JOEL ROSE: We used to have Thanksgiving together every year, and he would just bug me, saying, “Let’s do a graphic novel together. Let’s write comic books together.” And I was always like, “Dude, what the fuck? I’m not doing that.” I consider myself a novelist; I didn’t want to write a comic book.*
He was over for Thanksgiving one year, and Ariane was little, she was like four, and she was sick, and she was on the couch. He caught me by the elevator and pitched me Get Jiro. He gave me the background, and I wrote to Karen Berger at Vertigo and said, “Would you be interested, Tony Bourdain and I have this idea . . .” and she went, “Are you crazy? Of course!”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen him more happy and jazzed than that day when we went in to talk to Karen Berger at DC. We put that together, and it was really fun. And with Hungry Ghosts, it was the same thing.
When I worked with him, he was so responsive. Writing is hard, and it’s lonely. I felt totally comfortable when I reached a place of difficulty for myself, that I could say, usually by email, “Hey, I’m having problems right here. Can you write a scene in front of the dojo, or in front of the ramen shop,” or whatever, and it would come back to me in, like, fifteen minutes.
And it wouldn’t be polished, it would just be pure Tony. It would be a blast. And for me, it was like a smorgasbord, because I could just pick and choose what he had sent me. Some of it sucked, but most of it was brilliant, and I could take those brilliant things and plug them in.
DAVID SIMON, COCREATOR, TREME: As a writer, he was so good. Prose, dialogue; you know, he overwrote scenes. “Tony, I can’t do four and a half pages in this kitchen scene. It’s got to be one and a half pages. We got to get there faster.” But it was always there. He knew exactly why the scene was there, and he knew how the characters should talk. His sense of who these characters needed to be, and what they needed to say, was so acute. I admired him as a writer, and I loved the engagement there. It was just a matter of delivering the economy of scale for a sixty-page script.*
LOLIS ELIE, JOURNALIST, WRITER, TREME: Tony would tend to fly in [to the writer’s room in New Orleans] for a day, and he would solve somewhere between 75 to 100 percent of the problem of what’s going to happen to Jeanette [Desautel, the chef character on Treme]. His scenes always came in long. It was kind of like if I told you, “OK, you’re going to be onstage for five minutes,” and you’re like, “I’m going to get out there and do everything I can.”
ERIC OVERMYER, COCREATOR, TREME: Tony was wonderful company; he was a wonderful writer. When I got a Tony scene to polish, I had very little to do except to trim it. They were always too long, and too full, but all good stuff. He had a real sense of the shape of the scene; he had a sense of the dramatic flow, and how to take some unexpected turns in a scene. He had a sense of characters’ voices. He was a natural. Most rewriting is not a pleasure, but it was always a pleasure to polish his scenes; they needed very little work.
LOLIS ELIE: What Tony managed to do was devise the kinds of tortures that would happen in the kitchen, that you don’t really know unless you work in the kitchen or talk to a lot of chefs. I don’t think we ever used it, but we talked about the grease trap as an issue. I would never have thought of that. I think he liked the idea of simultaneously talking about the glories and the hell of chefs’ lives, and how, as much as they hate it, they also love it.
ERIC OVERMYER: Tony would bring detail [about restaurants], both in front and back. In the last season, Anthony Anderson played a very smart, savvy waiter who could predict how big his tip would be by what kind of shoes the customer was wearing. That was Tony; he was just full of stuff like that. He was a joy to have in the room, and his stuff was just gold.
LOLIS ELIE: He and I had one run-in, which was kind of funny. Part of what we were doing—Treme was simultaneously a totally fictional show, and in a sense a documentary about what actually did happen in those months and years after Katrina. Alice Waters is important, in terms of, she opened the Edible Schoolyard [in New Orleans], and I got to know her and be friendly with her. So I suggested in an email, “Hey, we’re talking about all these chefs coming to town; maybe we should have Alice?”
Tony’s response was, I’ll say, “scathing light.” In essence, he said, “Her stuff is old, no one would ever do that again, this is a terrible idea,” et cetera. But he didn’t shoot it down entirely, and so I had a response. Part of this also was Tony saying Desautel was a woman chef who could run with the boys, so I might have said it would be good to have a woman chef.
Eric Overmyer was like, “You should just leave this alone,” but I sent my response, and then I think we went from Tony at a level two, to Tony at a level seven. Again, Eric Overmyer said, “You should’ve left this alone,” and I was like, “I lost the battle. I’m not worried about that, but I ain’t gonna let this motherfucker tell me I don’t know the show well enough to pitch a good idea.”
So it got to be that kind of thing; I’m trying to save a little face. And then it was sort of funny, because we were in the room, and he’s saying, “You know what I think would be good is that there’s some dish that she starts off loving, that’s so important, but it takes over, and she wishes she could take it off the menu, and then she’s trying to figure out how not to make it not be such a pain in the ass.”
And I say, “Maybe a pasta dish, and she goes from making fresh pasta to making it with using dried,” and Tony says, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” And I really felt that was Tony throwing me a bone. I think he believed he was right about Alice, but that he was harsher than he could have been, or should have been.
DAVID SIMON: He constructed all those storylines in Treme. He argued for what he argued for. He took possession of those things in a very heartfelt way. Wrote his way through all of them. There were times when, because of the rush, or because he was out of the country, and we had to reverse some scenes or maybe a storyline, I would have to pitch him stuff cold and send it to him. It would always come back better. But when I could land one in the pocket, where he was like, “This is good. This is funny,” I was like, “Geez, I ducked a bullet.”
I had absolute confidence in his ability to write anything. He’d have been great on The Deuce. He’d have been great on anything. He was funny. He was ridiculously self-effacing about his writing and his narrative abilities.
ERIC OVERMYER: I remember we were at some Spanish restaurant in the warehouse district [of New Orleans]. Lolis handed Tony the wine list, and Tony handed it right back, and said, “I don’t know shit about wine.” That was a very endearing moment, just genuinely modest. And he was fond of saying that being invited to write for us on Treme was like playing shortstop for the 1927 Yankees, which was such great hyperbole. He was a master of highly entertaining hyperbole.
28
“I Felt Like I Knew Him All My Life”
David Simon Recalls Tony
DAVID SIMON: The moment I fell in love with Tony as a person, I just wanted to go sit beside him. The TV shows, to me, were journalism. And incredibly political, without being didactic or ideological. But there was a general ideology, one that was very humanistic and very antihierarchical.
I remember this image: he’s in some urban center in South America. I want to say Montevideo, but maybe it was Buenos Aires. He’s sitting against the wall of an alley. Gangly and tall. He’s got his arms wrapped around his knees. And they’re all drinking the siete y tres, seven and three, and the kids are kicking some sort of ersatz soccer ball.
And he’s sitting there, and the footage of kids, and the men drinking, and him, and there’s this look of incredible sadness and love. It was a moment of duende for me. It’s like, This guy loves people. He’s trying desperately to connect in ways that great journalists and great writers connect. And also, the writing is so good, the narration was so well written, that I just wanted to be his friend.
I’d already met him once, in Manchester; he’d written a crime novel and I met him then. [My wife] Laura [Lip
pman]’s the mystery writer; I was there hanging with her and just looking for people to drink with. Kitchen Confidential, I think that book was just out, but I hadn’t read it. So all I had was this tall guy, who was very charming and playful. Nice guy, he used to be a chef. I didn’t remember him.
Then I’m watching the show and not connecting it to having met him. I watched, like, twenty hours with our son. We just couldn’t get out of our fucking underwear. We sat on the couch.
Laura came in and she saw us and asked, “You guys pissed away the whole day?”
“Absolutely not! We watched this guy Tony Bourdain. He’s the coolest guy on the planet, and he needs to be my friend.”
It took a couple of days, and she said, “I know how you can meet him.”
Laura probably went through a publisher, and got something. When I first got him on the phone, I was talking so fast. I felt like such an interloper.
The thing is, I know foods that are sort of hot and taste good. I hear about the new shit, because I chase it down, because I like putting new food in my mouth. I don’t know how kitchens work. I love eating, but I often felt like I disappointed him; there were moments I felt like I just revealed myself to be an incredibly disappointing rube.
He interviewed me one time for a show. He was out doing this boucherie in Opelousas, western Louisiana. I had hooked him up with these guys, Joel Savoy and that group. They’d helped us make Treme.
Anyway, my son and I got there early in the morning, to watch it. Got to the campground, watched Tony shoot the pig, watched them film it. At some point, just before the band played, starting the celebration, he said, “We’re filming some extra video for the website. Can I interview you?”
I sat down, he asked me a bunch of questions, and some of the answers I gave clearly amused him. But then he said, “OK, you’re going to die tomorrow. What’s your last meal?”
I said, “The first time that I had a couple of dollars to scratch together to buy any meal I wanted, somebody took me to Nobu to have a meal. And I’d had sushi, but suddenly there were these sauces. I put this food in my mouth and I was like, ‘This is new. I wasn’t expecting this.’”
I realized, as I was answering, he was just so disappointed in me. I could see it in his face. It was so uncool an answer by the standards of a guy who finds himself in some back alley, hunting for the perfect noodle dish in Hong Kong. It was such an un-Tony answer. He wasn’t mean about it, but I could just see, You’re letting me hang. You have really distinct opinions about people, politics, and food, and you’re picking the perennial number-one listing in New York in the Zagat guide.
I felt like I knew him all my life, and I’ve known nobody like him. Does everybody else feel that way? He was so accessible in his intellect and his humor that when I watched him on the screen without knowing him, I felt like I knew him, and I needed to hang out. And I am not seduced by television—I am engaged in this industry. I understand how attenuated reality is from what we put on the screen.
His journalism was so good. His voice was the voice of people I’ve loved in my life before I met him—my cousins from New York, the retort, the hyperbolic and outrageous statement that nevertheless makes you perceive just how wrong or right something is. Which he could do about food or drink or politics. I felt like I knew him so well, even before I made that first phone call, and then everything fell into place. Sometimes you think that’s going to be the case, especially with actors, because actors are so good at pretending. I don’t think Tony was particularly good at pretending. That’s not what his skill set was.
It’s a rather rare thing for people to feel, There’s no way you can flip on me as a person. This thing you’re giving me is not a persona, it’s really you. And for it to have so many edges, because he wasn’t trying to be likable at all points; he was just trying to be truthful. And he was trying to be generous with the people, for the most part, who were leading him around, showing him the world, talking to him, feeding him.
29
“He Could Have Sat in a Santa’s Throne in a Shopping Mall”
The Onstage Experience
SAM GOLDMAN: Tony was masterful at speaking to a group. I remember the days when he would hold court at restaurants, at one place in particular, Nikki & Kelly, up on Columbus. There was staff meal, and then there was staff meeting, where we’d tell the waiters what was going on, and, I mean, you were a captive audience, they didn’t have any choice, but Tony was brilliant.
DANIEL HALPERN: He was an unknown when Kitchen Confidential was published, but he turned out to be such an appealing man, an amazing speaker—an amazing speaker, given how shy he was. I think he was really shy.
BILL BUFORD: He was fantastic impromptu. Really probably at his best. His spoken narrative was virtually as good as his written narrative, but it had the virtue of being spoken, and it gave his shows their poignancy and their poetry and their moodiness, their sense of reflection. He’s got a feel for language, which can come only from having a command of language, and knowing what you can do with language. He understands word choice, and he understands kind of the beauty of combining unlikely words.
LAURIE BARNETT, LECTURE AGENT: Tony was introduced to Royce Carlton, the lecture agency where I was working, by Kim Witherspoon. That was at the onset of No Reservations. To be honest, no one else on the team wanted him as a client. When Kim walked him in the door, the response was, “Who’s gonna pay money to listen to a cook?”
I had to beg for the first $5,000. “We don’t pay cooks,” you know. On our watch, we set a bar that Tony’s heroes in the food world had not raised. They were out there doing quite a bit for free, in that style of, “OK, they’re my patrons, so I have to give them everything.”
So there was an arc from $5,000, to the end, fifteen years later, a whole lot more. The very first event was in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Six hundred people. When we pulled up in the cab, the cooks were lined up on the sidewalk.
They’d put him in a rangy exhibit hall, with lots of ambient noise. It was standing room only. The voice on the page from Kitchen Confidential leapt out as the voice on the stage. It was all there, the heart and the scathing humor. He was magic onstage, and it became pretty clear, pretty soon, that this was going to become a big, exponential deal.
I [met] with a rep from Guilford College, which is a Quaker college. And I said, “If you want a capital campaign, this is the guy.” These were the Bush years; everyone wanted high-profile news correspondents from the New York Times. But they put him in his first theater, two thousand seats. And that shifted the game. Promoters who fill those kinds of seats, and performing arts centers, started to come to us as customers.
ADAM EPSTEIN: It was in Denver, in 2009, it was the first time we did a show with Tony. We did a few more dates—Ann Arbor, Michigan, and New Orleans—as part of a speaker series. We really started to understand how his audience was incredibly passionate for him, for his narrative and his delivery. They were excited by the energy he brought to the stage. He didn’t need any sort of presentation; he just commanded attention the second he walked out there. He just paced back and forth, and it seemed like stream of consciousness to me, except it had a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it didn’t feel rehearsed, and I don’t know if it ever was. It seemed to flow from him authentically.
I would have thought twice before giving him any criticism, but at the same time, I didn’t need to. He delivered. His presentation was so good, from start to finish.
From a ticket sales perspective, when we first did Denver, we didn’t know how much the audience was comfortable paying, so we priced tickets very, very inexpensively. We had a $99 postevent meet and greet where he just shook people’s hands and posed for pictures, but most of the tickets were $40.
At each venue, we sold about sixteen hundred tickets or so, but the thing was, we lost piles of money. On the second round of dates, we knew there was something there, people were buying tickets, so we raised the prices, and we
sold exactly the same number of tickets. They didn’t hesitate at all. And these weren’t golfers, they weren’t high-net-worth people; these were working people, pulling significant resources from their budgets to dedicate to a night spent with Tony.
Our tickets started showing up on secondary ticketing sites like StubHub for hundreds of dollars more than what we were selling them for. And we’re talking large numbers, and they were moving. It became a serious way to generate revenue for him.
LAURIE BARNETT: Tony came into my office, and said, “There’s someone I want you to meet. His name is Eric Ripert. It would make me very happy if you worked with him, too.” I said, “Absolutely.”
For that first gig with Eric, Tony said to me, like a week before, “So, who’s the local yokel who’s going to interview Eric and me onstage?” And I said, “Uh . . . we, we don’t have one.” He said, “OK, no problem. Go to the hallway of the theater and find me the creepiest, most beat-up old metal chair. Put it downstage center. Put a klieg light on it. And then put two comfy chairs behind it.”
He wrote this thing for Eric, a little script, an interrogation. He asked Ripert—a Buddhist and a strong proponent of sustainable seafood—what he would do if he were offered the last piece of endangered bluefin tuna in the world, an endangered species. “Would you eat it? After all, you not eating it won’t bring it back alive.”
It was taunting, teasing. Eric was a newbie at the stage thing; eventually he got more comfortable with all of it, and he started turning the tables, and asking Tony crazy things, and writing his script himself.
ERIC RIPERT: When we did the show “Good versus Evil,” he made sure that I was in very uncomfortable situations, and was taking advantage of it, for the well-being of the show.
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