Tony said, “Well, I’ll take a picture with her,” but I, to kind of protect Tony, I said, “Why don’t you bring her in, you know? We’re here. Like, come, bring her in. He’ll take a photo.”
He looks at me, he says, “Who the fuck are you?” And I said, “Well, you should ask around, and someone will tell you.”
And Tony says to the guy, “That’s my friend, you know. I don’t want you to buy any more of my books, I don’t want you to watch the show . . .” And the guy says to Tony, “Well, you know, technically, I pay your salary.”
And I said, “You need to be careful about the next words that come out of your mouth, ’cause your life could totally change in, like, one word.” And I’m smiling, he’s looking at me, and he says, “Fuck you.”
And I grabbed his hand, pulled him this way, and put my thumb underneath his chin. And I’m pushing him backward, to walk him toward the security guy. I was like, “You’re done now.” But over my shoulder is Tony, trying to grab this guy, going—“Don’t you buy any books! That’s my friend!”
You know what I took from that? No one’s ever stood up for me before. It just wasn’t necessary, right? But here was this guy whom I’d now known for five years, maybe, and he was standing up for me, like friends do. You don’t know somebody until it all goes wrong. He literally had my back.
When you flash forward to the last year of his life, I was like, “Where’s the guy who had my back? You believe something else, and write something, but you don’t even call me?”
ALISON MOSSHART: It was really shocking and alienating for all of us when he did that. And all of us struggled with it, because we’d never seen anything like that from him. He was reacting to people whom he loved and trusted in different ways; that was shocking.
I didn’t know then how much he was pushing people out. The Josh situation, that one hit home, because that’s someone I know very well, and I know that he and Tony had been friends forever. That’s so not what Tony would have ever said or done one year before. None of us knew how to approach him after that. It was like, “You never even asked the other side. You never not ask the other side.”
HELEN CHO: That was a huge red flag. We had dinner when he came back from Bhutan, and I said to him, “How could you do that to a friend of yours, and someone you’ve known so long, who has been so loyal, without checking in with him first?” I was very angry with him. I asked him, “If you do something like that, what kind of message do you think that also sends to all the people around you who have been loyal to you? People who have been working with you for more than a decade? Those who would drop everything to be there for you?”
And he was defensive, a little bit, and said he had no choice. But this is the thing with Tony, he would be open to being wrong, you know? He never had PR, he just followed his instincts, and his instincts were usually mostly right. But he knew he was wrong, and felt bad for what he had done. And he couldn’t take it back, at least at the time, because of the manipulation and force of this woman—he just couldn’t jeopardize that. He couldn’t deal with that.
ALISON MOSSHART: I just thought, Tony’s going to get it together and apologize to Josh, and things will go back to normal. But he had to alienate everyone else. And that’s what he was in trouble about. That’s what he knew. He was alienating the people who loved him the most, who cared about him, his family, his friends. You know, when you go that far, you don’t feel like you can come back, and that is really, ultimately, what I think happened.
The trouble wasn’t true trouble. The trouble wasn’t going to prison, the trouble was, I’m embarrassed and I can’t turn around, you know. I can’t face it.
DEAN FERTITA: I could sense him trying to figure out where he was in his life, after his home life kind of dissolved. He was one of those guys—I never thought that he wouldn’t figure it out. He was always funny, he had a decent perspective on whatever he was going through. I did feel like he was searching, trying to figure out, What do I do at this stage of my life? What do I really want?
LYDIA TENAGLIA: We thought, We’ll catch Tony when he falls, like we always have. Right now, he’s fucking infatuated, knee deep. This was a really extreme case of it, but it was like, OK, he’s doing this now, but we’ll all be here to hold the big basket when he falls out of this thing.
49
“He Was Like a Young Kid in Love”
JARED ANDRUKANIS: Near the end, when he was in love, he would talk to me more about his personal life. Which he never did before. It was strange.
HELEN CHO: Tony would call me and Jon [Heindemause, Helen’s partner] to have dinner much more frequently toward the end of his life. He wasn’t in New York very often, but when he would come back, he’d text me: “Are you in the city? Do you guys want to have dinner?” It wasn’t weird for him to ask if we wanted to have dinner, but the frequency, the intensity, did alarm me.
We would go and watch movies at his place. He was really proud of that apartment; he wanted it to look like a hotel, like the Chateau Marmont. But I also saw it to be a lonely place. He would say, after we would hang out, “Thanks for the company.” He talked about how “a lot more people are asking me for pictures when I walk down the street.”
But, obviously, his relationship with a very toxic person—everybody wanted to intervene in that, everyone who knew him. He spoke so effusively about her to everyone around him, because he was trying to convince himself it was OK. Everyone knew that that was toxic for him. He knew that, too, you know? But there was nothing that anyone could really do. I had spoken to him about it. I know other close people had, too. It was something that I just knew he wasn’t gonna listen to. In fact, I knew he was gonna do the opposite, which is what he did.
DAVE CHANG: The last time I saw Tony was when Peter Meehan and I were getting “divorced” [over the fate of their business ventures]. Tony really mentored us, me and Pete. When we would have disagreements over the years, we’d always go to Tony, to be King David and to arbitrate.
It was spring 2017, right before Lucky Peach closed, and I remember he had just moved into the Time Warner Center, and we were trying to catch up for some time. We met at the Coliseum, which was a cook’s bar late at night, and in the daytime it was pretty empty.
He ordered the fucking weirdest thing—curry fries. Then we go to Porter House New York [in the Time Warner Center] for dinner, and I was like, “Tony, you’re living in a fucking prison.”
I could see how fucking weird and plastic his life was becoming. We sat down, ordered an incredibly expensive bottle of wine, like way more than I thought we were gonna spend, and I just started to go into detail of everything that was happening, and just how fucking unhappy I was. Then he starts to tell me about his separation from Ottavia, and he said, “Well, I’m in love again.” It was one of those moments where Tony’s so euphoric in something that you know that it’s irrational.
Man, he was fucking madly in love with her. Just the way he was talking about her, I was like, “Tony you sound like a fucking ninth grader! What’s wrong with you?”
But I wasn’t going to tell him anything. It was hard to criticize him, as a friend.
BILL BUFORD: My own take, just from glimpses, but they were kind of strange glimpses—Tony was insecure with women, and they brought out a kind of wild intimacy, brought out a kind of wild vulnerability in him, that his active, hyperactive, slightly-bordering-on-manic productivity would never suggest that he had. Tony kind of liked being an uncomfortable member of a male club. But, fundamentally, he had a very nervous relationship with women.
His relationship with [Nancy] seemed almost like she was his mother. When I met Ottavia, we were doing a library event, Tony, me, and Mario [Batali]. Tony was all excited by the event, and he was very excited about the fact, I think, that Ottavia was coming. I remember when he said, “I can’t wait for Mario to see Ottavia.”
And it was almost adolescent. It was certainly disjunctive. And connected to what I’d seen with his first wife,
I thought, This is a person who’s got a complicated relationship to women. And it doesn’t surprise me that they split up, just for the simple reasons of Tony’s life.
He was profoundly, darkly vulnerable. That was all I got from my little glimpses. None of those things are normal things.
NATHAN THORNBURGH: I remember when he first— We were in Catalonia, filming the [Roads & Kingdoms] series we did out there with him in February 2017. It was the first time he had talked to me about Asia. He started flipping through her Instagram and he was like, “She’s trouble.” Matt [Goulding] and I were just kind of looking at each other like, Are you fucking seventeen? The foment around her, I would say that was a noticeable change in him, and I had been working with him long enough to know that that was unusual.
JOSÉ ANDRÉS: He was in love. He was like a young kid in love.
DAVE MCMILLAN: He was an adult man who fell in love with a girl like a sixteen-year-old boy falls in love with the first girl who gives it up. That’s how it felt. We were in the car; Fred [Morin] and I were, like, rolling our eyes, and he was going on and on in the front seat. I was like, “What are you? Sixteen?”
My ex asked me, “How is Tony? What’s with that relationship?” Which, by that time, was all in the press.
I said, “I don’t know, man, but it’s fucking heavy. That relationship is so fucking intense, it reminds me of your first love of your life who really ripped your heart out of your chest.”
LYDIA TENAGLIA: He was emotionally immature. In eighteen years, he didn’t evolve much emotionally. He became this great cultural anthropologist whom everyone so loved, but fundamentally he was like a teenage boy with his emotional development. He’d get into these relationships and kind of become somebody else. His whole life he gravitated toward these extremes of high and low.
CHRIS COLLINS: He’d go all in. He was never going to have a consistent relationship. I mean, that’s not the partners he chose; that’s Tony. He wasn’t capable of engaging in what is necessary.
HELEN CHO: He was the most brilliant person, but when it came to love, it seemed like he was just back to being a seventeen-year-old kid who just couldn’t help himself and wasn’t gonna listen. He pushed people away, people whom he had been loyal to for years. He left his base. He was not in his right mind.
He knew it, too. He was a smart guy. He knew what he was doing, and he couldn’t help himself, and it was paralyzing to witness, and I felt very helpless.
I told him. I said, “You’re playing with fire. You know that, right?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I absolutely know, but what can I do? She loves me.”
That was worth burning everything else to the ground.
ALISON MOSSHART: In Tony, you’ve got this person who is so in control, so opinionated, so quick, so sharp, so observant, and at the same time, someone who is a fifteen-year-old boy, who’s so not observant of what everyone is receiving from you. This is extreme behavior. In a positive, it’s beautiful behavior, but there has to be some sort of a balance. There wasn’t.
Everybody’s guilty of this a little bit, when you start dating someone and you’re in love. You take on some things about that person; you sort of melt into one person. But there’s got to be separation. You are two people, you’ve got two life histories. Some things started to vanish with him. I couldn’t see him.
NARI KYE: The beautiful thing about Tony, he’s very passionate about something, and he really gives it his all, you know, in his work, in his writing, in his shows, in everything. And I think that’s what happened with this woman. He got obsessed, and the obsession got dark.
PAULA FROELICH: He needed and he liked being challenged in not-obvious ways. And he really appreciated and loved smart women. But we can all get in a rut. You find yourself, perhaps, hanging out with the wrong crowd. And it has nothing to do with the crowd. It’s really your masochism. There was a streak of masochism [in Tony], and it definitely plays into a long-standing trope of live fast, die young, that he would always claim to want, but then, if you dug deeper, he’d be like, “Yeah, I don’t. I don’t want that at all.”
I wish that Tony had been mature enough to know that he needed to be careful. Because I think he had always just had it, in a fucked-up way, handed to him.
DAVID SIMON: My time for being a friend of Tony’s where he could be a little intimate about what he was feeling personally was a very short window. I didn’t know him when he got married. I didn’t know him in earlier relationships. I knew this moment of him going to Italy and blowing up his life and falling head over heels. It felt like a glorious midlife misadventure. I wasn’t judging it. I get it. The power of the new romance is relentless. And it’s always there. And that it happened, it didn’t seem inevitable that it happened, but it didn’t seem implausible, either.
He said, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me in life. This is everything. She’s perfect.” I was hearing the power of new.
MARIA BUSTILLOS: The way he was in love, and described being in love, I would have been concerned if I’d been one of his friends. And I’m not saying that in retrospect; I thought it then [in February 2018], for sure. He didn’t go for five minutes without saying, “Asia thinks this” and “Asia thinks that.” He sounded like a person who was deeply infatuated, obsessed, even, and it struck me as a vulnerability in him.
Just the way that the idea of who he was when he was alone was so bound up with this lady, that was concerning. I would have been concerned.
DAVID SIMON: The new romance—all the places where you’ve shit the bed in life, those get scrubbed clean, and you get to start over and be charming and be charmed by the new person. I experienced Tony going through that with Asia, though I never met her.
She was the new person with him, and it was powerful, and it was kid-like, in a way that we’re all kid-like at that moment. Show me an eighty-year-old widower who takes up with a seventy-five-year-old widow at the nursing home in Florida, and he’s going through the same emotions while they play canasta in the community room. That’s just who we are; it’s what long-term relationships are battling all the time. You have familiarity and trust and history and love and shared sense of purpose, but you don’t have new. And the new person, you get to start painting all over again. And so I saw him in that moment where he was painting all over again with somebody he was in love with.
ALISON MOSSHART: It’s so strange. Tony—as Tony as he was in his work, and his actual personality, and what he’s like with his friends—everything about that guy was like a fucking dream. And then there was 5 percent of him, his psyche, that was strangely not matching with anything else. He wanted to be loved so much, but in this insatiable kind of way. There was that need, or that addict part, that he just couldn’t let go of, that came in to fuck up all the brilliant shit in his life, made it impossible for him to enjoy it.
Nobody’s perfect, nobody makes the right decisions all the time. There was just this slight disconnect, and it fucked him.
DAVE CHANG: He told me, “I’m done. I can’t carry the load for everyone; I have to make myself happy. I’m just going to disappear and move to Italy and grow old with Asia, and that’s it. I’m gonna let the guys at ZPZ know. I’m done with it all.”
50
“Every Good Band Eventually Breaks Up”
CHRIS COLLINS: In 2017, there was an epic, epic meeting between me, Lydia, and Tony. We went to some Irish bar. I’m sure at that moment, he was walking in to call it a day, and we were walking in with 100 percent clarity. Lydia and I stopped outside, looked at each other, and said, “If it’s done, it’s done. There’s going to be no tears. It’s going to be fine for all of us.” Because it had reached a breaking point. We had, for the better part of that year, been avoiding him as much as possible.
LYDIA TENAGLIA: Because he was behaving really poorly.
CHRIS COLLINS: It was not productive for business and, mostly, the relationship. There was no talking about stuff; and it had just become too much; and Tony had e
nough people sucking up to him where he could get that. I don’t think we ever fulfilled on that level, buying into the bullshit. Could we have been there for him more? Maybe, I don’t know.
LYDIA TENAGLIA: Kim [Witherspoon] had even staged an intervention with us and Tony, before this meeting, because things had gotten so bad. And then we had that meeting in the bar; he became really dramatic.
His opening salvo was, “Look, guys, every good band eventually breaks up. They just come to the end of their run. It’s just better to go our separate ways, and I think we’ve reached that point.”
Then he launched into all the shit that we didn’t do.
CHRIS COLLINS: It was just Tony unloading about stuff that wasn’t done, and what he needed, and probably part of it was right. I’m not saying we were perfect, by no means. There was a fair amount of jealousy, on his part, that we, as a company, had grown. He had grown out his work world, and we were no longer the center of each other’s worlds.
LYDIA TENAGLIA: This was somebody who, for whatever reason, was hurting emotionally in his own life, so it was, Now I’m going to shit on the people who I know will always be there, regardless of how poorly I behave.
So when he said, “We’re done, it’s over,” Chris and I are like, “OK, got it.”
CHRIS COLLINS: “We’re good.”
We had built this Tony thing together, and he built his Tony thing off to the side, and we built ZPZ into a bigger company. So when this came, we were ready for it, and I don’t think he thought we were going to be ready. And we weren’t bluffing when we said, “We got it, we hear you.”
And then Lydia and Tony, in Lydia-and-Tony fashion, proceeded to argue and argue and argue. Tony said, “I just want to go away, live in Italy.” Lydia said, “We support you. Put your jacket on, get up, and go.” He stood up, put his jacket on, and stood there. They kept arguing.
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