MICHAEL STEED: I qualify this, knowing there’s nothing I could have done, but in retrospect, I wish I had talked to him more. I’m a believer in chaos, so two more seconds with him, and he doesn’t decide to walk into a bathroom and do what he did. I wrestle with that.
After his death, this thing kept rolling in my head, where it’s like, I think I killed Tony. It was always kind of a joke, Which producer kills Tony? Or, Which director kills Tony? But it’s me.*
58
“It’s Hard to See Things as They Really Are”
MICHAEL STEED: Tony was as depressed as anyone with his eyes open. If you travel the world and you see shit, if you’re not depressed on some level, you’re a fucking sociopath. He was a weird combination of really self-involved but an empath, which is why people fucking loved him.
MORGAN FALLON: It’s hard to be around someone of such extraordinary stature, such a high-powered mind, and be able to see things clearly. It’s kind of like how a neutron star will bend light; it’s hard to see things as they really are.
LYDIA TENAGLIA: I always suspected that we would get a call that Tony died. I didn’t think it would be by his own hand. I thought it was going to be an accident, or that he had a heart attack. I did not anticipate “he hung himself.” That was hard to understand.
CHRIS COLLINS: We got lulled into what we experienced for two decades; we knew how this thing went down. We understood [his relationship] would end, and there would be a blast zone, and a number of people would be in that blast zone. We would do what we always did: you wipe it off, you pick him up, and you move on. We didn’t get the opportunity.
I didn’t believe that Tony had the ability to do what he did. I did not see him possessing that kind of facility to end it himself. He just wasn’t that guy, and I don’t even know who that guy is, but I knew my friend Tony was . . . there was a certain narcissism that would not allow him to do something like that.
LYDIA TENAGLIA: He never liked looking like a rube. I don’t know. Who knows? I think he was profoundly hurt, and profoundly disappointed, and profoundly humiliated, and he probably had a moment of epiphany, that he had just fucking leveraged his whole life, his reputation, his words, his family, his money. I think it was just kind of like, I’m done, I’m exhausted.
CHRIS COLLINS: It’s an inability to break. He did not die of a broken heart. He would still be here if he allowed his heart to be broken, I think. That’s what you do, you break and then you mend, and he couldn’t break this time.
JARED ANDRUKANIS: He was always a good time. Like, even if it was a bad time and shit was a mess, it’s still going to be a good time because he’s there. He’s going to find some sort of dark humor in the most terrible situation. Crack a joke. Say something. And that made me feel like we were indestructible as a team. Like no matter how bad it got, we were gonna be OK.
But something changed at the end. And I didn’t like him as much, as someone who was madly in love. I didn’t like seeing how it was changing him and how he interacted with us.
I liked him better when he was just kind of living his best life and looking in the rearview mirror like he stole something. This beautiful life that he had, something people would dream of, and no one else could do it but him. A “slit my wrist” love story is just the shittiest ending to it all.
The wheels flew off. One of the laments, for us, was we were just getting really good. He was just getting really, really good. But I guess the thing he was missing, the work could not provide it for him.
NICK BRIGDEN: He had stepped in quicksand; it was apparent. When he did get sucked down very quickly, and took his own life, it was shocking. It was surreal, because he was such a fucking fighter.
NARI KYE: Honestly, when I first heard about it, I was like, This is foul play. I thought someone had murdered him, because it was so unlike him. It was on a shoot, and he was someone who was so perpetually professional. The guy who’s an hour early for call time. It was so unlike him, with Eric in the next room and his crew staying at the hotel.
We would always joke that he was like Keith Richards. Someone who’s smoked crack and done heroin and traveled three hundred days a year and, you know, eats butter for a living. He felt immortal.
MATT WALSH: I thought he was invincible. He was such a powerful mind, such a strong spirit, I thought he was bulletproof.
DAVID SIMON: When it happened, it made no sense. I’m certainly not of the opinion that anyone is obliged to pursue the logic of any relationship with anybody, based on the idea that somebody’s going to take their own life, whether those are the stakes. Those can’t be the stakes for anybody in any personal relationship. Nobody’s responsible for anyone.
If [his relationship] was ending, or it wasn’t on the terms he thought it was, or if something had changed, he was in some hotel room alone, and he feels a level of exhaustion for having committed so deeply and having made choices in life—he’d expressed some pain to me about where it left his daughter and him, and his struggles to work back toward her, to right the ship. He was not oblivious to it. He said, “She’s mad at this, and she has a right to be. I have to work with that. It’s my job.”
ANDERSON COOPER: My brother died by suicide when he was twenty-three and I was twenty-one. I’m aware of the punch-in-the-gut feeling of this information. Very rarely am I surprised by something that somebody does. I think we are all capable of anything.
I know with any suicide, there are people who are just stunned by it and say, well, “This person would never have done that,” or, “He was the last person I would think would do that.”
That’s what people think, but in reality, a few things going wrong in a certain order can result in somebody doing something that most people would never think that he would do. And so, when I heard, I understood. As somebody who’s spent a lot of time traveling around the world, with and without camera crews, and spent a lot of time in hotel rooms by myself, in places far away, I understood how that can happen. And it just made me so sad.
JOSH HOMME: When I saw that fucking [tabloid] photo, and I didn’t reach out—boy, I really wish I had. I was so mad. Because it was like [snaps fingers], “See?!” and not like, “I told you so,” but like, “Now you know.”
BILL BUFORD: When these [paparazzi] pictures appeared, I just thought he would plummet, he would just plummet. He’s publicly exposed. He’s publicly vulnerable. And it hit all kinds of things that I don’t understand, but I think I’ve glimpsed that he kind of—he short-circuits.
DAVE MCMILLAN: Listen: if you’re in the best mood, if you’re at a great place, and this person you deeply love cheats on you, and you’re just a regular person, and only five people know, it’s fucking awful.
He not only got cheated on; he got cheated on and ten million people are gonna know tomorrow. The social pressure of that makes it super easy to put a rope on that beam and to jump off that table.
NANCY BOURDAIN: Tony could be very possessive of— He was a control freak. He just—he liked control. That was the only thing I have to say about his suicide that makes sense, the control aspect.
JOEL ROSE: I knew him for so long, and I know that he would want to be in control. And he was in control. But I’ve always had, since it’s happened, I’ve had this overwhelming feeling that he committed himself to this, the act of taking his own life, and then said, “Oh, fuck, what have I done?”
There was throwaway stuff, he’d make dark jokes, but when Kim called here to say that Tony was gone, it was like, “Tony who?” It seemed so unreal and so foreign to me. I had had an email exchange with him the day before, about the dedication to the book, and he seemed fine. The world is not better off with him not here. It’s just not.
JOSH HOMME: I’ve said so many times, “I wish he’d called me,” but it wouldn’t have been in character for him to call me in a moment such as that. It wouldn’t have been in the white-hotness of that moment. It was always after exiting, like, “I didn’t have reception when I was totally depressed. Bu
t I got one bar now, and I’m feeling a little better. I’m feeling good enough to say something out loud to your ears.” And clearly that was the case for everyone who didn’t get a call, which is everyone.
He banded [all] these people, without banding them together. Maybe that’s the problem. I didn’t meet lots of these people till it was too late. Everyone had this striking similarity, that they felt they could have done something if he— No one was sharing info about him. And so, he had access to us all, we had access to him, but not each other. And so, there was no life raft. He was in a rowboat alone. And I fucking hate that. Because he wasn’t alone. He just felt he was alone. He could have weathered that storm if he was on the life raft that he actually built.
ASHA GILL: He would only ever call me out of the blue when things weren’t going so OK. The calls would be real Maydays. So I’m kind of fucking mad that, you know, there was no Mayday.
He just never wanted to be a burden on anyone. He was always just— He hid his pain very well. You could see it in the quiet moments. He walked a tightrope between both edges, and that’s where his genius and his creativity was. Sometimes he could go a little bit too much into the sort of Edgar Allan Poe side of life, and then he could go in the others. And I’d see him finding the greatest joy in the simplest of things, and the simplest of things kind of catching him.
It was like he was trying to fill himself up with the world, which is one of his most beautiful traits—and I have not seen it in anybody else—just this childlike curiosity about things that hurt, as much as things that are tasty or beautiful or whatever.
And I still find it very hard that he took his own life. He kicked heroin; he went through fucking hell. He’s a man of steel inside. Like, the grit to fucking find a way, man’s not going to beat me down, I’m gonna find a way and do it myself.
For him to be, without the use of any narcotics or anything, driven to that point, I think that whatever was going on—he would have had to be at such a compromised place, with such massive conflict within him.
SANDY ZWEIG: I just feel like it was an impulsive decision. And Tony could be hyperbolic and sort of overly dramatic. I feel like there was some aspect of that, an impulsive decision that, in another moment, he might not have made.
PHILIPPE LAJAUNIE: When Tony died, it was very surprising, but at the same time, once I learned the background, then I was not surprised at all. Let’s put it this way: no one can use drugs the way he was without being scarred deeply; one of the consequences is a lingering depression. Using drugs at that rate, and that kind of drugs [that Tony used] will alter your mental chemical balances, and will generate depression, from time to time.
FRED MORIN: He had just a weird darkness, you know? I don’t think he was afraid. I think he had a metaphorical cyanide pill, under his tongue, at the ready, all his life, since he was very young.
DAVE MCMILLAN: When we were in Newfoundland, one of our best friends, John Bil, was in the end stages of cancer. So, of course, Fred wasn’t in the best spirits when we were in Newfoundland, because he said, “What if John dies when I’m gone?”
We talked about that with Tony, and Tony was dismissive, completely, about the whole thing. He goes, “Ah, fuck that. I know what I’d do if I’d been given a few days to live: heroin. Give me a terminal diagnosis, and I know where I’m going.” It was . . . insensitive.
JOHN LURIE: I wish I could have gotten to know him better, because I could have helped him, I think. I saw a thing that he was hiding, kind of a sadness, a thing—but he wouldn’t let you get too close. There was just something behind the eyes, you could feel it, you know. But I would have gotten there. I mean, I’m relentless with that shit. I would have told him to run. At least to take some time [off]. But he almost couldn’t go anywhere. I mean, they would know who he was everywhere.
JASON REZAIAN: I always think of Tony as a role model of somebody who started living his best life in middle age. The truth is, that there’s a lot of people like that, but we just don’t hear about it as much, right? We are so attracted to youth.
I can’t pretend to know what led him to take his own life. Like anybody else, I have consumed lots and lots of analysis. I’ve purposefully not taken part in creating any of that analysis. What I preferred to analyze was the impact that he had on us, but also on Iranians, and other people whose voices he amplified. You get the sense that his life had a lot of chapters, and the chapters that we’re associated with, I really hope that when he pondered them in the moment, and in retrospect, he felt really good about them, because he should.
W. KAMAU BELL: The last time we talked was in Nairobi, before we went to the airport [after wrapping the Parts Unknown Kenya episode]. We had different flights. He gave me his number and said, “When you’re in New York, look me up. We’ll go out to eat.”
I didn’t want to be the guy who’s, like, actually taking him up on it. Now I feel I should have been the guy.
KAREN RINALDI: Loneliness kills. And you’re thinking, how can you be lonely if you’re beloved by all? He managed to cross all boundaries; that’s what was amazing about Tony: Black, white, straight, gay, blue, red, anywhere in the world, he was able to cut through all that divisiveness. If you’re that person, which would speak to a certain comfort with who you are, how does that person not reconcile with his sense of self and value in the world? And sometimes I wonder if he just had a moment where he’s like, you know, fuck everybody. Because Tony also had that . . . just like, “You know what? I’m outta here.”
I interviewed him for my book [(It’s Great to) Suck at Something] in March 2018, just three months before [he died]. I was trying to unwind what it was to be cool. I went to the coolest of cool cats I’ve ever known, knowing that underneath it, I always thought of Tony as being incredibly nerdy. That’s how I thought of him, that’s how I felt about him, and my love for him was born from that knowledge of him.
ALISON MOSSHART: He was the coolest motherfucker I ever met.
KAREN RINALDI: The coolness, for me, was awesome to watch, and funny. “You’re cool but I kind of know better; but let’s talk about that.” He got it immediately. My point was that cool is a mask for vulnerability. I talked about some of the research, and some of the theories of that. I remember thinking he understood immediately. It needed no explanation.
I’ll put this out there first, since Bourdain was emphatic about one thing above all.
“Simply put?” he said. “I am not cool. I have never been cool.”
Admitting to his fair share of recklessness in younger years to compensate for awkwardness, fear, and insecurity, Bourdain admitted that doing the most drugs, drinking the most alcohol, and trying to be badder than everybody else as a strategy for social acceptance was never successful. It didn’t really make anyone cool. . . .
“I think cool suggests the absence of caring. . . . It’s an almost sociopathic state—the ability to not give a shit about anything. . . . In my experience, people are foolishly attracted to people who know what they want. And when all you want is to play blues better than anyone else—or take heroin . . . that, dismayingly, has an appeal to those of us who struggle with our feelings, needs, and desires every day.”
And yet, in spite of all that, we sometimes learn in the most painful way how vulnerability and the veneer of cool we project onto others can hide someone’s darkest hour. On June 8, 2018, with the news of Tony having taken his own life, I was reminded that the labels we put onto others have no bearing on someone else’s pain. The best we can do is to expose our own pain to daylight and pay attention to the twilight messages we might otherwise miss from our loved ones. [Karen Rinaldi, (It’s Great to) Suck at Something (New York: Atria, 2019)]
Tony was a complicated guy. He was not an angel. Nobody who is . . . I mean, who the fuck is, right?
The interesting thing about Tony is, you thought he wasn’t paying attention, but he was, and he gave it back in a way that you weren’t expecting or didn’t understand, or maybe not in the w
ay you wanted it, but he was there.
When I asked him for the interview, for example, for my book, part of me thought, He’s so busy, he’s not going to be able to do this, but it wasn’t even a question.
He had this incredible generosity; he was generous and thoughtful and loyal. I felt like saying, “You’re giving, but were you able to receive that back? Did you open up that door, too? It can’t all be going out this way.”
Not to say that he was selfless. I would never do the martyr thing with him; it’s not who he was. It was just an interesting flow of loyalty and generosity and awareness. He was hypersensitive to people, which is a tough place to be, and then, could he accept back and feel that love, loyalty, generosity from others? Or was that valve closed? Whatever the wounds were that prevented him from possibly feeling that—it’s speculation, who the fuck knows?
MIKE RUFFINO: About a week after he died, everybody was commiserating [in New York] and we all wound up walking by Les Halles, when they were dismantling all those letters and photographs, everything, the impromptu memorial [to Tony]. Just giant pieces of it in the dumpster, and I was standing there, taking it all in, as best I could. It was quite overwhelming. This guy walks by, pushing his shopping cart with everything he owns in it. And he stopped at me, for some reason, and said, “What’s this, some kind of cook died? Argh, argh, argh, argh. What the fuck you doing here? What’d he ever do for you?”
SALLY FREEMAN: The thing with Tony was, people went to him for help. He was such a strong force. People used him as a kind of moral compass as to what they thought about things. I remember, when I heard the news that he’d died, I thought, So many people have lost their anchor.
DAVE CHANG: After he passed, I was reflective; I think all I wanted was to take from Tony; I never gave to Tony. In our relationship, there were moments when I should have spoken up, and I didn’t, because he’d cut you right out of his life, too. That same vengeful Tony who was on your side when protecting you, he would turn it around on you, particularly to those he had known forever.
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