Chris Jones & Michael Mooney on the Rise and Fall of Siegfried & Roy

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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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,

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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, 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

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

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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 by iHeart Radio.