MICHAEL STEED: There’s two Tony Bourdains in my mind: the real one, which is so close to the [other] one [whom] everyone saw on television. What’s going to add to the mystique of Tony? You’re sort of molding this character, as a director, adding more and more to this real-life person, and to the one on television.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: I was always very aware of how he—it’s almost a feature of his graciousness, combined with his awareness, as a writer, of what a writer needs. We had that amazing moment that’s in the piece [in Vietnam] where he says to me, “Hey, come on. I’m gonna take the Vespa for a spin. Why don’t you get up on the back?” And my internal monologue is like, Yes, a scene. And then, my meta internal monologue is like, That’s why he’s doing this.
I don’t want any of this to sound cynical . . . I mean, I think he understood that there was a myth of Tony Bourdain, and he would attempt to burnish that myth. So maybe it was cynical in that respect, but I also think he was, at least in my experience, fundamentally a very obliging, accommodating— He came up in the hospitality business, right? So there’s a sense in which he’s like, “Patrick has come all the way to Vietnam. I know what this piece would need at this point, and it’s a ride on the back of a Vespa around Hanoi.”
In France, he has this weird near-death experience, and then goes back, and the first thing he does is write [a] letter to [Nancy]. That felt very revealing to me. The reporter in me is thinking, This is gold—and then, the person who has been hanging out with Tony long enough to know is thinking, This didn’t slip out under your expert questioning.
NANCY BOURDAIN: I got mad at him when the New Yorker article mentioned the email. I remember when I got it, I felt very good. We had a nice little email conversation—and when the piece came out, I thought, That was private. That was between us. Why did he do it? Was it to publish it later? Everything was kind of grist. I don’t want to be just grist for the mill.
RENNIK SOHOLT: He had his shtick, so to speak. He knew his story. I think that’s important for famous people. They know their brand, and they’re able to articulate it and give people what they want, but then those stories sometimes become bigger than other stories that are just as important to the person and who he is, but don’t necessarily sell the product. At a certain point, you become a product, so to speak, that ultimately needs to sell in a marketplace. I think Tony knew that very well. He knew his story, he knew himself as a product.
MARIA BUSTILLOS: When I read all his books, I had a strong feeling about his vulnerability; I got concerned that someone that vulnerable should be in the public eye the way that he was. Everybody wanted him to be perfect, and in the public eye he really was perfect, and he was really careful to say the things that sounded really good. For a person who had been through what he had been through, I thought, This must be a huge strain.
The more I read, the more evident it became to me that he was kind of constructing, I’m not saying a false persona, but communicating certain beliefs in a way that was suitable to the form. He had this reputation for extreme candor but . . . there were, like, ellipses in all these places. It was like he sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus at the age of forty-whatever, after Kitchen Confidential was published. He had this life before his forties that he wasn’t super proud of. We know there was heroin in it, even though he talks about “my junkie past,” and he makes jokes about it, but the details are scarce.
As an interview, he was telling you not what you wanted to hear, but what he thought would be useful to you in the context of what you were trying to achieve. I saw him being circumspect; it was as much self-preservation as it was also good manners, or sensitivity to all the different constituencies that we have to serve when we inform people. He had a really delicate, elegant, sensitive sensibility. At the same time, you knew there was this really renegade person with a lot to hide in his private life, who was willing to take a lot of risks, clearly.
It’s weird, because, in his work, it’s kind of the same, the good boy and the bad boy inhabiting the same person. It’s a huge paradox: the really restrained, mannerly person who was raised to be that way by his mom—he condemned her, in my mind. That’s my armchair psychology, anyway.
I think he was very lonely. But there were people around him who loved him and would do anything to be near him. And he had a close group of people. He did know who his friends were. He had lifelong friends, but I still think that he must have felt lonely.
37
“Such an Unlikely Program for Him”
The Taste
CHRIS COLLINS: There was a period in there where he was trending toward, “I don’t know how much more I can do, I’m starting to feel wrung dry.” And I think he did feel just completely weary and exhausted. He was trending toward dialing back.
LYDIA TENAGLIA: He was pushing us to come up with another construct that would take way less time to shoot, and we came up with a competition show called Have Knife, Will Travel.
We said, “Here, look, we can shoot the entire season in thirty days. We put time, money, effort, and work into trying to figure this out for you, because we get it.”
CHRIS COLLINS: We built it to fit him, so he could slide into something that was not off-brand for him.
LYDIA TENAGLIA: We pitched it to everyone. We went to this meeting at CBS with Les Moonves; we’re in this huge office, there’s Les, and he says, “OK, I like this. I’m going to set you up with these two development people to push this forward.”
Then he said, “Just so you know, this is CBS. This is the big time. Anything less than eight million viewers is going to be considered a failure.”
We all shook hands, went out on the street. Tony—
CHRIS COLLINS:—lit two cigarettes at the same time—
LYDIA TENAGLIA:—And he said, “Eight million people? No way. I don’t need that kind of pressure. I don’t need someone up my ass like that all the time.” He killed it.
We’d just spent time, $150,000 worth of development, traveled all over, went to LA, pitched everybody. We did exactly what he said he wanted, and he said, “Let’s just keep doing what we’re doing,” so that’s what we did. We kept doing what we were doing.
And then he made [the network cooking competition show] The Taste.
NIGELLA LAWSON: I really got to know Tony while doing The Taste. Such an unlikely program for him to be involved in. He’d been speaking to Kinetic, the production company, and the deal was, we would do it only if we were doing it together, and we were both EPs [executive producers]. Knowing that he was doing it, as far as I was concerned, guaranteed that it would have integrity.
I wasn’t particularly comfortable doing it, but I loved doing it, because I liked hanging out with Tony and Ludo. We’d often go out eating in between times, but Tony really needed to be alone and in his trailer a lot. The only time I saw him outside was when he was still smoking. You’d be filming and there’d be a relight, and he’d be editing a book or finishing something, writing something. He didn’t give himself that much time off, on purpose.
He was a very introverted person, which people misunderstood in a way, because of his facility with people, but he was always a slightly detached presence. Enormously friendly; he would look at you in a terribly warm way. And when he needed to pull back, I just felt there was something, like many introverts, he just needed a bit of space around him.
He was such a strange mixture between an extraordinarily measured person and sort of a manically obsessive person. I think that’s why he was always so fascinating. I always used to describe him [as] something like Gary Cooper mixed with Keith Richards.
I loved being in his company. When you’re young, what you want of people is that they’re funny and clever. And then as you get older, you realize kindness is important. But it’s not often that you meet people who are funny, clever, and kind. And he was.
Sometimes, as much as he could be, he was quite relaxed. I would like to think that he took for granted that he didn’t have to pe
rform in my company. I would say he was not a flirtatious person, but I also think I wasn’t a woman he needed to win over.
We talked a lot about things other than ourselves. We’d talk about books. And he always wanted to add things to his life. He was never closed off to the recommendation of a book or a film.
He—as I did—he liked being in the Chateau Marmont for a month. I think it gave him a certain sense of stillness, but he was busy all the time; we had very early starts. I love being busy and not having time to think about myself or life. It’s actually quite rare that you can do it away from home, but in a fixed place, for a month. It was quite a treat.
MIKE RUFFINO: Part of his deal with The Taste, you know, was he got September at the Chateau. So I would just clear the decks for September, and we would cram a lot in, including planning out most of the season for the show. A lot of dinners, and a lot of pool time, and a lot of whatever silliness we would get up to.
I think he was really riding the wave at that point. [With Parts Unknown], he really developed something that he could be proud of. And then, things like The Taste, he was just enjoying himself and getting a good run at the Chateau. There was nothing to complain about, you know? It seemed to me that that was about when he started to feel, at least, as much as he ever did, comfortable in his own skin, and with his own career, and his situation, instead of always having the feeling that it was too good to be true, that the rug could get pulled out at any minute.
PETER MEEHAN: I went to LA one September to interview him for an LA piece [for Lucky Peach]. There was something magical about walking up to the Chateau Marmont—you know, they give you that question like, “Who the fuck are you?” and I said, “I’m here to see Tony,” and they’re like, “Oh, sure.” And then you were in. And going up to his room, and him answering the door barefoot and asking, “Do you want a beer?” and just sitting there on the balcony, smoking a pack of cigarettes and drinking all the beer in his fridge, until the sun set.
NIGELLA LAWSON: I remember saying to him—because he would have the spaghetti bolognese [at the hotel] most nights, or an In-N-Out Burger—“Tony, the food is so bad here.” And he said, “If the food were good, it would ruin it. People would come here for the food. That’s not why you come here.”
I put my breakfast tray outside, and it would [stay there] longer and longer. And once it was up to about four trays, and I complained to him. He said, “Nigella, you’re getting the Chateau all wrong. Obviously they can’t do room service cleanup, but if you kill someone by accident, they will remove the body, no questions asked.”
SAM GOLDMAN: At his speaking gig at the Pantages [Theatre, in Los Angeles], there was a Q&A, and somebody asked him about that terrible cooking competition [The Taste] he was doing, and Tony said, “I have nothing to say, except that my daughter is not going to community college.”
TOM VITALE: I was with Tony and [cinematographer] Zach [Zamboni] in Paris, filming a scene for The Layover, and a couple of tourists came up to us and said, “Hey, aren’t you that guy from The Taste?”
Zach and I had been devoting our lives and careers to Tony’s shows, but we had nothing to do with The Taste, it being a studio show out in LA.
I was pissed at being interrupted while filming; not to mention that they knew Tony from a show I had nothing to do with. But the level to which Zach took it as a personal insult made the whole thing instantly funny, for me, at least.
38
“Push the Boundary Really Hard, Really Fast”
The Move to CNN
AMY ENTELIS, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT FOR TALENT AND CONTENT DEVELOPMENT, CNN WORLDWIDE: I came into CNN in January 2012. The prior year had been full of big breaking news stories—the Arab Spring, Fukushima and the earthquake in Japan, the tsunami, and I think there was a royal wedding that year—lots of big, driving stories that sort of kept people coming to CNN. But between those news stories, viewership totally dropped off. So it was a situation of peaks and valleys of viewership.
There was a recognition that something had to be created that would engage people, other than the headlines, because you could get headlines anywhere. The people who hired me had this idea that it should be original, long-form programming that was created by outsiders. The theory was that they had done a lot of interesting documentary-style programming at CNN over the years, but it was all done by the same people, more or less, from the same culture, who did the news, and therefore there was a sameness to it, if you will. Some of it was groundbreaking and award winning, but over multiple years, it seemed like it didn’t break through. And I think there was a recognition that a great deal of money was spent on it, and it was not really returning anything.
They had this idea that if they took some of those resources and applied them in a different style, looking for outside directors, and producers, and creators, they would be developing programs that felt somewhat different from the normal fare at CNN, and would attract people, engage people, and would become, in the best of all worlds, appointment television. That was my mandate.
It happened very early on that we reached out to Tony. And one of the biggest challenges for us was to figure out how to make this programming fit into CNN, and make it organic to CNN, but also to distinguish it from what CNN did every day. That was a hard needle to thread, because it had to fit in the zeitgeist, but it also had to be special and different. We landed on the notion of Tony, because he was a storyteller, a brilliant writer, a world traveler, a thinker, and those elements seemed to add up to somebody who operated in the same universe and came out with a completely different product or vision, but not too different.
We called him, and had a secret room at the Time Warner Center to meet him. We just thought we should be a little bit quiet. He was within inches of re-signing with the Travel Channel. And so, our luck, timing, good fortune—everything just happened in a way that could never have been orchestrated.
It was capturing magic in a bottle, in terms of our coming together. He told me that CNN represented, to him, an ability to stretch and do things in his work that he wanted to do but didn’t necessarily think he could do. Our view of the world, and our global reach, and our ability to get things done in crazy corners of the world, I think all those things helped fuel another level of his work.
EILEEN OPATUT: I’m so glad that Tony found a place that appreciated him, and allowed him to experiment even more, and recognized how much he wanted to explore, because he was so curious.
JEFF ZUCKER, PRESIDENT, CNN WORLDWIDE: I arrived in January 2013, officially. They took me through the plans for [Parts Unknown] in December 2012.
They had already bought the show, they were excited about it, and my job, frankly, was to come in and not screw it up. It was a whole new venture for CNN to move into original series, and Tony and Parts Unknown was the lynchpin of that whole idea. If it hadn’t worked, I’m not sure the entire “CNN Original Series” thing would still be on the air today.
LIZZIE FOX, NETWORK EXECUTIVE: I was hired at CNN as director of original programming. What sealed the deal for me was that my first show was gonna be Parts Unknown. I thought, Here’s an opportunity that would be so stupid to not seize on. So Tony actually changed the direction of my life.
CNN was zigging when everything else was zagging, and Tony was the face of that. He created the entire brand of that division, and everything kind of emanated from him and what he stood for.
ANDERSON COOPER: I was really kind of thrilled when he came, because I’d watched his show on other networks, and at the time, CNN was looking to try to diversify the range of storytelling that we were doing. I just thought it was a great fit.
He was a great storyteller. I knew that from the time I read Kitchen Confidential. To have a voice, and be able to write in your voice, and be able then to produce a television show that is completely in your voice, and is even shot in a way that complements, and is an extension of your voice, it’s a real achievement. It’s not an easy thing to do. Finding your voice
as a writer is one thing. Making that into television is a completely other thing.
JEFF ZUCKER: Parts Unknown made a huge difference for CNN. First of all, it brought in a different audience than the one that watched CNN on a regular basis. Its ratings were incredibly strong, so it became the most-watched program on CNN. It attracted new advertisers. It really opened up a whole new world for us: new viewers, new advertisers, and a new way people started thinking about CNN.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Tony was a huge mountain in this landscape. And that’s not to say that Tony was an angel, because he wasn’t—he was profane, and really out there. He would say these things that people don’t say in public. I couldn’t believe it when CNN allowed him to take his writing into a realm that none of us in the news division, or in the documentary division—we’d never been allowed to go there, and none of us have been allowed since. He carved out this special place where he could use language and observation and push it to an extraordinary limit that nobody had heard before on mainstream television. And yet it wasn’t insulting; he was very careful to be respectful, without being obsequious.
AMY ENTELIS: Certain people felt rather threatened by this new direction, and there was some backlash about Tony not being a journalist. He called himself a storyteller, not a journalist, and to some people, that represented something at CNN that might threaten the natural order of things. It takes some education, or I guess the word now is socializing, across a very broad organization, that was successful at doing what it did and didn’t see the need to do things any differently.
From our point of view, it was sixteen hours a year, you know? We weren’t taking all of CNN and throwing it upside down. We saw it as completely additive and complementary. It was sort of two sides of the same coin.
You know, Anderson Cooper went to Libya to do the civil war, and covered that gigantic story that we were all riveted by. Tony went in several years later and did that story, but he did it from a different vantage point. He talked to people who lived through that, and actually said to them, “Where did you live? How did you live? What did you eat?”
Bourdain Page 21