In matters of taste and excess, there is such a thing as Too Much. And Too Too Much. And Way Too Much.
And then there’s Vegas.
Las Vegas is where you go if you’re an artist born to a German war widow as Allied bombs fell around her, and your closest childhood friends were the big cats at the shabby Bremen zoo, and you catch the eye of a flamboyant magician while you are working on a cruise ship, and together you dream up an act that is part circus, part burlesque, part magic show, part fireworks display — and 110 percent over-the-top camp. Vegas is where you go if dancing with tigers is not enough, so you dance with rare white tigers; if you sense that a disappearing elephant trick would be greatly improved by adding near-naked dancers in sequins; if seeing yourself in a skintight jumpsuit, your cheekbones rouged to lethal sharpness, makes you think: Hmmm, needs a cape.
[Roy Horn, half of the big-cat illusionist team Siegfried & Roy, dies at 75 of coronavirus]
And if you can deliver So Much Too Much night after night and year after year, with a level of self-discipline and perfectionism that puts the Too in Teutonic, you go to Vegas because that’s where 1,500 people per show will pay more for tickets than they ever dreamed of paying, and gladly tell their friends back in Waukegan or Wichita or Walla Walla that “whatever you do, don’t miss it!” until some 25 million tickets have been sold and you’re so rich you don’t live in a mansion, you live in a compound of connected mansions that you call Little Bavaria.
You go to Vegas if you are Uwe Ludwig Horn, known as Roy — as in Siegfried & Roy, kings of the Strip during the last years of the 20th century. And when your Too Muchness finally comes to an end, as Roy Horn’s did on May 8 due to complications from covid-19, Vegas honors you like royalty. Flags all over Nevada were lowered to half-staff. Horn was 75.
People used to ask (not Vegas people, of course; other people): Which one is Siegfried and which one is Roy? Siegfried Fischbacher, who is 80 and living in Little Bavaria, was the magician. Roy was the animal trainer. Siegfried was the blond and Roy the brunet, though they tried a lot of things with dye. The hair color was probably natural in 1967, when dashing Tony Azzie of the Folies Bergère caught their act in Paris and booked them for his upcoming Vegas revue.
Vegas was still finding itself in those days. Oh, it had the sin down pat. As early as the 1930s, working men building a giant dam on the Colorado River did their boozing and gambling in town. Ditto the soldiers who trained nearby during World War II. Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky took the place over for the Mob after the war. Entertainment was mostly singers and comedians in tuxedos and bare-breasted girls doing high kicks.
By 1967, though, rich and crazy Howard Hughes had bought up half the town and surrounded himself with strait-laced Mormons. An idea began to form that Vegas could be more than a den of iniquity; it could be also be a family room of wow. Along with year-round circuses and Broadway musicals for the kids, the casinos booked incredibly successful acts — notably singer Wayne Newton and pianist Liberace — aimed at ladies of a certain age.
I’ll wager that the German arrivals took in Liberace’s show a time or 12 and went to school on it. Taking the stage in a Rolls-Royce covered in tiny mirrors, clad in a cape stitched with thousands of crystals, clutching a microphone studded with diamonds, the barely closeted entertainer was box office gold. After Liberace, there would never be a day without glitter in Vegas. And what Liberace did with a grand piano, Siegfried & Roy began doing with flash pots and lions. During the nearly 14 years that they reigned at Steve Wynn’s 3,044-room Mirage resort — a place with its own volcano — they were Mr. Showmanship’s spiritual heirs.
[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]
Then came the showstopper. On Oct. 3, 2003, before a house packed with friends marking his 59th birthday, Roy Horn reached the part of the act where he danced with a full-grown tiger named Mantacore. For some reason, the tiger did not want to dance. With a swipe of his paw, he dropped Horn to the stage, then sank his teeth into the star’s neck and dragged him to the wings. Though Horn narrowly survived the attack, he could no longer perform.
“The world has lost one of the greats of magic, but I have lost my best friend,” said Siegfried upon the death of Roy. And on the strangely silent Strip, shuttered by the virus, for once there was nothing to add.
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