March 21, 2023 • 39 mins
On October 3, 2003, a horrified audience looked on as Roy Horn, one-half of the famous German magician duo Siegfried & Roy, was bit by a 400-pound white tiger named “Mantecore” and dragged offstage. After many years in residency at the Mirage Las Vegas and more than 30,000 performances over their career featuring exotic animals, one of the big cats finally turned on their handlers. Chris Jones and Michael Mooney are the authors of The Atlantic article “The Original Tiger Kings: The Improbable Rise and Savage Fall of Siegfried & Roy,” which deconstructs this moment and everything that led to it. Jones and Mooney are journalists that have collectively written for Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire and The Wall Street Journal Magazine. Chris Jones is also the author of the book The Eye Test: A Case for Human Creativity in the Age of Analytics, as well as serving as a writer and producer on Netflix’s Away. Michael Mooney is also the New York Times best-selling author of The Life and Legend of Chris Kyle: American Sniper, Navy SEAL. Together, they speak with Alec about the tragic event, the reporting behind the scenes and the lessons learned from the end of an era.
You can find the article at:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/11/siegfried-roy-fame-rise-and-fall/671528/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's
the Thing from iHeart Radio. On October third, two thousand three,
an audience of fifteen hundred men, women, and children were
settling into the theater at the Mirage Resort and Casino
in Las Vegas for an evening of magic, spectacle, and delight.
(00:24):
The world famous German magicians known simply as Siegfried and
Roy took to the stage that night for what would
be their five thousand, seven hundred and fiftieth show at
the Mirage. One of the hallmarks of the duo's act
was the use of exotic animals like elephants, lions, cheetahs,
and tigers. Siegfried and Roy had worked with exotic animals
(00:49):
on stage for forty four years in a career that
spanned over thirty thousand performances until that infamous evening in
two thousand and three. To the horror of the audience
and the crew backstage, Roy Horn was bit that night
during their act by a four hundred pound white tiger
(01:10):
named Manticorps and dragged off stage by the neck. Trainers
intervened and ultimately saved Roy's life, but the magicians suffered
a stroke, severe blood loss and paralysis. Roy Horn would
require multiple surgeries and intensive rehabilitation. My guests today. Chris
(01:32):
Jones and Michael Mooney wrote the article unearthing the backstory
and the fallout of the tragedy for The Atlantic. Jones
and Mooney are journalists that collectively have written for Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire,
and The Wall Street Journal magazine. The two writers combined
their talents to construct the jaw dropping article entitled The
(01:56):
Original Tiger Kings, The Improbable Rise and Savage Fall of
Siegfried and Roy. I'm Chris Jones, I'm Michael Mooney. When
you guys worked together, had you ever worked together before?
This is for Chris. No, we were good friends. You
knew each other, Yeah, we knew each other. And I
was a big admirer of Mooney's work. In fact, I
(02:17):
first knew Mooney because I read two He wrote two
great stories back to back within a month, and I
emailed him and I was like, who are you? Because
these are great? Now, Michael Mooney, when these things happen,
are most of them pitches that you make? Are they
commissions where someone comes to you, an editor that you've
worked with, used this particular piece you wrote. This was
(02:38):
for The Atlantic. And how does this come about? Is
it a commission or you pitch? It's about fifty fifty
So this one originated with the editors of the Atlantic.
This one was one of their ideas. Especially after Tiger
King the Netflix show was so popular. This seemed like
a natural follow But honestly, it really is about half
and a half. The story I did for The Atlantic
(02:59):
right before this was a crime story that I pitched them.
And when you pitch, Chris, is it like sometimes you
just say a name, Sometimes you say a murderer, sometimes
you say a performer's name, and they go, I'm in.
How did the pitch work with an editor when you
were pitching? Sometimes it's a name. Sometimes literally a pitch
is one line, and sometimes it's a more elaborate thing.
(03:21):
I mean. One of the things that young journalists need
to understand about this business. You know, I was a
staff writer at Esquire for fourteen years. They were paying
me a salary and I was probably one for twenty
on my pitches, I would guess like they would reject
nineteen of my ideas and they were paying me to write,
and so for a freelancer. Pitching it's tough, and sometimes
(03:42):
you really have to convince somebody that this is a story.
But sometimes it can give me an example, what's a
story that it was an uphill battle for you? If
you can, Oh, yeah, I can tell you one right
now that I had to pitch again and again was
Roger Ebert, the film critic. You know, he had cancer
and he lost the ability to speak and eat and drink,
and he sort of re emerged as a blogger. He
(04:04):
had to remember he had that, like, he had this
amazing blog and he was such a beautiful writer. I
think people knew him as a TV person, but he
had he was a Pulitzurprise winning critic before that sort
of iteration of himself, and then through sort of tragedy,
personal tragedy, he became something else. It was it was
like this metamorphosis that happened, and I really wanted to
(04:27):
write about him. And writing about a writer is always
sort of a little tricky. It's like it's starting to
make a movie about a writer because so much, so
much of it is internal. So I had to pick Roger.
I would say I picked him four or five times.
And then the only reason Esquire assigned me that story.
In the end is I was I was literally supposed
to write about Taylor Swift, and she backed out, and
so there was suddenly a hole in the magazine. And
(04:48):
so I'll be forever grateful for Taylor Swift for backing out,
because the Roger's story was a hugely important story for
me personally and professionally. It did very well, but it
was also a hugely move gratifying now. And it's interesting
because you're in the bullpen, they're just throwing balls all
day long, waiting for them to call you in. And
when you're on it as a staff writer. Now, Michael,
(05:09):
when it's a commission, whether you're a staff writer or no,
when someone comes to you, if you're on the staff,
I guess you try to be as cooperative as you
can because you're they're paying you for that. It's your job.
But if it's a commission, is there any metric or
is there any sense? What's a fast no? Like if
someone comes to you and says we want you to
write a story about you know, the Will Smith Oscar slap,
(05:30):
and do you sit there and go, oh my god,
it's been covered to fucking death. You when they're coming
to you. What's the last thing you want to hear?
Something that's timely? Yeah, yeah, honestly, is a magazine story,
something that's you want to run about John Wilkes Booth's
last meal. Yeah, anything in the last decade. Yeah. I
mean there's also all sorts of bitfalls for in the
(05:51):
magazine world, right, I don't want to write something that
like I become the guy who does something terrible, right, Like, oh,
you want to send somebody who literally like lives in
tracks for a week, Yes, this is the guy like
Joe Stu Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in the magazine world,
if you if you write about something or a certain
way and people like that story, other editors immediately want
(06:11):
a version of that story. I did a couple of
right arounds where you know, if you can't interview the person,
then you have to interview one hundred and fifty people
who know that person. Sig Free and Roy didn't talk
to us for this story. But also you know, in Texas,
I was assigned a story about the Texas Rangers manager
Ron Washington when they were in the World Series a
(06:32):
couple of times in the offseason, and he lives in
New Orleans and really just famously does not give interviews
in New Orleans and does not share his private life
in that way. And I went to his house and
he didn't want to talk to me, So then I
had to talk to you know, I think probably twenty
five or thirty people who have worked with him and
known him through the years. But then you become a
right around person and every magazine's like, you know, who
(06:53):
won't talk to us, you want to do this story?
You know who will never ever sit down for you
and answer any question that you're curious about one you're
right about that person. They'll say that to you. Is
that to a degree your methodology, Michael, where when you
talk to people you just don't press and hope they
give it to you. Yeah, that's exactly right. You just
have a human to human conversation. And then honestly, often
(07:15):
the questions that you're most curious about are things that
they end up bringing up. You know, most people, if
you're sitting down for an interview, they know why they're there.
You know, they know the biggest questions in life that
you're probably gonna ask anyway, and they've probably prepared some
sort of answer in their mind, and if you start
with that, that is going to be very off putting,
just like any conversation would if it's not recorded or
(07:38):
it's not for you a magazine story. One of the
most underrated skills, and I don't mean just for journalists,
for human beings, is listening. Nobody listens. And you can
get someone who's famous or someone who's not famous, who's
the subject of a story because something terrible or wonderful
happened to them. No one in their life just sit
(08:00):
down and listens to them. And so if you're that person,
if you can get them to sort of almost forget
that you're a journalist and that you're just there to
hear their story and then relay their story, you become
sort of a trusted advocate for them, and then it's
a different experience. It's not an interrogation, it's a conversation.
And even in your regular life, like I say this
(08:22):
to people all the time, if you want to become
the favorite person in your friend group, be the one
who sits there and listens, Be the one who just
lets people talk. It was interesting, actually, if Mooney and
I interviewed people together, which I've never done before, and
describe what would that was like, Chris, what was it
like for you? It worked really well, I think, and
what sort of naturally happened. I think I was the
(08:43):
bad cop in the interrogations and Mooney was the good
cop because I tend to laser in on a detail
and I get really sort of excited and focused. I
want this information. I need this bit of color. I
need this. I need to know what the weather was like.
I need to know what you were wearing, you know.
I need this information to paint the scene. And Mooney
was Mooney's a very genial presence, like anyway, and he's
(09:04):
got this smile on his face. And Mooney would just
say something like, oh that's awesome, that's amazing, And then
that encourages people to keep talking because they want to
they want to please you, right Like It's it's like
an old reporter trick is to fake write stuff in
your notebook. You're not right, you're just scribbling, but someone
sees you write something down and they go, oh, he
liked that. I want to give more of that because
(09:24):
it's just sort of an interesting So Mooney and I
talking to people together, I thought, Okay, how is this
going to work and it worked out great because we
have slightly different styles, but we've got all the information
we needed using them together. Yeah, similar sensibilities, like we
understand stories the same way, so we know to the
same way. But yeah, but I also just I mean,
(09:44):
it's hard not to just be incredibly enthralled. It's one
of the problems with the challenge of the story of
figuring out the right way to tell it, because it's
every element of it was so just enthralling. Right. Yeah,
people open little windows, and with this story, they would
open a little window and it would be a whole world.
You know. It's just like, ye oh, by the way,
lions are harder to train than tigers. Well that's a
(10:05):
whole thing, and you're telling me about that. So sig
Freed and Roy. For most people of a certain age,
that this was Jack Hannah meets Elton John Jack Hannah,
who was the animal guy on Johnny Carson all the time.
Here have these two guys come, and it's like Liberaci
with a whip in one hand and a chair in
the other, you know, I mean, like, these two guys
come and you can't believe. Describe for us. We'll start
(10:28):
with Michael what did you think of Sigfreed and Roy
going in and what did you begin to discover about them?
I mean, I was interested in a couple of different
tracks of their lives. Their relationship I thought was really interesting.
The relationship to animals was this kind of thing that
you could not exist in twenty twenty two. Why there
have been so many sea worlds and Ringling brothers. Our
(10:49):
society has collectively in the last couple of years decided
that huge animals just can't be used for entertainment in
the Rings right right, Yeah, And you know, we're gonna
look back at that time where we would all get
together and go see giant animals perform tricks for us.
People are gonna look back at that, and that's gonna
seem so bizarre. What about you, Chris, It's funny. First,
(11:09):
I got to say that I'm so pissed off at
your descriptions because I wish we use them in the
story Liver Roxy with a whip in a chair. That's
good with a whip in one hand, then a chair
and the other, God damn it. And Jack Hannah, I
mean Selton, John, God damn it, YEA thought the same thing.
Sit here going shit. I'm a big magic nerd, and
I'm a huge Vegas nerd. I love Las Vegas and
(11:31):
everything about it, even though I know rationally it's a
terrible place, like five million people should not be living
with slot machines in the desert. But a very good writer,
a friend of mine named Charlie Pierce, once he was
writing about a racehorse, and he said, a great horse
builds its own universe. And there are certain people who
create a whole new world around themselves. And it doesn't
(11:54):
happen very often, but you get these people who just
build not just a building or a monument, but they
build an existence that previously did not exist. And Sigfried
and Roy did that. They built themselves into a kind
of celebrity that probably won't happen again, in a place
and a time that probably won't happen again. And the
(12:14):
idea of exploring that little Siegfried and Roy planet for
me was all I needed. I've noticed that in the
world of show business there seems to be a magnetic
field around people who indulgence, the grandiosity, even the camp
the imperiousness, you know, over the top, outrageously kind of monarchical,
(12:38):
kind of performers. You know that two of them were
kind of like royalty in the world they lived in.
The more you exude that, the more you get away
with it. You act like you're the greatest goddamn thing
in the history of Las Vegas. And those people that
don't get it are idiots. And you see where it's
kind of a self fulfilling prophecy in a certain way.
Then they just become bigger. And then do you turn
(12:59):
around and they got two hundred and fifty people working
for them, correct, correct, Yeah, when you first went to
the facility, what is it called again in the article
the Secret Garden? Of course it is did you go
together to the Secret Garden for the first time or individually?
I went before he did, but then we went together
as well. And when you went, Michael, and describe what
(13:21):
it was like. It's really just cats in cages and
like you know, the regular Las Vegas faantypack crowd walking around.
They monetize it. You buy tickets twenty five dollars to
get in. And you know, if you have kids in
Las Vegas, learned that many things for kids to do,
So it's a disproportionate number of families and then at
the end of the day, right before they were moved
(13:42):
back to their homes behind the casino, a lion on
one side of a wall and a tiger on the
other side of the wall started roaring back and forth.
And you know, I'm ten twenty five feet away and
you can hear the lion roaring. You could feel it
in the bones in your torso. Oh yeah, right. It
was such a primal, you know, sensation, And honestly, the
(14:04):
first thought that I had was like, this is really magic, right,
this is something that's happening in front of humans that
we truly do not understand. Only get here. You've got
to come here to see this. What year did you
first go, the two of you, Well, this year you
just went, yeah, yeah, we went together earlier this year.
I went last year for the first time. Oh no,
it's there now. So hard Rock has bought the mirage
(14:26):
and they're gonna renovate it. And the fates. There's fourteen
remaining animals of stag Freed and Roy's out of how
many fifty eight something at at the top of their menagerie. Now,
of course, one assumes that the whole thing is destined
to die out when they die, and that it can't
go on without them. But how much before the attack
(14:49):
on him that happened to win again? He was attacked
by the tiger. What year two thousand and three, So
two thousand and three, twenty years ago, and he lived
how much longer after that? Seventeen years? He lived seven
teen years Because like many people, as a sick part
of you that's always trying to find Sigfried and White
tiger attack video, where's the video? Where's the video? To
(15:09):
ascertain just how significantly he was mauled. It's one of
those Mandela effects things. So many people believe that they've
seen this video that they have not seen. I never
been made public. I thought I've seen the video. We
both thought we'd seen the video. Yeah, we have not
seen the video and you haven't. No, No, there is
no video. Don't know there's video. Oh there is, but
no one knows where it is. Well, the guy who
(15:31):
presently owns it, Steve Win, Bobby Baldwin, right, Mike. He
was the latest that we know in the chain of custody.
Had a had a version of it? Yeah? Was he
a videographer? No, No, he owned He was the person
who wasn't put in charge of the mirage after Steve
Winn and he and also famous poker player, and you know,
so Steve Wynn had it. So Sigfried and Roy recorded
(15:53):
every show so they could watch it afterwards. Well, sigfreed,
so Sigfree could watch it afterwards and study the tape.
So they recorded every show just out of habit, and
Steve Wynn had a copy of the tape that passed
along to Bobby Baldwin when Win sold the casino, and
Steve Wynn thinks it was destroyed, but it's unclear, but
no one in normal civilian life has seen it. Millions
(16:16):
of people think they have seen it. Yeah, one USDA
agent during an investigation got a moment to watch it
one time, and it never was made public. And I
spent a long time trying to track it down and
seeing if I could potentially get hold of it. Now,
apart from the video, it's interesting. What I think is
interesting when you're talking about sigg and Roy with a
lot of people is they think the tiger killed him. Yeah,
they think Roy died in two thousand and three, and
(16:38):
then you tell them that he died of COVID and
they're like, what are you talking about. COVID just happened. Well, yeah,
that's when he died. Now, when when after he's attacked,
he doesn't come back to the show in any function
whatsoever after that. Correct, he never appears publicly again. Correct,
he would appear in publics in very very rare occasions.
The show was canceled immediately. He's year in the hospital.
(17:01):
He spent another year in some sort of halfway out
situation rehab. But the show died that day was over. Yeah,
curtain's closed. Sigfreed announce the show was over, and it
was over over, And Sigfried never never conceived of going
on on his own, bringing in a kind of a
second banana assistant. No way he wanted to go on. Yeah,
he knew that the animals were Roy's thing, and that
(17:21):
without the animals, their show was Siegfried and Roy. And
he knew, you know, and he had been confiable. He
was older, he was a couple of years older, and
he had been talking about the fact that they needed
to slow down, they needed to retire anyway, right, This
show was incredibly physically demanding, where each one of them
is running basically five miles per show because you know,
(17:42):
when you disappear and reappear somewhere, that's not actually disappearing
and reappearing, that's sprinting somewhere in a darkness where nobody
can see you. So in this right around approach, you
have to talk to other people to find out everything.
Because did you find any interviews with Siegfried and or
Roy where they spoke publicly that you looked? Did they
go on their record with anybody or they never talked
(18:02):
to anybody? Yeah, they did a couple interviews over the years.
You know, they were on a Seakfreed was on Barbara
Walters at one point. They did a lot of that
kind of stuff. And then through the years, people that
they worked for would come forward with versions of the
incident that they didn't necessarily agree with, So then they
would do some sort of public counter interview where they
said they felt very sorry for this trainer, this former
(18:24):
trainer of theirs that had this version that didn't match theirs,
They felt very sorry for that person's life, or something
like that. Very seag Freed and Roy way of responding
to criticism. So they were in public and they had
their shows had been recorded and made into DVDs, and
public things like that, but the public never got what
they were like in some sort of personal world, right
that was never they were so closed off from that. Yeah,
(18:45):
there was no transparency there. No, they're difficult subject. I mean,
you know the Secret Garden as a metaphor in a
lot of ways because half the stuff that kept secret
and the other half, I mean, there was a lot
of bullshit. And so it's their tough subjects as journalists,
especially for a place like the Atlanta, where I know
journalism sometimes takes some knocks about information and misinformation. The
(19:05):
Atlantic is it's exhaustingly a thorough in terms of facts,
more than the New Yorker. I would assume they're on
par I would guess they're on part here. Alex. You
won't remember this. I wrote a story about you for
The Atlantic, and I was at the we were at
the Saturday Night Live and you were doing the table
read and Lauren Michaels was eating what appeared to me
(19:26):
to be snow peas out of a little bowl, and
I'm like fifty feet away and I'm like, okay, So
I had this little detail in my Atlantic story about you,
that Lauren Michaels is eating snow peas. I get a
call from the fact checker who goes, that was Adamme,
I'm going to change that to Adam, that's Chris. Yeah.
How could you think he was eating snow peas? But
that's the rigor of the Atlantic. And so to write
(19:48):
about Sigfried and Roy for the Atlantic, because so much
of it was either secret or nonsense, and decades ago
and decades ago, it's very difficult. They're hard subjects writers
Chris Jones and Michael Mooney. You can find a link
to their Atlantic article on Sigfried and Roy in the
(20:10):
show notes of this episode. If you enjoy conversations about
intensive journalistic investigations, check out my episode with Lawrence Wright,
author of Going Clear, Scientology and the Prison of Belief.
If you and I were sitting in a Scientology auditing
session right now, and you're my auditor, and and I'm
(20:32):
holding the cans which are attached to the E meter,
and you're probing, asking me very impersonal questions about my life,
things that I would not want to disclose to anyone
else except in this very confidential confessional atmospreciatingly material that
is actually secretly recorded, sometimes videoed. And then it becomes
(20:53):
apparent to you that if you decide to leave, the
church may use some of that against you. And I
talked to that. I talked to a guy whose assignment
was to go through all those old auditing sessions on
John Travolta and find stuff they could use against him,
because they were worried that he was going He's going
to go over the wall. Right. To hear more of
(21:14):
my conversation with Lawrence Wright, go to Here's the Thing
dot org. After the break, Chris Jones and Michael Mooney
share the fate of Manticor, the white tiger that nearly
took Roy Horne's life. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening
(21:39):
to Here's the Thing in retrospect. The spectacle of Siegfried
and Roy's wildlife menagerie is almost too outrageous to believe,
and its fate seemingly all too inevitable. I wanted to
know if Roy Horne ever expressed any regret or responsibility
for these circumstances that led to his own mauling. Not
(22:04):
even close. He went the other direction at top speed.
You know. He very quickly started telling people that the
tiger had saved his life, that he was having a
stroke on the stage, the tiger noticed something was wrong
with him and lifted him up by the throat to
carry him off. And that the puncture of his ajorta
had relieved pressure in his brain and saved his life.
(22:27):
And in fact that this tiger, when when the tiger
was born, had been what was born not breathing or
something like that needed to be resuscitated. Yeah, And that
Roy had personally, mouth to mouth, saved this tiger as
a cub, and so the tiger was returning the favor.
So it was totally the office service animal. Yea. And
literally they said that the animal sensed in some bizarre
(22:51):
telepathic way that he was struggling. Siegfried didn't say that,
but Roy was. That was his and even people really
close to them believed that something was off with Roy
that night. You know, nobody else want as far as
to say that the tiger saved his life. But you know,
so there are some elements that are that are confirmed
and some This is kind of the nature of telling
a story about these people is it's so hard to
(23:12):
figure out what is completely you know, like a fabulous creation,
what is completely grounded in the truth. What years things happen.
You know, everything blends into some kind of miasma of
fantasy and fairy tale that's fantastic to delve into and
terrible to go through fact checking about. I feel like
(23:34):
the story about the roy story for the tiger was
very identifiable as bullshit. No tiger, yeah, and in the
history of the world has saved a human life. That's
not what tigers do. So yeah, after he was attacked,
did a horn recover all of his motor skills? Could
he talk and walk? It all? He could sort of talk.
One of his size was essanctially paralyzed, whether it was
(23:56):
happening before the tiger attacked him or after. He suffered
from a series of strokes and a lot of oxygen.
His brain was deprived of oxygen because his airway was
crushed the tiger got him around the throat and crushed.
Tigers have enormous what was it a thousand pounds per square,
actually have enormous bite force sure, and also surprisingly the
largest teeth, the largest canine teeth of any predator. So
the strokes caused him to have sort of permanent paralysis
(24:18):
on one of his sides. He could speak, but you know,
he had a thick German accent anyway, and then it
was sort of indistinct. I would describe it. What happened
to the cat? What happened to Monticour, So he was
put back on display. He just went back to his
regular cat life. They used a different names so that
people didn't identify. And then years later, when they kind
(24:39):
of tried to do one quick night of a reunion
type show for fundraiser, they said that that cat was
in the show again Monticour, but it wasn't, so they
put another cat in there and called it montcor exactly, Yes,
a cat who was very famously docile, right, and Montcour
never had another issue. No, many thousands of people went
(25:01):
to the Secret Garden and saw Montagor, thinking it was
a cat named Jaipur, but they saw montag They saw
the cat that attack Roy. Now Siegfried is left there
now and the printing press, the cash cow for the
show is over. What does he want to do? Meaning
did he want to just shut everything down and divest?
Did he want to just keep Secret Garden running as
(25:21):
an attraction? What did he think his career would be
for them? He was sixty four at the time. Of
the attack. I think he was thinking about winding things down,
but I don't think he had envisioned what his life
would be like after the show. And so he had
a period where he tried to live like a normal
civilian and I think in some weird ways saw the
magic of ordinary life, Like he would travel, or he
(25:43):
would go grocery shopping, which is not something he did.
The Atlantic couldn't verify this, and it's one of my
favorite facts. I was not in the story, but apparently
he was obsessed with like the grocery soore scanner, like barcodes,
how do they work? You know? Like it that to
him was like never mind sawing a lady in half?
How does it know how much minds are? That's crazy?
And so Sigfreed would see sort of the crazy stuff
in everyday life. And then he started going back to
(26:05):
the secret Guard and he would wander around until someone
recognized him. He still had this void like one of
the interesting things about Sigfreed and Roy was definitely the extrovert. Apparently,
if Roy was in a room, you knew he was
in the room. Sigfried got a lot of energy, needed
praise and needed adoration, but he didn't particularly want to
be around people. Like he would put on a mask
(26:27):
before Sigfried and Roy show and wander around the crowd
as a greeter, no one knowing he was sig Freed,
just so he could get the buzz. The Sigfried never
took off the mask, no one knew that was Sigfreed.
But but then and the secret Guard. My favorite part
of the whole story thing is he would go to
the secret Guard and he would wander around, someone would
recognize him. He would pretend like he never went there.
Oh my god, you've caught me the one time I've
(26:49):
been here in the last twenty years. He would go
there every day. That's a very vaguas thing, by the way,
big like, oh, how lucky it is that we're all
here together. And then he would do little sleight of
hand coin magic, which is how he started. Like when
he was five. His dad was this drunk, ruined German
soldier and the first time Sigfried had said his dad
(27:10):
acknowledged his presence was whenever the coin disappeared. Yeah, and
so in this beautiful sort of full circle way without
the cats, well surrounded by the cats in their cages,
but without any of the sort of excess. He would
do this little sleight of hand magic for these tiny
audiences at the Secret Garden, and that would be he
would give them the coin. I think he would be like,
(27:30):
this is a very special coin. He had bags of
thousands of them, you know, in the back, because he
would come there every day. But it was this beautiful,
like little tiny, you know, almost like a little drip
of his former fame, the thing that won over his father,
the thing that had won over his dad. It's very
much for me, like a Flowers for Algernon kind of
story where he he's the small thing. It builds, it builds,
(27:52):
it builds, it builds of builds because their only answer
to fame was more, their only answer to like, how
do we make this more spectacular? More more cats, more fireworks,
more smoke, bigger cod pieces, you know, and then it
all falls away instantly and he finds he goes back
to what he was before, which is a sleight of
hand coin magician. I'm so admiring of the two of you,
(28:12):
you guys are doing, because I'm obsessed with these pieces.
You know, you nail it when you say this couldn't
exist today, you know, when that ended, a whole era
of that live entertainment died. I remember a writer did
this profile on Wayne Newton and they're sitting in the
audience with a stopwatch and Newton says, okay, get out, everybody.
Thank you. He said, no, no, no, you know some
(28:33):
we'll do something we never do. We're gonna do another number.
Come on, everybody, tie a yellow ribbon route whatever he sings.
This was even part of their show. The part of
the show that happened that the malling happened at was
called the Rapport, and it was like a quiet little
interlude in the Magic Show, and they would start it
by saying, this is the first time this tiger has
ever been on stage in front of people. Montacour had
(28:55):
done thousands of shows, and the night of the malling,
he was still introduced as you know, this is the
first time on stage. Would you welcome this tiger? Because
they wanted people to feel super special, like they knew
who was going to see them, and they knew that
the people who would see them multiple times would forgive
them that kind of thing. But the vast majority of
people who encountered Siegfried in the Secret Garden, he felt
(29:17):
like they had stepped upon one of the most special
days they possibly could have been in an animal exhibit
behind a casino in Las Vegas. I want to ask
you both one question, So Janet Malcolm, she writes the
article that becomes the book, The Journalist and the Murderer.
She's writing about the Jeffrey McDonald and Joe McGinnis case.
This is a legendary quote. Every journalist who was not
(29:40):
too stupid or too full of himself to notice what
is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.
He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance,
or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
And I'm wondering for you, guys. Do you think just
as Siegfried and Roy have gone their way and they don't,
(30:03):
then then their time has passed? Is what she's saying
true about writers like you? Has that gone past? And
you're not confidence men? Or is what she describing about
writers who do the pieces you do? Does it still apply?
I hate that fucking quote totals total fucking Hey. The
way she constructs that sentence is like, this is what
(30:23):
I think this is my experience, and if you disagree,
you're a moron or a liar. It's like, well, so
what option or you give me to counter your argument,
which I think is not true. There is a certain
kind of journalists, certainly who's predatory and career aspirational and
all the bad things that all the Rita Skeeters of
(30:44):
the world from Harry Potter like, those journalists absolutely exist.
I am not that kind of journalist. Mooney is not
that kind of journalist. We spend time with people who
deserve to have their stories told. I've always tried to
approach people kind league generously. I listen, I am careful.
(31:05):
I convey information in a way that is hopefully entertaining,
but it is also factually accurate. I think sometimes people
appreciate being written about When I write about them, and
when Mooney writes about them, the story becomes something they keep.
The best stories. The subject reads the story and learn
something about themselves. I wrote a story about a woman,
(31:27):
a genius, an astrophysicist at MIT who my eldest son, Charlie,
has autism, and I was hanging out with Sarah, doctor
Sarah Seeker her name is, and I was in my head,
I'm going, well, you're clearly autistic when you have a
when you're close to someone with autism, you can spot
someone with an autism from a thousand yards away. It's
the way they walk, the way they hold their hands,
or just tells. So in my head, I'm going, you
(31:47):
are clearly you clearly have autism. She had never been
diagnosed with autism. She had no idea about this essential
facet of herself, and she only learned it through the
process of spending time with me in the story. And
so for me, it's like this idea that we're all
terrible people doing terrible things. I think it's so insulting
of a profession that, at its best is a noble
(32:12):
and good profession. Our job is to tell people about
themselves and to make strangers, to transport people to different worlds,
to show them behind the curtain of things they need
to know about. I think it can be a really
beautiful profession, And so the idea that we're all killers
drives me mental writers Chris Jones and Michael Mooney. If
(32:37):
you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure
to follow. Here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify
or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Chris Jones shares some of the unexpected gifts that can
come from writing celebrity profiles. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
(33:11):
listening to Here's the Thing. I first met Chris Jones
in twenty seventeen when he was covering me for a
profile in The Atlantic. Learning more about the many challenges
that come with the deep dive reporting that Michael Mooney
and Chris Jones are known for. I wondered what pieces
rank among the most difficult they've ever written. I mean,
(33:34):
this one was one of the hardest I've ever done.
Why Because it's so many different stories? Right. Their story
is a love story, It's an animal story. It's also
like the story of Las Vegas. When they got to
Las Vegas, it was Seemy Davis Junior and Frank Sinatra,
and when their show ended it was a totally different place.
You know, there were so many secrets involved. It's a
(33:55):
story about grandiosity. You know, you want the text to
match the feel of the story in some sort of
way too. You know, it's such a challenge. It's also
two people's lives over six decades. There's so much information,
there's so many secrets and so many levels of reality
in a story like this where they built their own
(34:16):
fairytale life and figuring out what was what. You know,
there's some things that that are delightful to be. You
know that the people close to them wanted to show
me the secret door in their library that opened and
said sarmode, which was like their magic word, and you know,
the wall moves and it's a secret path to Secreed's bedroom.
I'm sorry, why did he need a secret path to
(34:38):
his bedroom? I don't know that anything about the story
is his need. Yeah, exactly. I don't think there's nothing
about this that somebody needs as much as it's just
filling the emotional holes in their hearts. Would you say, sarmodi? Sarmodi?
Siegfried Androy masters the impossible? So r M I TI
(35:02):
Sarmodi was their magic word, and you know the fact
that they had a magic word speaks to the fact
that this is a story of a different era, right,
And so there's some part of like it's like a
childlike mentality to think of the world this way, but
also super fascinating in a literary sense. So just figuring out,
(35:23):
you know, when you have all of these teams rolling around,
like what's the first sentence? How you know ultimately what
writing isn't What Janet Malcolm did not get in any
way is ultimately what it is is like we're putting
ink onto dead trees and somehow somebody is staring at
that for an extended period of time and transporting themselves
to a different part of the planet at a different time,
around people that they never otherwise would encounter at all.
(35:45):
And to make the technical aspects of that after learning
about this entire world, that's a real challenge. So Chris,
what's one you did that you enjoyed and you learn
a lot and it was really a pleasure for you
for the whole dive and exploration and so forth, so
many of them. I mean, that's a better your bread.
I loved our week together because I was having a
(36:07):
really hard time in my life. I was getting divorced,
I was reigning in New York, and I was I
was nervous coming to talk to you. It was my
first story for The Atlantic, and you couldn't have been kinder.
You were super generous with your time. I never would
put myself on the list of the guy you should
hang out with when you're getting divorced. I wouldn't put
myself on the list, but you were amazing about it.
(36:27):
You won't remember this at all. You won't remember this
moment at all. But we were done. You were about
to go do the show. I followed you for the
whole week. You're about to do the show, and then
you're going to disappear into the celebrity ether. And you
came up to me and you gave me a hug
and you said better days. Yeah, And I was It
was exactly what I needed. And because it was so unexpected,
(36:50):
because I thought you were gonna, I don't know, I
thought you might be tricky, and and it was a
wonderful experience. I've had so many another one in a
Vegas one I had. And this will how sort of
trite carrot Top, because you discovered what about him that
was unexpected, What it's like to live your life as
the punch line but actually be the victor. He won.
(37:12):
He has a sold out show at the Luxe or
every night. A woman laughed so hard when I was
a Carrot Top show that she shit her pants, like
literally shit her pants in the chair. I went to
see him six times that week. I laughed my ass
off and as carrot top, and you go, oh, he's
a prop comic, he's a whatever, he's this, he's that.
He's a lovely guy named Scott who's got a mansion
(37:34):
in Florida and a mansion in Las Vegas. He goes,
I met him. He's the loveliest guy. It's the loveliest guy.
We were in Caesar's Palace and he goes, Oh, my
friend Shanaia wants to see us. Do you want to
go see Shanaia? And I was like, are we talking
about Shania Twain? Like what are we talking about here?
And we spent all night in Shania Twain's villa, naked
in a hot tub with carrot top. She was not naked,
the hotsu was carrot topping me naked in the hot tub.
(37:56):
And I was like, I was like, oh, man, you're
just a nice dude, Like you're just a good guy,
and I just enjoyed time with you. Like those For me,
those are the best stories where you're like, you're surprised
by what you find out about the person. So I
was surprised with you. I was surprised with carrot top.
Roger Ebert was a transformational experience so many times. This
job is a gift where you just get to spend
(38:16):
time with people who are lovely. Well, I'm glad that
whatever I said to encourage you after your divorce got
you naked in a hot tub with carrot top. I
mean I missed a direct line. It was that weekend,
but anyway, listen, fellas. Thank you. I'm very grateful to you.
Thank you so much, Thank you for having miss my.
(38:39):
Thanks to writers Chris Jones and Michael Mooney. This episode
was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're
produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeice, and Maureen Hoban. Our
engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingwich.
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you
(38:59):
by iHeart Radio.
This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's
the Thing from iHeart Radio. On October third, two thousand three,
an audience of fifteen hundred men, women, and children were
settling into the theater at the Mirage Resort and Casino
in Las Vegas for an evening of magic, spectacle, and delight.
(00:24):
The world famous German magicians known simply as Siegfried and
Roy took to the stage that night for what would
be their five thousand, seven hundred and fiftieth show at
the Mirage. One of the hallmarks of the duo's act
was the use of exotic animals like elephants, lions, cheetahs,
and tigers. Siegfried and Roy had worked with exotic animals
(00:49):
on stage for forty four years in a career that
spanned over thirty thousand performances until that infamous evening in
two thousand and three. To the horror of the audience
and the crew backstage, Roy Horn was bit that night
during their act by a four hundred pound white tiger
(01:10):
named Manticorps and dragged off stage by the neck. Trainers
intervened and ultimately saved Roy's life, but the magicians suffered
a stroke, severe blood loss and paralysis. Roy Horn would
require multiple surgeries and intensive rehabilitation. My guests today. Chris
(01:32):
Jones and Michael Mooney wrote the article unearthing the backstory
and the fallout of the tragedy for The Atlantic. Jones
and Mooney are journalists that collectively have written for Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire,
and The Wall Street Journal magazine. The two writers combined
their talents to construct the jaw dropping article entitled The
(01:56):
Original Tiger Kings, The Improbable Rise and Savage Fall of
Siegfried and Roy. I'm Chris Jones, I'm Michael Mooney. When
you guys worked together, had you ever worked together before?
This is for Chris. No, we were good friends. You
knew each other, Yeah, we knew each other. And I
was a big admirer of Mooney's work. In fact, I
(02:17):
first knew Mooney because I read two He wrote two
great stories back to back within a month, and I
emailed him and I was like, who are you? Because
these are great? Now, Michael Mooney, when these things happen,
are most of them pitches that you make? Are they
commissions where someone comes to you, an editor that you've
worked with, used this particular piece you wrote. This was
(02:38):
for The Atlantic. And how does this come about? Is
it a commission or you pitch? It's about fifty fifty
So this one originated with the editors of the Atlantic.
This one was one of their ideas. Especially after Tiger
King the Netflix show was so popular. This seemed like
a natural follow But honestly, it really is about half
and a half. The story I did for The Atlantic
(02:59):
right before this was a crime story that I pitched them.
And when you pitch, Chris, is it like sometimes you
just say a name, Sometimes you say a murderer, sometimes
you say a performer's name, and they go, I'm in.
How did the pitch work with an editor when you
were pitching? Sometimes it's a name. Sometimes literally a pitch
is one line, and sometimes it's a more elaborate thing.
(03:21):
I mean. One of the things that young journalists need
to understand about this business. You know, I was a
staff writer at Esquire for fourteen years. They were paying
me a salary and I was probably one for twenty
on my pitches, I would guess like they would reject
nineteen of my ideas and they were paying me to write,
and so for a freelancer. Pitching it's tough, and sometimes
(03:42):
you really have to convince somebody that this is a story.
But sometimes it can give me an example, what's a
story that it was an uphill battle for you? If
you can, Oh, yeah, I can tell you one right
now that I had to pitch again and again was
Roger Ebert, the film critic. You know, he had cancer
and he lost the ability to speak and eat and drink,
and he sort of re emerged as a blogger. He
(04:04):
had to remember he had that, like, he had this
amazing blog and he was such a beautiful writer. I
think people knew him as a TV person, but he
had he was a Pulitzurprise winning critic before that sort
of iteration of himself, and then through sort of tragedy,
personal tragedy, he became something else. It was it was
like this metamorphosis that happened, and I really wanted to
(04:27):
write about him. And writing about a writer is always
sort of a little tricky. It's like it's starting to
make a movie about a writer because so much, so
much of it is internal. So I had to pick Roger.
I would say I picked him four or five times.
And then the only reason Esquire assigned me that story.
In the end is I was I was literally supposed
to write about Taylor Swift, and she backed out, and
so there was suddenly a hole in the magazine. And
(04:48):
so I'll be forever grateful for Taylor Swift for backing out,
because the Roger's story was a hugely important story for
me personally and professionally. It did very well, but it
was also a hugely move gratifying now. And it's interesting
because you're in the bullpen, they're just throwing balls all
day long, waiting for them to call you in. And
when you're on it as a staff writer. Now, Michael,
(05:09):
when it's a commission, whether you're a staff writer or no,
when someone comes to you, if you're on the staff,
I guess you try to be as cooperative as you
can because you're they're paying you for that. It's your job.
But if it's a commission, is there any metric or
is there any sense? What's a fast no? Like if
someone comes to you and says we want you to
write a story about you know, the Will Smith Oscar slap,
(05:30):
and do you sit there and go, oh my god,
it's been covered to fucking death. You when they're coming
to you. What's the last thing you want to hear?
Something that's timely? Yeah, yeah, honestly, is a magazine story,
something that's you want to run about John Wilkes Booth's
last meal. Yeah, anything in the last decade. Yeah. I
mean there's also all sorts of bitfalls for in the
(05:51):
magazine world, right, I don't want to write something that
like I become the guy who does something terrible, right, Like, oh,
you want to send somebody who literally like lives in
tracks for a week, Yes, this is the guy like
Joe Stu Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in the magazine world,
if you if you write about something or a certain
way and people like that story, other editors immediately want
(06:11):
a version of that story. I did a couple of
right arounds where you know, if you can't interview the person,
then you have to interview one hundred and fifty people
who know that person. Sig Free and Roy didn't talk
to us for this story. But also you know, in Texas,
I was assigned a story about the Texas Rangers manager
Ron Washington when they were in the World Series a
(06:32):
couple of times in the offseason, and he lives in
New Orleans and really just famously does not give interviews
in New Orleans and does not share his private life
in that way. And I went to his house and
he didn't want to talk to me, So then I
had to talk to you know, I think probably twenty
five or thirty people who have worked with him and
known him through the years. But then you become a
right around person and every magazine's like, you know, who
(06:53):
won't talk to us, you want to do this story?
You know who will never ever sit down for you
and answer any question that you're curious about one you're
right about that person. They'll say that to you. Is
that to a degree your methodology, Michael, where when you
talk to people you just don't press and hope they
give it to you. Yeah, that's exactly right. You just
have a human to human conversation. And then honestly, often
(07:15):
the questions that you're most curious about are things that
they end up bringing up. You know, most people, if
you're sitting down for an interview, they know why they're there.
You know, they know the biggest questions in life that
you're probably gonna ask anyway, and they've probably prepared some
sort of answer in their mind, and if you start
with that, that is going to be very off putting,
just like any conversation would if it's not recorded or
(07:38):
it's not for you a magazine story. One of the
most underrated skills, and I don't mean just for journalists,
for human beings, is listening. Nobody listens. And you can
get someone who's famous or someone who's not famous, who's
the subject of a story because something terrible or wonderful
happened to them. No one in their life just sit
(08:00):
down and listens to them. And so if you're that person,
if you can get them to sort of almost forget
that you're a journalist and that you're just there to
hear their story and then relay their story, you become
sort of a trusted advocate for them, and then it's
a different experience. It's not an interrogation, it's a conversation.
And even in your regular life, like I say this
(08:22):
to people all the time, if you want to become
the favorite person in your friend group, be the one
who sits there and listens, Be the one who just
lets people talk. It was interesting, actually, if Mooney and
I interviewed people together, which I've never done before, and
describe what would that was like, Chris, what was it
like for you? It worked really well, I think, and
what sort of naturally happened. I think I was the
(08:43):
bad cop in the interrogations and Mooney was the good
cop because I tend to laser in on a detail
and I get really sort of excited and focused. I
want this information. I need this bit of color. I
need this. I need to know what the weather was like.
I need to know what you were wearing, you know.
I need this information to paint the scene. And Mooney
was Mooney's a very genial presence, like anyway, and he's
(09:04):
got this smile on his face. And Mooney would just
say something like, oh that's awesome, that's amazing, And then
that encourages people to keep talking because they want to
they want to please you, right Like It's it's like
an old reporter trick is to fake write stuff in
your notebook. You're not right, you're just scribbling, but someone
sees you write something down and they go, oh, he
liked that. I want to give more of that because
(09:24):
it's just sort of an interesting So Mooney and I
talking to people together, I thought, Okay, how is this
going to work and it worked out great because we
have slightly different styles, but we've got all the information
we needed using them together. Yeah, similar sensibilities, like we
understand stories the same way, so we know to the
same way. But yeah, but I also just I mean,
(09:44):
it's hard not to just be incredibly enthralled. It's one
of the problems with the challenge of the story of
figuring out the right way to tell it, because it's
every element of it was so just enthralling. Right. Yeah,
people open little windows, and with this story, they would
open a little window and it would be a whole world.
You know. It's just like, ye oh, by the way,
lions are harder to train than tigers. Well that's a
(10:05):
whole thing, and you're telling me about that. So sig
Freed and Roy. For most people of a certain age,
that this was Jack Hannah meets Elton John Jack Hannah,
who was the animal guy on Johnny Carson all the time.
Here have these two guys come, and it's like Liberaci
with a whip in one hand and a chair in
the other, you know, I mean, like, these two guys
come and you can't believe. Describe for us. We'll start
(10:28):
with Michael what did you think of Sigfreed and Roy
going in and what did you begin to discover about them?
I mean, I was interested in a couple of different
tracks of their lives. Their relationship I thought was really interesting.
The relationship to animals was this kind of thing that
you could not exist in twenty twenty two. Why there
have been so many sea worlds and Ringling brothers. Our
(10:49):
society has collectively in the last couple of years decided
that huge animals just can't be used for entertainment in
the Rings right right, Yeah, And you know, we're gonna
look back at that time where we would all get
together and go see giant animals perform tricks for us.
People are gonna look back at that, and that's gonna
seem so bizarre. What about you, Chris, It's funny. First,
(11:09):
I got to say that I'm so pissed off at
your descriptions because I wish we use them in the
story Liver Roxy with a whip in a chair. That's
good with a whip in one hand, then a chair
and the other, God damn it. And Jack Hannah, I
mean Selton, John, God damn it, YEA thought the same thing.
Sit here going shit. I'm a big magic nerd, and
I'm a huge Vegas nerd. I love Las Vegas and
(11:31):
everything about it, even though I know rationally it's a
terrible place, like five million people should not be living
with slot machines in the desert. But a very good writer,
a friend of mine named Charlie Pierce, once he was
writing about a racehorse, and he said, a great horse
builds its own universe. And there are certain people who
create a whole new world around themselves. And it doesn't
(11:54):
happen very often, but you get these people who just
build not just a building or a monument, but they
build an existence that previously did not exist. And Sigfried
and Roy did that. They built themselves into a kind
of celebrity that probably won't happen again, in a place
and a time that probably won't happen again. And the
(12:14):
idea of exploring that little Siegfried and Roy planet for
me was all I needed. I've noticed that in the
world of show business there seems to be a magnetic
field around people who indulgence, the grandiosity, even the camp
the imperiousness, you know, over the top, outrageously kind of monarchical,
(12:38):
kind of performers. You know that two of them were
kind of like royalty in the world they lived in.
The more you exude that, the more you get away
with it. You act like you're the greatest goddamn thing
in the history of Las Vegas. And those people that
don't get it are idiots. And you see where it's
kind of a self fulfilling prophecy in a certain way.
Then they just become bigger. And then do you turn
(12:59):
around and they got two hundred and fifty people working
for them, correct, correct, Yeah, when you first went to
the facility, what is it called again in the article
the Secret Garden? Of course it is did you go
together to the Secret Garden for the first time or individually?
I went before he did, but then we went together
as well. And when you went, Michael, and describe what
(13:21):
it was like. It's really just cats in cages and
like you know, the regular Las Vegas faantypack crowd walking around.
They monetize it. You buy tickets twenty five dollars to
get in. And you know, if you have kids in
Las Vegas, learned that many things for kids to do,
So it's a disproportionate number of families and then at
the end of the day, right before they were moved
(13:42):
back to their homes behind the casino, a lion on
one side of a wall and a tiger on the
other side of the wall started roaring back and forth.
And you know, I'm ten twenty five feet away and
you can hear the lion roaring. You could feel it
in the bones in your torso. Oh yeah, right. It
was such a primal, you know, sensation, And honestly, the
(14:04):
first thought that I had was like, this is really magic, right,
this is something that's happening in front of humans that
we truly do not understand. Only get here. You've got
to come here to see this. What year did you
first go, the two of you, Well, this year you
just went, yeah, yeah, we went together earlier this year.
I went last year for the first time. Oh no,
it's there now. So hard Rock has bought the mirage
(14:26):
and they're gonna renovate it. And the fates. There's fourteen
remaining animals of stag Freed and Roy's out of how
many fifty eight something at at the top of their menagerie. Now,
of course, one assumes that the whole thing is destined
to die out when they die, and that it can't
go on without them. But how much before the attack
(14:49):
on him that happened to win again? He was attacked
by the tiger. What year two thousand and three, So
two thousand and three, twenty years ago, and he lived
how much longer after that? Seventeen years? He lived seven
teen years Because like many people, as a sick part
of you that's always trying to find Sigfried and White
tiger attack video, where's the video? Where's the video? To
(15:09):
ascertain just how significantly he was mauled. It's one of
those Mandela effects things. So many people believe that they've
seen this video that they have not seen. I never
been made public. I thought I've seen the video. We
both thought we'd seen the video. Yeah, we have not
seen the video and you haven't. No, No, there is
no video. Don't know there's video. Oh there is, but
no one knows where it is. Well, the guy who
(15:31):
presently owns it, Steve Win, Bobby Baldwin, right, Mike. He
was the latest that we know in the chain of custody.
Had a had a version of it? Yeah? Was he
a videographer? No, No, he owned He was the person
who wasn't put in charge of the mirage after Steve
Winn and he and also famous poker player, and you know,
so Steve Wynn had it. So Sigfried and Roy recorded
(15:53):
every show so they could watch it afterwards. Well, sigfreed,
so Sigfree could watch it afterwards and study the tape.
So they recorded every show just out of habit, and
Steve Wynn had a copy of the tape that passed
along to Bobby Baldwin when Win sold the casino, and
Steve Wynn thinks it was destroyed, but it's unclear, but
no one in normal civilian life has seen it. Millions
(16:16):
of people think they have seen it. Yeah, one USDA
agent during an investigation got a moment to watch it
one time, and it never was made public. And I
spent a long time trying to track it down and
seeing if I could potentially get hold of it. Now,
apart from the video, it's interesting. What I think is
interesting when you're talking about sigg and Roy with a
lot of people is they think the tiger killed him. Yeah,
they think Roy died in two thousand and three, and
(16:38):
then you tell them that he died of COVID and
they're like, what are you talking about. COVID just happened. Well, yeah,
that's when he died. Now, when when after he's attacked,
he doesn't come back to the show in any function
whatsoever after that. Correct, he never appears publicly again. Correct,
he would appear in publics in very very rare occasions.
The show was canceled immediately. He's year in the hospital.
(17:01):
He spent another year in some sort of halfway out
situation rehab. But the show died that day was over. Yeah,
curtain's closed. Sigfreed announce the show was over, and it
was over over, And Sigfried never never conceived of going
on on his own, bringing in a kind of a
second banana assistant. No way he wanted to go on. Yeah,
he knew that the animals were Roy's thing, and that
(17:21):
without the animals, their show was Siegfried and Roy. And
he knew, you know, and he had been confiable. He
was older, he was a couple of years older, and
he had been talking about the fact that they needed
to slow down, they needed to retire anyway, right, This
show was incredibly physically demanding, where each one of them
is running basically five miles per show because you know,
(17:42):
when you disappear and reappear somewhere, that's not actually disappearing
and reappearing, that's sprinting somewhere in a darkness where nobody
can see you. So in this right around approach, you
have to talk to other people to find out everything.
Because did you find any interviews with Siegfried and or
Roy where they spoke publicly that you looked? Did they
go on their record with anybody or they never talked
(18:02):
to anybody? Yeah, they did a couple interviews over the years.
You know, they were on a Seakfreed was on Barbara
Walters at one point. They did a lot of that
kind of stuff. And then through the years, people that
they worked for would come forward with versions of the
incident that they didn't necessarily agree with, So then they
would do some sort of public counter interview where they
said they felt very sorry for this trainer, this former
(18:24):
trainer of theirs that had this version that didn't match theirs,
They felt very sorry for that person's life, or something
like that. Very seag Freed and Roy way of responding
to criticism. So they were in public and they had
their shows had been recorded and made into DVDs, and
public things like that, but the public never got what
they were like in some sort of personal world, right
that was never they were so closed off from that. Yeah,
(18:45):
there was no transparency there. No, they're difficult subject. I mean,
you know the Secret Garden as a metaphor in a
lot of ways because half the stuff that kept secret
and the other half, I mean, there was a lot
of bullshit. And so it's their tough subjects as journalists,
especially for a place like the Atlanta, where I know
journalism sometimes takes some knocks about information and misinformation. The
(19:05):
Atlantic is it's exhaustingly a thorough in terms of facts,
more than the New Yorker. I would assume they're on
par I would guess they're on part here. Alex. You
won't remember this. I wrote a story about you for
The Atlantic, and I was at the we were at
the Saturday Night Live and you were doing the table
read and Lauren Michaels was eating what appeared to me
(19:26):
to be snow peas out of a little bowl, and
I'm like fifty feet away and I'm like, okay, So
I had this little detail in my Atlantic story about you,
that Lauren Michaels is eating snow peas. I get a
call from the fact checker who goes, that was Adamme,
I'm going to change that to Adam, that's Chris. Yeah.
How could you think he was eating snow peas? But
that's the rigor of the Atlantic. And so to write
(19:48):
about Sigfried and Roy for the Atlantic, because so much
of it was either secret or nonsense, and decades ago
and decades ago, it's very difficult. They're hard subjects writers
Chris Jones and Michael Mooney. You can find a link
to their Atlantic article on Sigfried and Roy in the
(20:10):
show notes of this episode. If you enjoy conversations about
intensive journalistic investigations, check out my episode with Lawrence Wright,
author of Going Clear, Scientology and the Prison of Belief.
If you and I were sitting in a Scientology auditing
session right now, and you're my auditor, and and I'm
(20:32):
holding the cans which are attached to the E meter,
and you're probing, asking me very impersonal questions about my life,
things that I would not want to disclose to anyone
else except in this very confidential confessional atmospreciatingly material that
is actually secretly recorded, sometimes videoed. And then it becomes
(20:53):
apparent to you that if you decide to leave, the
church may use some of that against you. And I
talked to that. I talked to a guy whose assignment
was to go through all those old auditing sessions on
John Travolta and find stuff they could use against him,
because they were worried that he was going He's going
to go over the wall. Right. To hear more of
(21:14):
my conversation with Lawrence Wright, go to Here's the Thing
dot org. After the break, Chris Jones and Michael Mooney
share the fate of Manticor, the white tiger that nearly
took Roy Horne's life. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening
(21:39):
to Here's the Thing in retrospect. The spectacle of Siegfried
and Roy's wildlife menagerie is almost too outrageous to believe,
and its fate seemingly all too inevitable. I wanted to
know if Roy Horne ever expressed any regret or responsibility
for these circumstances that led to his own mauling. Not
(22:04):
even close. He went the other direction at top speed.
You know. He very quickly started telling people that the
tiger had saved his life, that he was having a
stroke on the stage, the tiger noticed something was wrong
with him and lifted him up by the throat to
carry him off. And that the puncture of his ajorta
had relieved pressure in his brain and saved his life.
(22:27):
And in fact that this tiger, when when the tiger
was born, had been what was born not breathing or
something like that needed to be resuscitated. Yeah, And that
Roy had personally, mouth to mouth, saved this tiger as
a cub, and so the tiger was returning the favor.
So it was totally the office service animal. Yea. And
literally they said that the animal sensed in some bizarre
(22:51):
telepathic way that he was struggling. Siegfried didn't say that,
but Roy was. That was his and even people really
close to them believed that something was off with Roy
that night. You know, nobody else want as far as
to say that the tiger saved his life. But you know,
so there are some elements that are that are confirmed
and some This is kind of the nature of telling
a story about these people is it's so hard to
(23:12):
figure out what is completely you know, like a fabulous creation,
what is completely grounded in the truth. What years things happen.
You know, everything blends into some kind of miasma of
fantasy and fairy tale that's fantastic to delve into and
terrible to go through fact checking about. I feel like
(23:34):
the story about the roy story for the tiger was
very identifiable as bullshit. No tiger, yeah, and in the
history of the world has saved a human life. That's
not what tigers do. So yeah, after he was attacked,
did a horn recover all of his motor skills? Could
he talk and walk? It all? He could sort of talk.
One of his size was essanctially paralyzed, whether it was
(23:56):
happening before the tiger attacked him or after. He suffered
from a series of strokes and a lot of oxygen.
His brain was deprived of oxygen because his airway was
crushed the tiger got him around the throat and crushed.
Tigers have enormous what was it a thousand pounds per square,
actually have enormous bite force sure, and also surprisingly the
largest teeth, the largest canine teeth of any predator. So
the strokes caused him to have sort of permanent paralysis
(24:18):
on one of his sides. He could speak, but you know,
he had a thick German accent anyway, and then it
was sort of indistinct. I would describe it. What happened
to the cat? What happened to Monticour, So he was
put back on display. He just went back to his
regular cat life. They used a different names so that
people didn't identify. And then years later, when they kind
(24:39):
of tried to do one quick night of a reunion
type show for fundraiser, they said that that cat was
in the show again Monticour, but it wasn't, so they
put another cat in there and called it montcor exactly, Yes,
a cat who was very famously docile, right, and Montcour
never had another issue. No, many thousands of people went
(25:01):
to the Secret Garden and saw Montagor, thinking it was
a cat named Jaipur, but they saw montag They saw
the cat that attack Roy. Now Siegfried is left there
now and the printing press, the cash cow for the
show is over. What does he want to do? Meaning
did he want to just shut everything down and divest?
Did he want to just keep Secret Garden running as
(25:21):
an attraction? What did he think his career would be
for them? He was sixty four at the time. Of
the attack. I think he was thinking about winding things down,
but I don't think he had envisioned what his life
would be like after the show. And so he had
a period where he tried to live like a normal
civilian and I think in some weird ways saw the
magic of ordinary life, Like he would travel, or he
(25:43):
would go grocery shopping, which is not something he did.
The Atlantic couldn't verify this, and it's one of my
favorite facts. I was not in the story, but apparently
he was obsessed with like the grocery soore scanner, like barcodes,
how do they work? You know? Like it that to
him was like never mind sawing a lady in half?
How does it know how much minds are? That's crazy?
And so Sigfreed would see sort of the crazy stuff
in everyday life. And then he started going back to
(26:05):
the secret Guard and he would wander around until someone
recognized him. He still had this void like one of
the interesting things about Sigfreed and Roy was definitely the extrovert. Apparently,
if Roy was in a room, you knew he was
in the room. Sigfried got a lot of energy, needed
praise and needed adoration, but he didn't particularly want to
be around people. Like he would put on a mask
(26:27):
before Sigfried and Roy show and wander around the crowd
as a greeter, no one knowing he was sig Freed,
just so he could get the buzz. The Sigfried never
took off the mask, no one knew that was Sigfreed.
But but then and the secret Guard. My favorite part
of the whole story thing is he would go to
the secret Guard and he would wander around, someone would
recognize him. He would pretend like he never went there.
Oh my god, you've caught me the one time I've
(26:49):
been here in the last twenty years. He would go
there every day. That's a very vaguas thing, by the way,
big like, oh, how lucky it is that we're all
here together. And then he would do little sleight of
hand coin magic, which is how he started. Like when
he was five. His dad was this drunk, ruined German
soldier and the first time Sigfried had said his dad
(27:10):
acknowledged his presence was whenever the coin disappeared. Yeah, and
so in this beautiful sort of full circle way without
the cats, well surrounded by the cats in their cages,
but without any of the sort of excess. He would
do this little sleight of hand magic for these tiny
audiences at the Secret Garden, and that would be he
would give them the coin. I think he would be like,
(27:30):
this is a very special coin. He had bags of
thousands of them, you know, in the back, because he
would come there every day. But it was this beautiful,
like little tiny, you know, almost like a little drip
of his former fame, the thing that won over his father,
the thing that had won over his dad. It's very
much for me, like a Flowers for Algernon kind of
story where he he's the small thing. It builds, it builds,
(27:52):
it builds, it builds of builds because their only answer
to fame was more, their only answer to like, how
do we make this more spectacular? More more cats, more fireworks,
more smoke, bigger cod pieces, you know, and then it
all falls away instantly and he finds he goes back
to what he was before, which is a sleight of
hand coin magician. I'm so admiring of the two of you,
(28:12):
you guys are doing, because I'm obsessed with these pieces.
You know, you nail it when you say this couldn't
exist today, you know, when that ended, a whole era
of that live entertainment died. I remember a writer did
this profile on Wayne Newton and they're sitting in the
audience with a stopwatch and Newton says, okay, get out, everybody.
Thank you. He said, no, no, no, you know some
(28:33):
we'll do something we never do. We're gonna do another number.
Come on, everybody, tie a yellow ribbon route whatever he sings.
This was even part of their show. The part of
the show that happened that the malling happened at was
called the Rapport, and it was like a quiet little
interlude in the Magic Show, and they would start it
by saying, this is the first time this tiger has
ever been on stage in front of people. Montacour had
(28:55):
done thousands of shows, and the night of the malling,
he was still introduced as you know, this is the
first time on stage. Would you welcome this tiger? Because
they wanted people to feel super special, like they knew
who was going to see them, and they knew that
the people who would see them multiple times would forgive
them that kind of thing. But the vast majority of
people who encountered Siegfried in the Secret Garden, he felt
(29:17):
like they had stepped upon one of the most special
days they possibly could have been in an animal exhibit
behind a casino in Las Vegas. I want to ask
you both one question, So Janet Malcolm, she writes the
article that becomes the book, The Journalist and the Murderer.
She's writing about the Jeffrey McDonald and Joe McGinnis case.
This is a legendary quote. Every journalist who was not
(29:40):
too stupid or too full of himself to notice what
is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.
He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance,
or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
And I'm wondering for you, guys. Do you think just
as Siegfried and Roy have gone their way and they don't,
(30:03):
then then their time has passed? Is what she's saying
true about writers like you? Has that gone past? And
you're not confidence men? Or is what she describing about
writers who do the pieces you do? Does it still apply?
I hate that fucking quote totals total fucking Hey. The
way she constructs that sentence is like, this is what
(30:23):
I think this is my experience, and if you disagree,
you're a moron or a liar. It's like, well, so
what option or you give me to counter your argument,
which I think is not true. There is a certain
kind of journalists, certainly who's predatory and career aspirational and
all the bad things that all the Rita Skeeters of
(30:44):
the world from Harry Potter like, those journalists absolutely exist.
I am not that kind of journalist. Mooney is not
that kind of journalist. We spend time with people who
deserve to have their stories told. I've always tried to
approach people kind league generously. I listen, I am careful.
(31:05):
I convey information in a way that is hopefully entertaining,
but it is also factually accurate. I think sometimes people
appreciate being written about When I write about them, and
when Mooney writes about them, the story becomes something they keep.
The best stories. The subject reads the story and learn
something about themselves. I wrote a story about a woman,
(31:27):
a genius, an astrophysicist at MIT who my eldest son, Charlie,
has autism, and I was hanging out with Sarah, doctor
Sarah Seeker her name is, and I was in my head,
I'm going, well, you're clearly autistic when you have a
when you're close to someone with autism, you can spot
someone with an autism from a thousand yards away. It's
the way they walk, the way they hold their hands,
or just tells. So in my head, I'm going, you
(31:47):
are clearly you clearly have autism. She had never been
diagnosed with autism. She had no idea about this essential
facet of herself, and she only learned it through the
process of spending time with me in the story. And
so for me, it's like this idea that we're all
terrible people doing terrible things. I think it's so insulting
of a profession that, at its best is a noble
(32:12):
and good profession. Our job is to tell people about
themselves and to make strangers, to transport people to different worlds,
to show them behind the curtain of things they need
to know about. I think it can be a really
beautiful profession, And so the idea that we're all killers
drives me mental writers Chris Jones and Michael Mooney. If
(32:37):
you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure
to follow. Here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify
or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Chris Jones shares some of the unexpected gifts that can
come from writing celebrity profiles. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
(33:11):
listening to Here's the Thing. I first met Chris Jones
in twenty seventeen when he was covering me for a
profile in The Atlantic. Learning more about the many challenges
that come with the deep dive reporting that Michael Mooney
and Chris Jones are known for. I wondered what pieces
rank among the most difficult they've ever written. I mean,
(33:34):
this one was one of the hardest I've ever done.
Why Because it's so many different stories? Right. Their story
is a love story, It's an animal story. It's also
like the story of Las Vegas. When they got to
Las Vegas, it was Seemy Davis Junior and Frank Sinatra,
and when their show ended it was a totally different place.
You know, there were so many secrets involved. It's a
(33:55):
story about grandiosity. You know, you want the text to
match the feel of the story in some sort of
way too. You know, it's such a challenge. It's also
two people's lives over six decades. There's so much information,
there's so many secrets and so many levels of reality
in a story like this where they built their own
(34:16):
fairytale life and figuring out what was what. You know,
there's some things that that are delightful to be. You
know that the people close to them wanted to show
me the secret door in their library that opened and
said sarmode, which was like their magic word, and you know,
the wall moves and it's a secret path to Secreed's bedroom.
I'm sorry, why did he need a secret path to
(34:38):
his bedroom? I don't know that anything about the story
is his need. Yeah, exactly. I don't think there's nothing
about this that somebody needs as much as it's just
filling the emotional holes in their hearts. Would you say, sarmodi? Sarmodi?
Siegfried Androy masters the impossible? So r M I TI
(35:02):
Sarmodi was their magic word, and you know the fact
that they had a magic word speaks to the fact
that this is a story of a different era, right,
And so there's some part of like it's like a
childlike mentality to think of the world this way, but
also super fascinating in a literary sense. So just figuring out,
(35:23):
you know, when you have all of these teams rolling around,
like what's the first sentence? How you know ultimately what
writing isn't What Janet Malcolm did not get in any
way is ultimately what it is is like we're putting
ink onto dead trees and somehow somebody is staring at
that for an extended period of time and transporting themselves
to a different part of the planet at a different time,
around people that they never otherwise would encounter at all.
(35:45):
And to make the technical aspects of that after learning
about this entire world, that's a real challenge. So Chris,
what's one you did that you enjoyed and you learn
a lot and it was really a pleasure for you
for the whole dive and exploration and so forth, so
many of them. I mean, that's a better your bread.
I loved our week together because I was having a
(36:07):
really hard time in my life. I was getting divorced,
I was reigning in New York, and I was I
was nervous coming to talk to you. It was my
first story for The Atlantic, and you couldn't have been kinder.
You were super generous with your time. I never would
put myself on the list of the guy you should
hang out with when you're getting divorced. I wouldn't put
myself on the list, but you were amazing about it.
(36:27):
You won't remember this at all. You won't remember this
moment at all. But we were done. You were about
to go do the show. I followed you for the
whole week. You're about to do the show, and then
you're going to disappear into the celebrity ether. And you
came up to me and you gave me a hug
and you said better days. Yeah, And I was It
was exactly what I needed. And because it was so unexpected,
(36:50):
because I thought you were gonna, I don't know, I
thought you might be tricky, and and it was a
wonderful experience. I've had so many another one in a
Vegas one I had. And this will how sort of
trite carrot Top, because you discovered what about him that
was unexpected, What it's like to live your life as
the punch line but actually be the victor. He won.
(37:12):
He has a sold out show at the Luxe or
every night. A woman laughed so hard when I was
a Carrot Top show that she shit her pants, like
literally shit her pants in the chair. I went to
see him six times that week. I laughed my ass
off and as carrot top, and you go, oh, he's
a prop comic, he's a whatever, he's this, he's that.
He's a lovely guy named Scott who's got a mansion
(37:34):
in Florida and a mansion in Las Vegas. He goes,
I met him. He's the loveliest guy. It's the loveliest guy.
We were in Caesar's Palace and he goes, Oh, my
friend Shanaia wants to see us. Do you want to
go see Shanaia? And I was like, are we talking
about Shania Twain? Like what are we talking about here?
And we spent all night in Shania Twain's villa, naked
in a hot tub with carrot top. She was not naked,
the hotsu was carrot topping me naked in the hot tub.
(37:56):
And I was like, I was like, oh, man, you're
just a nice dude, Like you're just a good guy,
and I just enjoyed time with you. Like those For me,
those are the best stories where you're like, you're surprised
by what you find out about the person. So I
was surprised with you. I was surprised with carrot top.
Roger Ebert was a transformational experience so many times. This
job is a gift where you just get to spend
(38:16):
time with people who are lovely. Well, I'm glad that
whatever I said to encourage you after your divorce got
you naked in a hot tub with carrot top. I
mean I missed a direct line. It was that weekend,
but anyway, listen, fellas. Thank you. I'm very grateful to you.
Thank you so much, Thank you for having miss my.
(38:39):
Thanks to writers Chris Jones and Michael Mooney. This episode
was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're
produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeice, and Maureen Hoban. Our
engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingwich.
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you
(38:59):
by iHeart Radio.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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