Bourdain

by Laurie Woolever

  I think he began to understand, “I can actually have fun with this. I can do something that has some meaning.”

  PHILIPPE LAJAUNIE: There was an implicit trust; there was no ambiguity in our relationship. Tony was trustful enough to take me, a few times, with him filming episodes—very early, on Food Network for A Cook’s Tour, in Vietnam and Cambodia.

  What was remarkable is that, as big as he was—he was a tall guy with a huge head—he was doing his best to disappear behind the people whose stories he was showcasing. At the beginning, he’s a big kid having plenty of good fun, and it’s about him going around on behalf of the viewers.

  When we arrived in Angkor Wat, he was, in a way, not in paradise, but he was in the world that he wanted to be in. I had never seen anyone happy like this, except a four-year-old to whom you give his first bicycle. It was unbelievable, and the whole trip was absolutely magical, because of the state he was in. It was extraordinary, although I should mention, in the middle of that trip, I saw him fall into the abyss. It lasted just a few hours, but in those two weeks of complete elation and happiness, I saw him fall, like falling from a plane, down deep dark, and then he climbed back out.

  We talked very little about it, but the little we spoke, he opened the window, the door, to what was inside, and it was dark. He partially knew where it was coming from, or he might have made up a certain logic for why it was this way.

  CHRIS COLLINS: Tony’s sort of swinging in emotions—it reared its head, even in those early years, where you thought you were sure of your footing [with him], but don’t be too sure, because you don’t know what door is gonna open up.

  In 2000, Dmitri Kasterine, a filmmaker, began to shoot footage of Tony, with the intention of making a film about his life. A short version of the film, called “Out of the Pan, into the Fire,” debuted as a special episode of No Reservations in 2010.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: We both really liked [Dmitri], maybe me more than Tony, since Tony was the focus. It was new, and I think he felt a little like the bug under the microscope, for the first time.

  CHRIS COLLINS: The film about Tony, which Dmitri was shooting, part of that was shot after we came back from those first six weeks. I didn’t see that footage until a decade later. I got to see Tony reflecting on what he’d just experienced with us, out on the road. There was a certain sadness, and this dawning realization that my life may be changing.

  We would see that over the course of our decades with him; it would draw back in him, and there would be a sadness. I’m not suggesting it was depression. It was reflection about, How am I going to change? What does it mean to the people around me? What does it mean to my current career?

  LYDIA TENAGLIA: He would often say, “The kitchen is a meritocracy. You’re as good as what you accomplish in a shift, and it’s palpably measurable.”

  I think at times he struggled with the transition. Part of him was like, “Can you believe my friggin’ good luck, that I’m getting the opportunity to leave the kitchen?” versus, “Who am I, and what value am I creating in this scenario?”

  PATTI JACKSON: The last serious conversation that I ever had with him, kind of mano a mano, before he really took off, he said to me, “You’ll never know the consequences of getting what you want until you get what you want.” He was super enthusiastic about all the changes that were happening, and who wouldn’t be, right? He was also, obviously—he knew that it was a breaking point, that he was separating himself from his old life in that way.

  PANIO GIANOPOULOS: We had this whole kind of running gag in A Cook’s Tour, the book, which was, “reasons why you don’t want to be on television.” It was a series that went through the book, and it was about selling out, and about the bullshit, and the artifice, of making a TV show.

  And this was before reality TV was just an everyday thing. So I think he was dealing with the kind of compromises inherent in it, and he was writing about it in a typically brutal Tony way, being completely up front and revealing about it, which I thought was really charming, and I imagine readers did, too.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: I remember he said to me, “I have to go talk to my agent, because she wants me to decide whether I’m an author or I’m a TV personality.” Things had started to develop, and I think he was very uncomfortable.

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: When Tony hit it big [with Kitchen Confidential], and suddenly had money, he and Nancy rented a fantastic private house with a pool, in a really, really nice neighborhood in Saint Maarten, up the street from one of his favorite beaches, where there was just a guy with a chicken shack and Heinekens. We visited them then, and my kids totally loved it. They loved their uncle Tony intensely. He and Nancy were just the best aunt and uncle. They spoiled our kids. We liked that. They let them do everything we wouldn’t let them do. That’s what aunts and uncles are for, as long as it’s not dangerous, or going to get them killed, fine.

  I’ll never forget, my son was afraid, at age six or seven, of getting his head underwater in a pool, and it impeded him learning how to swim well, but somehow Tony got my son to be unafraid of getting his face underwater, in the pool at that house. He was just so good with him, and so much fun with him.

  CHRIS COLLINS: In 2002, we flew to Saint Maarten, which had deep meaning for him. He invited Lydia and me to spend some time with him and Nancy, just socially, prior to shooting what would be the first episode of the second season of A Cook’s Tour [in Saint Maarten].

  It was a really fun time, having dinners together and going to the beach. They seemed to be getting along well. They were finally in a position to rent this villa that they had always admired but were never able to afford.

  LYDIA TENAGLIA: We were there for a couple of days, then we shot the episode, which had all these characters whom he had known from his years of going to Saint Maarten, and we left. Then he called us.

  CHRIS COLLINS: Something happened after we left. They’d had a fight. I think she split, and he said, “Can you come back down? I don’t want to be alone.”

  LYDIA TENAGLIA: He had gotten, I think, really drunk, and walked into a glass door and split his nose. He got a tremendous amount of stitches in his face, and he was starting to reel in the aftermath of it.

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: Tony and Nancy invited us to be in Saint Maarten with them as a family one more time, but they were sort of in the middle of separating at that point, and the plan had changed up at the very last minute, and we found out that we were going to be there alone with Tony, which was still very nice, but it was awkward. I don’t think we wanted to tell our kids about it, because I didn’t know at that point: Was this permanent? Could they fix this? Somehow, we lied about it; we didn’t want them at that point to know that Tony and Nancy were splitsky, because they loved them so much, and identified them with everything that is fun; people who weren’t telling them what to do.

  It was kind of obvious that the whole fame and TV thing was not for Nancy. She didn’t like the attention, she didn’t like the intrusiveness, she didn’t like, “Oh, we have to be places at a specific time.”

  I was very uncomfortable that week in Saint Maarten, because (a), we were kind of hiding stuff from our kids; and (b), we had nailed down a certain kind of routine that we expected, being with Tony and Nancy, and it was just a little more awkward being only with Tony. And then the other thing that made it very awkward—you know, it was emotionally trying for him. I don’t think he was happy that he had just split from the woman he had known since the age of fourteen. But, anyway, we’d come home from dinner, or have dinner at the house, and then we’d play poker or hang out or something, and Tony would basically go out and get banged by prostitutes. He’d ride out somewhere at ten p.m., and he’d be back by the time we woke up.

  He was very up front about it. I don’t think he was saying it out of pride or shame; it was just matter-of-fact. I think he felt he needed it for some reason. I mean, you know, that was not my scene. I was uncomfortable with that.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: We were both ver
y compartmentalized. I think that’s why we got along. Life, when it worked, it worked. Once the [chance to make] TV came along, he embraced it. I think it took a little while, but Tony was very smart, and I think he realized, This is the way things are going. It does weird things to a marriage.

  There were times when Tony would just want to go to movies. It didn’t matter what movie, any movie. Looking back, I realize this was an escape. He just couldn’t handle whatever he wanted to tell me, or not tell me, or whatever was going on. He would go to a movie and really get taken away. That was a red flag for me.

  As I watched his career develop, he seemed more at ease with giving all of himself, which, I hate to say it, gave me pause. You’ve gotta save something. You just have to have something that’s your own—and Tony didn’t. Sometimes I would die of mortification when my parents were still alive. I didn’t want them to know some of the things. You know, they were happy living in disbelief. I wanted that to continue.

  We were together a long time. The plan was for Tony to write books, and us to travel all around, go to all these places, and have a great time. Traveling in Russia with Tony was a good experience. Spain was terrible.*

  CHRIS COLLINS: We went as a group to Barcelona, to shoot Ferran Adrià. In the midst of that, there was another fight, and [Nancy] showed up at a meal; her eyes were swollen from crying. They had obviously been arguing, and there was a lot of discomfort.

  NANCY BOURDAIN: Everybody went to El Bulli, and I wasn’t allowed to go. And I said, “Tony, can’t you just pretend I’m somebody else, and I’ll take notes?” It was like, I couldn’t be the girl just taking notes at the restaurant; I couldn’t even go.

  I said to Tony, “I want to be included.” Tony would do terrible things like make me sit on the damn floor, because he didn’t want a camera guy to not have a seat. I mean, I just felt like I was the lowest of the low, and after that happens for a while, you don’t want to go.

  When we were teenagers, we made fun of TV. Ted Baxter was on Mary Tyler Moore, and everything was goofy. It wasn’t something you aspired to, the little screen. But that changed over the years. Once it was offered to Tony, he grabbed it, and he was pretty selfish with it.

  I think he was confused a lot. Looking back now, he handled it as well, I guess, as he could. No, that’s not quite true, because, he [could] be very iron door, you know? Once Tony’s closed that iron door, it’s never coming up again.

  LYDIA TENAGLIA: Who knows? They were together for a long time, but I certainly think that him shifting gears in his career had something to do with their coming apart at the seams. It’s inevitable. He’s this person, and now he’s becoming someone else.

  PHILIPPE LAJAUNIE: I have known very well [Tony’s] first wife, Nancy, and he was very much in love with her. They were extremely sweet and loving; there was a fundamental bond between the two. Then they were going through rough times. His universe was changing so dramatically.

  18

  “He Was Ahead of His Time”

  The End of A Cook’s Tour

  EILEEN OPATUT: Tony and Chris and Lydia tried to push the boundaries. One of the episodes starts with him on the floor of the toilet. Well, my god, the people down in Knoxville [Tennessee, the home of Food Network’s parent company, Scripps], where they still had prayer meetings even though they weren’t legally allowed to, almost murdered me for that one. They would say, “He can’t smoke on TV!” and “He’s cursing!”

  He knew how to write mysteries, and maybe I am romanticizing it, but he created mysteries that led you through a half hour, so that you were always waiting for some surprise. The intellectual rigor, that literate approach, the ability to reference other cultural elements—art, music, writing, sculpture—for me, that was heaven; for Scripps, it was hard to justify.

  [A Cook’s Tour] was not something that Food Network really stood behind, as opposed to, say, Paula Deen. And because I was in charge of scheduling, I gave it a very prominent position in the lineup, so that the most eyeballs could see it, but it didn’t really explode. It had a moderately good number of viewers, but it didn’t have a breakout number of viewers, and it was an expensive show for us, so as the years went on, I was really pressed by management to cancel the show.

  I hate the phrase “He was ahead of his time.” He was on the wrong channel! He was on the channel I wanted to make, but it wasn’t the channel for the audience that Scripps wanted to sell advertising to.

  CHRIS COLLINS: Once we said our goodbyes to Food Network, in classic Tony form, he said, “When you figure something out, let me know, because I’ll be there.”

  We started to pitch what became No Reservations. It took a long time to sell it. Tony went back to Les Halles; it was a solid twelve months. The first place we pitched was Travel Channel, and we thought, This is going to be a slam dunk. They were intrigued, but they said, “We don’t do food.”

  Somewhere in that twelve months, we went to A&E and got an offer to do a pilot. This was at the beginning of their ascent into the docu-follow reality world. And they said they would give us a few hundred thousand dollars, but “there’s one thing we would like to change. We’re wondering if you can make it New York based.” Tony was still with Nancy at that juncture. “You’re hanging out and arguing with your wife, seeing your chef friends”—

  LYDIA TENAGLIA: They wanted a reality show. “All the worlds you explored in Kitchen Confidential, the mafia underground, out carousing with different people, I’m sure that puts a lot of tension on your relationship at home . . .”

  At that point, a year had gone by and none of us had been out in the field. Tony was thrust back into the rhythm of his old life. He had just gone two years around the world and then was just thrown right back where he started, so he entertained the idea.

  He said, “What do you think? Should we do this thing?” and we said, “This is not what the show is, and if we do it and we fail, that’s it, we’re done, and frankly, what they want, it’s really kind of egregious.” So we said no.

  Very shortly after that, Travel Channel came back around, and we were out in the field again.

  CHRIS COLLINS: It was very quick. They called in September, and by the end of October, we’d signed the contract to do three pilots. And we went out in the field in late November.

  LYDIA TENAGLIA: Tony and Chris did the first [No Reservations] pilot in Paris. They ended up having this huge fight in the field. It was an existential crisis. Tony was like, “This is all bullshit. I don’t know what this is. What am I, a TV personality now?”

  CHRIS COLLINS: It was the first day.

  LYDIA TENAGLIA: Chris talked him off a ledge.

  CHRIS COLLINS: I wasn’t doing talent management as much as saying, “Fucking pull it together. Somebody just paid for us to be here. You better get your head around this thing.” We were in the shadow of where the original Les Halles market was, and we went for a walk. There was the simultaneous smoking of two cigarettes.

  It was probably a forty-five-minute postponement. And then we went back in—it was that restaurant with the catacombs underneath it, and the skulls. We thought Paris was the great reentry for us back into the field, that it would be so much fun, but it was anything but fun in the beginning of that shoot. [Laughs]

  And it happened again on the next shoot, when we got to Iceland. It was just Tony and me eating dinner; we might have been shooting in the restaurant and then the scene was over, everyone was gone, and it was just the two of us sitting at a table where he, again, kind of fell apart, with tears, questioning what we were doing, and what it meant.

  It was obviously upsetting for him, and for me as well, because, between Tony and me, there wasn’t a lot of emotional maturity. We were not those guys who could talk it out in a productive way. But at the time, I just saw it as, “We’re all scared of our new venture; we’re trying to figure it out.” I think the underpinnings of his relationship falling apart were really coming to the surface at that point.

  JOEL ROSE: I was
close with him and Nancy. Nancy had a really hard time when Tony began to get famous. She was not into that. When they split, it hurt me. And then I saw him with a bunch of different women. As handsome and as great as he was, he was not a ladies’ man. He just was not. He was so shy and awkward and loving and needy.

  SAM GOLDMAN: Tony had somehow developed this magnetic sex appeal.

  HELEN LANG: I was completely surprised; I had no idea. It just seemed like he and Nancy were soul mates, and I never expected that to happen.

  BETH ARETSKY: When he and Nancy split up, I was really surprised. They’d been together for so long. It was a little awkward and uncomfortable, to say the least, but I did not see him in any dark place. He moved into [producing partners] Chris and Lydia’s old apartment, and I helped him outfit the whole place, from soup to nuts. He gave me his credit card and said, “Get me everything I need.”

  I got him 1,000-thread-count sheets. He had no clue about these things. I turned him into the princess he became later on in his life.

  Tony was always completely respectful. He never hit on me. And he was never rude or crude toward me. We just had a mutual respect. One week we were working in Saint Maarten; we’d go to the nude beach, sitting there naked next to each other picking out recipes [from Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook] that would be best for TV spots.

  STEVEN TEMPEL: I knew him before he was famous, before he had money. The first couple of years after he got famous were fun. In the beginning of A Cook’s Tour, he was grounded, but then when No Reservations came out, he turned into a real cock. He did reach out to me once in a while, but I think he just got caught up in what he was doing.

  I got married. I bought a restaurant. I called him and said, “I had a child!” and he said, “Yeah, that’s nice, I’m four-wheeling in the desert with Ozzy Osbourne,” and I was like, Fuck you. To see pictures of Tony Bourdain in a tux at the Emmys or whatever—to me, that’s not Bourdain.