by Tom Vitale
Being invited to move into Tony’s hotel suite—or villa complex, in this case—wasn’t an everyday occurrence. In the last year or so Tony had become more volatile, but also generally nicer to me than he’d been in the past—which, ironically, had only made me more nervous. The truth was Tony scared me. Was I going to say something stupid and embarrass myself? Was he going to do something mean? Was this a gesture of kindness, or just another impulsive mood swing that could reverse itself at any second? I didn’t trust my own judgment when it came to Tony. I worried if I let down my guard, it was going to be all the more painful when he inevitably pulled out the rug. Somewhere along the line, I’d learned it was safer to keep a distance.
“Crazy what Lawrence said about the hotels, huh?” I said, eager to change the subject.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “We’re sitting on a mountain of skulls.”
Another of the episode’s intended through-lines was the still-unfolding aftermath of anti-communist massacres in 1965 known as “the year of living dangerously.” Three million Indonesians had been killed, by some accounts. It was a poorly kept secret that the luxury hotels lining the beach had been constructed on top of unmarked mass graves. I had an image of corpses emerging from beneath the swimming pool to seek revenge on oblivious hotel guests, like in Poltergeist.
“One order chicken wings, two orders french fries, two orders margarita pizza, two orders burgers, and four double Johnnie Walker Black and a Coca-Cola,” the waiter said, delivering our standard international off-camera dinner.
“You haven’t said anything about the picture,” I said once we were alone. I’d been carrying around a framed photo of my cat Frida—the one Tony had renamed Mr. Whiskers—waiting for him to notice. But after four days and a few drinks, I was getting impatient. “Mr. Whiskers died the day before I left for Indonesia,” I said, my voice cracking a little. “She knew I was leaving. I buried her in the backyard under our favorite rose bush.”
“Aww, I’m sorry, Tom,” Tony said, sympathetically looking up from his iPad. After a long pause, he said, “Asia’s been offered a role as judge on that Italian TV show The X Factor. I think it’s a really bad idea. It’s a tough schedule and going to take up a huge amount of her time.”
Tony was fully aware how close I was to that cat, and I felt hurt by his seeming lack of interest in my life, even though I knew it wasn’t really the case. Not unlike me, one of Tony’s strategies for dealing with uncomfortable situations was to change the subject.
For years, I’d had to pretend to care about whatever Tony’s current obsession was—Brazilian jiu jitsu or the Marvel versus DC Universe, and for the last eighteen months all he’d wanted to talk about was Asia Argento. I knew he wanted me to ask what The X Factor was, but I just didn’t have the energy to humor him tonight. Instead I let silence fill the empty space between us.
Tony stared at orange paper lanterns strung between the palm trees swaying in the ocean breeze before he got up, saying, “All right, I’m heading out. Let me know if you want to move in tomorrow, man. I’m telling you there’s a whole fucking extra building. You get your own pool.”
“WE’RE ROLLING,” I SAID.
“So this, too, is Bali, I guess. Or it is now. Thank you, Jimmy Buffett, for taking a big dump on the world,” Tony said to the camera.
He sat in a poolside lounge chair wearing a black shirt, jeans, and jet-black Persols and couldn’t have contrasted more with his surroundings. All around us there was laughter, splashing, and leisure. We were filming a solo scene at the hotel’s impressive five-level lagoon-shaped interconnecting swimming pools, which cascaded down from the mezzanine to the beach. Couples in bright pastel bikinis and Speedos suntanned on lounge chairs while other guests frolicked on oversize rainbow-colored unicorn pool floats. Australian bros chugged beer while high-fiving each other. Everyone was enjoying themselves, except for Tony, who was looking hilariously miserable.
“I have to say, this is not the Bali I remember. It’s different… It’s, like, crowded,” Tony said. “Why can’t I be happy? I do not smell the spices of the East. I no longer hear the gamelan, bing-bong-boong, like I first did when I came here.” Tony sipped his W Bali signature mango margarita.
“Anyway, guys, we’re having a few buckets of chicken later at my place. It’s a pool party, nothing high-profile,” Tony said by way of an invitation to the crew. In the last year or so, Tony had displayed more interest in wanting to hang out, regularly inquiring when we’d be getting back to the hotel. Usually it was too late for the camera team, which meant it was just me meeting him at the bar. But we were finishing early tonight, already at the hotel, and Tony had discovered there was a KFC nearby, so it was going to be a party.
“Don’t forget to order mac and cheese and biscuits,” Tony said after the scene. “I’m hungry as fuck.”
“NOT JUST ONE, BUT THREE people from my village have died,” Desak said. “And one of them is even a high priest.”
“You’re kidding? That’s fantastic!” I said before catching myself, toning down the excitement. “I mean, my condolences to the family.”
I couldn’t believe Desak had pulled it off. Despite all odds, I had got my funeral after all. The next morning, and last day of the shoot, we prepared for Tony to share a simple breakfast of rice, sambal, and chicken steamed in banana leaf with a local man named Kadek. He wore a traditional sarong with batik headscarf, T-shirt, and a gentle smile on his face.
When Tony arrived, he sat down cross-legged at the table and saw I’d placed the small picture of Mr. Whiskers next to an offering in the background of the scene. He glanced quickly at me with an expression I couldn’t exactly decipher, but said nothing.
“It’s a joyous occasion, especially the cremation. It’s a big party to send the spirit to the afterlife,” Kadek said.
“Because people firmly believe that we are not talking about the end, so this is something to be happy about?” Tony asked.
“Life is cyclical,” Kadek said, nodding in agreement. “The state of mind at the time of death is very important for your next journey… Cremation frees the soul, purifying it by fire. This allows the dead to rejoin the cycle of reincarnation.”
After we filmed breakfast, the crew reconfigured for the cremation parade and celebration. Cameras rolled as the body of the high priest was washed and wrapped in white cloth before being placed inside an elaborate multi-tiered pagoda shaped like a bull. Made of bamboo and paper and the height of a two-story house, the bull was white with gold horns and draped in gold jewelry, scarves, and headdress. Intended to carry the deceased to the next life, it was an unbelievably beautiful piece of sculpture designed to last for only twenty-four hours before being burned.
The funeral procession began with the banging of drums, chanting, and ringing of bells. Several hundred members of the village were there, laughing and yelling, some taking pictures or filming with their phones, others carrying offerings of food or flowers. Everyone gathered around the bull, which was lifted onto the shoulders of about twenty young men. The music kicked up a notch, and the cavalcade got underway. As promised, a party-like atmosphere prevailed. Everywhere there were huge smiles; the feeling was more victory parade than funeral, at least compared to what I’d experienced before. There was no denying the event was an impressive spectacle to behold.
“The priest is throwing out rice along with money to confuse and misdirect the spirits that might try to follow the procession,” Kadek explained.
Dressed from head to toe in white, the band beat drums, cymbals, chimes, gongs, and gamelans, some small, others massive, over four feet in diameter, keeping time to an increasingly frantic tempo.
“I love the sound, it’s beautiful,” Tony said.
“It’s slightly off tune always, so they create that big noise that reverberates throughout your body,” Kadek said above the din. “The idea is that it shatters the illusion between the seen and the unseen worlds.”
Chanting and cheers swirled tog
ether, with the cacophony increasing in intensity and building toward a crescendo. Men carrying the bull began yelling and shouting, spinning the deceased in circles and shaking him up and down.
“Who’s that?” Tony asked, pointing to someone who’d appeared on the bull, riding it like a rodeo cowboy while holding on for dear life.
“The son of the deceased,” Kadek said. “It’s a big honor to be on the float.”
We were swept along in the ever more raucous festivities until the procession arrived at an open field. The pagoda was set down, offerings placed around its base.
“Shit, it’s hot in the sun,” Tony said, out of breath. “We got anything to drink?”
We had a little bit of time before the cremation began, so I brought Tony to the courtyard of a nearby house arranged as a rest area and a place to stash our gear.
“I’ve started seeing a therapist,” Tony said out of nowhere.
I was a bit surprised; he’d always stalwartly refused the notion of therapy. Tony was someone I had always looked to for answers, that millions of fans had looked to for answers. To hear him voluntarily admit that he didn’t have all the answers and was seeking guidance was uncharacteristically vulnerable.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Good, she makes me feel better about myself,” Tony said. “You know, sort of that I’m not such a bad person after all.”
I studied him for a moment. It was hard to know what he was grappling with behind his sunglasses. Was he regretting his personal and professional choices? Did he feel a need to make amends with the people he cared about?
One thing was clear, Tony was thoroughly exhausted and could use a vacation. Tony had an addictive personality and was without doubt a workaholic, choosing to travel over 250 days a year for as long as I’d known him. Whenever I used to suggest he take some time off, Tony would say, “Television is a cruel mistress. She does not let you cheat on her, even for a while.” I’d learned that the truth was he couldn’t rest. Tony always needed a distraction, a project, a problem to solve. And, for better or worse, the show provided that in spades.
“When was the last time you had some real downtime?” I asked.
“Last summer in Italy with Asia. Five or six days on a boat; it was glorious,” Tony said, lighting up with excitement. “I did all the cooking. I had the boat stocked with fresh truffles, foie gras, caviar, a couple cases of really good wine. I even brought my own omelette pan. Occasionally we’d go ashore in disguise wearing hats and sunglasses, and line up with all the housewives to get fish from the market. It was fucking great.”
“Are you doing it again this year?” I asked.
“We were hoping to, but if Asia gets the job on X Factor it’s going to be difficult,” Tony said, deflating somewhat. “She’s going to move to New York in the fall; I’m really looking forward to having her there.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I’ve been feeling pretty lonely too.”
“Get rid of that fucking house,” Tony said. “You could move into my building.”
“Yeah,” I said with a smile. No matter how much I tried to keep up a wall, it wasn’t successful, because Tony was at the absolute center of my personal and professional life. It was equally hard for me to consider the possibility that I was only of use to him as a director, as it was that he could have really cared for me and loved me. Times like these made it hard for me to keep my distance, as I could feel his genuine affection coming through his kind, although completely unrealistic, comment. Even though there was no way I could afford $16,000 per month for an apartment in Tony’s building, I sincerely appreciated that he’d made the suggestion.
“We’re going to Seattle this summer for the speaking tour,” Tony said. “Is Jennifer O’Degan still there?”
Tony’s question caught me completely off guard. It had been seven years since I told him about my elementary school nemesis, who had punched me in front of the whole class to the cheers of all the kids watching. I couldn’t believe Tony had been listening, let alone retained details.
“You remember her?” I said, as a wave of emotion swept over me.
“Of course I do,” Tony said. “There’s a bucket of pig’s blood with her name on it.”
This blew my mind. Even though it was a small gesture, it erased years of bad feelings. My tenuous state of mind over the past few years had led to some tension between me and the New York office, but we’d patched things up a bit lately, and I was working on getting my personal life at home more under control. I’d been making some adjustments in the name of mental health, figuring out how to stay sane for the long haul and survive on the show.
“Come over now!” the walkie screeched. “They’re lighting it up!”
Tony and I hurried back across the street, and he got into position next to Kadek. Family members placed lighted incense and matches at the base of the bull, igniting the funeral pyre. Once it was fully engulfed, a man with a massive flamethrower sprayed the body with a jet of fire while another jabbed around with a poker, ensuring it was fully burned. A column of smoke reached into the sky, buoyed by the sound of gongs, drums, and joyful chanting while relatives and loved ones watched.
I stood away from the crowd and lit a cigarette. I couldn’t know it at the time, but after all those miles, a lifetime of gonzo adventures, I’d just finished the last scene I would ever film with Tony. Fitting, then, somehow, that it was a funeral. Not in a million years would I have believed within the month Tony would disappear into flames.
Looking back, I didn’t see the warning signs, although there were some. It was less about his musings on death, karma, and spirituality, and more so his attempts to show me that he cared. Repeated requests to hang out are what stand out most. Tony’s ability to hide his fears behind his dark humor, combined with his near unflappable façade of strength and impenetrability, prevented me from seeing these requests for what—in hindsight—I realized they were: the actions of someone lonely and depressed, trying his best to come to terms with himself.
Later, I would think about something Tony said at the end of the shoot. At the time I hadn’t paid much attention. Of course, in retrospect, what Tony said takes on new meaning.
“I would like to be thought of as a good guy. I mean, I don’t want people walking over my grave—if there is even a grave—or see a picture of me—in the unlikely event anyone bothers to look—and for them to say, ‘Oh, that son of a bitch. I’m glad he’s dead.’ I’d prefer not… I don’t know that I’m trying to accrue good karma specifically, but I’m definitely trying to avoid bad karma these days. I am thinking about how I’m going out and on what terms…”
Shortly before Tony’s departure for France and his death, he asked me to have dinner with him. We’d just returned from Indonesia, and I was busy preparing our India trip, so I declined the offer, figuring soon enough I’d be seeing Tony every day whether I wanted to or not. I’ll probably never stop asking myself if I could have changed things had I accepted the invitation. I’ll also probably never forgive myself. But what I can see now, that I didn’t back then, is that ultimately Tony was a man who was trying his best—to free himself of his analytical mind, to find a belief system that was more forgiving of his spiritual ambivalence, to express his love to the people he cared about, to reconcile the contradictions that embodied his internal and external life and ultimately defined his persona. His best was enough for millions of fans, but it wasn’t enough for him. Throughout the years, both before and after his death, I’ve struggled with persistent questions of whether he actually cared enough about me to give me his best. But ultimately it doesn’t matter: I’m just grateful for the time I had with him.
EPILOGUE
HOW DO YOU END A STORY LIKE THIS? THE TRUTH IS I DON’T FEEL DONE or remotely satisfied with what I’ve written. All along I’d been clinging to the naïve hope that, given enough time, I’d be able to find the missing pieces of the puzzle.
When I came across a long-lost U
SB memory stick buried in the back of my desk, I thought maybe I’d found what I’d been looking for. A year before Tony’s death he’d put it in my hand, looked me in the eye, and deliberately said, “Whatever you do, don’t look at this.” What had he meant? Actually don’t look at it? Or don’t look at it, wink, wink, as in, do look at it? Was it a prank or a test? Ultimately I’d decided to play it safe, and I put the drive away. With the craziness of life and work, I’d forgotten it even existed.
I held my breath as I inserted the drive and double-clicked it open to find a document named “Hungry Ghost.” My eyes raced back and forth across the pages of what appeared to be an unfinished manuscript Tony had been working on before his death. It was the story of his travels—our travels—to many of the same places I’d chosen to include in my own book. His writing was lyrical, almost stream of consciousness, riddled with errors and omissions, but exquisite nonetheless. I found it humbling how, even in an early draft, Tony succeeded at effortlessly capturing the dislocation of moving through space, the blur of a life spent in motion.
It took a moment for me to realize how different it was than Tony’s other work. Instead of the curiosity and humor that usually characterized his writing, Tony described himself as wandering from place to place, haunted by crushing loneliness. A lost soul trapped in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction, always longing for more, he was the very embodiment of a hungry ghost.
Over the next eighty pages Tony wrestled with some of the questions that had been eating away at me for years. Writing about Libya, he examined why we’d gone to such dangerous places and whether it was worth the risk. Every time I’d asked Tony those questions, he’d given me some unsatisfying non-answer. Until now.
I looked around the room at my closest colleagues and friends. People I’d spent the greater part of my waking hours with for YEARS. More than my wife or my child or anybody I called a friend. What was MY responsibility to them? Tom, my producer, who’d been with me in one capacity or another for nearly 100 shows. I knew he’d walk straight into a fusillade to get a good shot. But that was Tom. What about Todd, who’d been with me from nearly the very beginning—nearly 15 years of putting up with my shit, my moods, my personal ups and downs, while walking backwards holding cameras in Borneo, in Liberia, Mexico, and Beirut? I knew his wife, his kids. Zach had been with me for some years too. Josh was new. He surely hadn’t signed up for THIS shit.