by Tom Vitale
Chapter Three
APPETIZER
I WAS THIRTY-EIGHT WHEN TONY DIED, BUT I FELT LIKE I’D ALREADY LIVED nine lives and had the premature gray hair to prove it. For better or worse over the preceding decade and a half, I’d organized my life around Tony and the job.
All I have to do is close my eyes, and there he is, looking every bit the globe-trotting TV star. Both old and young at the same time, full head of curly gray hair, cigarette in his mouth, standing tall at six-foot-four, sunbaked, half-hidden behind a pair of solid black Steve McQueen Persols. Tony always seemed in a hurry, like he might disappear at any second. He’d only ever smoke about half a cigarette before stamping it out. I asked him once why he did that. “Old habit from my restaurant days,” he said. “Gotta get back to the kitchen and see what’s fucked up.”
My relationship with Tony was complicated. Tony was hard to be around, and painful to be away from. He was intellectually stimulating beyond compare, and his energy would suck you dry. Frustrating, difficult, and even terrifying at times, but always fascinating, bigger than life. Taking a drag of his cigarette he’d say, “You gotta make sacrifices to do this.” Now, without Tony, life as I knew it was over. It was starting to sink in that I had no idea who I was outside of the show.
TELEVISION IS AN AMAZING MACHINE. TV has the power to transport you far, far away. Away from the dreary everyday to somewhere better. More colorful. Believing the miracle invention to be evil, my misguided parents forbade me as a kid the comfort of TV’s artificial bluish glow. But that didn’t stop me. I would steal it late at night or whenever I was left home alone. I couldn’t get enough. TV felt like dreaming awake, a place you could go to get away, at least for a little while.
Real life had bullies, and chores, and difficult, thorny problems. TV, on the other hand, had friends, candy, new cars, air-conditioning, and what looked like love. TV was easy to digest, and it made sense; the rules were clear. No chance of missing the point. The musical score told me exactly when to be scared, when to be happy, when something important was about to be said. A comforting laugh track made it clear I was in on the joke.
Sure, I could sense its one-dimensionality—flat, unrealistic sets and cheaply made characters. Wonder Bread family values, high-fructose morality, irradiated comedy for my viewing safety. But no one in the TV seemed to mind. And at the time, neither did I.
I wanted so bad to be there—to be on TV, to be in the TV. So, of course, I got a job in TV. I didn’t need to watch TV anymore, because I was living it, high as a kite on the indefinable magic of the medium to transport and erase. There was some sacrifice here and there—lost friends, failed relationships, a warped worldview, an unhealthy amount of stress, and a good dose of psychological isolation—but the rewards turned out even better than I could have imagined. I had done the impossible, fulfilled my dream, and stepped through the screen into a more colorful, exciting, ready-for-prime-time dimension of travel, opulent hotels, awards ceremonies, and extraordinary adventures. My life became a collection of picture-perfect postcards, all thanks to the magic of television. And it was wonderful. For a while.
The irony, of course, was that the dreary life I had so eagerly sought to escape as a child was in reality more like Mayberry than anything on TV. My father bought a video camera when my younger sister was born. Cutting-edge technology in 1983, it was a monstrosity that came in several pieces, camera on the shoulder with the recorder tethered by wire and worn over the shoulder on a strap. It recorded what looked like a pretty magical and idyllic childhood in the woods. And for the most part it was. Except for school.
In addition to my impressive roster of learning disabilities, some of my best talents included crippling social anxiety and an uncanny ability to attract bullies. My teachers used to say I brought it on myself, and ultimately I’d have to agree with them. I knew how to push buttons, and I antagonized my peers to get attention. Though awful at the time, looking back, my greatest elementary school achievement may have been inspiring the entire fourth grade to write a group letter complaining about me. When Mrs. Bennaquade read it aloud in front of the class, I burst out crying.
“Are those real or crocodile tears?” she said with mock sympathy.
My social and academic struggles in school gave me a very strong distrust of institutions and made me want to take them apart. I became adept at instigating other people to do things that would then cause situations to spiral out of hand. It was my way to gain some power and control, and it was a skill that would end up serving me well in my chosen career.
One day I found myself standing with Tony behind a pier-side San Francisco burger joint while the directors of photography made final adjustments to the lighting inside.
“What’s the best way for a kid to deal with a bully?” I asked. Even though Tony could be one at times, I knew nothing bothered him more than bullies. One of the best things about the show, if not the best thing about the show, was how Tony used his platform for good. From Mexican cooks to Palestinian shop owners, Tony championed the marginalized and gave a voice to the voiceless, stuck up for the little guy.
“In high school a friend of mine was getting pushed around by this jock,” Tony said. “I went out and got an after-school job, saved up enough money to buy an ounce of weed. In the meantime, I’d gone to the library and learned how to pick a lock. So I broke into the jock’s locker, planted the weed, then made an anonymous report to the police claiming the jock was dealing drugs. The cops searched his locker, found the dope, and the jock got sent off to juvie. Ruined his life. That’s how you deal with a bully.”
I was simultaneously impressed, a little terrified, and touched by Tony’s story.
“I was bullied a lot,” I volunteered. “One of the most embarrassing times was in elementary school when my math teacher was late to class. We were all lined up in the hallway waiting for her to arrive when Jenny O’Degan, smallest girl in the grade, punched me in the face. The rest of the class erupted into hoots of laughter and cheers. I was crying and they all high-fived Jenny.”
“Where does she live?” Tony asked, taking a drag of his cigarette.
“Umm, I’m not sure,” I said, surprised by the question. “I haven’t really kept in touch, I think she’s in Seattle now.”
“All right, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Tony said. “We’re going to add Seattle to the book tour this summer. We’ll look her up, find her address, send her gold-plated VIP tickets so she and seven of her best friends show up. Then at the end of the show, I’ll call her up on stage, and you drop a bucket of festering pig’s blood on her. You know, the Carrie thing. Then we watch everyone in the audience laugh. I know where to get pig blood in Seattle.”
What Tony said meant a lot. He knew exactly when to make grand gestures, the kind of displays of warmth and caring that inspired a level of devotion that made me gladly put the show at the very center of my life, consequences be damned.
ONE OF THE SECRETS TO Tony’s success was a fearless risk-all attitude that was at times indistinguishable from self-sabotage. It was a strategy that had yielded him a best-selling memoir and TV series seemingly out of nowhere. But after season two of A Cook’s Tour, it appeared fate had called Tony’s bluff. When the Food Network decided to cut international destinations in favor of domestic barbeque, Tony shocked everyone by quitting rather than star in a show he didn’t want to make. He would often say, “Everyone on TV is afraid of not being on TV,” but not Tony.
Chris and Lydia, who’d produced A Cook’s Tour, spent a year or so trying to pitch a travel and food show with Tony but PBS and A&E along with everyone else declined. Just when Tony had made peace with his TV career being over, the Travel Channel ponied up the money to shoot three pilot episodes. All of a sudden he was back on TV. Titled No Reservations, this time the show took the ideas behind A Cook’s Tour a step further, with episodes twice the length, a larger budget, and a more ambitious travel itinerary.
When Chris and Lydia started Zer
o Point Zero to make No Reservations in 2005, they hired me as post producer. It was my job to work with the editors after the crew returned from filming to convert roughly sixty to eighty hours of raw tape into one cohesive forty-two-minute episode.
It was great to be back with the team, but there was a problem. Watching that footage, I knew I wouldn’t be happy stuck in an edit room. I had to find a way to be a part of making it happen. If other people could get paid to live what looked like the adventure of a lifetime, why couldn’t I? ZPZ had an informal atmosphere, and it became something of a recurring joke that every Friday I’d go into Chris and Lydia’s office and tell them that I wanted to travel. Eventually, maybe just to shut me up, they gave me a shot.
My first trip with Tony was to Moscow in 2006. I stood there waiting for him at JFK, feeling like I had won Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. And in a way I had. Several days later I withdrew two weeks’ salary from my personal checking account to balance the production budget so nobody would know I’d been pickpocketed in Red Square. Thus began a pattern of extreme ups and downs that would continue as long as I worked with Tony.
I was a wide-eyed twenty-six-year-old and joyously threw myself into the job 150 percent, fully committed to proving my worth. As the junior producer, my responsibilities included everything from managing our visa applications to pitching story ideas. I oversaw the booking of hotels, ground transportation, and flights. Once in-country, I was responsible for the petty cash, securing releases, keeping us on schedule, and making sure the crew was fed. Compared to later days when our shoots more resembled a film set with grips and dollies and a lighting truck, back then logistics were much simpler. For the Russia episode there was just one van, seven cases of equipment, a producer, cameraman, me, and Zamir, our fixer.
Zamir had arranged the two Cook’s Tour Russia episodes, in the process proving himself an extremely entertaining on-camera companion. If Zamir wasn’t a professional hustler, he might as well have been the world’s amateur champion. Always scheming, running a side hustle, or pitching some get-rich-quick racket, often Zamir did all three at once. Zamir had intrigued Tony with his tall tales of underworld Soviet espionage and connections to shady figures in the Russian underworld. Zamir possessed a magic ability to open doors to locations and secure access to people usually off-limits to outsiders, let alone TV cameras. This time Zamir had used his connections to arrange a scene with Victor Cherkashin, the notoriously reclusive former KGB spy master and one of the most influential players during the Cold War. We spent the day with Victor at his country house outside Moscow. He and Tony wandered among birch trees collecting mushrooms while discussing counterespionage, double agents, and recruitment techniques.
The trip to Moscow exceeded my expectations; it wasn’t easy, but it was far more thrilling than I could have imagined. Life was never dull when Tony was around. He must have been happy enough with my work because I became a regular part of the road crew. Back then I never could have imagined I’d ultimately work on roughly a hundred episodes; I pretty much took life one shoot at a time. After Russia there was a magical trip to Singapore, then Tuscany, where we all stayed together in a rented villa. One evening as we sat drinking wine watching the surrounding vineyards glow in a brilliant orange sunset, I worked up the courage to ask Tony to sign my copy of Kitchen Confidential. He gladly obliged and drew a kitchen knife along with the inscription, “To Tom, with many thanks for three, count ’em THREE flawless shows! Here’s to many more. You make television fun again.”
MUTED ORANGE AND BROWN LEAVES pinwheeled silently down from trees lining the Dâmbovița River. There was an uncanny quiet broken only by the odd crying baby or trundling of wheels over otherwise empty and uneven cobblestone streets.
I stood watching Todd film b-roll of neglected Beaux-Arts, Renaissance, Neoclassical, Gothic, and Rococo piles. Romantic Second Empire domes fish-scaled in faded blue slate showed patches of rafters like the protruding ribs of a decomposing whale. Bucharest, Romania’s capital city, possessed an aura of nineteenth-century stateliness that was rudely interrupted by the occasional Soviet-era housing block. Small knots of emaciated dogs wandered about, seemingly less interested in the architecture than they were in Todd and me.
Both the grim housing blocks and the plague of roving mongrels were the result of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s urban redevelopment programs. Romania’s violent 1989 revolution had resulted in Ceaușescu’s execution along with the end of Communist rule, but Bucharest—along with much of the country—had yet to fully recover. The city once known as “little Paris” more closely resembled postwar Vienna. A beautiful woman with a dirty face.
I pulled the van door closed as more dogs emerged from the woodwork. “Umm… Todd?” I called over the walkie, hoping he was wearing his earpiece. We’d been warned about the dogs and how last month a Japanese tourist had been taking pictures when he was ripped limb from limb by a pack of strays. “Todd, I think you might want to get in the van,” I tried again. Todd remained fixed to his eyepiece, oblivious to both my transmissions and the growling canine semicircle closing in around him.
It was late October 2007, almost exactly one year after my trip to Moscow, and I’d been given a trial run to see if I could handle being in charge of, well, everything, including—for the first time—prodding Tony for “content.” Whether by pushing him to make an insightful observation or to wax poetic to the camera, I would discover it was easier said than done.
But I had an ace in the hole. Good ol’ TV gold Russian Zamir was fixing my episode. He had a claim on all destinations formerly behind the Iron Curtain and had pitched Romania for his next adventure with Tony. But from pretty much the first moment we landed in-country, things started to go wrong.
One scene after another, the itinerary, locations, and even the menus turned out to be completely different than promised. Eventually it became apparent that the Romanian Tourism Bureau, with whom Zamir had cultivated a relationship, was blocking access to the sort of natural, working-class locations that were the show’s bread and butter, instead attempting to steer us toward stage-managed government-approved duds. We’d show up expecting a natural scene at a family home only to find ourselves at an educational farm museum with the entire family lined up in fake traditional costumes. Zamir was drinking heavily and seemed oblivious to the problems, as well as perpetually confused about locations and people with which he was supposedly familiar. It was becoming clear Zamir was a little… unhinged. Not in an “I’ve had too much vodka” sort of way. Unhinged in a “trying to sell a decommissioned Russian nuclear submarine while dressed in a battleship Potemkin outfit” sort of way. Looking back, the show really went off the rails around the time we boarded a train to Transylvania.
“Zamir, are you wearing a crucifix?” I asked in surprise. “Aren’t you Jewish?”
“It’s the insurance policy against threat of vampire’s blood sucking,” Zamir said. “I have a basket of garlics if you are in need of the protection.”
Our destination, the central Romanian province of Transylvania, was, of course, memorably described as the home of Count Dracula by Bram Stoker. The vampire legend was inspired by the life and times of a real fifteenth-century prince named Vlad Tepes, known for impaling his enemies and countrymen alike. As it turned out, Zamir actually seemed to believe in the undead—as well as Transylvania’s untapped investment potential for Dracula-themed tourism opportunities.
“Jeez, Zamir,” Tony said. “You’re banging the Dracula thing pretty hard. Dracula motels, Dracula gift shops, Dracula theme parks, Dracula, Dracula, Dracula… What’s next, are you going to pitch me on Count Snackula’s Diner?”
Disembarking at Brasov, we traveled the rest of the way to our hotel by van along narrow roads twisting through thick Transylvanian forest. Out the window a slate gray October sky blended with wisps of fog curling down from the steep, snowcapped peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. Just after dark we arrived at the House of Dracula Hotel, a faux castle constructe
d of what looked to be highly flammable polystyrene blocks. It was decorated in a style reminiscent of Medieval Times meets Madame Tussauds, and Dracula-themed all year, although we had the luck of arriving on Halloween.
Being it was my favorite holiday, when Zamir had informed us there was a costume party at the hotel, I’d eagerly insisted we attend. Tony positioned a fake plastic knife on his head and painted a trickle of blood dripping down his face while Zamir squeezed into a pirate costume and I put on my homemade reindeer outfit complete with floppy antlers. We arrived in the ballroom, cameras rolling, to find ourselves in the midst of a tour group of retirees from Nevada. Despite being promised the party wasn’t for tourists, I really should have known better. Dynel-wrapped vampires toasted fake-blood cocktails with septuagenarian sexy witches. It was basically Tony’s worst nightmare. He described the atmosphere as something akin to “A Carnival Cruise to Geriatric Funkytown.”
The whole sordid affair was as horribly off-brand as it was hilarious, and I continued to prod an extremely reluctant—and increasingly incensed—Tony for content.
“Oh my god, you just won’t stop! You’re like a fucking monkey jamming a fork into a light socket,” Tony said. “You get zapped, but you keep doing it over and over again.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Zamir was dancing the funky chicken and making new friends. “This is the best fake blood cocktail I’ve had in my life,” he said, sipping from a goblet of bright red liquid. “Tomski, sit down with us. I would like to introduce you to the organizers of tonight’s party. This is Uncle Dudu and his niece Miss Transylvania.”
“Great party,” I lied.
“From the most gorgeous girls from all over the country we make our selection of Miss Transylvania,” Dudu beamed. They certainly made for an odd pair. Dudu was short, fat, bald, spoke in a high-pitched nasal voice, and was dressed in a white lace frock he explained was a “Little Bo-Peep” costume. Miss Transylvania, on the other hand, was stunning. She was wearing an emerald green ball gown and tiara that held back long brown hair, showing off her slender neck and delicate features.