The Amazing Kreskin, an entertainer who used mentalist tricks to dazzle audiences as he rose to fame on late-night television in the 1970s, died on Tuesday at an assisted living facility in Wayne, N.J. He was 89.
Meir Yedid, a close friend, said the cause was complications of dementia.
Kreskin's feats included divining details of strangers' personal lives and guessing at playing cards chosen randomly from a deck. And he had a classic trick at live shows: entrusting audience members to hide his paycheck in the auditorium, and then relying on his instincts to find it -- or else going without payment for a night.
Born George Joseph Kresge Jr. in Montclair, N.J., on Jan. 12, 1935, and known professionally as either the Amazing Kreskin or just Kreskin, he said he was drawn as a child to both magic and psychology. He was performing mentalist tricks for audiences by the time he was a teenager.
His star rose in the 1970s and early 1980s when he was a regular guest on the talk show circuit, appearing on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson," "The Mike Douglas Show" and "Late Night with David Letterman." With other famous guests, he played psychological tricks that looked like magic: asking people to put their fingers on objects that would seem to move, for example, or guessing what card had been pulled from a deck.
He also gave live performances around the world, using audience members as his props. He promised that he had no secret assistants or electronic devices that enabled him to find hidden objects or guess a stranger's thoughts.
As his career progressed, Kreskin diversified. He wrote several books. He earned a few acting credits (usually playing himself). He offered mental training to boxers. He even created a dating website for people interested in the supernatural.
Kreskin often said that he was not psychic and did not possess any supernatural powers; he was, he said, simply was able to read certain cues, like body language, and use the power of suggestion to guide people's actions.
That didn't stop him from making predictions about the future -- including, in 2015, the coming presidential election. That year he told a Fox News affiliate in Washington that he knew who would win the election but didn't want to get too specific.
"I've been in his house," he said. "The one that's been shouting all over -- everywhere."
Fox's report mused that "the one presidential hopeful who could easily fit his description would be Republican candidate Donald Trump," whom many considered a long shot at the time.
But Kreskin's predictions have disappointed fans, too -- most notably in 2002, when he said there would be mass U.F.O. sightings over Las Vegas on June 6 and promised to donate $50,000 to charity if he was wrong.
Reports indicate that the gathered crowds were underwhelmed by the night sky that Thursday. But Kreskin said a few people saw strange things overhead -- enough that he didn't have to make his donation. And anyway, he said to The Las Vegas Sun, his ultimate goal had been to make a point about the dangers of public susceptibility to suggestion.
No immediate family members survive.
Though he continued to perform until this spring, Kreskin's star had been on the decline since the 1970s. That trajectory was captured in "The Great Buck Howard," a 2008 movie based loosely on Kreskin's life, written and directed by Sean McGinly, who had worked as Kreskin's road manager. John Malkovich starred as the title character, a once-famous mentalist struggling to make a comeback amid increasingly distracted audiences.
Kreskin himself suggested that the march of technology was making his work more difficult, changing not only the entertainment industry but the nature of human interaction in general.
In a video for the online knowledge forum Big Think, Kreskin complained that "traditional culture is disintegrating" in ways that made it hard to communicate as a mentalist.
"People don't hear each other anymore," he said. "There are actually human beings, and this is going to seem incredible, who when they're in a restaurant have a cellphone on the table and they're looking into it."
Fans mourning Kreskin might take some solace in a comment he made in 2015, suggesting that not even death could stop his work. It was during an interview with The Huffington Post, when he was asked when he might retire.
"Exactly 10 days after I drop dead," he replied.
John Yoon and Ash Wu contributed reporting.