LYDIA TENAGLIA: I said to him, “You’re full of shit.” The subtext was, You’re yelling at us that the nature of our business and what you’re doing is preventing you from going to be happy now. I said, “You’re completely in command of your own destiny. If you really want to go, why are you standing here?”
CHRIS COLLINS: We’re in the upstairs of this bar, and I’m pretty sure there’s a couple listening, and some guys behind us, and I’m thinking, This is gonna end up in the papers, because he was wearing a jacket that said BOURDAIN on it, the navy jacket.
It got to the point where I was now uncomfortable with him standing in the middle of this bar and I said, “Sit the fuck down. Sit the fuck down, right now.” And he did. Then he fell apart.
LYDIA TENAGLIA: I think Zero Point Zero, me and Chris, the people he went out with on all these shoots, we were the long-term relationship that he was able to sustain, even though he yelled at us, and this and that. I don’t know if he was truly capable of having a relationship in which you actually have to attend, do the relationship, be present, deal with all the shit, all the good and the bad and everything in between.
We were, to him, like a surrogate family. He knew that when he was really hurting, or having a hard time, or angry about something, he could shit all over us. And he did, many times over the years. I mean angry, angry shit. Angry letters, angry phone calls, nasty lashing out, and it hurt at the time. It caused unbelievable stress and anxiety—almost like, Do we really need this kind of stress?—but somehow, we knew we were Tony’s family. We’d been together almost two decades, and who are you going to lash out to? You’re going to lash out to the people you feel closest to.
I think he always realized when he had behaved badly or pushed it too far, and he would be conciliatory, in his way. It was never, “Hey, I’m sorry I was a dick,” but he always came around in a different way. I don’t think he was good at self-reflection, but [he knew], There’s only so much shit I can put my friends and loved ones through; I’d better say something.
CHRIS COLLINS: There was a certain level of self-awareness; it didn’t necessarily mean he was gonna change how he acted, but it gave him a moment of pause. More times than not, he would—not so much apologize as acknowledge poor behavior.
I saw it countless times in the field with him—he shows up an hour later, sort of contrite, just to you, not in front of anybody else, and says, “I fucked up.” Doesn’t mean he’s not gonna do it again and again and again, but there was that sort of reflection.
Frankly, for me, it was part of his beautiful charm, that douchebaggery that manifested itself, that he could see through it, and apologize in his own way, which might be by sending a stupid fucking gift basket with fruit in it. He truly enjoyed that stuff. He liked the swag that came with some of what he did. He loved flowers. He wanted to do a gardening show. Maybe we should have done a gardening show; maybe we’d still be doing that gardening show.
51
“Embracing the Chaos”
Rome and Puglia
Tony and Asia first worked together on the Rome episode of Parts Unknown. The following year, they collaborated on the Puglia episode. After that, Asia directed and appeared in the Hong Kong episode, and she was central to a shoot in Florence, three weeks before Tony’s death, that was never edited into an episode. She was also slated to participate in a Parts Unknown shoot in India, in late June 2018.
JEFF ALLEN: The Rome and Puglia episodes were two totally different experiences of making TV with Tony and Asia. In Rome [in 2016], it was really challenging. It was our most ambitious episode to date. I mean, every episode ended up being that, so it’s not really saying anything, but it truly was. We had gotten all the specialty cameras, the biggest crew, and the most money we had ever invested in making the look of the show, with this Panavision kit, and grip trucks, and dolly tracks, and storyboarding out shots, and really going for the boldest look ever, and that was so exciting.
Asia was supposed to be our fixer on that episode, but the reality is, a lot of the time, the people who have the best ideas might not have the best tools to execute those ideas practically. And that was the case in Rome. She had incredible access to characters and locations and ideas of what to shoot. Tony wanted her to give that to us, and then also expected of her, maybe naively, to find out how to do it, but she didn’t offer that. She didn’t know us, or trust us yet, so she was being very kind of standoffish about volunteering information or people to help us out, and that made it incredibly challenging.
We ended up planning a whole backup show, in the event that all her ideas just might not work, because they weren’t happening, going into it. We bent over backward to make it all work, but we were terrified of her.
She is a fucking ballbuster. She’s very strongly opinionated, and Tony knew she was really special, and we had to treat her like royalty. So not only were we supposed to rely on her for all this stuff to make the show, we also had Tony screaming, asking for updates, because we had to make it perfect for her. And the real world doesn’t work like that when you’re planning a travel show, with all the insane shit we do. In the end, we made it work, but it came at great cost. To Asia’s credit, she ended up pulling together some amazing shit for us.
By contrast, Puglia [in 2017] was this magical experience. She was, like, our best friend, she was happy the whole time, and of course, Tony was in love and overjoyed that they were making a show together. And all that reverberated in our experience of making the episode. Puglia was insane for other reasons—southern Italy is extremely difficult to film in, because people aren’t on time, and nothing’s really planned until it happens, and we were filming with Francis Ford Coppola and his people, so the stakes were even higher. But Asia was supportive, and when shit would go wrong, she’d say, “Don’t worry. It’s gonna be fine. We’ll figure it out.” And Tony was supportive of us.
And shit went wrong. I mean, in all of my days of being a producer and director, I’d never lost a filming day until Puglia, because the fixer had promised us to film in this masseria. We get there, and we had the whole Italian film crew setting up dolly tracks, prepping lighting, and Zach is building an insane lighting grid for this epic feast we’re gonna have. We had invited fifty people to come, and everybody’s cooking food, and planning, and there’s dancers, and music. Guests are starting to show up, and then that shit gets shut down by the Italian equivalent of the FBI, because, apparently, the fixers had not brokered the right means of permission with the Italian government, and we had to cancel the whole thing.
I mean, we have only eight days to film an episode. Losing a whole day is insane, let alone a supercomplicated huge party, with fifty people, and guests, and food, and music. It was the scariest moment. It was fucking terrifying, and Asia and Tony were like, “This is hilarious. This is the best story ever. Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.”
Like, who are these people? Tony should have been furious at us, but they were incredibly supportive, and embracing the chaos, in a weird way that we had never seen before.
So that was different, for him to say, “Don’t worry. You’ve had the worst day of your entire life in production? It’s gonna be fine.”
We ended up pulling it together, at about two in the morning, at a different masseria, and people showed up, and it was fucking magical. That was the last time I worked with Tony and Asia together. I know things changed, but from my perspective, we went out on top.
52
“We Bolstered Each Other’s Incorrect Assertion That Asking for Help Is Somehow a Mistake”
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: Tony always struck me as very, very—as far as people I’ve interviewed go—very self-aware. To this day, I don’t know how much therapy he’d done.
JOSH HOMME: Oh, fuck. The amount of times we made fun of getting help in various ways. Talking about psychology together, like, “You’re a stranger, right? Can I give you some money? Will you listen to this? Do you have any training whatsoever? No? I’m in.” T
aking potshots, to make each other laugh, that are categorically incorrect, without a single right thing, necessarily.
I had this discussion with him about therapy. I had a bad experience as a young man with a therapist, and it’s terrified me from then on. He and I had talked about that. And we’re making fun of it. We bolstered each other’s incorrect assertion that asking for help is somehow a mistake.
Our hardships were strikingly similar, about feeling down and getting stuck in the molasses of depression. I’m glad I had this kind of existential relationship with him. And I miss it. And I also don’t think, in this context, he took any of my advice, because look what happened.
ALISON MOSSHART: How old was he when he became famous? He was quite old [forty-four]. So you’re always stuck in that time when you weren’t famous yet. You’re always stuck in whatever disaster of a life you had before that. That’s just who you think you are. You don’t just wake up and go, It’s all sorted out. It’s not. It’s even cloudier, because you’ve got all this, and everybody thinks you’re so great, and it’s just like, This is what kind of made me good, made me cool: having problems, having something to push against and fight against. You know: being broke, being high, being in a bad relationship, something. So there’s a tendency to repeat that, because you know that that works to get you to the next place.
PAULA FROELICH: I saw him a couple of years before he died, at an event, and he was just cordoned off by himself. Like, literally, they put him behind a velvet rope by himself. It was like he became the zoo animal, and he was so uncomfortable with it.
Being on CNN heightened his fame to a certain level where it became oppressive. I’m not blaming CNN. I’m quite thankful that he had the opportunity. But it is oppressive. Who the hell are you going to meet, you know? Like, how do you meet someone?
And then you had depressive tendencies, and you live a certain lifestyle that, to the outside, is everyone’s dream, and you can’t bitch about that, because they’re like, Oh my god, what do you mean? Your brand is being adventurous and super cool—you can’t ever let anyone not see that.
And then you’re traveling, you don’t even know what country you’re in half the time, you know. You know shit because you get the information packet the day before. And you try to prep by reading certain books, but then you’re traveling so much, you forget which book you’ve read. And have to be on. And being on is exhausting.
So, after shooting, you’re just exhausted, because you’ve just been filming for eight hours. And then you just want to go and have a cuddle or touch base with someone, and have comfort.
What was great about Nancy, and me, and Ottavia, was that he had a home base to come home to. If you don’t have that—we all absorb the energy around us, and who we choose to hang out with.
DAVID CHOE: I’ve done a lot of work on myself, and I’m not trying to be a detective, but it’s very clear to me what happened. He was very depressed; he told me he was depressed and miserable.
I don’t know very many people who are in the entertainment business, no matter how cool they are—and Tony’s up there with the coolest—who aren’t sick. You have to sort of be sick to be in this business. There’s a lot of narcissism, there’s a lot of ego, there’s a lot of “not enough.”
Is Tony, “the most interesting man in the world,” allowed to ask for help? Because the place he was at, when he died, he was pretty much a god. Is a god allowed to come down to the mortals and say, “Hey, guys, I’m like you, I need help”? That takes a lot of surrender.
MIKE RUFFINO: There was a brutal moment, in the last year or so, when Tony just outright said, “I have no friends.” And it just killed me.
I know what he meant, that he just didn’t have the opportunity for normal friendships. It just made me think about how much he did for me, how many people he was protecting and helping; that also is gonna alter any relationship at least a little bit.
It’s been a strange realization, to recognize how much normal friendship, that thing that didn’t fit, just got kinda chucked off to the side. These things that are interfering with a normal life, you just accept them, but they have this impact that you can’t change or predict.
People around him, myself included, would like to think that that’s exactly where we could have helped, but how?
DAVE CHANG: I was at a crossroads in my life. I told Tony I wanted to figure out how to start a family, I would love to be a father, all these things. I was asking him advice, and—it’s hard to even say—he said to me, “You’re going to be a horrible father. You’re going to fuck it up just like I did.” It was fucking hard.
I know he didn’t say that to hurt me. I know that it was him projecting, but it just crushed me. Then he went right back to talking about Asia, and I’m like, What the fuck is happening?
I don’t really remember too much after that. He didn’t know that he had hurt me, and I just tried not to show it. I think he was really talking about himself.
After that, he sent me an email, right when I got home, that said, “Be a fool for love, for yourself, what you think might possibly make you happy, even for a little while, whatever the cost or the consequence might be.”
All I ever wanted was his approval. And as Tony’s life got more and more insane, all I ever wanted was for him to be happy and to pursue what he wanted to do.
53
“Call It Impostor Syndrome, If You Want, but Tony Definitely Had It”
ALISON MOSSHART: Tony was like me or you, with real-life worries and issues and sadness. The guy who can figure out everything and is so incredibly observant can’t come across like he’s not, and like he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
It was incredible what he did for people. I always tried to explain to him what a gift he was giving, making people understand other people, other cultures; how important that was, the work he was doing. There was part of him that didn’t understand what I was saying. He didn’t feel any of that. He would change the subject. He wouldn’t want to talk about that. He couldn’t accept it. I think it was absolutely impossible for him to see it. I don’t think that’s totally unusual, but it was pretty extreme.
DAVID SIMON: I will say this: Tony did not believe, fully, any praise that was delivered to him unequivocally. I don’t think he ever heard me say how good a writer he was, and I told it to him routinely, when he would turn in work, or after he would come up with ideas, or after I’d thank him for this last season of this and that storyline.
I don’t believe it when people compliment me. It’s part of being a writer. You know your bag of tricks, and you know what you’ve done before, and you know what you can’t do or what you didn’t reach. You sit down at the computer and you start typing and what you come out with is 85 percent of your intention, because nobody can get everything. And deadlines—even good writing is abandoned at a certain point.
And so you’re not being grandiosely self-effacing when people are telling you you’re a frigging genius, you’re the best writer, this is the greatest—I love you, I love you, I love you. You’re saying, Calm the fuck down. Call it Impostor syndrome, if you want, but Tony definitely had it. Even when he was at the top of his game, he’d be like, “Ah, that was a shitty episode.” Which is how you have to be if you’re going to get better, or stay on your game.
I never got a sense of any level of self-loathing that I took seriously. I have all kinds of memories of beautiful and comically delivered self-loathing, and “I’m so full of shit, but nobody will catch me now,” laughing-at-himself sort of stuff, and I’d be lying if I said now I’m hearing it with a different ear because of his suicide. I don’t think so. It was delivered in such a way that it seemed like the very wit of mental health.
JOHN LURIE, ARTIST: I don’t think he knew really what he had. He did sort of seem to have a low self-esteem. Like, I don’t deserve this thing that I got. He had a thing—I wouldn’t call it self-hatred, but it was more like he felt he wasn’t so important. There was something else, a
lmost a saintliness, and I think that was why he was so beloved. I didn’t see it until I met him in person, but I think others just felt it off the TV. And what is weird, or unfortunate, is that I don’t think that he knew he had that. I can’t think of hardly anybody I’d rather have in my corner than him.
The last thing I ever said to Tony was, “It’s such a relief for me not to be famous anymore. I didn’t know I hated it when I had it, but it’s worse than drugs. It gives you this buoyancy that’s false, but you can’t explore your own soul and your own psychology.” And he said, “Oh, I know, I’m completely agoraphobic. I don’t like leaving the house.”
We were talking about going out to eat. And I said, “I don’t really want to go anywhere where I know anybody.” He said, “I don’t want to, either.” There was a pain behind the eyes, but I didn’t know him well enough to really see it.
He could have just disappeared for a couple of years. I’m sure he was polite to every fucking person who approached him, and that’s just exhausting. Each one of those fans—it takes a little tiny chunk of your soul. It gives you very little back, and takes something from you. And some sick thing in you wants more of it.
54
“We Should Do Something Together”
Kenya with W. Kamau Bell
W. KAMAU BELL, HOST OF UNITED SHADES OF AMERICA ON CNN: I was a comedian, not very successful, so there was a lot of sitting around, watching TV. I stumbled into that cable universe of No Reservations, Dirty Jobs, MythBusters—the kinds of shows that basically used to play on PBS, but the personalities are better, the hosts are better. They’re allowing themselves to have fun with it. I remember thinking, I’d like to have a show like that someday.
Years later, I’m sitting in the CNN offices, having a general meeting, and my agent said, “They have an idea for a show for you.” And that’s when they told me about the show United Shades of America. I remember thinking, Bourdain can pull this off. Like, it didn’t make him softer.
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