I was making sure that Tony saw that Asia had control, because there was no rational person in him at that point. I knew that my input was only going to be filtered through her, and I also wanted the episode to be good, and make sense.
56
“You Can’t Put Your Arms around a Memory”
New York, Asturias, Florence
The last few episodes of Parts Unknown that Tony shot, in the spring of 2018, included Indonesia; West Texas; Asturias, Spain; and Florence, Italy. The final new episode to air on CNN was “Lower East Side,” which used an experimental style to take a clear-eyed look at a fast-changing downtown Manhattan neighborhood where Tony spent time as a young man. It was shot in April 2018.
MICHAEL STEED: I wanted to break the fucking show, you know? We’re talking about an era in the Lower East Side, we wanted to stay true to that era, and try to make an art film that people needed to watch. All that music was chosen beforehand. The last track [“You Can’t Put Your Arms around a Memory”] was something Tony [chose].
The walk-around scenes, through New York—he hated fucking doing those scenes. It’s a trope. He walks as fast as he can, gets to Tompkins Square Park, we turn the cameras off, de-mic him, and he says to me, “Oh, I’m going to just walk over to Fourth [Street] and [Avenue] B and just look at my old spot, where I used to score shit,” and I’m like, “All right, dick.” And then, “Cameras, go.”
That little moment at the beginning, where I’m kind of on camera, asking him questions and he’s talking to me—that moment still really chokes me up. Once he freed himself from a mic, he was really just talking to me; it was true fucking vérité, that perfect sort of moment where he’s just revealing and vulnerable. Just telling a story, like he would at a crew meal or something.
JOHN LURIE: I had a dream that me and Tony were on the radio, talking about how to curb your Twitter addiction. And I came downstairs, opened my email, half-awake, and I saw [an email from Tony]: “Would you like to be on Parts Unknown? We’re doing the Lower East Side, nothing too sentimental.” He must have been writing it at the exact same moment as I was having the dream.
I wasn’t that hopeful . . . I didn’t think I was gonna dislike him, but I just thought, This’ll be good for me, to be on the show. Maybe I can get my paintings in there.
The crew was just— I hate having people in my apartment. There’s always that one asshole who needs attention, [but] they were just the nicest. I was happy to have them here, which never happens. I thought, Well, is that a trickle-down from Tony? Or has Tony lucked himself into this situation? And then he just kind of walks in, and I liked him immediately. He was just so unassuming. And he’s also kind of awkward, but kind of elegant at the same time, which I just love. And he has an apple juice. And then—he’s got all these people here who are basically working for him, and I’ve got my assistant—and the motherfucker goes and washes his own glass.
ARIANE BUSIA-BOURDAIN: We were in this old Italian restaurant [John’s of 12th Street], and I was at the table right behind him, and he was filming with this guy who painted with, like, one hair [Joe Coleman].*
JOE COLEMAN: We talked about the Lower East Side and danger; part of the thrill with copping drugs back then, too, was, you go into an abandoned building and the cops might arrest you, or you might get shot by someone who wants your money. And you can get a bag of poison that you go shoot up, instead of heroin. You have no idea what you’re going to get, but that is part of the excitement of being addicted to drugs. We both went through a lot of the same experiences. We learned about life from a period of chaos.
ARIANE BUSIA-BOURDAIN: It was kind of chaos, because there were a bunch of people coming into the restaurant at once, and people filming outside. But it was fun, and I think he was happier that I was there. And then after that, he took me to this little place, Trash and Vaudeville, and bought me some really high platform boots, and checkered jeans, and these really cool spiky choker things. When we got home, I was expecting my mom to be mad, but she was like, “Oh, that’s really cool.” So I ended up wearing that to one of my concerts.
NICK BRIGDEN: Asturias [Spain], with José Andrés, was the last episode I did with Tony [in April 2018]. I didn’t see it or notice it, until I got back home and really was looking closely at the footage, but there was—weariness? There was a weight that—when we were shooting that episode, it just wasn’t registering, because there was so much on my plate. It was a tricky episode to do, logistically. But looking back on it now—and I remember watching the footage and seeing—there was a weight. He was carrying something deep and internal. I think he was expending a lot of energy, just processing what was happening outside the shoot, in his life. And I didn’t know at the time what that was, but now, knowing, the pieces come together.
Also, we had put together some jiu-jitsu sparring in Spain, and he had wrenched his back, because some guys went at him really hard, and he hadn’t been training a lot. So, toward the end of the shoot, he was in physical pain, and certainly he needed to alleviate that physical pain with whatever he had on hand.
JOSÉ ANDRÉS: We were in this place where my father and mother [were] married, these beautiful lakes that are mythical in Asturias, where I was born. These beautiful lakes, and the sun was so high, and in the mountains, it is rare that the clouds and the blue sky all at once, and the cows. We were looking back at it all, but the cameramen wanted that view behind us, as we were talking to each other, so we were looking at the bathrooms. It’s TV, I realize. Tony was like, “What the fuck are we doing? Why are we talking about how beautiful Asturias is, and we’re looking at the ugly fucking bathrooms?”
NICK BRIGDEN: There were a lot of factors contributing to a heavy disposition on the Asturias shoot, but we had some great times, some really authentic, lovely, beautiful times. And Tony was never a physical guy, but he had a last scene with José, a big meal scene, we drank a lot, and it was just such a high note. We were getting him into the car to get to the airport, and he just gave me a big hug. That was the first hug I ever got from him, and that was the last time I saw him.
JARED ANDRUKANIS: The last time I saw Tony, he was really happy, I remember, because he was going to Florence in a few days.
SANDY ZWEIG: When we were getting ready to shoot the Florence episode [in May 2018], Tony asked what we could afford to pay Asia, and what did producers make? He was surprised, I think, at the number, how little that was. He then said he would supplement that, in order to pay her more. So I think he clearly was looking for ways for her to be involved, but I also think, ways for her to be gainfully employed.
MORGAN FALLON: I did not want to be on a show with Asia. I especially did not want to direct a show with her involved, because I knew it was basically her show. Tony had so empowered her that even shows that she wasn’t involved in, I was getting notes from her.
The psych rock segment [on the Parts Unknown Nigeria episode] was a perfect example of it. We were not talking about the problems [in Nigeria] so much, but about the tremendous depth of potential. And then, plastered in the middle, is this archaic scene about Nigerian psych rock that didn’t make a whole lot of sense in the context of the show, but it was a mandate that came down from Asia. And, by the way, it was super expensive to license [the music].
That whole genre of music was a reaction to the Biafran War, so we were able to make this narrative left turn into the fallout of the war, and a larger statement about antimilitary, antiestablishment [sentiment], and move that into the Kuti family. It happened on the fly; that whole scene came together in twenty-four hours, because we got a message from on high. And that proved the theorem that I didn’t want to do a show with her.
Lo and behold, the next season, I got assigned a show with her, the Florence episode. I said, “This is your show; you just tell me what to do.” That wasn’t a hill to die on. I had no particular attachment to Florence.
She’s super smart, and she’s a good character, and Tony was just frankly really into it. A
nd [at times], she came out with extraordinary venom, cutting down ideas, cutting down scenes that she had approved, characters that she had given the thumbs-up to, and was into, the day before. She was volatile, and that was really hard to navigate.
Luckily, my wife [Gillian Brown, who was the episode producer] and I ended up making this incredible show, the lost episode of Parts Unknown, which will never be seen.
At the end of the Florence shoot was the happiest I have ever seen Tony. That’s what fucking hurts so much. I said goodbye to him on this gorgeous sunny spring day in Santa Maria Novella Square. He was fucking glowing, gave us huge hugs. He had talked to my wife the night before and said, “I love doing this with you. We’re gonna do this many, many times again. I just signed for another three years.” And that was it. That was the last time I ever saw him.
JOSH HOMME: The last conversation, we were on the mend. We ended up talking about being lonely on the road. I said, “You know what? We should take our daughters on the road and let them experience our lives.” And he said, “Yeah, I’m gonna do that.”
And then he said, “I know it’s been difficult to be my friend lately. And the shoe will be on the other foot, I promise you, and I know you’ll be there.”
ALISON MOSSHART: The last email he sent me was like a week before he died, and it was really sweet. It was because Ariane came to my gig in Brooklyn, and then she went home, and she was really excited about it, and he said, “I’ve never seen my daughter so happy in my life.” That was the last I heard from him. I hadn’t heard from him in a number of months. Really, after the Josh [Homme] thing, I didn’t hear from him again.
DAVID SIMON: I will say, in my last conversations with him, especially that one at [Coliseum], where we drank ourselves silly, he was head over heels for [Asia]. And if it didn’t work out, it would put him in a trough, as it might have put anybody in a trough if you’re in a relationship with somebody whom you really care about.
I also know that he was a tangle of emotions about his ex-wife and his daughter. He had upended a lot, and he was spinning. He was living life at a high rate of speed, and at some pretty acute vectors, bouncing around. Grafted onto all of that was the travel. He was living life in a metal cocoon, traveling from one part of the world to the next. All of that can unground an even very sensible person. But I’m speculating now, and I’m doing it in retrograde, because I didn’t have any sense of it.
57
“All OK”
Alsace
In the first week of June 2018, Tony and the ZPZ crew, along with Eric Ripert, went to Alsace, France, to shoot an episode of Parts Unknown, directed by Michael Steed.
MICHAEL STEED: The first day, he was fine. We shot a fairly benign scene with Eric [Ripert] and Tony, eating the pot-au-feu.
The next day, I was shooting Tony and Eric riding through wine country, getting wide shots of those guys riding this fucking tandem bike. I have a picture of it on my phone, and every time I see it, I think, Oh my god, this must have been the final straw. It’s either crying or joking, right?
They had to wait, we had to set up cameras, go down the hill, stop, resets, resets, real big wides, so there was a lot of waiting and driving back to location. At a certain point, I see Tony, and he’s so pissed. He comes up to me and says, “I just want to go back to the fucking hotel. I don’t want to fucking miss lunch.”
And I said, “Tony, we’ll get you to fucking lunch, man. This is all you’re doing today. All you gotta do is ride this fucking bike down to the bottom of the fucking hill.”
LYDIA TENAGLIA: [Director] Mike [Steed] touched base with us right away, first or second day of the shoot. He said, “Something’s off, Tony’s off; he’s in a kind of dark mood. I don’t know what’s going on.” I texted him: “Hey, you doing OK, you wanna talk? If there’s anything we can help with, please let us know.”
He just wrote back, “All OK.”
MICHAEL STEED: The next day, we’re filming at this fourth-generation, five-star French restaurant where the grandma feeds bread to the geese every day. Before lunch, two beautiful women are giving these two old men [Tony and Eric] massages. It’s everything he likes, with a guy he really digs, and he can go take a quick nap before we set up for lunch. And he’s a grump. He said something to [producer] Big Josh [Ferrell] that was not jokey, kind of mean.
Then he has the meal, has a couple of drinks, and he’s talking to Eric about French food, but also about shitty New York hot dogs, and choking to death on a hot dog. There’s this conversation about death. Tony is being hyperbolic, crass Tony, and Eric is shocked. They’re playing their parts. The vibe’s not terrible, Tony’s on, it’s a funny conversation, and they have cheese. Tony goes out and smokes a cigarette, and he’s on the phone for a while.
TODD LIEBLER: At one point, he went outside, probably to talk on the phone with Asia, and Eric turns to me and says, “What is wrong? What is going on here?”
And I said, “I don’t know. I mean, he just had a massage, maybe bad things came out?” I was just very naive to what was going on.
MICHAEL STEED: He again says something kind of dickish to Josh, and I call Helen [Cho] and ask her, “Is there something up?” And she sends me the tabloid shit.*
HELEN CHO: Up to his very last few days, he was still posting Instagram stories of empty hotel rooms with soundtracks from films; he was telling about what had just happened, the [tabloid] pictures that came out. He posted a story with music from the film Violent City. It has a very ominous soundtrack. Essentially, it’s a revenge film, a story about betrayal and revenge.
TODD LIEBLER: The crew had lunch afterward, and then the whole thing with Asia and the photographs came up, which made it a little more understandable. Although I did think that the paparazzi can turn the story into anything they want. And I was a little disappointed that Tony would get so swayed. My first thought was that Asia just couldn’t handle that he was turning into this mushy little schoolboy, and she had to throw a wrench into the pot. Once I could see that the hurt was way more evident, I was more sympathetic to him.
Tony and Zach [Zamboni] had had a pretty good relationship. I felt that if Zach were there, he definitely would have reached out. But Zach wasn’t there, and I felt compelled to reach out to Tony that evening. I texted, just saying, “Hey, it looked like you had a tough day. I hope you’re doing OK. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” And I never heard back from him.
KIMBERLY WITHERSPOON: I still have the text. “I’ll be OK.” He wasn’t picking up his telephone when I was calling him. He just kept saying he was coming home that Monday, and we would get together and talk about it when he got here, and that he was OK.
MICHAEL STEED: Next day, we’re at this old French monastery and we’re gonna shoot a meal and talk about the weirdness of Alsace. The meal is fine, and then—I remember it vividly—after the meal, he’s looking over this valley; it’s just idyllic, beautiful, and he’s smoking a cigarette. I go out there and I say, “You all right, man? Are the tabloids just trying to fuck with y’all, or . . . ?”
He says to me, “A little fucking discretion. That’s all I ask.”
And I was just like, “Whoa, man, I just want to make sure you’re—”
He says, “Not you. Her. I don’t want to be on the fucking cover of these tabloids, and answer people’s questions.”
And that’s all he said. That’s the last I talked to him.
TODD LIEBLER: Friday morning, we were expecting Tony on set. We prepared the area, and we’re waiting, and finally I just got up and started shooting B-roll. And I’m just double-checking where we set up all the flags, and stuff for the lights. And then I get this massive punch in my shoulder, and I turn around, and Mike Steed is already walking away, but gesturing for me to follow him. And he turned to me and said, “Tony hung himself.”
And I asked, “Well, is he dead?” In that moment, I didn’t know what that meant. And then when it was clear what had happened, we all just started walking around
this location like fucking zombies, just completely lost and in shock. There was just disbelief and confusion. It was pretty fucking confusing.
CHRIS COLLINS: Mike called us [in New York] at three o’clock in the morning and said, “Tony’s dead, and he hung himself.”
JOSH FERRELL: We did HET [hazardous environment training] courses about kidnapping, about gunshot wounds, about getting sick, fires, catastrophes, monsoons—we talked about every single thing under the sun that could happen to us, as a crew, and this was the one thing we had never prepared for. That really fucked with me. I was always taking care of Tony, and that was on my shoot.
The day he died, the second scene we were supposed to do, and I had set this up—he had this thing about the Swiss, Switzerland; he feared them. So, with the permission of Mike [Steed], I organized a Swiss brass band to be playing music on the border, next to a bar in France where Eric and Tony were gonna be having a drink. They were going to be drowned out by the goddamn Swiss brass band. Wearing lederhosen. That was the second scene of that day. And Tony didn’t know.
So there’s all these little things I think about, like, If he had only known. Or, Did he know? But there was something about that shoot—like the tandem bike thing—it just makes it all worse. All that shit, it was such a comic gag, and it was so fucked up, in hindsight. Because he was so not happy.
TODD LIEBLER: As the elder person on the crew, and maybe the fact that I’m a dad, I definitely felt responsible for the crew. My default was to take care of other people. It’s easier, because you don’t have to deal with whatever it is inside yourself. I really didn’t fucking lose it until I got on the airplane back home.
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