I watched that whole thing happen again and again, the whole time we were filming [Parts Unknown] in Nashville. And then we did London, too. Jamie [Hince], my bandmate, was in [that episode]. I was there. It was fucking hysterical. Well, it’s funny to the person who’s not being yelled at, you know. You can get away with that for a long time, until that’s exactly who you are. But he absolutely loved everyone who worked with him. That was his family.
JEFF ALLEN, PRODUCER: He would always stay in the nicest room, and that often meant he was isolated. It’s probably depressing to be in the castle all alone. He would be in the palace, and we would be in the horse stables. That’s literally where we stayed in Laos. Tony was in the Amantaka hotel, living in the villa, all alone, and the crew stayed in the former horse stables, which had been converted into a shitty little hotel.
We made a point to go over to Tony’s room once in a while. It was a challenge, because the nature of the beast is constraints. We had budgets and time to deal with; we can’t all afford to stay at the nice hotel with Tony, but we also can’t afford to not get face time with him, because that’s how we make the show—have a beer at the end of the day and talk to Tony about all the creative, and informing him who he’s gonna meet the next day, and talking through ideas. And when we didn’t get that, there were repercussions. He would get cranky, or come in pissed off about something.
ANDERSON COOPER: You spend a lot of time in hotel rooms alone by yourself, [and] it seems, from the outside, kind of glamorous, and sometimes they’re really nice hotels, and sometimes they’re not. But there is— It’s just lonely. No one wants to hear anyone complaining about [it]. You’re not working in a coal mine, and obviously it’s fulfilling in a myriad of ways, but there is a real loneliness to it. It’s like the old movie The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. And I think of that in relationship to Tony.
You have friends, and they love you, and you’re loved by— Tony is loved by people around the world, but that doesn’t really— In the end, when you’re in a room by yourself, that’s not necessarily what you feel.
JOSH FERRELL: We did a shoot in Tanzania, and we went to the Ngorongoro Crater, the crater of life. It’s like fucking Lion King, all the animals in the kingdom are in this goddamn crater. We worked out a deal for Tony with &Beyond, which is the ultraluxe accommodation, cabins along the crater, all $2,000 a night, rose petal baths each night, that sort of thing. The rest of us were at the Econo Lodge on the other side of the crater.
The first night, Tony said, “OK, so we’re all staying here?” and I said, “No, but we can come over here for dinner, or you can come over there for dinner.” And he goes, “Why don’t you just stay here?” And I said, “I can’t stay here, there’s no budget.” And he says, “I’m gonna need you to stay here.”
So I worked out a deal with the office and the hotel, and they let me stay at another cabin. Each night, at the end of each safari, Tony and I would have a literally candlelit dinner with, like, six butlers, and I would say, “How was your day?” and he’d say, “Eh, it was all right,” and we’d just shoot the shit, talk about jiu-jitsu. He’d ask me about myself, we talked about shoots, and just have this lovely dinner together, each night.
JEFF ALLEN: In Indonesia, we had this nice hotel on the beach, and they’re super pumped to have Tony there, and they put him in this isolated villa that’s like a twenty-minute walk from where the crew is. So, every day, Tony was inviting the crew to hang out at his villa, because he’s just sitting there alone after the shoot. All he wanted to do was send a PA out to get KFC and a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and drink and eat chicken and talk for hours. And it’s challenging, as a producer or director, because you also have to get shit done. Hanging out with Tony is where the fun is, but I also have to manage a crew of twenty people who need to know what we’re doing tomorrow, and how we’re getting there, and what time. We hung out, but at great cost to our sanity and sleep.
In the Greece episode [of Parts Unknown], he asks a question in the voice-over, something to the effect of, “Is it worse to be in a bad place with people you like, or in a beautiful place all alone?” So much of his life was going to beautiful places and being all alone.
35
“Tony Had a Burden of Leadership That Was Real”
MARIA BUSTILLOS, JOURNALIST: I got the feeling talking to him—in the first part of our conversation [in February 2018], he was very polished, and very much the commercial product, but as time wore on, and we kept drinking, and he was letting his hair down more, I got a real sense of him having to manage his own admissions, or information. [We talked about] how he felt about Emeril, whom he had criticized so much, but then he came around, and the thing that he really identified with was that idea of having a big group of people who depended on him to look after them.
“I asked for the fame. I asked to be the big guy, and now I’m accountable to this huge group of people, and I have to do a really good job, and I have to be Anthony Bourdain all the time. I chose this, and this is the cost and the price.” So that was the big vulnerability that I saw.
I said, “Is it worth it?” and he said, “Some days, yeah. Others, eh.”
MIKE RUFFINO: When No Reservations still had a couple of seasons left, Tony was already like, “Ah, I’m all done.”
His idea was that he was just going to be able to step back and not be on camera. But ultimately, there were a lot of people depending on him. And he wasn’t gonna pull out of that.
MORGAN FALLON: I remember saying, “Why the fuck aren’t you just slapping your name on a pizza box, dude? Sell the fuck out. Cash in. Stop. Don’t be on the road 250 days a year anymore. It’s one phone call, man. Who cares? None of the people who love you are gonna judge you for that.”
I think he was so concerned, in some ways, about what his legacy would be. Here he is, this ex–heroin addict line cook and chef, who got away with the greatest fucking con job in the history of mankind, being paid to basically live out his personal fantasy. I think that became handcuffing, in a way. He had a lot of people depending on him.
TOM VITALE: I mean, he was a very successful writer. He could have dialed back the other thing and still been very comfortable, and flexed those creative muscles, everything good, and shaken off the bad parts. And yet, he just went after more and more intensity, those things that exacerbated the issues in his life.
FRED MORIN: We had a plan for Tony. He loved putting on tunes on the radio. We’re like, “Sirius Radio, you have a show, you play music. The radio’s the best, man.”
DAVE MCMILLAN: “You never leave Manhattan. You’ll be as big as Howard Stern. And you can interview everyone in the food world.” He said he felt responsibility [to continue making television]. He was like, “I gotta fucking figure it out, but there’s so many fucking people on the payroll.” Tony had a burden of leadership that was real.
KIMBERLY WITHERSPOON: Tony shared with me his concern that he was floating the boat for a lot of other people. He felt tremendous responsibility for the team that he had assembled, in different areas of his life. He felt a lot of responsibility, for example, for his publisher, and for [production company] ZPZ. He never said that he felt responsible for me, but I always assumed that it was a 360-degree point of view. Even though I was making these deals for him, and for other clients, he also considered me part of his responsibility. I know he spoke to other people about the fact that he found that burden very heavy.
It colored his perspective, that he was supporting the people he was working with and had on his team. And, of course, financially, that was true. But the emotional dynamic was that he had a team of people who were invested in caring for him, not just because they worked with him, or for him, but because they were genuinely loyal and attached to him, as he was to them. He created this family of people, most of whom were initially assembled because they had work responsibilities. But, because he was so loyal, these relationships went on for years and years. And the familial component of it all became
as important as the work relationship.
I think that the work aspect of it allowed Tony to have control over the emotional dynamic. Because we all worked with him, or all worked for him, he was able to establish and, to some degree, control how close people could get to him, what they could say to him, what he was willing to tolerate.
CHRISTOPHER BOURDAIN: It drove both me and Tony crazy that our mother just seemed convinced that “my son is now prestigious, and famous, and making a lot of money, so I deserve to have him give me all sorts of money.” Where do you come off with that attitude?
There was always some story about why she was out a huge sum of money. She redid her apartment, and the contractor went flaky on her and left her in the lurch with a half-done job, and she was out $15,000. Every few years, something like that would go on, where she had the idea and the energy to get the thing going, but meanwhile wasn’t attending properly to the financial details or protecting herself. And then Tony would get an email, like, “Oh, I need $50,000 in dental work, and I can’t afford it, I have no money at all. Can you help?” And he did, at times.
There was one dinner we had where she presented the grand plan that Tony and I were going to bail her out, mostly Tony. I had found out a few months earlier that she had falsified my signature on a document, and had basically yanked our dad’s ashes out of the place where we had them stored. She was technically still his wife; they never divorced. Even though she’d basically kicked him out, she had convinced herself, wrongly, that he had forgiven her, and they should have their ashes scattered together on Long Beach Island.
So just having her plop down that night at some restaurant and say, “This is what you’re going to do for me: you’ll buy my apartment, and, Tony, you’ll give me a stipend,” I think Tony’s jaw dropped, and I went kind of ballistic about the ashes, which I very rarely do, and I said, “That’s the shittiest thing you’ve ever done, you should be ashamed of yourself.” She walked out in a huff, and Tony and I stayed and had dinner.
CHRIS COLLINS: We challenged Tony to dial back. Because I’m not convinced, necessarily—all that travel, as physically and emotionally and mentally draining as it can be—if it was the personal life that was more unstable, that he could not get right. He understood the road; that was, at the end of the day, the most grounded thing he was doing. We had everybody at this company surrounding him and trying to make things as good for him as humanly possible, you know?
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: Another of the big questions that I asked him about a half a dozen times over a year is, “What are you chasing? Why do you keep doing it? Why not slow down?”
He had shifting explanations, and honestly, I thought, for a guy who was so adept at diagnosing himself, none of his explanations were very persuasive. “Well, you go back to the same place you’ve already been before, but it’s changed in the interim.” Or, “Even if the places don’t change, our filmmaking techniques do, and so we want to see it in another way.”
We talked a bit about Iggy Pop in one of our conversations, because I think he saw the fact that Iggy was out there, and didn’t quit, as inspiring.
To me, the most persuasive answer in the [New Yorker] piece came from Eric Ripert, when he said, “I think Tony keeps moving because he’s afraid of what would happen if he stopped.”
KIMBERLY WITHERSPOON: Even when he was on a shoot, he was also doing two or three other professional things, figuring them out, whether it was getting information on a book that he wanted to publish on his imprint, or getting ready to go on the road with a lecture series, or something else. I just always felt that Tony was studying harder and harder.
NIGELLA LAWSON: All that traveling—I remember asking him, was it another addiction? I asked him in a public space, by the way. I interviewed him at the South Beach Wine and Food [Festival]. He said, yes, in some sense, that was true, but he was worried about the dark space he would go into if he kept still for too long.
NICK BRIGDEN, DIRECTOR-CINEMATOGRAPHER-EDITOR: He was a guy who liked and embraced and invited change. I think he needed that. He wasn’t in the same place for two weeks. He was a shark, always on the move. He had to move to survive.
36
“He Always Had to Perform the Role of Tony”
KAREN RINALDI: Tony’s persona got so huge; people thought he was a little scary or intimidating, and to me, he was always the opposite of that. I think he liked to push this persona forward, and it sort of kept people away. I can’t psychoanalyze, but I think that conflation, that tension, probably got difficult.
NIGELLA LAWSON: There were two things running at the same time. He was very polished, and that side, never talking in a sentence that didn’t end perfectly, and that would meander richly through many subclauses, all that was part of who he was. But, obviously, underneath that is something he didn’t give much expression to, that thing of being so famous that everywhere he went, he would be approached by people.
He became that person he was on the television. He was a lot that person. He was wonderful, articulate, brilliant, funny, and really so enormously reflective, but so quickly and deeply reflective, which is an odd combination. But nevertheless, I think that it trapped him in a form of solitude.
Success is a great force for conservatism, because it’s quite hard to break out of what you do to do something else, until it doesn’t work. And I think that, for a restless person, that’s a constraint.
KAREN RINALDI: I do think that these two sides of Tony—the shy, geeky, wounded side—maybe never reconciled with the level of fame and attention and how lauded he was. Maybe that’s true for anyone with a conscience who gets famous. On one side, he’s private, he holds himself close, and then he can just turn it on. He was performative, and that worked.
NIGELLA LAWSON: Tony had a way of talking about himself honestly without revealing himself, really. I mean, everything you read about him, he’s not telling lies. He’s hiding in plain sight.
HELEN CHO: The way he processed the world, it was almost too intense for him to keep up with the reality of what was going on. He was such a romantic, and had an ideal life in his mind, but the reality never lived up to it. And so, in my opinion, the way he was able to deal with how much he had seen, and how much he had experienced, was narratively.
He started doing his Instagram stories, these very similar pans of hotel rooms all over the world. If you just look at them, it was like, Man, these are really fucking boring, but if you really look at them, and you really listened to the music that he chose to play, if you really dissected them, I think you would find a theme and a story. He was telling people about himself through his experiences, wherever he was, through the music and film.
NIGELLA LAWSON: I feel that also, he always had to perform the role of Tony. So that performance was a form of protection, as well as a kind of punishment. I don’t know that he could be in a room with someone and allow himself to be dull. Tony was never dull. But there’s no such thing in the world as someone who sometimes doesn’t feel muzzle brained or too low to have a conversation. I don’t think he could put himself with anyone then.
DAVID CHOE: The first time I ever met him was at the Chateau Marmont. I was already meeting with Dave Chang, and he said, “Hey, can my friend join?” and then it was like, “Oh, shit, it’s Anthony Bourdain.”
The hotel has the reputation that celebrities can hang out there, because no one bothers you, but I will say that during that dinner, every single person, famous and not famous, stopped at our table, and it wasn’t just for a quick picture. It was like, “I’m so sorry, but I just have to tell you, my son was this, my father did that . . .”
He was so nice and so graceful, and I was like, “Dude, is this your fucking life?” And he said, “In New York, I used to go down to the bodega to get something, and it would take five minutes. Now it takes an hour. I have to stop to take a picture with everyone.”
I said, “I know we just met, but if you ever come back to LA and just want to have dinner at my mom’
s house, please do.” So the next time, he came to my mom’s house for dinner, and brought her Asian pears, which is a very Korean thing [laughing], and I was like, This fuckin’ guy.
BILL BUFORD: Tony seemed like a person who had developed strategies for protecting himself. He would disappear. He would kind of hold himself back. He seemed to make sure that he had private moments. I got a feeling of a person who is on a really crazy schedule, and one of the difficulties of the schedule is that the content implicitly assumes a commitment to excess, which was a feature of his early shows. You know, out on the ice in Montréal, and everybody’s eating and everybody’s drinking. They’re having their foie gras and their bottle of Sauterne. And it looked like he got into more politics and travel because they interested him, but there was a little bit of self-preservation there. He had enough of a history of being a person of excess to know he didn’t want to make that his life. So he was careful. It was appealing.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: What was daunting for me [as a writer] was that he’d been profiled a thousand times. It was a life that was very worked over already. Tony was such a pro, too; he gave a million interviews, but I think he was always very careful about what he showed to whom. I pretty quickly realized that there was an illusion with Tony, which was that he was an open book.
I think he was very attuned to these questions of who is the real guy, and who is the character that he’s playing, and what are the slippages between those two. And I think part of the illusion with him was that he was so personable, and so open. You could be talking with him, or reading an interview with him, or watching an interview, and think that you’re like, mainlining the guy in his entirety. But, of course, it was an illusion, right?
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