Tony challenged us, and our systems, often. And he did get to do things that other people would not do, or didn’t have to do. It wasn’t that the standards were different, but they were necessitated by the kinds of stories he was telling and what he was trying to communicate.
JEFF ZUCKER: There were people who didn’t think that we should be doing this type of programming. There were some people who, perhaps, didn’t like Tony’s brashness and language. And I completely defended it the whole way, and stood up for it, because I thought that we needed to evolve. Tony was a great face for CNN.
If you’re going to hire Tony Bourdain, then you let Tony Bourdain be Tony Bourdain, and you don’t try to water him down, and you don’t try to change him, you know? We let him curse, and we let him have colorful language. We didn’t hire Tony Bourdain to be somebody else.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I think he was a genius. I do. If you just go back and read Kitchen Confidential or watch Parts Unknown or listen to the interviews he does, I don’t know how anybody puts those thoughts or words together and comes out with this just lacerating, and profound, and sympathetic, and eye-opening view of the world. It’s extraordinary, the thoughts that come into his mind, and how he bunches them all together in this very unorthodox way.
LIZZIE FOX: In the beginning, I think he was really wary of all of us; he certainly wasn’t an open book. He carried over a little PTSD from Travel Channel.
We realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t about the food. ZPZ had it down, they knew how to do the food porn, and it was gorgeous, but you were always so much more interested in the conversation at the table. We wanted him in the journalistic mode, to make sense next to Anderson [Cooper] and Wolf [Blitzer]. Even though he never called himself a journalist, he was, so I think we always envisioned it in that way, and the food was the cherry on top.
SANDY ZWEIG: He was so much more engaged in Parts Unknown, engaged in the selection of locations, and just all around.
MORGAN FALLON: Immediately, we were all just making the show that we always wanted to make. We could really dig in on the cinematography, the identity issues, the global content. We had all the things that we could always fall back on, the food and the whole bag of tricks we had from No Reservations were always there, the world had just completely opened up, and that was awesome.
LIZZIE FOX: He wanted to push the boundary really hard, really fast. I never felt like I was duped by the locked cut, where I missed something and then he tried to sneak it in. He was like, “This is what I want, let’s go from here,” which I appreciated, because then you can sort of refine and position it. I always felt it was my duty to be the advocate for him, internally.
The first episode that I remember fondly was the Japan episode, because that was really pushing some boundaries. It was season 1; we were still figuring it all out. I loved him for it, but it was such a bizarre scenario. I remember standing in my office, late at night, on a phone call with standards and practices, saying, “So, the nipple pinch is not OK, but the spit in mouth you’re good with?”
AMY ENTELIS: That particular episode, we had many, many, many rough cuts, and it went back and forth for a long time.
LIZZIE FOX: It’s funny, because Tony was awkward, very socially awkward. That’s where I give a lot of credit to not only Tony’s capabilities, but also ZPZ’s production of him and editing of the stories. If you let that live the way it was shot in the field, he wouldn’t look nearly as charismatic as he did. He had it there, but that’s editing and producing there, that combination.
TOM VITALE: He was just so good at being in front of the camera, partially probably because he was so uncomfortable with it. It kept him fresh. If he’d liked the attention more, I think he would have been less authentic. If he hadn’t had those demons, it certainly wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did. He hadn’t crested yet.
AMY ENTELIS: There was a certain awkwardness to him. I think people at CNN were intimidated by him, and I think he was intimidated by the people at CNN, but I think there was a tremendous amount of mutual respect. Tony was sort of quiet and wide-eyed around CNN, but I think it came from a great deal of respect, for knowing that he got to go around the world in a way of his own design. And the people whom he knew at CNN, and had known before he came, or got to know once he was there, I think he had a healthy understanding that they occupied the same terrain, but what was asked of them was completely different.
LIZZIE FOX: It felt like he was always a collaborator, even though he came to it with such a strong point of view. He knew what he wanted, but he also understood that someone with an outside perspective, who hadn’t been in the trenches, might have a good idea or suggestion, and that we could work together to make sure it was the best it could be. It was the most gratifying time of my career.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: The thing that was really striking to me [about his television work] was just the artistic ambition, frankly. Tony was aiming very high, and he surrounded himself with a lot of people who were really good at what they did, and who spoke a similar aesthetic language. When you watch the show, all that ambition is manifest on the screen.
LIZZIE FOX: You can get so stuck in the way you tell a story, especially in documentary, where you can do interview, archive, verité, interview, archive, verité. He was able to make minifilms out of these episodes, over and over, every single time, and prove that it can all exist under the banner of documentary.
That instilled in me a sense of, “Fight for the creative risks you want to take, because they’re worth it.”
JEFF ZUCKER: Tony Bourdain never wanted to be a company man, and yet he was always there for the company. He was always there whenever CNN needed him, whenever we called him for the upfronts—the annual presentation for advertisers—or when we needed him to do an event for us. You know, he could be a little prickly from time to time, but in the end, he always came through.
AMY ENTELIS: Tony always went along. We were always mindful of not asking him too much, because, if you know Tony, you know those are not his favorite things. I remember standing around with him at all those occasions, and he was not a glad-hander, by any means, but he knew the drill, and he pulled it off every time.
We never went with him anywhere. We had a very strong understanding that that wasn’t the way he envisioned his work. There was no hanging around the set for CNN. We were fine with that, but when we were a couple of years in, we wanted to figure out some way to celebrate him. I remember looking at the shooting schedule, and I knew that we wanted Jeff [Zucker] to come, and I knew that we couldn’t go halfway around the world and back in three days, so it was just sort of fortuitous that Havana was on the schedule.
We had arranged a dinner at a restaurant, in a sort of a dilapidated, beautiful mansion. It had a roof bar, so we went up on the roof to wait for Tony and his team. There was a band playing up there, and this beautiful sky, beautiful view of Havana, and Tony and the group sort of trudged up these long staircases to come to the roof. And I remember him looking around, and we were all drinking by then, and he saw Jeff, and he saw me and Lizzie, and he said, “Oh my god, am I getting whacked?”
And I think Jeff looked at him and said, “No, asshole, we’re here to celebrate you.” It was really a sweet moment.
So we drank on the roof, and then we went down into this magnificent dining room, and we had an incredibly wonderful dinner, and went out after that to a club and listened to music. And that was it; the next day, they went off to shoot, and we went sightseeing.
I think he was moved that we kind of picked ourselves up and went to Havana to say, “We love you, we appreciate you, and we thank you.” I think he got it. And more than that, I think he probably appreciated that we didn’t hang around after that.
39
“I Really Wasn’t Doing It for the Cronut”
Tony Tries a Talk Show
On July 25, 2013, Tony sat in for Piers Morgan on his live evening broadcast on CNN.
AMY ENTELIS: It was defi
nitely not an audition. I think we understood that what Tony did was completely different from what somebody who does a studio show does. It was more a matter of exposing him to our audience.
JEFF ZUCKER: [Having Tony guest host for Piers Morgan] was to increase his profile; he was still a relatively new face for the traditional CNN audience, and, look, I don’t know that we thought it was a formal audition, but on the chance that it caught fire, you never know, right? At the end of the day, I think it was clear that Tony wasn’t gonna give up his day job to do that on a full-time basis, and it turned out to just be a good promotional stunt.
DAVID SIMON: I know he couldn’t say no to himself, in terms of adventures. He had me come up one time at CNN. He was filling in for Piers Morgan.
I get this call from Tony. He’s like, “You’ve got to come. I need good guests. I want to show them that I can do this, because maybe I’ll become a CNN anchor.”
I said to Tony, “Motherfucker, you’re doing the best journalism I’ve ever seen, traveling around and examining people and food. Why would you give up that gig, which is so beautiful, and so you, to be some dickhead talking head?”
He goes, “I just wanna try. You gotta come up.”
I said, “I’m in Baltimore, I got nothing to sell.”
He said, “I got Cronuts”—you know, these fucking Cronut things that everyone was chasing in New York. He goes, “Yeah, I got a box of them. I’ll have them here for you.”
I go, “All right, sold.”
The planning period was rocky. At one point, Tony pushed back against the lighthearted nature of producer Shant Petrossian’s suggestion for a Cronut-tasting segment, emailing him, “I may as well just go full Roker and put on a frilly apron, interview a guy dressed up as a seal, and fuck a rolling donut.”
SHANT PETROSSIAN, PRODUCER: I do remember that email; I do remember the shock.
In hindsight, he was absolutely right. As producers, we think we know best. It’s important to get the hosts to weigh in. He went to an extreme to prove a point. He knew what he wanted. In the end, he did enjoy himself, and we produced a good, solid hour of television.
We had four or five other guest hosts in for Piers that year. Every host came to the table with opinions. They all wanted to bring and do so much more than we could do. We had Rosie O’Donnell, Matthew Perry, Regis Philbin, Jane Lynch, and Harvey Weinstein, who threatened my family at a meeting across the boardroom table.
About Tony, I remember thinking that he was difficult, he was opinionated, all those things, but the day of the show, everything came together. And Parts Unknown was kind of a hero moment for CNN.
My favorite part of that day was when Tony interviewed Eric Ripert. Eric—there couldn’t have been a nicer person on the planet, and everyone knew Tony was tough, and I was like, How are these two guys best friends?
DAVID SIMON: I really wasn’t doing it for the Cronut. I couldn’t say no to Tony. So I get up there, I walk into the greenroom and Eric Ripert and Mario Batali have their faces stuffed full of Cronuts, and they’re just eating them, one after another. They’re rushing, makeup, they put us onstage.
He had me on with [the late New York Times media columnist] David Carr. The way he got us both to talk about bullshit! I have no reason to do talking head stuff; I come out of my hole once every couple years to do publicity. If I’m not selling something, I don’t want to be on CNN, doing two or three sentences about the NSA stuff that was going on. I’m like, What the fuck am I doing here? This is what I got on an Amtrak for?
I go back into the greenroom, and there’s an empty box of Cronuts. And I go, “OK, where’s the rest of the Cronuts?” And Dominique Ansel goes, “We don’t have enough. We promised the studio audience.”
“What the fuck do you mean, you don’t have enough?” So they bring out one Cronut, and we split it. I had actually been in an argument with David Carr before, over some column he wrote that I was in, but we actually bonded over being fucked out of our Cronut. It was probably the best moment I had with David Carr.
I get on the train and write this essay about betrayal. “Motherfucker, you owe me a Cronut.” And Tony wrote back. He had no idea we were fucked out of the Cronuts. First he tried to blame the crew. And then, “I’ll get ’em mailed to you.” And then, “No, we can’t mail them to Baltimore.”
I never got the Cronut. In the end, never mind the stupid pastry; being able to banter for a whole day in prose writing with Tony Bourdain was the most fun I had all week. It was probably worth the trip to New York alone.
40
“Middle-Class White People Going to Poverty-Stricken Parts of the World . . . without Being Dicks about It”
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Maybe around 2015 or 2016, I suddenly had a whole epiphany about war, and about humanity and relationships and marriage and sex. This is something I’ve covered all my life, war and the consequences. I was always hearing terrible stories about all these Syrian refugees, from the raging war there, having to flee their homelands and come to refugee camps, and living cheek by jowl. Yes, they were being kept together body and soul, but what about their humanity? How do the women fare? How do they keep their marriages going when they’re living in a tent with maybe five or six of their children, or in a metal container, with no privacy?
So that was the nugget of my exploration. I tried to persuade CNN and others to do it, and it took a long time.
One day I said, “Look at the way Tony Bourdain does essentially what I do: he’s a foreign correspondent, he goes around the world, and tells his viewers stories, through the paradigm of food and community. I’m going to tell this story by going around the world and explaining what it means to be a woman.”
So I took that concept to him. It was actually very informal; I wanted his advice. We sat at this beautiful bar at the Surrey hotel [in New York], the Pleiades, and talked for about two and a half hours. He loved the idea, and once he got behind it, I was able to take it back to CNN, and people had a new sort of respect for the idea, and knowing that his company wanted to produce it just gave it a whole new life.
AMY ENTELIS: There was Christiane pitching [Sex and Love around the World] to me, and then she said, “Oh, and by the way, Tony wants to do this with me.” It was a fresh idea, it was a hard thing to do, but based on what Tony had done and accomplished so far, it felt like it was an obvious continuation of Parts Unknown.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: We green-lit the series, and we did six parts, in six different cities around the world. I attribute the fact that it came to fruition to Tony and his belief in this, that he put his name to it. It was great to have that kind of validation and to know that he liked it.
MARIA BUSTILLOS: He was such a symbol of how Americans would maybe like to be better than they’ve been, vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Not just going to the George V [hotel, in Paris] and trotting in front of the Vermeers, but trying to understand the world. Learning how people live, in a place where they actually live; hanging out with people who live in that place.
SAM SIFTON: From the point of view of cultural journalism, which I think is really what he was doing, it’s pretty revolutionary. He was performing a kind of reportage that allowed him to use his character to achieve a kind of mass success, but really what he was doing was reporting. And it really wasn’t about the food, it was about the culture. And he was able to tell stories that I think others would have had a hard time telling, and he told stories that others haven’t told, certainly not on TV.
I think there’s a kind of travel that is embraced now that is curious about world culture, and curious about new flavors, and is both of those things without being disrespectful. And because of the mass appeal of his shows, he can be credited with some of that. I think middle-class white people going to poverty-stricken parts of the world and experiencing delicious food and incredible hospitality without being dicks about it, that’s a testament to his work, if it’s happening more, and I think it may be happening more.
CHRISTIANE AMA
NPOUR: He was an observer of the human condition, and he used food to be able to crystallize all that. By taking that notion around the world, and humanizing people around the world, particularly in this era where, in the West, the idea of the other, the foreigner, is suddenly so politically toxic—he, without being didactic or pedagogic, made people from all over the world and their culture and their food and their conversation and their traditions relatable. He showed a whole generation of Americans, and CNN’s global viewers, that we’re all essentially the same.
41
“It Was Too Much of a Dream”
The Bourdain Market
For a roughly five-year period, Tony and a small team of designers and investors worked toward building an international food hall in New York City. As Tony said to the food news website Eater, “I’ve long felt that we should have the kind of delicious, diverse food centers that Singapore (for instance) enjoys. And, in fact, it is my hope that an important component of this project will be representatives of Straits hawker masters. My likes are pretty well known: dai pai dong in Hong Kong, Boqueria in Spain, hawker centers in Singapore, street tostadas in Ensenada. To the extent that I can help bring those things home to New York, along with a truly interesting collection of homegrown innovators, I will be very, very pleased.”
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: The market was actually part of my pitch to The New Yorker. I said, “Here’s this guy who, presumably, could have put his name on restaurants a hundred times over, and never did.”
ROBIN STANDEFER, DESIGNER, PARTNER, ROMAN AND WILLIAMS: For [partner] Stephen [Alesch] and me, the market represented something that we always wanted to achieve—this strange hybrid of a punk reality and a commercial and nurturing ability to be communicative and sort of public. Those things are often in conflict, and Tony merged them in the most extraordinary way.
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