Authors: Penn Jillette
I liked nothing about the Siegfried and Roy show—but I loved all of it. I loved it with all my heart. I saw it several times, and every time it inspired me and filled me with a rage to live. Bob Dylan said, “Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?”
Siegfried and Roy always inspired me. They showed me how pure and simple art could be. Their show had a zillion dancers and big stupid props. Their show was dripping with over-the-top hype and empty glitz, and had more honesty, purity, and bravery than all the alternative folk lo-fi acts at all the non-Starbucks coffee shops in the state of
Washington put together. I’ve quoted, since I was a child, Lenny Bruce saying the purpose of art is to stand naked onstage. I can’t find that quote by Lenny in any books, records, or transcripts. I think I made it up. So . . .
The purpose of art is to stand naked onstage.
—Penn Jillette
Too bad it’s a quote from an asshole and not a genius, but it’s still true. Lenny Bruce, playing a strip club before he made it, once came out onstage wearing nothing but a bow tie and a pair of shoes. He stood onstage and pissed in a knothole in the floor to protest the danger of that stage knothole to the strippers in high heels. Teller and I used to strip naked onstage to prove there was nothing up our sleeves. But Lenny Bruce, Penn Jillette, and Teller were never as naked onstage as Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn. Siegfried and Roy would walk onstage to huge applause (beefed up by prerecorded applause over the loudspeakers) in their goofy, sparkly, rhinestone-skin coats and leather pants with codpieces. Their hair would be perfectly frosted and layered and they’d be wearing almost as much makeup as Bill Maher. They looked out at their audience, and we could all see deep into their hearts. They were completely naked onstage. So naked you could see into their past: the twelve-year-olds in Germany standing in front of their mirrors, maybe each with his cock and balls tucked between his legs hiding, arms up in the air like the pope, smiling big toothy smiles, hearing this applause in their heads. It was all pretend when they were children, and as adults it was all real. So painfully, embarrassingly, proudly, honestly, purely real. The tricks didn’t matter, the animals didn’t matter, the shithouse rat–crazy King of Pop grunting about mystical gardens, violets, devotions, and hallucinations didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the raw, desperate purity in the eyes of Siegfried and Roy looking out at the crowd. They wanted to be onstage so much—too much—that I was proud to be just an extra in their fantasy. I applauded, screamed, and cried my eyes out. I loved Siegfried and Roy onstage.
I also loved Siegfried and Roy backstage.
When P & T went to see S & R, we went backstage. If you go backstage at the Penn & Teller Theater, it’s not glamorous. We’ve got very plain dressing rooms. We each have our desk and computer—those are the centerpiece of each room—and we’re usually typing right up until we go on. I have music playing and a left-wing or right-wing television news station with no sound on. I read the closed captions when I look up from my computer. Teller is forced to hear my shuffled 650 gigs of nut music through the shared beige wall. Teller has a poster up for the production of
Macbeth
he directed and some paintings by his mom and dad. I have a big poster of D. A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan documentary
Don’t Look Back,
some Ayn Rand handwritten pages from
Atlas Shrugged,
an eight-by-ten of Raymond Burr and the rest of the cast of
Perry Mason,
some Tiny Tim pictures, and artwork by and pictures of my children.
Our greenroom is the Monkey Room. It’s a jungle-themed room with smoking monkeys and a small fridge with Blenheim really spicy ginger ale. There are a few pictures on the wall of us with people like Madonna, Warhol, Steve Martin, Run-DMC, Iggy Pop, and David Allan Coe. Most of the decorating was done by the TV show
While You Were Out.
If not for that TV show, our greenroom wouldn’t even be green, it would be hotel beige with an off-white acoustic-tile ceiling. The fluorescent light fixtures show shadows of dead roaches. The Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino is very clean, so they’re probably made of rubber and put there by Teller. I won’t give him the satisfaction of asking.
Backstage at Siegfried and Roy was real showbiz. It was as pure as their walking onstage. Roy had a huge jungle-themed bedroom. We have pictures of monkeys backstage; Roy had real live wild animals in cages all around the room. He needed a live ocelot, a snake, and a few birds in his bedroom so he could commune with them before the show. We surf porn on our computers. Roy meditates with endangered species. Everything was opulent, that golden-toilet, Dubai kind of opulent, that poor-no-more Elvis opulent. S & R didn’t greet us backstage barefoot in jeans and T-shirts like P & T, wolfing down after-show room service on
TV trays; they came out in yak-hair dressing gowns. Teller and I don’t even shower after the show, we just throw our street clothes on over the sweat. S & R were showered, their hair was blow-dried, they smelled pretty, and they were wearing makeup. They were wearing makeup backstage after the show and after showers. Penn & Teller don’t even wear makeup onstage. S & R looked better backstage after their show than P & T looked onstage at the Emmys. They are fucking superstars; we are fucking pigs.
Teller and I sat at S & R’s backstage bar with the Masters of the Impossible themselves. Siegfried kissed my date’s hand and showed her a card trick that had the punch line built into a fancy wooden clock in the wall. The clock bloomed with flowers and her freely selected card. They had a . . . what’s the word? “Assistant” isn’t right. Butlers don’t have their heads shaved and a coolie topknot. Valets are obsequious but don’t bow and cast their eyes down. I guess this guy was a servant. A very old-school servant. Like Dark Ages–school servant. I don’t know what he was, but he waited on Siegfried and Roy, and he seemed thrilled about it. I don’t mean he got them a Coke from the fridge. He would put cigarettes in their mouths and light them. Really. I was nervous. I didn’t fit into this kind of showbiz. Not at all. Fischbacher and Horn’s childhoods in Germany were probably humbler than my dead-factory hometown in Massachusetts, but they had risen above their past and I was still living mine. I was dressed for the dishwashing job I would have kept had I stayed in Greenfield: work shirt and dirty jeans. They were dressed for the jobs they were destined for. They are superstars. I fiddled with a cigarette on the bar and their . . . servant (“servant” really doesn’t bring up the full image) brought me a brand-new pack, opened, with a cigarette sticking out ready for me. He would have lit it for me too. If I’d wanted, he’d probably have expertly massaged my chest to suck the smoke in.
S & R & P & T talked. We have a lot in common. All four of us are part of a showbiz duo. Put Tommy and Dick Smothers, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone in that room with us, and we would have all understood everything. Tolstoy had it
right: successful partnerships are all the same. Unsuccessful ones are all different. Sam, Dave, Phil, Don, Simon, Garfunkel, Lennon, McCartney, Gilbert, and Sullivan all went their separate ways in separate ways. Dino Martin left Jerry Lewis for different reasons than Cher left Sonny, but I work with Teller for all the same reasons Abbott stayed with Costello.
When I was on Howard Stern all the time, I spent some time trashing Siegfried and Roy. I don’t do gay jokes, but the stuff I did about them fucking the tigers was close enough to be cruel and outside of my comfort range. The Stern show was intense, and I was out of my league. But the show was important—it sold more tickets than anything else we did. I pushed hard. I was scared and I would say anything to try to please Howard, so I sometimes went too far. There are things I still wince about. I lost a few friends and a couple of girlfriends from nonsense I spewed on that show, but when I trashed S & R in public there was often a voice mail from Siegfried the day after thanking me for the mention. He wasn’t being sarcastic, it was just a thank-you because I’d mentioned them. S & R are classy showbiz all the way. They took the high road, even when I hadn’t.
Siegfried and Roy invented the big Vegas magic show. I’m not sure there would be a Penn & Teller Theater in Las Vegas if not for our glittery Teutonic brothers. Before S & R all magic shows were just, as J. D. Salinger wrote, “all that David Copperfield crap.” Everyone just toured. Only variety shows and lounge acts stayed in Vegas full-time. Those are just the business changes Fischbacher and Horn made; S & R did big artistic changes too. As surely as Miles Davis invented a few forms of music, S & R were the birth of the cool animal act in magic. As a result, Penn & Teller have to explain why we
don’t
have sexy dangerous animals in our show (we have only a cow). People think all magicians have wild animals in their shows, and many of them do now, but that’s all Fischbacher and Horn. Houdini vanished an elephant, and some guys did horses or mules, and there were always rabbits and birds, but Siegfried and Roy upped the ante with tigers and shit. They created the act that most magicians are ripping off now.
Siegfried and Roy did more than just combine a big illusion
show with a big animal show to make a big Vegas show. Roy also changed the way dangerous animal acts were done. From Frank Buck to Gunther Gebel-Williams, animal trainers made it look dangerous and hard. I started out as a juggler, and the whole idea was to make everything look as hard as possible. Teller and I end our show by ostensibly catching bullets in our teeth. It’s way way safe, and we hope the audience knows it’s safe, but it feels way way dangerous. We don’t get too cheesy with it, we don’t do that David Blaine/Criss Angel life-and-death shit, but we still make sure people think about the guns as dangerous items. Lion tamers always had whips and chairs and they were in a cage with dangerous beasts. They were in there with things genetically programmed to kill them. That was the entertainment. It was big swinging-dick macho that your tiger could get your tiny human swinging dick caught between his huge tiger fucking teeth. Animal trainers would crack the whip and put their heads in the lion’s rotten-meat-stinking (that’s one word in German) mouth. Roy didn’t do it that way. He did this crazy nutty insane stupid thing where he took something really really really dangerous and made it look like love. No whips, no chairs, no dominating the beasts. He treated them like his friends. He loved them. The amazing part was that it was impossible to get your little pussy to do that at home—how did he get those big, fluffy, beautiful, cuddly tigers to do it?
When you take something easy and safe and make it look difficult and death-defying, you are a cheesy circus act. When you take something impossible and make it look easy, you’re an artist. It’s always back to Miles Davis and Picasso, and let’s throw in David Letterman. What they do looks easy and simple and, well, it just happens to be close to impossible and stirs your heart to the very depths. That’s the way Roy played the tigers. It made me crazy. I fucking hate big dangerous animals. I hate them. When I was at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, the Greatest Show on Earth, the animal guys would walk these fucking big smelly monsters on leashes around the ring while I was practicing my juggling and it just made me tremble. I would sneak off and lock myself in a room. I’ve ridden elephants and they scare me
shitless. They could kill me on a whim. Every species of living thing has individuals who go crazy and there’s no way of telling which ones they are. I might be riding on an eight-ton gray Ted Bundy with a trunk. But Roy really believed those eating machines loved him. I don’t want to see animals onstage, I don’t think show business should ever be really dangerous, but he invented a new art form, no doubt about it. I was always so worried about him.
When you’re a headliner in Vegas there are press events where you have to show up to prove you’re working. That meant we would see S & R on red carpets and at charity events. They would walk the red carpet like royalty, and I would limp and lumber down the red carpet like a New England shit-kicking farmer in my work boots. It didn’t matter how many S & R tiger-fucking jokes I’d made the week before on Stern—S & R greeted us with big toothy smiles and real joy in their hearts. We’d stand there chatting while cameras flashed, Siegfried and Roy in glitter tuxes or paisley Nehru jackets with perfectly tailored tight leather pants, and Penn in an off-the-rack shirt from a big and tall men’s store and maybe an indifferent suit jacket. They were superstars. I was there to sell someone a car. I tried to pass it off that I was being all humble and shit, but the truth is, I was the one who was being self-aggrandizing. I was acting like just showing up was enough to make people happy. Siegfried and Roy were doing their jobs and I was slouching and slacking. The audience doesn’t pay us these stupid amounts of money so we can invest wisely or even help people with Kiva, they pay us that money so we’ll do stupid shit. So we’ll show up in a Rolls-Royce with a driver in a little hat and we’ll all be wearing leather pants. Even faced with my self-absorbed, unprofessional clothing, knowing I’d be trashing them on any radio show I hadn’t properly prepared for, they would be smiling at me, hugging me, really happy to see me. We would pose for pictures together, two superstars and a guy who was there to clean up after the party was over. Their smiles were big, toothy, and radiant, and mine looked like I had just farted.
Then Roy got his fucking head bit off. We had just finished our show and we came backstage and were told that Roy had an accident.
“Accident” is an odd word when you’ve intentionally gotten close to a predator, but Teller and I rushed over to the hospital, where we ran into Lance Burton and every other magician in town. Bernie, S & R’s perfect manager, is exactly the guy they should have. He is as purely a manager as S & R are purely superstars. Bernie asked me if I’d go on camera and give updates as to how Roy was doing. I was going to talk about S & R from my heart and not do jokes. I was there at the hospital most of the night. I was there the next day. Here I was, the host of a show called
Bullshit!,
listening to all the stories about the tiger really trying to save Roy’s life and not rolling my eyes. This here atheist was at the candlelight vigil. This here atheist stood quietly while people publicly prayed.