by Tom Vitale
“My father killed himself last year,” said a voice from behind me. Startled, I turned around to find a guy named Austin who did something with computers and was the only person at the office who knew how to operate the espresso machine. “Dad was about Tony’s age, he had a good job, well respected in the town where I grew up.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” I said.
“It’s gonna get harder. This is the easy part, when everyone is together, all grieving at the same time. But a couple months from now, once everybody goes their separate ways, and life settles back into a normal routine—but you don’t feel normal—that’s when it’s really gonna suck.”
The full weight of things hadn’t sunk in yet, and some part of me must have wanted to keep it that way. I stiffened at his words, not liking the way Austin was talking to me as if we were now in the same sad club. At that moment there was only a very small group of people I wanted to be around, and I knew exactly where to find them.
Along with much of the road crew, I set up shop at a nearby bar we jokingly referred to as our New York office and embarked on a week-long bender of an Irish wake. A general state of intemperance and liquor-soaked disbelief prevailed.
“When Tony wakes up tomorrow, he’s really gonna regret what he did last night,” I recited between double shots of Johnnie Walker Black with a Coke chaser. There was confusion, sobbing, and anger too.
“We fucking risked our lives making that show,” someone slurred. “And do you think Tony even knew your kids’ names?”
“How could he do this to his daughter, she’s only eleven,” came another whinge.
“This is all Asia’s fault, she fucking killed him,” was a popular opinion.
The name Asia Argento came up a lot that evening. Tony had started dating the beautiful and mysterious Italian actress after meeting on our Rome shoot two years before. It was a passionate and volatile on-again, off-again relationship that had supposedly ended for good a few days before when paparazzi photos surfaced of Asia with another man. And then Tony had killed himself.
It didn’t make sense. I played back a litany of “lasts.” Last scene I filmed with Tony on my shoot in Indonesia a few weeks ago. We’d had our last “real conversation” that day. The last time we talked had been at a voice-over session the day he left for France. A few days before that he’d invited me to dinner for the last time. I’d declined, a decision I was very much regretting. Our last communication was an email about my Bhutan edit sent only hours before he died. “I don’t like the cold open and would replace it,” was all he wrote.
The shock and alcohol were bubbling a lot of emotions to the surface. “Tony hated me,” I professed to anyone who would listen. I knew that he’d kept me around because I worked hard; I was confident of that. But as a human being, I was sure he hated me. Now, so consumed by grief and denial, I didn’t have the capacity to think about what any of it really meant.
In the real world—the one that made sense, where the sky was up and the ground was down—I was supposed to be getting ready to leave to direct an episode in India. Instead I found myself in a totally fucked alternate reality standing in front of Tony’s former restaurant, Les Halles. The shuttered brasserie on Park Avenue South had become a makeshift memorial, overwhelmed with pictures, chef paraphernalia, flowers, letters, and a mix of fans and restaurant industry professionals. Seeing it all, arrayed there against the windows and door of the storefront, I was confused. Who were all these people carrying on like it was Christmas Eve and Santa Claus had just been killed in a fucking suicide bombing?
I read a note left by a woman who drove all the way from Tennessee:
Thank you for being real in a world where everyone seems so fake. I hate to idolize “famous” people that I don’t know, but you are different. I love you and thank you for giving me hope. Thank you for showing me how I want to live my life, you set a great example for some of us “misfits.”
Tony meant the world to those who knew him personally, and I was aware he possessed a militant faction of superfans, but they couldn’t account for such a large number of complete and total strangers. Could it be possible that Tony really was that famous, beloved, and inspirational on such a mass scale? If true, had Tony even been aware of this development? Because if he was, he certainly never acted like it. As long as I knew him, Tony seemed to exhibit a real inferiority complex, under the impression that the attention was fleeting and could disappear at any second. Blindsided by the tremendous outpouring of grief, I might have been forgiven for thinking Tony had been mistaken for some kind of Kitchen God. And maybe he was. Nearby stood a group of line cooks who’d arrived after their shift, still in uniform. They were quietly sobbing.
The next day I took a taxi to JFK to meet the crew returning from France. I couldn’t imagine what it had been like that awful morning, getting set up for Tony, expecting him to arrive any second, but instead getting the news that he wasn’t coming. He would never be coming… I both wished I’d been there because maybe I could’ve done something, and was so thankful I wasn’t.
In the roughly hundred shows and thousand scenes I’d filmed with Tony over the years, he’d only ever missed his call one time. We were shooting in Manila, and when he didn’t show up at our location for the day’s shoot, I’d called him up and gotten no answer. This was unusual, but not unheard of. I dialed him back five minutes later and five minutes after that. His phone just rang and rang. His hotel phone also went unanswered. I rushed back through Manila’s painfully slow gridlock traffic and in a panic explained to the front desk I needed to get into Tony’s room immediately. While riding up in the elevator I thought about how easy it had been to convince them. I hadn’t been asked for ID or any corroborating evidence that I wasn’t some “Squeaky” Fromme or Sirhan Sirhan type. I rang the buzzer and knocked loudly; no answer. I stepped back, and the bellman unlocked Tony’s door. Inside, the room was pitch black, blinds drawn. A shaft of light from the hallway illuminated Tony lying motionless in his bed. As my eyes adjusted, I could see he was naked, partially covered by twisted sheets. Something smelled like sour milk, and I was convinced he was dead. Maybe it was the light or my involuntary exclamation, but Tony finally woke up. He looked right at me, blinked, then bellowed, “Get the fuck out!!!”
Practically running downstairs, I wiped the tears from my face and tried to steady my breathing. Not ten minutes later, Tony strolled into the lobby, ready to be on TV. He didn’t mention anything about what had happened, and I never brought it up. From what I understood, that’s pretty much how it happened in France. Except this time, Tony wasn’t in the lobby ten minutes later.
After an emotional reunion at the airport, we all went back to the Brooklyn home of our longtime director of photography, Todd, where we started drinking or, more accurately, continued drinking. While we got plastered, Tony was waiting. Tony hated waiting, he’d be furious, I thought. But this time he was waiting on a refrigerated tray in a far-away morgue while his family figured out who was in charge. Word eventually came that he was to be cremated in France and sent home via messenger. There would be no body. There would be no funeral. He just… disappeared.
Tony had always been fascinated by Eastern legends of the hungry ghost—a spirit stranded in the netherworld due to a tragic death or lack of a proper burial—and in keeping with everything in his life playing out like a book, movie, or legend, now in some horrific twist of fate he had become a hungry ghost himself.
Eventually I went home to sleep off what was sure to be a Godzilla of a hangover. At the door was my suitcase, ready for the trip to India. That’s when I all but came unglued. Even though by this point I was a travel professional, I habitually waited until the day before leaving, then in a frenzy I’d haphazardly grab whatever was at hand and stuff it into my luggage. Strange irony that I’d packed early for a trip that would never happen.
Over the years, few others had clocked more miles on the road with Tony or had as much opportunity to know, t
rust, fear, admire, and learn from him as I did. Tony was complex, so much had to be gleaned by paying attention, by filing away some offhand remark, or cataloguing some slip of the veneer, details to be analyzed and interpreted at a future point. In more than a decade and a half, what had I learned? Staring at that suitcase, I thought about how my privileged position, my years of access, also meant I had something else few others had: an opportunity to see the warning signs. So how had it ended up like this? What had all of it really meant? Tony used to say that the questions were more important than the answers. I had plenty of questions. Answers, however, were in short supply.
Chapter Two
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“YOU CAN’T FUCKING BREATHE A WORD OF WHAT I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU!” Tony said when he spotted me waiting for him curbside at Santo Domingo Airport. In accordance with post-flight ritual, he lit up a Marlboro Red, taking a long—nearly half the cigarette long—drag before continuing, “If this gets out the WHOLE deal could BLOW UP. I just came from a meeting. It was so, so beyond secret they brought me up in the GOD DAMN freight elevator. It was total cloak and dagger ass shit!”
Tony’s eyes darted back and forth as he talked, one slightly larger than the other, giving him the tweaked-out look of a squirrel on amphetamines. This was an unusual greeting—even for the predictably unpredictable Anthony Bourdain.
“We can kiss those fuck-tards at Travel Channel goodbye… No Reservations is… OVER!” Tony said, finishing the smoke and tossing it to the pavement.
Struggling to keep up, I lit a Red and noticed my hands were shaking.
“Congratu-FUCKING-lations, Tom, we’re moving the FUCKING show to FUCKING CNN! Can you FUCKING believe it?!?!?”
Seven months later in November 2012 we touched down in Burma, or Myanmar, depending on who you were talking to, for the Parts Unknown pilot episode. Real life doesn’t offer clear beginings, of course. At least, we rarely recognize them as such at the time. But looking back, our trip to Burma seems like as good a place to start this story as any other. I was thirty-two years old at the time, and for the last six years I’d been on the road with Tony getting paid to goof off and travel the globe while eating and drinking. Emphasis on the drinking. Which is maybe why I still couldn’t believe CNN had given Tony—a countercultural, mostly uncontrollable ex-heroin addict in his mid-fifties—a blank check to go anywhere and do pretty much anything he wanted. It sounded insane to me, and I was the show’s director. Marching orders from our new television masters were simple, at least: “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” citing the No Reservations: Mozambique episode’s blend of history, culture, and personality as an example of what they hoped we’d deliver. But Tony being Tony, he wasn’t going to settle for what worked last week, let alone last season, forget last network.
HAVING SPENT THE PAST FIFTY years under an oppressive military regime, Burma had been all but closed off to outsiders for decades. First impressions on the ground, though, were that Yangon, the country’s largest city, was far from the time capsule I’d been told to expect. Moldering colonial Art Deco buildings from the days of the British Empire were everywhere, but the vibrant street life overflowing with a swirl of colors was anything but caught in time. Pedestrians, vehicles, and monks in scarlet robes fought for space with food vendors, sidewalk haircut stands, and tea stalls. Women wore thanaka on their faces, a natural sunblock made from tree bark, while men chewed betel nut and spat bloodred on the sidewalk. The ringing of bright green sugar cane juice carts was audible over the general din of shouting vegetable hawkers and the grunt of diesel buses bursting at the seams with passengers. Nested in an impossible tangle of sagging power lines, telephone pole megaphones broadcast what sounded like Burmese country-western music. The off-key vocals competed with overmodulated chanting emanating from loudspeakers at the many Buddhist temples and gold stupas. The chaos was almost symphonic.
For nearly half a century, not much had gotten in or out of Burma. Since 1962 a junta ruled the Southeast Asian nation with an iron fist, suppressing almost all dissent and wielding absolute power in what was the world’s longest-running military dictatorship. The government possessed an appalling human rights record of child labor and ethnic cleansing, gagged the press, trafficked in heroin and blood rubies, and was waging an unending civil war in the north. Monks, artists, activists, and journalists were imprisoned for having an opinion. One in four Burmese was said to be a secret agent or informer. While the government was busy ensuring complete lack of personal freedoms through a vast bureaucracy powered by carbon copy, typewriter, and fear, the economy collapsed. Forget the lowest cell phone and internet penetration of any country—including North Korea—three-quarters of the Burmese population didn’t even have electricity.
Then in 2011 something unheard-of happened. Long-ruling military general Than Shwe stepped down, and the junta, fearing an Arab Spring–style revolution, gave the country back to the people. Just like that, generations of totalitarian rule were over. Wildly popular Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winning leader of the opposition, was released from house arrest; Obama visited; trade sanctions were lifted; and for the first time in forty-nine years Coca-Cola was for sale on store shelves.
Now, thanks to a well-timed move to CNN, somehow we were going to be the first TV show of our type to come to the notorious hermit kingdom and work without restrictions. In order to do justice to what was an all too rare success story, we pursued an ambitious lineup of former political prisoners and democracy advocates to appear on camera. And much to our amazement, nearly everyone agreed enthusiastically.
Modern conveniences, and even necessities required to make a travel TV show, however, were proving difficult to put in place. Transportation was unreliable and complicated. With Burma having just opened up, there was a lot of demand and nearly zero tourist infrastructure. Hotels had a nasty habit of selling out six months in advance. Arranging domestic flights had to be done within the country, and Myanmar Airways didn’t comply with international safety standards. Due to continued civil unrest, sudden government travel restrictions were a concern. Outside the hotel, there was no internet whatsoever, and our phones didn’t work.
“Afghanistan has better cell service,” Tony complained.
Most difficult of all, there was no banking system. Burma was a cash economy with no ATMs, and nobody took credit cards. We’d been warned that the only acceptable currency were perfect, unblemished US hundred-dollar bills, which money changers examined like diamond merchants. One fold, one imperfection, one stain, one tear would result in a rejection. We arrived with $30,000 worth of crisp new bills in our carry-on.
“ONE HOUR TO TONY, ONE HOUR TO TONY,” came over the walkie. The countdown to Tony’s arrival always had the effect on my nerves of hearing a ticking time bomb. Eleven a.m. and the pressure was rising right along with the temperature in downtown Yangon. This being the pilot episode of our new show, the stakes were high to get things right. One hand holding a Marlboro Red, the other fumbling to untangle Tony’s microphone, I surveyed our location. It was the type of locals-only street-side restaurant Tony loved; low plastic stools, bustling and noisy. But it was also exactly the sort of place that made filming and recording audio nearly impossible. Even though we’d been through this drill literally thousands of times, the crew was especially frantic preparing for Tony’s arrival. Mo was our most daring cinematographer. He was a human avalanche who’d come along on the pilot to operate an additional third camera and was currently vibrating like a massively overcaffeinated hummingbird to get shots of the customers. Veteran producer Josh—code name “Magical Giant” due to his good humor, heart of gold, and larger-than-life proportions—had just returned from making a donation to a nearby temple, hoping they’d turn down music blaring from their loudspeakers. Zach and Todd, our longtime directors of photography, were—as usual—butting heads over where to seat Tony. Along with their local assistant cameramen, they’d spent the last hour frantically lugging sandbags, hang
ing lights, rearranging tables, blocking shots, checking audio levels, calibrating back focus—in the process transforming an otherwise functioning restaurant into a cluttered and dangerous film set. These highly trained television professionals running around like chickens with their heads cut off were literally the best in the business and had become, over years spent traveling together, my closest friends.
“FORTY-FIVE MINUTES TO TONY, FORTY-FIVE MINUTES TO TONY,” crackled over the walkie. Amid the increasing commotion, it wasn’t hard to spot our fixer, Patrick, wearing a shell-shocked expression to complement the dark circles under his eyes. Predictably, he’d chosen the most inopportune time to ask a chagrined restaurant owner to sign our three-page release (a terrifying document indemnifying the network against litigation resulting from physical damage, personal injury, or defamation of character). As if on cue came a KER-THWAP-SMASH, the noise of someone tripping over an extension cord, knocking over one of our light stands.
Patrick already seemed to regret having taken the job, but I had faith he’d hold it together. I needed him to. Fixers were our lifeline, helping us navigate the often challenging complexities of each new location we filmed. They were almost always locals, but unlike pretty much anywhere else we’d worked, Burma lacked any recognizable film industry. So that left us with Patrick from North Carolina. But beneath the freckles, auburn hair, and button nose beat the heart of a hard-core investigative journalist. He was based in Bangkok, where he reported on Southeast Asia’s illicit drug trade, and most recently he’d been undercover writing about government-sponsored heroin trafficking in the Golden Triangle. Over the two months of pre-production leading up to our trip, Patrick helped plan travel logistics, shared his contacts, assisted with our visa application, collaborated on the storyline, scouted locations, and recommended high-quality locals and experts for Tony to interact with on the show. The “sidekicks,” as we called them, were Tony’s window into whatever location we were visiting. Tony’s experience, and therefore the show, was only as good as the people he spent time with on camera.