![]() ![]() Horn, who led the duo’s animal efforts, while Fischbacher headed up the illusions, had long projected a mythos around his own animal handling, describing a nearly supernatural bond cultivated through direct observation, conversation, even meditation. (In a stand-up routine that aired on HBO six months after the attack, Chris Rock mocked the notion that big cats could ever be domesticated, declaring, “That tiger went tiger!”) Lawrence, 45, says he sympathizes with the pair and believes they promulgated their storyline because the reality undermined a lifetime of image-building: that the self-styled “masters of the impossible” were capable of awe-inspiring interspecies bonds and that their wild beasts could be tamed into reliably docile creatures. “While Roy, unfortunately, bears the physical scars of the attack,” says Lawrence, “he definitely isn’t the only person that was left suffering in the aftermath of it.” ![]() He contends it was a version shaped by the illusionists to protect the brand, save face and cover up for a series of onstage handling errors made by Horn. Yet Lawrence - a figure central to the story, now speaking for the first time - says the official narrative of the night put out by the show isn’t what really happened. Today, he’s able to stroll short distances when not confined to a scooter and can talk only with difficulty. (The tiger, often misspelled as “Montecore” in the press, died in 2014 at age 17.) Fischbacher, now 79, went on to extravagantly care for his lifelong friend and former lover Horn, 74, at their Little Bavaria estate in Vegas, whose sprawling, rustic grounds are outfitted with hip-high rails along winding paths to make it easier for Horn to get around. Mantacore, deemed blameless, was reintegrated among the rest of the duo’s big-cat menagerie. After the incident, the show - a Vegas mainstay that grossed $45 million a year - shuttered permanently. 3, 2003, Horn’s 59th birthday - are now part of the pop culture firmament: Horn suffered an onstage stroke, the story goes, and Mantacore lunged at him in a misguided instinct to help. The events that unfolded that night - Oct. Soon, as Horn’s decades-long partner, Siegfried Fischbacher, cried out and the evening’s audience of 1,500 people watched agape, Mantacore dragged Horn’s unconscious body offstage through the ball-fringe curtains. Inside Amazon Studios: Big Swings Hampered by Confusion and Frustration ![]()
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