JOSH HOMME: Tony was a bit of a nerd. I could easily make the case that Tony was pursuing his passions at the speed of inspiration. And what reason is there to go half measures, or to stop, if you’re loving it? What about a lust for life that takes you down dark paths, that it’s your job to overcome? What’s that quote—“Wisdom comes from experience; experience comes from bad decisions,” right? It’s interesting, admirable, and exciting to watch someone who’s chasing his passions at a pace that you cannot do yourself.
For self-proclaimed atheists, we had a lot of deep conversations about being on a rock that spins around a star that’s exploding. Why do you think he was searching the world, looking for something to believe in? And finding it. And losing it. Chasing its brake lights again. And going in that direction. It’s this existential crisis on a grand level, and everyone gets to watch. I mean, that’s what we talked about.
ANDERSON COOPER: I think people who are drawn to a lot of the places that he went, and that I’ve gone, tend to be drawn, it comes— I think it comes from a similar place. I always felt that about Tony.
It’s hard for me to put this into words without sounding like an idiot or a jerk, but there are people who are attracted to the edges of the world. And at the edges of the world, a lot of stuff is stripped away, a lot of bullshit, a lot of falsehoods, a lot of the stuff that anybody deals with in his normal life. Things are more elemental, or feel more raw, or more alive in some ways. The desire to travel to those places, I totally understand the appeal. I also understand the pain associated with it, and that it comes from— Just as comedy often comes from a dark place, if you are entirely content, you don’t spend two hundred days a year traveling the world. There’s a certain restlessness I think that is inherent in that desire.
DAVE CHANG: He jumped into everything headfirst, full steam ahead. Heroin never was replaced, actually; he tried to fill the void with celebrity and fame, which he didn’t necessarily want, but it was temporary, and the notoriety. He tried to fill it with travel. I think the travel made the addiction worse.
NANCY BOURDAIN: Tony is younger than I am, by about fourteen months. The last couple of years I’d think, How the hell does he do it? It was a hectic schedule. He’d complain when we were together, about the travel, and how taxing it was. I think travel was passing for his addiction for a while.
MIKE RUFFINO: He had about ten years on me, but we both went pretty dark, at about the same time in our lives, so we had a lot in common.
I remember him once asking, “Well, how much crack did you smoke when you were shooting heroin?” I said, “What? None. That’s crazy!” And he said, “See, that’s the difference between you and me.”
I guess there was a danger to it; he was a little bit more eager to ride the edge. He didn’t really do the half measures of anything.
He was very aware of his self-destructive impulses. I mean, that’s one of the things we discussed pretty frequently. Just by discussing them, they just don’t seem that dangerous themselves.
STEVEN TEMPEL: The last time I saw him was in 2012, at [the] Googa–Mooga [festival, in Brooklyn]. He seemed uncomfortable in his own skin. I gave him a Vicodin and he put it in his pocket. Later that day when I saw him again, he remembered he had it; he reached in his pocket and took it, and gave me a thumbs-up.
HELEN LANG: I absolutely see him as an addict. He was a fiend. He had a totally addictive personality.
TOM VITALE: Everything in moderation was not something Tony ever mastered.
BILL BUFORD: I think it’s the addictive personality [that] now makes sense of his busyness. His busyness kept him from being an addict. If you’re busy, you’re not allowed to follow impulses to where you say, “Why stop?”—which is the addict’s intensity. Because he was the busiest, most productive person I think I know. And I know I wasn’t seeing all of it, but I was certainly seeing enough of it.
NARI KYE: Tony’s always been, in one way or another, addicted to something. He gets obsessed with one thing, and he gets really into it. We saw that with jiu-jitsu. We see that with the duck press. I remember he was obsessed with that for a while. He saw it in France, and he was like, “I need to have that.” Weird, little, quirky obsessions, he would get really into. And I think it was a way for him to keep his very, very running mind focused on something, because he always had so much going on. I don’t think he really slept much, so I think things were always running through his head. I think these obsessions kind of honed things in for him.
JOSH HOMME: Certainly, he was a man of extremes. So maybe it’s an extremist personality that’s the trouble. I guess I think of addictive as a word of negativity, and maybe that’s just semantics. Because, at the end of the day, there’s this amalgam of reasons why things went wrong.
ROY CHOI: Even though he was famous, he was still mad at shit. I knew that he was still struggling. I remember little tics about him; he always drummed his fingers. I know, because I’m an addict, too; I’ve always connected to him, knowing that there’s something else going on.
NANCY BOURDAIN: When he smoked, he smoked. I remember Tony would wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, and he’d light a cigarette. I would say, “What are you doing? You’re gonna be asleep in five seconds.”
DAVID CHOE, ARTIST: Whenever I would meet Tony, there was very little small talk. We would just get into it. I had never met anyone who had beat heroin addiction without a twelve-step program. The relapse rate is like 90-something percent, and so I’m like, What can I learn from this guy? He’s like a walking miracle. If he figured out a secret way to get out of heroin addiction, that’s amazing.
And a lot of his theories and ideas on how to beat [addiction] were very similar to what I had thought: just get out of the house, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
NATHAN THORNBURGH: One of the things that was always shockingly great about Tony was that kind of teenage enthusiasm, just the way he could immerse himself in a moment. It was why he could make such great writing, and why it translated to television really well. He really felt things, on a level that must have been out of this world. He was living there, he was camped out. He was so immersed in the moment of the absolute. Maybe it’s like having too strong a sense of smell. Maybe that wasn’t survivable, at the end of the day, that kind of quick response to the moment.
I knew, even in my deepest cups with Tony, there was always so much daylight between who we were. I mean, I live in a small apartment with my wife, whom I met when I was eighteen, and my two kids, and a dog, and like, that is who I am, and that is who Tony could not have been, despite moments, I think, of wanting to have that.
ANDERSON COOPER: The more you travel, you come back home, and you feel like you don’t speak the same language. You’ve had these interesting experiences, and for everybody else, it’s just been another week that’s passed. And maybe they went out to dinner, or saw a movie, or whatever it was they did during that week, but in that week, you’ve gone to, say, Kashmir, and you’ve shot all this stuff, and had all these interesting experiences. And there’s a disconnect, and at certain times your friends kind of fall away, because you’re never around, and then, when you come back, the stuff that they’ve been doing just seems mundane, and it’s hard to connect.
But I don’t think it’s that the travel leads to discontentment. I think it certainly exacerbates it, or allows you to delay addressing it, but I think it’s the discontentment that leads to being drawn to these places.
32
“Darker, More Transgressive, and More Lurid”
Roads & Kingdoms
NATHAN THORNBURGH: I had a lot of jobs at Time magazine. I was the national political editor for a hot minute, which is one of the worst casting jobs I can imagine, and not long after that, they put me in an even worse job, which was to edit the celebrity profile right at the end of the magazine.
Somebody suggested we do Bourdain. This was in 2007. He took the subway [to the office], and he was just great. He spoke in complete paragraph
s. It was when he was on his anti–Rachael Ray kick, and it was so delightful to hear him splattering her entrails across the interview room. He took all the time in the world to do the interview. He was super interested in the journalism that we were doing. We were talking about Iraq and the Baghdad bureau. It was, by a factor of ten, the most positive experience I had in that entire run.
A couple of years after that, [writer] Matt Goulding and I started talking about Roads & Kingdoms, and started putting together this web publication that would end up, editorially and emotionally, in a space that Tony had been heading to. He was coming from food to journalism, and Matt and I were coming in the other direction. Matt had met Tony in Catalonia [Spain], with José Andrés.
MATT GOULDING, EDITOR-WRITER; PARTNER IN ROADS & KINGDOMS: In the spring of 2011, Tony was filming the closing of El Bulli with José Andrés and Ferran Adrià, and I was doing a profile on José for the Wall Street Journal magazine, and they invited me out for what’s called the caragol lleida, the big snail feast in the interior region of Catalonia, in the spring. Lots of wine, just a shitload of snails, good times, everyone kind of just cuts loose. Can’t really think of a better scenario in which to meet Tony.
He likened the villa where we met to a place in The Godfather: Part 2, where Don Ciccio gets stabbed in the gut by an emerging Corleone, when he goes back to Sicily. I mean, it was the perfect kind of Bourdainian moment. I was obviously super nervous because I’m riding shotgun with my hero, but he was great. We had really good conversations about the food media world, trading little anecdotes and gossip. I may have mentioned to him that I was starting something with my partner, in the food and travel, culture and geopolitical space, that might be of interest to him. And I got his email address, for a couple of quotes for the José story, which was a tether that kind of allowed me to circle back and reach out to him.
NATHAN THORNBURGH: We spent that first year going to these different countries that had really good food stories and interesting political stories.
MATT GOULDING: We were in Copenhagen, and we had just had a big night of filming at Noma with René Redzepi and the crew, and sleeping in this tiny houseboat, which was all we could really afford on the Roads & Kingdoms budget. We woke up, and our phones were vibrating like crazy.
NATHAN THORNBURGH: Overnight, Tony had tweeted something like, “Roads & Kingdoms does consistently fine work.” Which, for a man with a lot of words, was pretty austere, but it was great. I thought, Maybe he’s full of shit. We were slightly disbelieving, but psyched.
Not long after that, Matt was sending me these ridiculous emails from [his research in] Japan, and I told him that he should write to Tony and pitch his experience as a book. Matt did, and Tony wrote back right away, and that’s how it started. It was all very strange and unexpected.
MATT GOULDING: Tony basically said, “Anything that is an ongoing expression of Roads & Kingdoms and its ethos, I want to be a part of.” I don’t want to overuse the phrase, but it truly was life changing.
NATHAN THORNBURGH: Tony invested $400,000 in Roads & Kingdoms, in the form of cash and services. He wasn’t a private equity guy; this was money that he worked for, and it felt finite, and it was also just enough money to be dangerous for us. It was not enough where we could really go after a thesis; it was enough money to get him skin in the game, so that we could be empowered to go and make more money.
He wasn’t anticapitalist. He just, from my experience as his business partner, had lots of bright lines that he wouldn’t have wanted us to cross for him, in making that money, and I think that’s why we got along. It was really fun running a business with him, because he always had this outlaw mentality, which is very rare in business in general, and particularly from the investor side.
MATT GOULDING: Everything he brought to the table was much more valuable than the money itself.
There were no questions about What are your traffic numbers; what’s your model; how do you guys make money; do you make money; how do you see yourself making money in the future? How can I help you guys make more for all of us? That never happened, not once. We shared a couple of tax returns with his accountants, and that was it. That was the extent of our conversations about the business of Roads & Kingdoms.
NATHAN THORNBURGH: We knew that Tony wasn’t going to line edit or sit in editorial meetings, but we would send him things before publication, and every once in a while we’d have a back-and-forth about a piece. The one that sticks out in my mind is when he said, “Just remember to make it darker, more transgressive, and more lurid.” As the investor, he’s got to know that that’s really bad financial advice—ain’t no money in darker, more transgressive, and more lurid—but he gave us permission to not succumb to whatever weird bullshit we might have gotten into as a media company, in a race to get him his money back, in a race to have an audience that would match the size of his television audience.
MATT GOULDING: It’s not surprising that his favorite pieces were ones like “The Dog Thief Killings,” about vigilante locals in Vietnam who were killing drug addicts who stole dogs to get their fix. That was a quintessential Bourdain story, so much so that when we went to CNN to pitch a television show, a Roads & Kingdoms TV show, that was the episode that had to get made. I remember [CNN executive] Amy Entelis kind of nervously shifting in her seat, being like, “Let’s see.”
NATHAN THORNBURGH: The last thing I wanted to do was be any kind of drag on him, because there was so much of that around. He had this obvious magnetism, amplified by the fame that he had, and I always tried to not need to be liked by him, because he was inscrutable and temperamental. Often he would be incredibly magnanimous in ways that surprised us, but I remember he was having a bad day, the day that we announced our launch, just a being-short-with-people kind of day. That taught me not to get wrapped up personally in shit. There wasn’t any sense in having his reaction on any given day be a referendum on my relationship with him, or on the business.
MATT GOULDING: On a personal level, you were never quite sure where you stood with him, because of how he was. I don’t think it was because of his fame or notoriety; I think just, deep down, there was a lot of shyness there, a lot of timidity. He wasn’t a guy for chitchat. And when you tried, it didn’t really move the needle. He wasn’t gonna ask you, like, “How’s your wife doing?”
And that’s something that I still get anxiety dreams about—there’s an assignment that I didn’t quite deliver on, or, in one dream, I’m on a cruise with my dad and Tony, and I just keep on doing awkward things that make all of us very uncomfortable.
We’d started to work on something together with David Gelb and Brian McGinn, the Chef’s Table guys, that was going to be a docuseries, bringing to life some of our more ambitious journalism; that was still in the works when he died. That’s one of the many really difficult things that we had to metabolize in the wake of his death. The first wave of it was that raw, searing pain of losing a friend, and someone you admired, and for me, losing my hero. That’ll always be there.
We had built a business together that was, in 2018, about to go over the hump; all of that came to a crashing halt.
From a morale standpoint, it’s really tough. This dream fell into our laps, in terms of being able to make media with the person who we thought did it best. And then suddenly to have that taken away from you—that voice, and that person, and that source of energy and strength and validation—that is a hole that you can’t ever really fill.
NATHAN THORNBURGH: I think we had a lot more opportunity than we ever tapped into. It could have been a real business, and I find it hilarious, in hindsight, that Tony and Matt and I, collectively, had the business sense of a spotted owl.
33
“Everyone Felt They Knew Him”
Charisma and Reserve
NIGELLA LAWSON: His attachments with people—once he liked you and you were doing something together, there would be a very firm attachment. But it’s not the same thing as just you both lying on a
different sofa having a talk about nothing. Our friendship was very much based on being in the same place, at the same time, for a joint purpose. I was a close friend in the sense that I think we both felt very warmly about one another. But we didn’t see each other outside those times. Which isn’t to say that’s a fake friendship at all. I think that was very much the pattern of his friendships.
ANDERSON COOPER: I was friendly with him, and I hugely admired him, and we got to hang out through work events. Our friendship, sadly, didn’t really extend beyond that. But we would get together whenever he had a new season out, and have conversations that would end up being divided up and used to promote his series.
As somebody who was not an intimate friend in any sense, there was something about— Every time I was with him, I wanted it to go longer. And I wanted to be friends with him. I wanted him to really like me.
DEAN FERTITA: He was a great person to be around. You felt better when you were around him. The relationship I had with him, it was usually in a working environment. He was always motivated, always pushing forward. From my perspective, I forgot what was going on in my life when I was around him; I was able to lose myself in whatever project we were doing at the time.
NIGELLA LAWSON: I think there is something about those extraordinarily charismatic people, that everyone feels they’re a close friend, you know, whether it’s someone who’s never met you, watches you on television, or whether it’s all of us who knew him in our compartmentalized ways. I think that was very much part of his charisma. I also think that it’s not entirely false, because I think he did make those connections like that with people.
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