just enough money to beat the gambler.

Grippo was also a very good hypnotist. He used hypnosis in a weight-loss clinic in Florida to help elderly patients lose weight. He told me that whenever he got out of his car down there, crowds of overweight elderly people would gather around him, asking to be put under.

He also performed mock hypnosis stunts. You know the trick where you apparently cut your thumb and produce great amounts of blood before it heals up? Grippo did a variation of that trick when performing for doctors. He’d tell them he was hypnotizing himself, but instead of cutting his thumb, he’d apparently cut his throat. It looked terrifying. Then he’d make the wound “heal.”

At one point in his career, Grippo developed a tolerance for electric shocks and began using them in his hypnotic act. He concealed a Tesla coil on his body, took a spectator by the hands, and commanded the person to kneel. If the spectator resisted the hypnotic suggestion, Grippo would activate the coil and, using his own body as a conductor, shock the spectator into dropping to the floor.

He stopped using the coil when he learned it was causing him heart arrhythmia.

Grippo also managed prizefighters. The character Evil Eye Fleagle in the “Lil’ Abner” comic strip, who put hexes on opposing boxers, was modeled after him.

Grippo would stand ringside, staring at a boxer and waving his hands, apparently putting a spell on them. Later, he hypnotized Muhammad Ali and told him he was invincible. He also taught Ali magic.

Grippo was always telling stories, and every so often, one of the strangest ones would turn out to be true, which meant you never quite knew what to believe.

For example, he used to claim that he’d advised Roosevelt to call his radio talks “fireside chats.” That sounded implausible. 

But Grippo also had a photograph of himself in the Oval Office, sitting at the President’s desk, with Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale nearby, standing.