The Improbable Rise and Savage Fall of Siegfried & Roy
he last survivors of a lost empire live behind the Mirage, in Las Vegas, out back by the pool. On a good day, Siegfried & Roy’s Secret Garden will draw more than 1,000 visitors, the $25 adult admission fee justified mostly by the palm shade and tranquility it offers relative to the mania outside its walls. There are also long summer stretches when it’s 100 degrees and things get a little grim. During a recent visit, only a few families strolled through, surveying the five sleeping animals on display: three tigers, a lion, and a leopard. The Secret Garden ostensibly operates as an educational facility. “Look, a lion,” one young father said to his son, while pointing at a tiger.
Yet residual magic remains. The best time to visit is late afternoon, just before closing, when the heat has started to subside and the sleeping cats stir. If you’re lucky—in this city built on the premise that you, against all odds, will be lucky—a tiger will roar when you’re standing nearby. A tiger’s roar is more than audible. You feel it in your chest, in your teeth, in the prickles of your skin. And if you turn to look at its source, you might catch a tiger’s gaze, its haunting eyes staring into yours, tracking your every move, knowing what you’re about to do before you do it.
At the peak of their particular and possibly extinct brand of celebrity, Siegfried & Roy were arguably the most famous magicians since Houdini. They were without question the most famous German magicians performing with a large collection of apex predators. Depending on when you enter and exit their story, it’s either triumphant or tragic, surprising or inevitable. It can serve as a testament to the power of lies, including the ones we tell ourselves, or a cautionary tale about fiction’s limits, especially when fact takes the form of a fed-up tiger. Now it’s about to reach its sad, instructive conclusion, the way so many modern fables end: with a corporate takeover.
In December 2021, Hard Rock International agreed to pay MGM a little over $1 billion for the right to operate the Mirage, including a three-year license to the name. For a little while longer, the hotel will continue to be marketed as a desert oasis, and its iconic volcano will still erupt. But Las Vegas is the least sentimental city on Earth, and Hard Rock has already announced plans to reimagine the property, including by building a guitar-shaped hotel like the one it opened in Hollywood, Florida, in 2019. The Mirage—the hotel that changed Las Vegas—will vanish from the Strip around the time it turns 35 years old.
It’s less obvious what will happen to the Secret Garden or its inhabitants, which include a few dolphins as well as the cats. There were once more than 50. Today, 14 remain, including Leni, a leopard; Maharani and Star, striped white Bengal tigers; and Timba-Masai, the “White Lion of Timbavati.” They’re put on display in shifts, mornings and afternoons, shuttled between their exhibits and their kennels in a complex the size of a football field. The animals have never known another home, and some of their human caretakers have worked here for more than three decades. Employees greet one another with the same worried question: Have you heard anything? No one has heard anything. There is a singular certainty in the Secret Garden: Its breeding program ended years ago, and so, one by one, its population will continue to decline. The only question is when, exactly, it will reach zero.
The fate of the larger-than-life statue of Siegfried & Roy—enormous busts of their perfectly coiffed heads, framing one of their beloved tigers—is also unknown. The statue has a precarious-seeming place on the stretch of the Strip between the Mirage and Treasure Island. When Roy died in May 2020, mourners placed flowers, notes, and candles at its base. They did the same when Siegfried died seven months later. People still stop to take pictures, careful to crop out the homeless man who sometimes makes camp on the sidewalk nearby. The statue has been painted to look like it’s made of
