Bourdain

by Laurie Woolever

  STEVEN TEMPEL: Tony and I worked together, from place to place, for years. Then I went into corporate, and for the first few months, working corporate, I missed working with Tony so much that on Saturday nights, I’d go to Les Halles and run the grill for him.

  KAREN RINALDI: Joel had always encouraged him to write nonfiction from his point of view as a chef, because he had that window onto it. He had stories to tell. I think he had more stories to tell than time to tell them.

  ROB STONE: Before Gone Bamboo was published, he wrote a short story, totally irreverent, sort of the chef-world version of Trainspotting. It was at least six or seven thousand words, unpublishable in the United States, not a novella, neither here nor there, but about two-thirds of the way through it, there were a thousand to fifteen hundred words that were offset, that told what I would call his origin story, of how he decided to become a chef in Provincetown, Massachusetts, working in some tourist trap lobster joint, taking a job as a dishwasher but becoming completely enamored of chef culture, and looking at chefs as if they were samurais—marinated in alcohol, drug addled, sex obsessed—but when he describes these characters, he gives them chivalry. And he wrote with this clear-eyed, simple style. He wasn’t trying hard; it wasn’t self-conscious. This thousand or fifteen hundred words was clear-eyed, beautiful memoir writing.

  I set a time to meet Tony for drinks at the infamous Siberia, a bar in a location that was built on generations of urine stains. It was a hole in the ground you poured alcohol and smoke into.

  Tony spent a fair amount of time there, and I was going there to pitch him. I think he had only ever imagined himself as a fiction writer. I knew I had to get there as soon as he was off work, and be as punctual as possible, so that everybody was sober, to tell him, “You need to go nonfiction. You’ve got a long con going here, not just a short con.”

  WEB STONE: You want him maybe after one drink, and before seven, where he’s gonna be receptive, a little less stressed, because the tension is cut, and you can pitch him and get him to understand that those thousand words of that story are where you hang your hat. Our whole thing was, “You’re missing where the gold is. The gold is this stuff that you think is throwaway, that you’re indenting and you’re putting in fricking italics. That is where you are.”

  ROB STONE: And, and, of course, the night ends at six in the morning, and we walk out, and there’s a fresh pool of piss right outside the door.

  WEB STONE: He was scared to death of doing this, because it was like, “I’ll never eat lunch in this town again.”

  11

  “It Was Picking Up a Rock Off the Restaurant Scene and Showing Everything That Was Underneath It”

  Tony wrote an approximately two-thousand-word essay about the restaurant business that he sent, unsolicited, to the Downtown Express, a Tribeca-based community newspaper, whose editors rejected it. He then sent it to the New York Press, an alt-weekly paper that was in competition with the Village Voice. Sam Sifton, now an editor at the New York Times, was then the Press editor who received and greenlit Tony’s essay, which ultimately didn’t run.

  SAM SIFTON, EDITOR: One of the things that I was unable to explain to Tony at the time, and am unable to explain to you right now, is why [New York Press editor and publisher] Russ Smith declined to publish the piece. Tony was unknown to me. Les Halles, where he was working at the time, was four or five blocks north of where my world ended, as a New York Press reporter and editor. We were downtown kids being downtown kids, and Les Halles might as well have been Le Bernardin. It was not for us.

  Nevertheless, the essay landed, and I read it, and it was great. It was perfect. It was everything. It was picking up a rock off the restaurant scene and showing everything that was underneath it. And it was telling the truth. And it seemed to me to be a really important, exciting, funny, brash, profane, and, above all, incredibly readable tale. Tony was a clean writer. We were soliciting first-person essays from the citizenry of New York, so I saw a lot of terrible copy. His was not that. It was like a slam dunk.

  So I thought we should publish it. Russ Smith, I believe, was on vacation, or away. It must have been ’98, and I’m thinking it must have been the summer. In any event, the Press was sent to the printer on Tuesday night, and Russ returned to the office on Monday, and the story was laid out.

  It was the cover story, and Russ killed it. It’s difficult to explain. The New York Press was a rowdy place, but it was run by a king. And what Russ said went. And there would be times when Russ was very clear about why he was killing something or championing something, and then there were times when he was not. And though I was very close to Russ at the time, and deeply respectful of him as an editor, I just didn’t get it. And I still don’t.*

  But, I will tell you, I’ve dined out on the story a million times. I liked that story when it was a New York Press story, I liked that story when it was a New Yorker story, I liked that story when it became the book.

  GLADYS BOURDAIN: David Remnick’s wife was a colleague of mine at the New York Times—we were sort of chums—and I asked if I might use her name and send the article to him, mentioning that we were colleagues. I didn’t want anything more than that. I do think that helped, to have David Remnick read the thing.*

  12

  “He Was Not Just a Cook Anymore; He Was a Real 3D Person”

  DAVID ROSENTHAL: Gordon Howard called to tell me that he was no longer working with Tony, and he was very upset.

  ROB STONE: Tony came to us and said, “I think it’s time for me to move on from Gordon. Where do I go?” And we said, “Our agent is Kim Witherspoon, and she is true, and honest, and a straight shooter. She may not be the agent who will get you the biggest advance, but she will get you the honest advance.”

  WEB STONE: She did not exactly jump on the prospect of representing Anthony Bourdain.

  ROB STONE: She definitely did not. It was a hard sell.

  KIMBERLY WITHERSPOON, LITERARY AGENT: It was 1997 when I was introduced to Tony. That’s a fair bit before he wrote Kitchen Confidential. When Web and Rob [Stone] introduced me to Tony, I don’t think he had a book project ready to submit to publishers. He didn’t come with a proposal for me to read. I think they knew they were coming to me with a bit of a mess, basically.

  He needed help with a problem with Random House, which is that they had published two novels and had not—in spite of the fact that they were each New York Times Notable Books—they had not published them in paperback, and were not planning to. And there were no e-books at the time, there were no digital copies of the book available, so if you didn’t have the book out in paperback, it was essentially not available, outside of libraries, after the first year of publication.

  I talked to Tony on the telephone, and I was struck immediately by the fact that he was very bright, very funny, and I thought that his expectations were realistic. I also felt that he would be a good partner in letting me take the lead and trying to work this out, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t the agent who had sold those first two books to Random House. It was a gamble, absolutely.

  The first time I actually met Tony was in the lobby of Random House on our way up to a meeting that I’d set up.

  He was early.

  We got up there, and there was a new publisher. It wasn’t David Rosenthal, who had originally acquired the novels, it was Brian DeFiore, who succeeded him. And Tony basically leaned back in his seat, stretched his legs out, and just glowered at Brian, while I explained that they either had to put the books into paperback or give us the rights back. That’s not an agent’s dream job.

  I didn’t have another book to offer them, so I had no leverage. They didn’t really have to do anything, but they gave us back the rights. The next book ended up being Kitchen Confidential. And that timing was brilliant, because we got the rights back, that piece got published [in The New Yorker], and then Karen [Rinaldi] signed him and put the novels back in print, in paperback.

  PHILIPPE LAJAUNIE: When we opened Les H
alles in Tokyo, I had a young French chef over there. I wanted him to have the exact same presentation as we were doing in New York, so I decided to take Tony with me for a week, to Tokyo.

  I left a day or two before him, and just as I was leaving, he gave me two books: Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo. It was like he pulled the curtain back—the sort of work it takes, the focus, style, intelligence, a big mental museum of experiences and drive to write a book—I was very impressed. He was not just a cook anymore, he was a real 3D person. I read the books, and they were pretty good, and then I was really, really impressed.

  In Tokyo, instead of leaving him in the kitchen on his own, I thought, Maybe that’s the guy to hang out with. I decided to go around and show him my favorite places. Of course, he turned out to be ahead of me: one night he could not be in the restaurant because he had a presentation with his book publisher in Tokyo, which sounded very glamorous to me.

  JOEL ROSE: Tony was working at Les Halles, and he sent me an email from Tokyo. First time he had been there, and he had just been to the fish market. He was standing in his hotel room, looking down on the street, and he wrote me an email. It was hilarious, it was great. Karen was in our living room breastfeeding [our son] Rocco, I’ll never forget this, and I went in, I said, “You have to read this!”

  KAREN RINALDI: It was about five or six in the morning and I was sitting on the ground nursing our then-eight-month-old son, and Joel was telling me, “Tony is sending me these amazing stories from Japan.”

  JOEL ROSE: And she said, “Joel, get the fuck out of here!” This was before the New Yorker article came out. We knew it was coming. Karen knew Tony, but not like I knew him, and she said, “Well, does he have other stories?” and I said, “He has so many great stories.”

  KAREN RINALDI: He handed me a printed-out email, and as I was sitting on the floor, nursing, I read the email, and it was just so fucking funny. I said, “God, he’s good on the page in nonfiction.”

  Joel said, “I know, I’ve been trying to encourage him to do this.” At that point, I had just started at Bloomsbury.

  JOEL ROSE: She called Kim while Tony was still in Japan, and she made an offer on a book. The contingency was he had to agree to it before he came back to the United States, because she knew The New Yorker was coming.

  PHILIPPE LAJAUNIE: The piece that was published in The New Yorker, it was really loaded with everything he had in him. The consequences were pretty amazing. It was not just the intellectuals commenting on it; the TV was there, radio was there, journalists came to interview him at the restaurant.

  I could tell this was something way beyond writing a piece for intellectual enjoyment; there was something that was touching people differently. And because the kitchen was running perfectly fine without him, I was willing to give him the space he needed to grow into that new dimension. I did not see any downside for the restaurant.

  DAVID ROSENTHAL: I left [Random House] to take over at Simon & Schuster, to run the whole adult trade division there, and one of the first calls I got was from Kim [Witherspoon], who said, “Tony wants to do a nonfiction thing about working in the kitchens,” and I said no.

  My immediate reaction was, had he been a chef at a really big, famous place, it would’ve been one thing, but he was sort of in a box. I felt that my credibility with the sales force would be somewhat damaged, because I had pushed very hard on his two novels, and they didn’t work.

  Kim had sent me over pages, and I thought there was very funny stuff in there. She called again to say that they had a big offer from somebody. I remember saying, “You know what, go with god.” It’s one of the phone calls I most regret in my life.

  KAREN RINALDI: It was kind of a playful negotiation. Kim brought it to him and Nancy faxed him the offer, and he thought it was a joke. And I said, “No, this is no joke.” So he accepted.

  When he got back, Tony and I met at a bar, and I said, “So, OK, you’ve got this book deal, what do you want to write? Joel tells me you have these amazing stories that you’ve been telling all these years. Just write those stories down.”

  JOEL ROSE: He couldn’t believe it. He was so happy. He came back from Japan, and he and Karen went out for a drink. It changed his life right there. I felt a little bit left out, because Tony and I had been so close, but also it was Karen, so I trusted her implicitly.

  KAREN RINALDI: He was like a kid. He was so happy and excited. He said, “I already have the title for it: Kitchen Confidential.”

  It was teed up; it was one of those magical moments when things just all happened at the same time. You can’t make that stuff happen; it was fortuitous on all ends. So that’s it—we started working together.

  13

  “I’m Not Gonna Censor the Guy”

  Editing and Publishing Kitchen Confidential

  PANIO GIANOPOULOS, BOOK EDITOR: The stories were so good, and they were so polished. They were the kinds of stories that he had clearly told a thousand times to friends; they were tested the way a comedian tests a set, you know, over and over. The beats were there, and the moments were all there. The editing was fun. There were no structural, fundamental changes that had to be made.

  Tony was the easiest author to work with, because he was so busy, he had no time to talk on the phone. He was still working at Les Halles. All these other authors who had nothing to do, they would just keep you on the phone for hours, but Tony was always like, “I gotta get back to work.” So he’d call me really quickly and answer a question, and then, boom, he’d go back to work. So that was sort of a pleasure.

  It came in—I think maybe half the book had come in at that point—and I went into Karen’s office to give her an update. It’s the only time in my life it’s ever happened: I said, “It’s incredible. It’s so funny, it’s so entertaining. If we can’t make this a bestseller, we don’t deserve to have our jobs.”

  One of the things I had to decide was, How dirty are we gonna let this be? How filthy, how many drugs, how much sex, how much cursing and profanity? I cut maybe 5 percent of the language, cleaned it up a little bit, cut a few things here and there, but really, we just let Tony be Tony, because that was his charm.

  But I remember when we had it copyedited. That’s part of the process where a person goes through and makes sure— Obviously, there’s things like grammar, and typos, and little things, proofreading, but there’s also bigger issues around fact-checking, and then there’s also things around tone, right, and that’s where the copy editor can have a big influence. And she went through, and she changed all the curses, she cut them out, and so then I had to go through manually, and just, like, stet, stet, stet, like, put back the fuckers, put back all the cocksuckers, put back all the fuck yous, and the this and the that. It was the PG version of it, you know, but we kept the R version.

  KAREN RINALDI: People were objecting to the all-caps profanity in the book—COCKSUCKER, MOTHERFUCKER, all that stuff—and I just said, “I’m not gonna censor the guy. He uses these words. No one’s gonna mind, because the book is so good.”

  PANIO GIANOPOULOS: I worked with Rose Marie Morse, his publicist. I remember her calling and asking me about the line about “making that fuzzy little Emeril my bitch.” She asked if we could cut that, and I said no. She was a little worried, I think, about how it might go over.

  KAREN RINALDI: What wound up happening, of course, is that his profanity and honesty were part of what drew people to him. That’s the beauty of publishing, that you don’t know what’s going to happen.

  PANIO GIANOPOULOS: He was the master of being provocative, yet it comes from a place of absolute sincerity, and it’s such an interesting balance of provocation and macho bravado, but it’s done in a playful way, too. Other people try it. You see it on Twitter all the time, and it’s just not charming. Tony had a way of being absolutely charming. And I think part of that is just because he loved the real deal, and he was the first to praise somebody if they were great at something; he didn’t care where they came from, and
who they were; if somebody was great, they were great.

  PATTI JACKSON: He was excited about the book coming out, because as much as he loved to cook, he also kind of felt like he had something inside him—I mean, obviously, he had a story, he had all those stories. I was like, “Nobody’s ever gonna buy that book, Ton. You are out of your mind. You can’t keep telling people not to order fish on Mondays, and what really goes on at brunch.” And he was like, “Patti, it’s a good story. People need to understand.” It seemed like such a pipe dream. If he had said to me, “I will become this famous novelist, raconteur, travel guru, political commentator, you know, hero to everybody,” I think we would have both laughed and taken a big drag on a cigarette. You know what I mean? Like, who would have seen that coming?

  KAREN RINALDI: Tony wanted to please everybody. He wanted people to be happy—deeply, he wanted that—but I think on the surface it was like, “I’m gonna do it my way,” and everybody let him, and he wound up being absolutely brilliant.

  There are very funny stories about me pitching it at sales conference, and everybody saying, “His track [record] is not good,” because of the modest sales on the fiction books. “Nobody knows him as a chef.”

  We didn’t actually shoot him for the book cover. That picture was taken for something else at Les Halles, so we grabbed it and put it on the cover. I said, “Look at that guy: Don’t you just want to know what he has to say?”

  The book came out in August 2000. I remember printing eleven thousand copies, and it came out and hit the bestseller list at number seven, with very few copies in the world, which is all about velocity of sales. He didn’t have a platform, he wasn’t selling anything. That was just him writing a book, and people wanting it.