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