HELEN CHO: He blended personal life with his work life. There were really no boundaries, honestly. He was a very private person, for sure. If we would go out to a restaurant, I would never put him in a place where I knew he would be a spectacle. You’d see it, the eyes on him in public, in certain cities and countries. It certainly felt like he was a spectacle. He couldn’t be himself. Sometimes you’d see him in conversations in groups, and he’d command the table and go on these monologues. It was genuinely him, but it also seemed tiring.
DIANE SCHUTZ: I’m sure it’s exhausting, to meet new people who want to ask the same questions, and you feel like you’re putting on a dog and pony show for everybody. As his celebrity grew, he was pulled in so many more directions.
NIGELLA LAWSON: Everyone felt they knew him. That’s what television does to you, and his particular form of television. I think it’s very difficult, because you’re dealing with a lot of people who need something from you, emotionally—they’re coming to hear him speak, and for someone who was quite turned in on himself, as an introvert, he was, more than a lot of men, quite porous in the sense of feeling people’s needs.
He wasn’t like that with producers; he was quite capable of cordoning himself off and not really troubling himself about displeasing. But in terms of people who looked up to him, the sort of people who might come and hear him speak, I think he was very acutely sensitive to what they needed, and what he was going to give, which is why he always gave such a dazzling performance, with moments of showing vulnerability to people. That’s why I think people responded to him.
JOSH HOMME: People knew who Tony was [snaps fingers] instantly, all over the world. That’s an intense, unspoken relationship with people you don’t know. And it can be challenging to navigate that. And in Tony’s case, it got so ubiquitous, with him telling the right stories to the whole world. There are [questions of] how to manage that: Am I doing too much? Am I working too much? Am I accidentally isolating myself because I don’t want to be hit up for something?
There’s a psychological, mental health, and emotional price that comes with that, that you had no idea about. And when you’re a workaholic, and you want to do a good job, and you don’t want to let anyone down, it costs you your relationships at home, because it has to. And so you end up looking for people of a like mind who travel, gypsies.
Because of the nature of Tony’s life, as his friend, you sort of existed in a vacuum. I didn’t know if there were parallels to our relationship existing all over the place. “Does he have fifty friends this way? Four? How many boxes like this, and were their boxes like mine? Or was it a special box?” But I wish he would have unboxed some of it. It would have been more to his benefit.
ERIC RIPERT: The beauty of the relationship that we had was, I was extremely comfortable being with him in silence. And, hours together, half a day together, maybe most of the day, without exchanging a word, and not really uncomfortable. So he would be really himself, doing whatever he wants to do, and I will be daydreaming, or I will be myself, basically, and knowing that it was all good, and then, at night, we will have a fantastic evening, talking, and laughing, and drinking, and we will have a good time.
HELEN CHO: There were a lot of quiet moments, too, where not much was said. I remember us driving in LA, and he would just play music. And he would say, “My dad took me to this show,” or something. I think about those quiet moments a lot. There was no pressure for him to be “on.”
ROY CHOI: In LA, we spent a lot of time together, driving and talking, not being filmed. He was always fascinated with LA driving, the harmony of left turns in LA.
I could spend hours with Tony and not say a word. I had a relationship with Tony like, when you’re young, with a friend playing video games and you don’t talk for twelve hours, and the only thing you say to each other after maybe nine hours is, “You hungry?”
But, like, you’re best friends, you know? That was the relationship I had with Tony: I felt I knew him, even though I didn’t really talk to him that much, and I hope that’s how he felt he knew me. It was almost as if we were both chefs together in a restaurant; we were very close, we had war stories together, but I never knew much about anything beyond that.
MIKE RUFFINO: Some of my fondest memories are days [at Chateau Marmont]; we’d just sit at the pool, and hang out, and read. And at some point, he’d get up and go, “OK, I’m taking a nap. Dinner at eight?” “Yup. See you.” There was no need to even talk; you could just silently comment. It was just a good friendship that way.
ROY CHOI: There are certain friends he had in our industry where it would be about sitting for hours, drinking whiskey and debating, but me and Tony never had that relationship. I’m more like a dog, man. I like waking up and living and being excited, knowing I’m gonna see you. Maybe that’s the side of Tony that I brought out: the generous, the good, the humorous, the simple, the kind, the caring and, like, brotherly, and always there for you. I know he and [Dave] Chang would always argue; I never got into political arguments with him.
I never really saw the dark side of Tony. I only saw Tony with a smile and open arms—that’s how my whole experience of Tony was: every time I saw or emailed him or talked to him, he genuinely wanted to be there, too.
I knew Tony—I knew he had his darkness, but it didn’t bother me; it wasn’t something that I felt I needed to fix. It’s not my business to know his darkness, and it’s not his business to know my darkness, it’s just to be together through that darkness.
34
“Get a Big Fucking Body Bag”
Frustration and Isolation in the Field
DIANE SCHUTZ: One thing Tony always valued was the camaraderie with the crew, but as time went on, our budgets increased, and you wanted to respect his time, so then he gets his own van to set, and the crew advances for an hour. Well, now he’s just lost an hour in the van with the crew, and he’s just there alone, with a local driver. That’s something I wonder: In later years, was it a factor in maybe not enjoying the shoots as much? On the one hand, we’re trying to make it easier for you, you don’t have to be on set for five hours, but at the same time something is lost, not being around people whom you know and like, and who know and like you.
NIGELLA LAWSON: What is wonderful is crew life. If you work alone, crew life is great. The camaraderie of a crew whom you work very closely with over years and years and years makes a huge difference, because you have people to hang out with. But I’m not sure, if you’re not feeling happy, that you’re going to feel happy in a beautiful part of the world.
PAULA FROELICH: What people don’t understand about him is, he was a serial monogamist. That kind of lifestyle, it’s perfectly lonely and disoriented. Even if you travel with the same crew, those people work for you. You like them and they like you, if you work for a certain amount of time together, but there’s still the employee-employer [dynamic].
PAT YOUNGE: I do also think we underestimated the impact of spending 200, 250 days a year on the road. I think that was really hard on him. I know he hated it more when he had a kid, but, as I look back, I do think, when you travel a lot, and you really think about airports, delays, reservation screwups, luggage not arriving, taxis to airports, all that stuff, it was quite hard; harder than I think I realized at the time.
We started introducing [episodes of No Reservations] with the best bits, where he would just have to film some scenes in New York, and we put together three or four scenes from other shows. But he hated doing those, because to him, it wasn’t really the art of television; it was sort of commodified, like a tacky suit.
STEVEN TEMPEL: It had to have been 2009 or 2010, when I was down in Miami Beach with Tony. He said, “People think, ‘Oh, you travel the world; you have the best life.’ I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m tired of traveling. I just want to do voice-overs.”
JOSH FERRELL: I did the Ukraine episode of No Reservations. We went to Chernobyl. It was such a sad day, because it’s fucking Chernobyl. At th
e end of the day we’re like, “Well, that was terrible, let’s all burn our clothes, and everybody take the night off.” I called Tony and said, “Everybody’s doing their own thing,” and he said, “Let’s go to McDonald’s.” So me and Tony went to McDonald’s in Kiev, and had this little lonely meal, and talked about what a shitty day it had been. We both needed comfort food, and not to be alone, and to acknowledge that that was fucking heavy and terrible, over a Big Mac.
MATT WALSH: We did a show in Harbin, up in the cold northeast of China, that got weird at one point. We had a great location at this rustic restaurant, where everybody sits around a big wok with coal burning underneath, and they chuck in some broth, and a whole fish, and god knows what else, and it cooks in front of you. Sort of like hot pot, but not really. Everyone sits around this thing to stay warm. I think the food was terrible, but visually, it was a great scene. In those days, the working method was, the crew would set up whatever lights they needed and scope out the right table. I’d go back to the van to get Tony and brief him about the place—what am I eating here, what’s important about this, what should I notice? I went out to the van to collect him, and I couldn’t sense it at that time, but Tom [Vitale], who was on that shoot, told me later that something had happened while we left Tony in the van. He’d been on the phone to New York, and his mood flipped. He came in, and was very dark, and very uninterested, and the scene devolved. They kept trying to save it, and eventually they pulled me into it, which didn’t help at all. He was just in a pissy mood. It was the kind of a thing I saw, in one way or another, on an increasing number of scenes, where I thought, I get that you’re the iconoclast, the anti–food show host, but, you know, think of the viewers. That’s what you’re here for. Do it. It’s not hard. It’s the greatest job in the world, just do it. He just sometimes didn’t want to do it. And that was disappointing, and frustrating.
He grew increasingly tired, and he grew increasingly fed up with the process of making the shows. Tony was curious about the world, and just not so crazy about the process of making TV.
I saw that come to a head during filming The Layover in Hong Kong. He was really pissed off. We had moments of fun, but he was up to here with having a camera in his face twenty-four hours a day, which is the way The Layover was shot.
And it was June in Hong Kong, so it was hellishly hot, and he was an angry man. Watch the episode, you can see it.
ALEX LOWRY: He hated The Layover. He would call me and be like, “Why am I doing this?” and I’d say, “Dude, you tell me! You’re the one who agreed to do it.” He was desperately trying to get the number of days down that he had to be in a place.
He said it a few times, that he felt like a sausage being stuffed with food, but this was the back-and-forth. I said, “If you’d give me two or three days, then you don’t have to do eight scenes a day.” He was almost literally twenty-four hours in and out; he would come in the night before, maybe if we could get him to do a scene that night, he’d do a scene, and then it was all the scenes the next day, and then he would fly out.
JOSH FERRELL: I did a season of The Layover. That was terrible. Like most nonunion shows, it was a labor of love. It was just insane. I have never been a part of any show that worked like that. The show was thirty-six hours in whatever place, and it was literally filming with Tony for thirty-six hours. It was run and gun: “Is this gonna work, is this not gonna work? Let’s overshoot it, because you don’t know what scenes are gonna work, what scenes are not.” So instead of doing two or three scenes a day, like you’d do with Parts Unknown, you’d do seven scenes. And there was so much food. Tony had to eat so much.
JARED ANDRUKANIS: The Layover years, when the Travel Channel years were coming to an end, Tony was overweight. He would do three or four scenes a day where he’d eat. But it was some of the funniest narration he’s ever written; he was just angry at everybody.
I don’t really know what was going on in his personal life, but we’d sit in the van in between scenes sometimes, and he would put the seat back and he was just breathing real weird. I could tell he was in pain. Really struggling. I would be like, “Dude, let’s just cancel. We don’t need to do another fucking food scene. You hate this shit. You don’t need to strap on the feed bag.”
But [he was] tied to the cart as much as everyone else. He wouldn’t take the out. He didn’t want to disappoint the guest.
JOSH FERRELL: I noticed that, with the humor that he would convey from No Reservations to Layover and then Parts Unknown to the end of Parts Unknown, the gag of like, “Oh this is terrible,” it started getting a little more sincere, a little more— I would have him sitting at a whiskey bar in Layover and he’d be like, “Oh, I can’t believe I have to sit here and drink this.” And then we were somewhere for Parts Unknown and he would say, “I fucking hate this.” And you would realize, “Oh, he’s serious.”
TODD LIEBLER: I think that when his expectations weren’t met, it was a crushing blow for him. When he was getting angsty, he would definitely— Well, first of all, the dude was so funny, and when he got angsty, it would just turn darker, you know? Or he would just kind of be inside himself. It was, to a certain degree, obvious when he was in his dark place. He’d go inside himself.
SANDY ZWEIG: When we started Parts Unknown [in 2012], he was not in great shape, physically. He was a little overweight. He had been on a speaking tour just before we started, and we started shooting in November, which is very late, to get sixteen episodes done. It was a very tough season. There were a couple of back-to-back shoots. The Libya shoot was stressful for everybody; a lot of stuff went down there that was difficult to handle in the field. And then the Sicily shoot, at the very end of the season, where that fisherman had somebody throwing, basically, dead fish into the water for them to catch, there was a breaking point there. I got an email from him after that scene was shot, which started out with, “Is this what it’s come to? After ten years on television?”
SALLY FREEMAN: Everyone asks, and used to ask him, “Which one was the disaster episode?” And it was one of mine, in Sicily. The story of that episode that’s kind of gone down in folklore is not the true story. He kind of had a mental breakdown on that shoot. It’s been played down and made into a funny story.
We took Tony fishing, and the chef who we got, in the middle of Sicily, was like, “Oh, come to this beautiful place. We’ll go diving.” And we realized, as Tony got into the water, there was another guy who came up on a boat, and was throwing dead squid and octopus and stuff into the water. And it was absolutely hilarious.
Tony was furious, in only that way that he can be. But it was so funny, because it was just— It’s the exact worst thing that can happen during a scene, when you’re trying to keep everything authentic and real, and this guy’s, like, lobbing dead fish. Tony wrote about that in the narration for that episode, and he made it very funny.
He was so strong; some guy throwing fish at him in Sicily is not going to be the thing that sends him over the edge. But it was also his birthday, and he’d almost reached the age that his dad was when he died, and it got dark. He really went into a funk, and he said that he hadn’t expected to live beyond that age. So, for me, whenever I hear somebody talk about this Sicily episode, and how the dead fish put him into a massive depression, it’s like, well, I know that it was nothing to do with what we were filming.
We coped with a lot on that shoot. He was having breathing difficulties, which looking back, I don’t know if they were breathing difficulties or whether he was suffering from anxiety, or something else. We got him an oxygen tank. We were texting him all night, every two hours, and if he didn’t text back, we were gonna break the door in. We were truly worried about him; worried for his health, for his mental state. And there was a day when he just sat in the garden and he wouldn’t film anything. That’s when I asked him, “What’s really going on here?” and he talked about his dad.
Nothing particularly bad came out of that episode or that situation, but if that
had been a close friend of mine who was like that, I would have thought, Yeah, he probably needs some help.
JOSH FERRELL: We were in Budapest, at this little schnitzel place, like an hour outside the city. Giant schnitzel, as big as the table. This old man makes it in this little tin box of a place, and it’s all steamy in there, and you drink the beer with it. So Tony eats it, and he was like, “Oh my god, that’s disgusting.”
We put him in his car, he heads back to his hotel, and we break everything down. Just before we leave, I say to my fixer, “You got the releases signed, right?”
And he says, “Oh, yeah, the old man said he needs to take a picture with Tony first, before he signs the release.” And I was like, “Dude, Tony left like an hour ago. Can he just sign the release?” and he said no.
So I called Tony. “I’m so sorry; in order to get this guy to sign the release, he says he’s got to take a picture with you,” and he says, “Josh, I can see my hotel. I’m going to take the biggest shit of my life when I get there.” I’m like, “I am so sorry, Tony,” and he hangs up the phone.
A few minutes later the fixer tells me the driver just called, and they’re turning back around. They drive an hour back. Tony gets out of his car, beelines it right toward the guy, and says to me, “Somebody better get a big fucking body bag.” Takes the picture, gets back in the car, and takes off.
It was one of those moments where I’m like, Is he fucking joking? It was so intense. It was so intense, and so fucking funny. That was the relationship that Tony and I had; he could give me shit, and I could take it.
TOM VITALE: There was a sort of a sadistic element to the job and the relationship, but the way I looked at it, it relieved pressure from him, that someone else was suffering a bit, too, because it was a tough job for him.
ALISON MOSSHART, MUSICIAN: His impatience was fucking hilarious, entertaining to everybody. When you’re a big figure like that, you’re allowed to be impatient, because people will make it so you don’t have to wait. Anytime you do have to wait, your brain explodes. A quick temper’s not a great trait. He could always put a humorous spin on it, if people were listening, but you knew that he really wanted to get the fuck out of there.
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