Everybody has that line, that they’re “thankful for their success and the people who put them there,” but he genuinely seemed, every time I ever hung out with him, he felt like his success was a gift of people’s attention, and if what he had to do was take a picture with someone to thank them for it? Then he had the time for it.
SAM SIFTON: I ran into Tony at a couple of industry rat-fuck events, to use a Bourdain term, over the years. And we had pleasant repartee.
One notable evening was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Alan Richman’s employment at GQ. And there was a roast of Alan at Le Bernardin, at which I spoke, Tony spoke, and he was really funny. That was the night when I really realized the bubble of celebrity in which he was living. He was there with Ottavia, and they were sitting with the Riperts. There was sort of a force field of glam that was all of a sudden surrounding him. He had passed over from being a writer guy with a working-class background into something that made him 120 percent of the people around him. He was the same as the rest of us, cracking jokes, but in his relationship to the crowd— This is an industry crowd, right? It’s all chefs and journalists. So he’s sitting amid chefs and journalists, but even there, he was not interacting with chefs and journalists. He was in the bubble, and then the bubble drifted out of the room, and that was that.
And if you’re socially awkward—and I think he was—you know, that’s got to be kind of weird. I don’t resent him that bubble. I’d use it, too.
JOSH HOMME: Tony had a guarded nature about him. In this thing we do, this travel, and that life, there’s a bit, like, “Is it still safe to speak to you? Are you in the same spot?” And I think, sometimes the trouble with going back home, when you travel a lot, is that they’ve moved down the track, and you’re still in the same spot. But bonding with someone like me and him, we’re in the same spot, bouncing around, so you just click back together.
KAREN RINALDI: Watching Tony in public, if you were out with him and he got stopped on the street, every once in a while, he got aggravated. Certainly when Ottavia and Ariane were around, he really didn’t like people interfering. But mostly, if you walked down the street with him, he handled it well.
DANIEL HALPERN: I guess being that famous at a certain point, the loss of anonymity takes over, and that can become devastating. You want to walk down the street without twenty people stopping you for a selfie. And he would never say no.
ARIANE BUSIA-BOURDAIN, DAUGHTER: When he was with me, I think he just liked to focus that he was with me, and not focus on the fact that he’s on TV, because when he’s at work, that’s the time that he acknowledges that. When he’s with me, then he just wants me to be the center of everything. So he didn’t talk about work too much.
When we traveled together, I think we kind of liked staying in the hotel, but we’d usually go to the beach, if there was a beach, and to the pool. And when we would go outside, he’d get recognized. I think he got recognized more in New York than when I was traveling with him, but yeah, he got recognized sometimes, and I didn’t really mind.
Sometimes he would just really want to hang out with me, but I kind of felt bad for his fans, because if I met a celebrity, I would want to do the same thing. Or if it was a kid, then I’d feel like, “Oh, Dad, go and take a picture with them.”
It wasn’t really bad; it was OK having fans come up to him. The only thing that was just kind of disrespectful was when people would film from afar, or when he’d tell them to stop, especially when they’d try taking pictures of me, and he’d already specified, “No, don’t do that,” and they’d still do it. That really annoyed me. Why would you? Why would you try and show this [child], who’s chosen to stay private? Because there are a lot of just people out there who are weird, and they’re gonna stalk you. I think of that all the time, and I don’t even know the answer. There are benefits of being famous but, you know, I feel like I’d rather have a private life.
It’s kind of unhealthy, for me, if I look at the things about him [online]. I used to always look him up, and I don’t really do it that much anymore. There are a lot of false things for sure, and it’s crazy how they can really make up things, and people, a lot of times, just trust the internet. People back up their statements with just a search from the internet. I’ve learned that a lot of things aren’t true, because I’ve seen things about me, saying I was born on a plane, that I had blue eyes—I learned that you really just can’t trust it. They make mistakes about my dad, they make mistakes about me, they could be making mistakes about a bunch of other people, too.
ERIC RIPERT: He was a good sport, very respectful of the people, and what the fans are asking. But he will lose patience, and he will lose his cool if people were becoming physical with him. So, for him, soon as some women, a bit drunk, will start to flirt too much with him, or touch him a little bit, or something like that, that will be the end, and it will be, like, drastic. He will be immediate, no more interaction. “I’m going to my car.” He will stop it, immediately.
TOM VITALE, PRODUCER-DIRECTOR: “The kissing booth” was what Tony called it when one person wanted a picture, or a selfie, or an autograph, and then everybody would line up. That was pretty much the worst-case scenario. It would cause him to panic. So he would prefer to just disappear, which unfortunately could be misinterpreted as rude. Back in the day, when we finished a scene, Tony used to go and thank the kitchen staff on his way out. That ended a long time ago. In later years, like Elvis, we would have to extricate him from the building.
JOSH HOMME: It’s hard to make friends when you don’t know why someone wants to know you, because you have some notoriety. He was in the beginning stages of that, which really, at the end, was a major contributor to why we’re talking about him, and not to him.
25
“We Got Shit Done”
Making No Reservations
NARI KYE, PRODUCER-DIRECTOR, CODIRECTOR OF WASTED!: In the early 2000s, I took a production assistant job on a show called 28 Days in Rehab, which, as you can imagine, was horrendous. The only silver lining was that I got to meet Chris [Collins] and Lydia [Tenaglia]. They hired me as their production manager for their brand-new company. They had just gotten green-lit by the Travel Channel to start making No Reservations.
On my second or third day, Chris Collins said, “Tony’s coming in today. He has this one weird thing—you should never look him in the eyes when you talk to him.”
Chris was totally scaring the shit out of me. I was twenty-two, just out of NYU film school. I didn’t know anything. I was sitting there sweating, thinking, I’m going to make a horrible impression and this guy’s going to hate me. Then, as Tony was walking through the door, Chris leaned over and said, “I was just kidding. He’s great.”
For me, whenever I was around Tony, I felt like I had to be “on.” I had to be witty and have something relevant to say about politics and art and music. Going toe-to-toe with him required a lot of energy. I would have a running list of jokes in my mind.
He made us do our homework, and he always had this grand idea in mind. We did our best to try to make that a reality, but oftentimes we didn’t have enough money, or time, or both. So it was a scrappy production, but I think that made it cooler, it made it more authentic.
RENNIK SOHOLT: Tony had already lived a substantial amount of life, and in some ways had nothing to lose, but he knew where he was going. That really served him well, even though he ruffled some feathers. He used to write emails to the network, and I guess they could be pretty articulate, in a . . . sharp way, if he disagreed. No one wants to make any enemies in this business; it feels like no one’s actually saying anything, and he was willing to say things and stick up for what he wanted. Had he had a less sordid background, he might not have been as fearless.
JARED ANDRUKANIS, PRODUCER: Usually this industry is about following the numbers, checking off the boxes to get things done, and he allowed this sort of crazy, no-lines approach to creativity, like, OK, you want to serve fresh eggnog to Queens of
the Stone Age while they practice their new single in your basement? You want to call Josh Homme your son, and oh, you’re also gonna stab your brother over the piece of skin that covers a chicken’s ass at a holiday dinner? OK, sure! Let’s try all that. And it worked.
TODD LIEBLER: My first shoot [for No Reservations] was in New Zealand. We all sat down for lunch. I don’t know if I had even shot anything yet. I was really excited, because my son had just hit a home run in baseball, and so I shared that with the table, and Tony just looked at me like, Why would I care?
I was pretty much petrified of him. He had a huge personality; it was intense, overwhelming. Those were my first impressions. Then, when we started shooting, things got better. We were shooting a bear-hunting scene. The bear was shot, and he and I went down the hill, and the bear was on the hood of the car. I was out of breath, and a little in awe, and nervous, and he said, “OK, Todd, just pan up from the bear,” you know, just gave me a little direction that centered the whole thing. It started on the bear, I pan up to him, and he does his thing. I was really happy that he reined in my nervous energy, you know?
It’s unusual to have talent directing camera, and he rarely did that, but he clearly knew that I was a little lost. This was maybe day two of shooting with him, and he just saw that I needed a little structure.
TOM VITALE: I started off as a tape logger on A Cook’s Tour, and then came back for the first season of No Reservations as postproducer. Every Friday I’d go to Chris and Lydia’s office, saying how much I wanted to travel instead of being stuck in the office. I must have worn them down, because they gave me the chance to go on the Moscow episode. I spent about a year as a segment producer before moving on to producer and ultimately director.
It could take years for Tony to make direct eye contact and say people’s names. I think that came from his extreme social anxiety.
He was quite observant, much more so, I think, than we gave him credit for. He had bat hearing, and he sometimes overheard things from across the room. I wasn’t always sure if he was being willfully oblivious, or actually oblivious, or distracted, or how present he was. It could be very hard to tell.
I took my job very seriously. Eat, sleep, dream the job, and Tony appreciated that. It was how he approached the shows personally. The line between Tony and the show was very thin, if it existed at all.
We used to ride in the same van together, but that was before it took three hours to set up in order to hit Record, because of lighting, et cetera. His spot in the van was always the one behind the driver. He’d never actually ask for it, but you just sort of knew. All our production vans, they always had this sort of grease spot on the window from his hair gel, in that one spot, because he used the transportation as an opportunity to take little naps.
NARI KYE: It was three Pelicans—the cases you put all the equipment in—and five people total, including Tony. He would play music. He would always be DJ. Back then it was a little iPod and speakers, and he would put it on his lap. And we would always tell fart jokes and be gross and silly. We’d all fit in one van, and we went everywhere together.
MATT WALSH: The first episode [I worked on] was Beijing and Chengdu. The second episode, Shanghai to Shangri-La, was also multiple locations. I was trying to fit in as much as possible, because I had no imagination that the show was gonna go on and on like it did. In those days, Tony was much more accepting of doing road shows, whereas later, he would insist on posting up in a five-star hotel and coming out when needed. And that limited the possibilities.
But back in the early days, we could do a series of days in Beijing, then hop on a plane across the country to Chengdu, do a series of days in Sichuan. And that was terrific. A few days in Shanghai, and then to Yunnan Province. We packed up the van, and went from Kunming, the capital, to Dali, where we shot, then up to Lijiang, where we shot, and then up to Zhongdian, which is what the Chinese government, for commercial reasons, is now calling Shangri-La. These were all four-hour drives from each other. Everyone was quite happy in those days. I thought that the actual traveling from point A to B to C helped the spirit of those shows; he was all about it. He was very curious, very excited, and wide open.
TOM VITALE: We all worked as hard as we could to make him as comfortable as possible. He complained about a lot of things, but not the sorts of things you’d expect from a famous person. He could also be himself around us, which must have been a relief. He didn’t have to perform.
He used to never sleep, early on. If I gave him a book at dinner, say, a novel about the place we were filming, he would have read it by breakfast. And I’m not talking about skimming; I mean, there were parts he could almost recite verbatim.
JARED ANDRUKANIS: Tony seemed very polite at first, and businesslike until we got to know each other, which was pretty quickly. My first shoot with him, in 2007, we were flying out to film Queens of the Stone Age in LA, and I think he was nervous about that, in the way Tony could be nervous, but I wouldn’t know that then.
This was for the first holiday special. We went out there for a day and a half to film at the band’s studio in LA, and then we cut it into the show as if it was Tony’s basement.
I got the impression that he doesn’t really focus on new people that much. He pretty much wanted to just talk to Chris when I was with Chris, and talk to Rennik when I was with him.
When you would see him call, you’d be like, I don’t know, should I pick it up? Because he was never really calling you to say “Good job,” or anything; it’s usually when something’s on fucking fire.
For the [No Reservations] New Orleans shoot, I called [assistant] Beth [Aretsky] to see if we could get an extra day with Tony, and she said he was free, and I changed his flight without checking with him. He called me as soon as he found out, and the first thing he said was, “I don’t know who to blame for this, but whoever it is I’m gonna cut off their head and shit down their throat.”
I’ve worked in restaurants, and on big sets, so that sort of thing didn’t rattle me, though Tony can rattle someone pretty easily because he’s tall, foreboding, says a lot of words, big, deep voice. That day, I answer the phone and he’s fucking screaming.
ALEX LOWRY: Lydia Tenaglia told me, in the beginning, “I think you and Tony are going to get along. He likes stronger women, and he likes being told what to do by them, and it works well.” I did kind of stick to that. He liked people who stood their ground or had an opinion; he respected that, I think.
SALLY FREEMAN, DIRECTOR: I took a jokey, kind of piss-taking approach with him in the field. I was never too worried about kind of placating him, which I think he was fine with.
JOSH FERRELL, PRODUCER: I was a very new production assistant, brought on in No Reservations. I didn’t know who Tony was; the first time I met him was in Belém, Brazil. I didn’t really talk to him, because he was such an imposing figure, but then we were in this market, and I was this big guy, new to the crew, right? In the middle of filming, this bird takes this giant shit on my shoulder, like a giant shit. Tony noticed; this was the first time he really made eye contact with me, and he said, “Hey, big guy!” and pointed to my shoulder. I said, “Oh, it’s good luck!” and he gave me the head nod and said, “It’s Josh, right?”
ALEX LOWRY: We were in Prague, and it was just terrible. It was freezing fucking cold, and he was not into the food there, and this sidekick we’d set him up with was such a wanker in the end, and they just did not get along. You could always tell with him if it was gonna go well, or when he wasn’t gonna click with the person.
No Reservations used to have a “final meal” scene, so we go to this house, an hour outside of Prague, and Tony’s sitting on the couch, fucking miserable; he just wants to get out of that house, and I’m like, “Dude, they’re doing all the prep, we’re here for hours. You just need to suck it up, buttercup; we’re not going anywhere.”
I’m getting pissed off, because he’s just complaining and moaning, and our poor fixer had to keep smoothing it ove
r with the hosts, because they could tell he wasn’t happy. I was like, “This is embarrassing. They can tell you’re miserable. It’s not a good look,” and to his credit, when I said that to him, he snapped out of it.
Then this massive dog bounds over, jumps on him, and just kind of lies there. And Tony just freezes, and puts his arms up. And the dog looks at him, and gets up off of him, and then there was a huge bloodstain on his pants. The dog was not spayed, and she had her period. I look at Tony, and he looks at me, and we just keep each other’s gaze for like ten seconds wide-eyed and I start to go, laughing, and then he just bursts out laughing.
He didn’t storm out; he didn’t get mad. Of course, he ranted and raved about it in the van on the way back. He had his moments, yes, when he could be unhappy, or a naysayer, or rude, or whatever, but it never lasted that long, and it was always tinged with a dark humor.
SALLY FREEMAN: The rule was, no surprises were allowed. He always wanted to know what he was walking into. We’d been at Cook It Raw in Japan [in 2010], and he’d had a lovely time. It was such a bro fest, with all these best chefs in the world. For the crew, it wasn’t the most interesting—it’s a bit of a chef conference, and it’s all very fancy.
Tony had been going on to Dave Chang the whole time, saying, “They’ve figured out the most amazing cocktail bar, when we’re back in Tokyo, classy balls carved out of ice, blah, blah, blah.”
He’d made it all up, because I had never said that. I said we would go to a bar, but he filled in the gaps, and I let him believe that’s where we were going.
And then we found something called the Kagaya Frog Bar. It was this guy who was probably in his thirties, and his mom sat there and watched him—he’d come out dressed as a frog, with a smaller frog attached to his front, and then he’d sit you down, and give you these beer tankers with gyroscopes on the bottom, which when you picked them up, like, started spinning around. They walked in, and immediately Tony gave me a look; he knew that this was not as promised, and he was kind of furious, but he did actually go with it. The guy comes out, and he’s doing all these weird sexual drawings, of himself, I think. He’s doing this whole show, this weird cabaret, and his aged mother is watching from the kitchen, and it just got worse and worse. And he’s getting in their faces with these frog dolls, and simulating things on them. Tony was laughing, which, you know, didn’t happen that often. I think he also enjoyed how deeply uncomfortable Dave Chang was. The crew were shaking while they were trying to film it, because it was so funny. We knew it wouldn’t be able to go on TV. It was the thing we’d always been warned not to do, and we did it. He came up to me at the end and said, “Well done. Good one. That is never going to see the light of day.”
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