Bourdain

by Laurie Woolever

  And our mother [Gladys Bourdain; born 1934, died 2020] grew up in a very middle-class Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, surrounded by a lot of very progressive and hypereducated people.

  When we were kids, we did not know that our mother was Jewish. I mean, in the fifties, if you were Jewish and came from New York City and you wanted to live in a proper suburb, there was a lot of prejudice and redlining, and you were not welcome in a lot of places. So, I know other people whose parents also kind of glossed over the fact they were Jewish to real estate agents, or changed their name to something more WASPy sounding, so that it wouldn’t cause any questions when they were moving out of the city. I know plenty of people who went that route, but then, once they got their house and were all settled, they asked, “Where is a synagogue near here? Let’s go.”

  Our mom buried it completely. She swore our dad to secrecy. She swore old friends, who might have known her when, to secrecy. Her maiden name was Sacksman, but she told us, growing up, that it was Saxon, like “Anglo-Saxon.” I would see her filling out applications for shit, and she would type in her typewriter, S-A-X-O-N, Saxon. She never wanted to talk about it, ever. I don’t think Tony and I found out until late in high school. We found some piece of paper that had her maiden name spelled the way it actually was spelled. One of us said, “That sounds kind of Jewish. Was your family Jewish?” And she went blank and said, “No, no, of course not,” or maybe, “No comment.”

  And just to give you an idea of how absurd it got, our parents had a wedding picture up on their dresser in the bedroom that we grew up seeing, this wedding photo. It was just always there, and after they separated, my mom lived alone, she still had that photo around.

  So, our mom died in January 2020, and I’m digging through all her old papers, and bugger all, I did not know that that photo we’d seen our entire lives, which looked like a happy couple standing on the steps of a church, it was the steps of a synagogue, on the Grand Concourse. I did not find that out until after she’d died.

  It was about wanting to fit in with the “right people.” Our mom created a whole thing. First off, she’s marrying this up-and-coming, dashing French American who seemed to be going someplace, and was working in the classical records business, and loved opera just like her, and actually took her to the opera, which her parents never did. She was going places, and she had, now, a French last name, Bourdain, so she could bury anything that spoke of a less-distinguished upbringing in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx.

  We also were never quite told that she grew up in the Bronx. She always said, “I grew up on the Upper West Side.” Not really. From what I can tell, she was actually born in her parents’ apartment in the west seventies, but after her brother died—she had an older brother who died when she was about four years old—her parents apparently couldn’t stand being around that place anymore, so they moved to University Heights, which was a perfectly middle-class Jewish neighborhood in those days. There are a lot of famous Jewish New Yorkers who come from that area—but I don’t think we found out until well into high school or college that she spent part of her childhood in the Bronx.

  She also told us, “I went to Hunter College for two years.” Now, we all know a Hunter College on Lexington Avenue in the sixties [in Manhattan], so I always assumed it was that, and she never said anything to refute that. I found out, only many years later, that what’s now Lehman College in the Bronx, it used to be called Hunter College in the Bronx. So she went to Hunter College near where she lived; she walked there.

  She really loved both her parents, especially her mom, and she would always say that they were very close. They died when she was pregnant with Tony, both of them. She had the theory that because Tony always seemed somehow anxious, always had a sort of dark view of things, she blamed it on the fact that she had that double tragedy when she was pregnant with him.

  The only grandparent we ever knew was our father’s mother, who was old and infirm when we knew her. We would go visit her, near Columbia University, on Sundays. She had very bad arthritis and could barely move, so she would sit there on the couch and our dad would chat with her. I can’t remember a single conversation I had with this woman.

  Our parents were both very into film, including foreign films. We had books about Fellini, and Bergman, and Truffaut, and Kurosawa sitting around in the living room. We all read them. We all watched the occasional Bergman rerun week on channel eleven, and Japanese films.

  They were both totally plugged into politics. They were anti-McCarthyism, and they were pro–civil rights, they were anti–Vietnam War, they were pro rights of workers, all those things. Not in a flaming radical way, more just what’s fair, and what’s just.

  That was the backdrop we grew up in. That was the backdrop Tony was a young adult in, and I think you can certainly see in his shows, where he would go to troubled spots, places that had had a civil war of some kind, earthquakes and famine—he was just continuing to inform himself, and us, about all of these things that we kind of grew up hearing about.

  Our parents had their friends who, of course, had the same views, and they’d all be grumbling, “Oh, can you believe Nixon?” or whatever, the same way we all do now. We would certainly talk about Vietnam. And we still had the draft. I remember Tony was definitely worried.

  We went to public school in Leonia, New Jersey, to grammar school. Some kid was verbally and emotionally tormenting Tony in his early grade school years. I don’t know all the details, but he was just a mean bastard. And also, Tony was way ahead of the class. He was reading fifth- and sixth-grade stuff in second grade, and he was bored to tears. And then he had this kid tormenting him.

  I’m not sure the order of events, but some of the teachers at the public school said to our parents, “You know what, if you have a chance, there’s the private school in the next town, and we think Tony would do better there.”

  Around that same time, our grandmother did us the economic favor of dying. She left our dad a bunch of money, and so they thought they could afford private school for a long time, and they sent Tony, starting in fifth grade. And they sent me the following year.

  GLADYS BOURDAIN (1934–2020), MOTHER: Tony always had a fabulous vocabulary, and he read early. I absolutely always saw a talent in him, for writing. In fact, when he was in second grade, his teacher recommended that we send him to private school, because while all the other kids were learning to read, he was in the corner, reading a book. Part of the reason he got into the private school was that he did a long composition about some French voyager who discovered the western part of France. I forget the name.

  He was a wonderful writer, always. When he was, I think, nine, he wrote a long composition about his younger brother, which was quite fabulous, and I wish to hell I still had it.

  And he was a gifted illustrator. He actually won prizes at school for some of the art that he did. I remember one particular thing—each child in his class was given a large piece of drawing paper with the first letter of his or her last name. And so, his was a B, a vertical B, and whereas everyone else took that letter and tried to make a picture out of it, he turned the picture sideways, and that B became a pair of ski goggles and he drew the person and the skis and everything.

  My husband came from a French family, and so we stayed with my husband’s aunt and uncle in the southwest of France for a while, and one of their neighbors was an oyster fisherman. We went out on the boat with them one day . . . oysters were very precious, but they gave their foreign visitors, us, a taste of oysters. I remember hating mine—I hate raw things like that—but Tony was just delighted with it. Tony always said that his first taste of vichyssoise, and then the oyster, sort of changed his life.

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: Our parents never had enough money, really. Our dad inherited a bunch of money when his mother died. She was one of these people who saved every penny for forty years, so she had a decent amount. We had two wonderful trips to France. We bought a ridiculously goofy British car while
in France and had it shipped back to New Jersey. We were sent to private school. But, actually, our parents kind of ran out of money after three or four years, and then were struggling for the next, well, forever, to pay for private school. I honestly don’t know how they did it. Once in a while, bill collectors would show up, or there would be obvious things in the mail, that bills had been unpaid. But, meanwhile, they kept it all looking OK, you know; they never let on.

  2

  “Super Smart, Super Funny”

  The Teenage Years

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: Tony and I really just didn’t hang out together as teenagers. We were into very different things. He hung out with a mostly older pack of friends, so already in ninth grade, he was in with friends in eleventh, twelfth grade, and he was gone a lot. But we got along well, and I think we always had, in our house, especially my dad and Tony and me, we had a very similar sense of humor. We were very much into the foibles and weaknesses of society, and people in general. And we respected each other, I think.

  We were a typical sixties household, you know: Dad went to work every day on the bus, Mom cooked dinner. Our mom, being a well-read person, very into culture, and who had married a guy whose mom was French, she was very interested in learning French cooking, and trying to impress with her French cooking. And it was right around that time, of course, when Julia Child first came along, and like so many women in this country, our mom got fully on board.

  When we had guests, she’d break out the Julia Child cookbook and make some nice stuff. I would have said, “Oh, Mom’s a good cook,” but what she was missing was, she had no spontaneity at all. It was formulaic. She could follow a recipe well, but she had no creativity. If you just gave her some ingredients and said, “Make a nice thing,” I think she would have fallen apart. She’d have no idea.

  Our dad got into the game when we were teenagers, because our mom, I think, was just starting to get tired of being the housewife doing all the cooking. It was around the time when Chinese cookbooks started showing up, and Szechuan food appeared. When we were really young, the only kind of Chinese food you could have was Cantonese, and then suddenly Szechuan food became the rage, in the seventies. We were one of the first families we knew with a wok. Our dad got the book An Encyclopedia of Chinese Food and Cooking; it was one of the early biggies.

  NANCY BOURDAIN, WIFE (1985–2005): When did I meet Tony? I don’t really remember. We did go to high school together. Back then, it was the Englewood School for Boys and the Dwight School for Girls. Everybody knew each other. Of course, I was in love, like you are in high school, with somebody else.

  SAM GOLDMAN, FRIEND: Nancy and I were high school sweethearts.

  JEFF FORMOSA, FRIEND: I met Tony in 1969, at the Englewood School for Boys, and we became fast friends. When I first met him, he was little; he was a shrimp.

  SAM GOLDMAN: He was tiny. He and [his brother] Chris, they were little kids, and then they had growing spurts. I remember we used to jam him up in the luggage racks of long-distance buses, because he was that small.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: He was shorter than I was. I think I must have been fifteen, so he must have been fourteen. He was a little kid, and he could tuck and roll really well. But he was very funny. And we had this big wall in the soccer field, and he would tell upperclassmen, “I’ll go jump. I’ll fall off that wall for a couple of bucks.” He would get money for falling off a wall. One summer, he completely grew. It was incredible, like a kitten or something, you know?

  SAM GOLDMAN: He was super smart, super funny. He was new to the school, and he needed to get into a clique, so he weaseled his way into ours, which wasn’t very hard. We were New Jersey teenagers; we never really went anywhere, but we drove around and smoked hash and hung out and ate.

  JEFF FORMOSA: We were inseparable. We’d ride bicycles behind my house, in front of his house. His mom would drive us to Bruce Lee movies. Gladys had a very good nose, and she always knew what we were up to.

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: I did wonder for a time, Why does Tony always seem to be in trouble? I was aware that he was using some drugs. I didn’t know to what extent. I mean, nobody had a major problem, even then, with weed. I think he was trying just about anything and everything that came along in those days.

  GLADYS BOURDAIN: He was a difficult teenager, not a great student. He wasn’t the kind of teenager who ran away. He just wanted to be everywhere, but he was home for dinner every night. When Woodstock happened, I know he wished he could be there, but he wasn’t. He was too young. I think he must have been fourteen.

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: There was a lot of conflict between Tony and our parents, especially our mom. Our dad hated conflict, and he usually ran from arguments, because he just wanted everybody to be happy, like, “Why can’t we all just get along, and listen to our music, and have a nice meal?”

  Our mom was always more argumentative and frustrated with her lot in life. When people weren’t doing what she thought was right, she would initiate arguments. Tony was into a lot of stuff that she disliked. I mean, he was into drugs, and he was hanging out with the “wrong” people. He wasn’t doing terrible things, but he wasn’t doing as well as she would have liked, and he seemed to disrespect the system. So they argued a lot.

  Sometimes our mom would sort of drag our dad to the table, so he’d sit there and do the bobblehead thing and say, “Yes, dear. Tony, listen to what your mother’s saying.” He would be kind of forced uncomfortably to sit in the same room, and to agree with my mom. But I don’t even know if he did, honestly.

  JEFF FORMOSA: You know, Tony’s speech, it all came from comic books. And it was infectious the way he spoke, his attitude. At school, you didn’t get your ass kicked, you’d “eat shoe.”

  That was his talent: he made everything sound better than it really was. He made you want to be there. When we hung out at each other’s houses, Tony would sit around and draw. I’d play the drums. We’d listen to music, try to get drugs, whatever we could get our hands on. A friend came back from boarding school and we took our first hit of acid and went to a swimming party.

  Tony had an endless stream of records, from when his dad worked in the music business. His dad is where he got his zaniness from. His mom is where he got his sneer.

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: Our dad was never particularly career successful. He lost his job several times, in our childhood and teenage years. I never really quite got the story there, but I suspect he was so not into corporate politics and weaseling your way up the corporate ladder. He just liked his classical music, and he liked reading biographies and history books, and knowing immense amounts of interesting shit, and never ever wanted to kowtow.

  The only two big company jobs he had, one was at a company that’s no longer around, called London Records. And he worked at Columbia Records, which later became CBS Records, and then later Sony Music. But he worked at a record store, and he worked at a stereo store, and was unemployed for quite long periods, and didn’t seem to feel a burning urgency. So we never had the money that those around us had.

  It was compounded, optically, by the fact that we were going to this private school, and were surrounded with people so much wealthier than us. Several of them had a second house somewhere. They would go to Florida on spring vacation; they would go to Europe a lot. I mean, we had been super lucky and had gone there as kids twice, but, you know, these other families got to travel a lot.

  In the brief couple of years where they had money, our parents did a huge house upgrade, a really nice kitchen, two nice new bathrooms upstairs. They turned the attic into a master bedroom suite. So they got that done, but then they kind of ran out of money, and the front hall, where all our guests came into the house, was never finished. It had this chandelier, but they had never quite hooked the wires up right, so it had this dangling-wire thing. And the steps were unfinished wood that had been painted years and years before—black, scuffed wooden steps with a broken banister. That was what our guests saw, you know, coming into the
house, and then you turned left, and you saw this really nice, brand-new kitchen. It was weird.

  They both spent stupid money they didn’t have. And honestly, I think she was worse at it than him, but he was no good. Five thousand dollars would come into their hands, and somehow they would spend ten. We have money for one nice vacation, so let’s take two. They would be going out to the opera and dinner, when my school was saying, “You’re four months late with the tuition.”

  That was our story, and I’m sure Tony felt that to a degree. I know I felt it a lot. I don’t think Tony ever had the delightful experience, at age fourteen, of opening the door after school, and there was a debt collector, delivering some collection notice related to my orthodontist. I don’t know how conscious Tony was of the gory details like that. He knew there was a sham going on, and that they never had as much money as they portrayed. But I don’t know if he ever got down in the weeds that way.

  If you lived in a suburb in those days, you could knock on people’s doors and offer to mow their lawn, you know, for a dollar. Tony did a paper route, mowed some lawns, babysat for people around the block, people who knew us. And then he got this job as a bicycle messenger in Manhattan.

  Back then, advertising agencies on Madison Avenue had cans of film that needed to be physically developed, in a vat of chemicals somewhere, usually over near Twelfth Avenue or in Tribeca. So there were all of these messengers bringing stuff around Manhattan on bicycles—legal documents, film for the ad agencies, and it paid well, and you’d have these crazy kids like Tony, who was seventeen, bicycling around Midtown traffic in the middle of the day, trying to rush a can of film from Madison Avenue to Twelfth Avenue. And he would tell these stories of grabbing on to the back of a bus, kind of getting a ride for a few blocks, stuff that would completely freak our mom out.