Bourdain

by Laurie Woolever

  MICHAEL RUHLMAN: We were together in Baltimore, speaking at an International Association of Culinary Professionals event in 2004. My book The Making of a Chef had been optioned, and Tony was working with Darren Star on developing Kitchen Confidential for TV. He says, “So what’s going on with that show of yours?” and I said, “It’s not going anywhere,” and he said “YESSS!” So, I mean, he was competitive like that.

  ERIC RIPERT: He was very competitive, yes. When we were together as friends, no competition. But when I realized for the first time he was competitive, obsessed with winning the challenge, it’s when we were in Peru. We were in the mountains, we were about to do a scene cooking for the farmers, doing a kind of a coq au vin, or something similar to that. We were supposed to slice garlic, and I took my knife, and I started, and I realized that he was going like a machine, extremely precise, and very fast, to beat me at my own game. And each time he would have an opportunity to beat me at my own game, in cooking, with the speed, he would do that.

  And in pétanque, he would be extremely competitive. We would play together, it would be fine, and he will be kind to others, but when he was playing against me, it was no pity. We were in the Cayman Islands, in the finals against my son and myself and someone else. And he looked at me, and he said, “Look at me in the eyes.” I look at him in the eyes, and we exchange some words, and then I look down for some reason, and he says, “You’re gonna lose.” And I say, “Why?” He said, “You look down. You jinx it. You’ll see, I’m gonna beat you.” And he did.

  19

  “He Was Prepared to Piss Off Everybody”

  Travel Channel

  PAT YOUNGE, FORMER PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER, TRAVEL CHANNEL: I took over the Travel Channel in 2005. The network had been without a boss for nearly a year, and when I joined, the cupboard was pretty bare. Bill Margol was the head of production and development, and he had been the one who stalked Zero Point Zero [ZPZ] and Tony from their Food Network show, and persuaded them to do a pilot for the Travel Channel. It was clearly the only bullet in my gun; there were literally no other new shows—well, there was one other new show, which I didn’t like—coming through.

  I’d heard of Tony, and I read him, but I’d never met him. When I first met Tony, it was at the day of the upfronts, and we had brunch in a restaurant, but I didn’t really get a measure of him. The next time I properly talked to him was when I saw the pilot. The pilot was done, in the bag; it was France. It starts off in black and white, and Tony is walking down the road, smoking. I understood it to be an homage to the French New Wave. And Tony said his aim was to show Americans that the French didn’t suck. We were betting the shop on this.

  And, I thought, How does this work? And I engaged with the team, and they said, “He’s got a vision. It comes together. It works. Trust us.”

  Then it sort of drifted out of my sight for a few weeks, until it came to the final edit, and my marketing guy came to see me, in a bit of a lather, and he said, “What should I do about this?” Tony had written, in an email, “The new title sequence, which you promised me would be modern, hip, and edgy, is, in fact, dated, trite, and wouldn’t have been edgy in 1962. I do not know the ninth circle of hell that the creators of this abomination inhabit, but I feel my enthusiasm for this project draining by the pint. Best, Tony.”

  And I’m like, pardon the language, but, “Fuck me.” This guy, he’s talent, you know? My marketing team are obviously upset, and I’m the new guy, and they’re looking at me, saying, “What are you gonna do?”

  I left it overnight, and I came in the next morning, and decided that this thing was a judgment call; there was no right or wrong. So I wrote to him: “Your judgments on all the other issues with the show seem to have been OK, so I’m going to go with you on this, but you need to understand that if this proves to be slightly slower and less impactful than we want, then I reserve the right to change it. Best, Pat.”

  He emailed me back: “Sir, you have a deal. If, however, your opinion is going to be based on the output of some focus clusterfuck group, then we should all bend over now, hold on to our ankles, and pass the lube. Best, Tony.”

  These emails, they’re burned into my brain. He was giving me a sense of the level at which he wanted to operate, and no detail was too small. When he believed in something, he really went with it and put his all into it.

  He did some great marketing for the show. We came up with his tagline for it: “Be a traveler, not a tourist,” and he did some great little vignettes for us. He even did one that he was pushing sort of various tchotchkes that people bring back from their holidays, like a stuffed donkey, and a snow globe, he was pushing them into a sort of wood-chopping machine.

  MUSTAFA BHAGAT, EDITOR: I’d been working on No Reservations for like two weeks, Tony wanted to have a meeting with everyone who worked in postproduction, so we gathered together in this little conference room, and he proceeded to tell everyone to ignore the network. He said, “Completely ignore everything they’re saying about music, about story, about shots. Let me deal with it all. I’m gonna make the show I want to make, across all fronts.”

  I had already been editing for at least ten years, and this was the first time I’d heard anything like this. Everyone is always just trying to make the network happy. That’s how production companies stay in business, by making the network happy. For me, it was the beginning of understanding how Tony empowered his team, using a kind of military-style, “band of brothers” approach. He demanded ultimate loyalty, and he gave it back in return.

  PAT YOUNGE: He was prepared to piss off everybody; he was going to make sure that we knew what he had to say, and let him say it. We agreed with him that there would be no product integration, and that he would sign off on any sort of correlated marketing propositions. His personal integrity was important to him, and we weren’t to do anything that was going to compromise that.

  I think you can get quite cynical in television; you can sort of get to a place where, “That’s good enough.” And for Tony, good enough wasn’t good enough. He really did raise the game, and that’s why that show stood out. It became definitional for our channel, a channel that had been a poker channel became a travel channel, and that show was like our north star, and it allowed us to build other shows around it.

  I do remember, he did an episode on the Tex-Mex border, and a car brand wanted to integrate their brand-new car into the show. I can’t remember what the deal was, but it was a good deal. And he said he’d do it, only on the basis that he had every right to talk about the car as he felt fit. And the way Tony felt fit was that in the show, as he walked up to get into the car, he said, “The advertising guys and bigwigs at the network want me to drive this car. So they’ve done a deal for me to drive this car.” But the car brand was really happy with it, because they liked the authenticity of it. Authenticity, I mean, it’s the word du jour now, but he was there a long time before lots of other people were.

  JEFF FORMOSA: He didn’t ever do the Imodium A-D commercial. He wrote his own ticket, he wrote his own ending. He wanted to maximize his chance and he did, whatever it cost him.

  DANIEL HALPERN: He could’ve done any number of things. He could’ve done commercials, backed products. He did it only a few times, for things that he really liked and believed in. But he was not motivated by money.

  RENNIK SOHOLT, PRODUCER-DIRECTOR: He would always make fun of people who did cheesy commercials. I asked him about product placement, if he’d consider doing it, and I remember him saying, “I’m going to wait for the big payout.”

  20

  “He Was Very Untethered”

  The Early No Reservations Years

  CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: After he and Nancy separated, I remember Tony fell fabulously in love with somebody in another part of the world, and had this notion of, “We’ll go and live in Vietnam together, and we’ll have a kid, and the kid will be running around barefoot on the beach in Vietnam.” I mean, he had a whole scenario built for himsel
f. He had gotten a publisher to give him an advance to go live in Vietnam for a year and write about living there. And it was a book that he never did end up writing.

  ASHA GILL, TV COLLEAGUE: I had just started working for Discovery Channel. I get the call from the editor for one of the newspapers I used to write for, and she’s like, “OK, this chef’s in town. He’s on his book tour.” This was in Malaysia, for Kitchen Confidential. “He’s also a TV host. Do you want to interview him?” For years, I was an anchor for Asia’s version of MTV, Channel V. So I wasn’t worried so much about meeting someone who’s this big celebrity, but I was a little bit daunted by the fact that I’d have only ten minutes.

  He’s sitting in his chair, and I walk in, and he sort of unfolds himself, because he’s such a lanky spider, and I’m like, “Fucking hell, you’re tall.”

  At twenty minutes or whatever, the press people were going, “Come on, come on. There’s more important press here. There’s Reuters coming in. Get out.” But it was just the most hysterical conversation. I’d read the book before I went to see him, and I knew how he felt about vegetarians. I’m like, “I’m not fucking leaving this room unless you give me one fucking vegetable that you like.” And he was hysterical, he was patient, he was gracious, and he was kind of shy, in the way the nerdy kid at school got famous, and he was awkward, with his tall gangliness.

  He was supposed to be having drinks at this other place, and he invited me. I walk in, there’s all these network executives at the bar, everyone’s drinking. And then I see him there in the corner. We just sat and talked bollocks, and really got on.

  We kept in contact. And if we were ever on travels or whatever, we’d connect. I think he delayed his flight one day in London, or something like that, because of something else he had to do, and that was fantastic, because I managed to see him for dinner in London. I’d just flown in to do a show, and he was on his way out. We just kind of cross-connected wherever we could.

  We used to call it, when we used to do stuff for Discovery, the dog and pony show, right? So we did a couple of dog and pony shows together. I remember the one in Taipei.

  We had to do a lot of sort of functions and stuff. This one night, afterward, we were like, “Dude, let’s go hit karaoke.”

  And, you know, off duty, Tony’s kind of chill, funny, but not in the centerpiece so much, right? This particular night, I was dying with laughter. I was like, “Come on, baby, sing me a song.” And he gets up and goes, “This one’s for you.” So we’re sitting there, and he, oh my god, he sings “White Wedding,” Billy Idol. He was fucking insane. And the minute he stopped, he folded himself back in the chair, going, “OK, who’s going next? Get me a drink.”

  MIKE RUFFINO, COMPOSER FOR NO RESERVATIONS AND PARTS UNKNOWN: When I met Tony, he was very untethered. It was at the Chateau Marmont, in 2003 or 2004. I don’t remember the actual point of collision, but, as I recall, I fell into his table, we wound up talking, and then, within minutes, I do remember this, we had a plan to make a film. I had no clue who he was. It was like, “This guy’s funny. I should hang out with this guy.”

  And we just spent, I don’t know how many days—you know, back in the day when he used to go pretty hard—there were a lot of very late night, early morning, you know, weird times. Very rarely leaving the Chateau, unless absolutely necessary, and it just wasn’t all that necessary.

  He was in LA talking to some producers, and he wound up kind of dragging me into the meeting with these film guys, thinking that I was a film producer of some kind. Of course, I was nothing. And I just thought he was a writer; I didn’t really put together the whole chef thing at all.

  And then he read my book [Gentlemanly Repose], on the way home, on the plane. I was supposed to be on a book tour, but I just never—the first interview was at the Chateau, and I never did the rest of it.

  Tony wrote me this email, a lengthy, very funny—really one of the better emails I’ve ever received. In that email, he said, “If I’m ever in a position to republish this book, I promise I’m gonna do it.” And then, almost unbelievably, [in 2011] he actually did get a publishing imprint, and, true to his word, republished my book [an updated version, retitled Adios, Motherfucker].

  At some point, it came up, on maybe the second or third visit—each of which was many days long, of getting completely screwed up together—he suggested that I do some music for his show. He was shooting the Los Angeles episode [of No Reservations]. I told him I had no idea what I was doing. He said, “It’s all right, neither do I.” And so, that was encouragement enough.

  Our musical tastes were identical, pretty much, and all the reference points were the same, and all our formative music was pretty much the same. He just wanted everything to sound like one band, like a live band doing it, but he didn’t know how it worked, and neither did I.

  It was all so casual. I think he just felt lucky to even be doing one more episode; he just had a feeling that it was gonna end soon, and he was gonna be back in the kitchen, and that was that. He wasn’t concerned or nervous; it was just something he’d already accepted, and, you know, “There’s no way this could keep going.”

  He was living it up while he could, and he used to try to convince me all the time, “Don’t get used to it, it’s gonna go away.” And I never really thought that was the case.

  ASHA GILL: I think when you get friends who do TV for a living together, it can be like a couple of teenagers being idiots. So it was a great laugh. He wanted to get a new tattoo. His Ouroboros on his shoulder actually is a copy, more or less, of a pendant that I had.

  Tony and I were extraordinarily close. I loved him. He’s an extraordinary man, chivalrous, just such a gentleman. We connected.

  I think that things conspired to make it just extraordinarily difficult, with me doing all my travel hosting stuff, and there was crazy talk of him relocating to this side of the world. Because I’m like, “I’m not fucking moving. I don’t know where to move. I can’t work in America.” So it was hard, you know.

  He loved, like, old-school love. And through loving, he filled up that hole inside himself, and connected back to himself. He was able to do that. And he was a hopeless romantic.

  Having said that, the kind of presents I got [from Tony] were coming from a loving disdain. Like a pan for omelets, because he couldn’t believe I didn’t know how to make an omelet. He shut down the kitchen in a very posh hotel in Singapore one time. He spoke to the chef, and I didn’t even know any of this. We were having some beers by the pool. He was like, “I’m going to teach you how to cook a fucking omelet.” I’m like, “Really? This is cutting into my beer time.” So he had me there, cracking eggs, and then I wasn’t doing it right. I finally did it. I think I must have, I don’t know, gone through a couple dozen eggs, but I finally made an omelet that he was OK with. And then I get a present through the post once he’d gone back. He sent me an omelet pan.

  BETH ARETSKY: Tony would go out a lot to Siberia [bar]. I would get phone calls from him at two in the morning, three in the morning: “Beth, I locked myself out of the apartment. Can you come down with keys?” There were a lot of those. There was one night he was actually locked down in the private room at Siberia, and he’s calling me to call them to let him out. He was a little out of control at the time. That was prekid, premarriage. He was a single guy looking for love.

  I think it was in Medium Raw where he wrote about the crazy cocaine model. I was still working with him then. He was calling me from Saint Barts, telling me, “You’ve got to get her out of here on the first plane. The Russian mob is going to kill me. Get me back to Saint Maarten, and get her back to England.”

  I managed to get it done. Whatever he needed, I always managed to get it done.

  PAULA FROELICH, JOURNALIST: We met at Siberia, the old bar with the toilet hanging from the ceiling, Tracy Westmoreland’s place. And he was friendly with my [New York Post] coworker Chris Wilson.

  There was some big after-party there, and I just show up
, and Chris is like, “Hey, man, you gotta meet my friend Tony.”

  Tracy said, “Hey, guys, come downstairs. I got something to show you.” Tracy, by the way, is this huge—he looks like this ginormous biker. He looks like kind of an overgrown Campbell’s soup kid, you know. He’s got that solid body, and he had this big ZZ Top beard. And he was wearing a Bamm-Bamm outfit. By that I mean, literally, a tiny little loincloth with maybe a sash. It wasn’t Halloween.

  We hover into this disgusting toilet, because everything Tracy did, he liked to do everything to level eleven, like, “All my bars have to be gross. It’s authentic.” It was like a hepatitis swimming pool. So, we go into this bathroom; we’re all super squished in, elbow to elbow.

  Tracy lifts up his loincloth, showing us that he had no underwear on. And from between his ball sack and his thigh, he whips out a bag of coke. And I said, “Dude, I don’t do drugs.” And he goes, “Tony?” Who says, “Ah, man, I don’t do drugs anymore.” And Tracy goes, “Merry Christmas. I do.”

  Tony and I go upstairs, have a few drinks; I ended up making out with him. I didn’t know who he was or what he did at the time, because I didn’t have time to watch TV. We ended up going home [together].

  He was the one-night stand who never left. I woke up in the morning, was like, “You can go now.” He said, “You don’t want breakfast?”

  I was like, “I guess. All right.”

  Then we dated for three months. We broke up, and then we dated for another eight or nine months, before I broke up with him again.

  But then, the second time I broke up with him, I realized I had fallen in love with him, so I got back together with him to fall out of love with him, and then broke it off for good.