Jay Marshall, who died Tuesday in Chicago at age 84, was the official dean of the Society of American Magicians, as well as perhaps the foremost comedy magician of his generation.

A skilled ventriloquist whose stylings were on display during his regular appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in the 1950s and 1960s, Marshall was among the best-known and most booked magicians of the day. Although exemplary in his skills, he was known more for his patter than for any particular trick, and generally approached the stage with no more props than he could carry in his deceptively fitting tuxedo. A scholar of the vaudeville stage where he got his start, Marshall liked to bill himself as “one of the better of the cheap acts.”

“He was a charter member of the school of suavity and drollery,” a scholar and practitioner of magic, Robert Reiss, said.

Together with his wife, Francis Marshall, he owned Magic Inc., a Chicago shop and showplace that was also among the nation’s most prolific publishers of magic books, including several written by him.

Marshall was born and grew up in Abington, Mass., the son of a banker in nearby Chicopee. In 1926, when Marshall was 7 years old, he saw Houdini perform, but celebrated this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by falling asleep during the show. Houdini was dead within the year.

Marshall nevertheless took up magic as a child, and soon added ventriloquism to the act he performed for neighborhood children, accompanied by a dummy of his own construction. By the late 1930s, Marshall was touring in vaudeville. Working as an entertainer in the Army during World War II, he drastically pared down the equipment he needed to carry to a few small items – cards, rings, newspapers for folding in a trick called “Troublewit” – and instead of a dummy, began using a plain white glove as a puppet. Their conversations soon became the climax of the act.

Lefty, as he called the puppet, was a minimalist rabbit with a range of opinions about affairs of the day. He became popular enough after the war that Lefty was playing to huge audiences at Radio City Music Hall, as well as the Palace, the old Broadway vaudeville house where Marshall played second-to-last – the starring spot – no fewer than nine times. Society columnist Elsa Maxwell wrote that Marshall’s was “the best routine I’ve seen in many a day.”

In 1948, Marshall was hired to train an actor to play a magician for the new Kurt Weil musical “Love Life.” The producers soon realized that Marshall himself would be a better choice for the role. He started the show with a few routine tricks, Marshall explained to the publisher of Magic magazine, John Mulholland. Next, the male and female leads came on-stage. Marshall levitated the man and then sawed the woman, Nanette Fabray, in half. “She’s in half over here; he’s floating in mid-air over there. I take a bow and walk off-stage,” while Fabray talked about how men and women can’t get together.

Because the role took all of four-and-a-half minutes, Marshall got special permission from producers to be absent for the final curtain, and instead booked himself into fashionable nightclubs, like Blue Angel or Diamond Horseshoe, doing up to three shows a night. He later appeared in the Golden Jubilee edition of the Ziegfeld Follies and other, shorter-lived musicals. Marshall’s popularity extended to Las Vegas, where he opened for Liberace and Frank Sinatra. As for being an opening act, Marshall cracked that, after all, it was “second-to-last.”

He made numerous appearances on television, including 14 times on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Marshall published “TV, Magic, and You” (1955), essentially a guide for magicians who wanted to get on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” although the author himself was known to sniff, “What magician can do anything more miraculous than the very television set he hopes to appear on?” Marshall also published various shorter how-to books, such as “Parakeet Magic.” He also edited a New York based magic magazine, The New Phoenix. A videotape he made of close-up gross-out magic, for instance sneezing into a handful of popcorn, was titled “Jay Marshall’s Table Crap.”

In 1955, Marshall married Frances Ireland, proprietress of the Ireland Magic, a Chicago specialty store bequeathed to her at her previous husband’s death. They reopened the store as Magic Inc. and built it into an active publishing house. Magic Inc. became the center of magic culture for Chicago, and to a certain extent for the Midwest. Chicago newspapers regularly sent reporters over to chew the scenery – rubber chickens, juggling supplies, trick instructions, and the like. A recent catalog from the store includes a number of tricks bearing Marshall’s whimsical touch, including the Idiot Rope Trick, a standard rope trick except that the magician forgets his scissors. “Fun and laughter follow in good measure. With rope.” He amassed a large collection of books, magic programs, and magic posters, which were recently sold to the magician David Copperfield, a protege and long-time friend.

Marshall continued to find bookings right up to the end of his life. “He retired a number of times, but somebody would always pay him enough to come back,” his son, Sandy Marshall, said. Always a popular draw at magician’s conventions, Marshall was elected dean of the Society of American Magicians in 1992. His 80th birthday was proclaimed “Jay Marshall Day” in Chicago. Lefty was donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

Marshall even used his own declining health as material. The torch song “If I Had My Way” had long been a part of his act with lefty, but after ocular surgery, it became “If I Had Eye Way.” After his final hospitalization, a visiting friend said to him, “Let’s get out of here,” according to Sandy Marshall. “He said, ‘How about Drake’s Funeral Home?’ So that’s where we’re having him buried.”

David Ward Marshall

Born August 29, 1919, in Abington, Mass.; died May 9 in Chicago after a series of heart attacks; survived by his sons, Sandy and James, a sister, Margorie Bamman, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.