Some time ago, I reviewed a couple of books about Anthony Bourdain: World Travel that is written with Laurie Woolever, his long-time collaborator, and The Last Interview and Other Conversations.
The other day it was eight years since Bourdain died.
Bourdain was a person just like anyone else. He had dreams, aspirations, and guess what? He had a lot of other sides to him, good and bad. Just like everyone else.
As Charles Leerhsen’s Down and Out in Paradise shows, Bourdain was a womens’ cause advocate while buying sex from women. He did TV about workers conditions while he could callously fire people on a whim.
That book, by the way, is not 'authorised' but Leerhsen had access to Bourdain's laptop and phone, In other words, Leerhsen learned a lot about Bourdain's inner life. The book is partly extremely revealing and humanising, and partly feels like robbing someone's grave, but... Bourdain's dead. His family and friends are mostly alive. Leerhsen's book's either something you can read or you won't open.
AB: Is there anything I can do?
AA: Stop busting my balls.
AB: Okay.—THE FINAL TEXT EXCHANGE BETWEEN ANTHONY BOURDAIN AND ASIA ARGENTO ON THE NIGHT HE KILLED HIMSELF.
Bourdain made magnificent TV shows where he engaged with real people. He wanted to make a true change, and was doing just that.
“His fans are young and old, male and female, straight and queer,” Tony’s book editor Karen Rinaldi wrote soon after his death, in a piece called “Why Anthony Bourdain Matters.” “They are blue and red, east and west, black and white; they are hip and square, adventuresome and timid, paleo and vegan, armchair and inveterate travelers alike. He was one of the few examples of someone who could piss people off and still maintain their respect in the wake of their rancor.”
Another book, Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, by Laurie Woolever, quotes a lot of Bourdain's friends, family, The book is definitely 'authorised'. I use quotation marks because I really wonder what the punk Bourdain would make of the word; I mean punk as in he loved the New York Dolls and even had Jon Spencer Blues Explosion make the theme song for No Reservations, The oral-biography book is no hagiography, as it says in its start. The book is very, very recommendable. Woolever has a done a terrific, above-and-beyond job in speaking with people; the editing process must have been torturous, both in collecting all the pieces of her old friend and then deciding how to put it all together.
Tom Vitale worked with Bourdain for years and produced different TV series with Bourdain. Vitale wrote a book named In the Weeds. They worked together for more than fifteen years. It's a moving and infuriating book; Vitale barely had days off during those fifteen years, naturally a choice he made; when you're in the presence of a person who makes you feel like the highlight of the universe, you're there, you don't want to be anywhere else. Most of us probably know what that feels like and know what you're willing to do to not fade away from that person, that beacon of light, that escape from boredom, that for-you unique individual.
Over his last two years Tony pushed people away or let long-running relationships lapse until by June 2018 there was no one left in his life to play the role of Person Who Plans Your Funeral—or at least no one except a woman whom none of his friends or family would speak to, or even speak about, and who would in any case and for various reasons not be up to the task of organizing a proper send-off.
Leerhsen makes for uncomfortable reading; it may be the truth. It feels to me like Bourdain was abused in his relationship with Argento.
I can't put my finger on it, but there's a lot about Leerhsen's style that I like, as seen in these quotes; it's a mix of unabashed honesty, verve, and something that makes me feel a grave's been robbed along with dignity. But when the hell are humans dignified? In church? We're not in church.
“For a while I watched him caught in a kind of cycle,” his longtime friend Robert Ruiz told me. “He would be so ready to quit, so close to sending me a text that said, ‘I did it. I’m out of there. Let’s go have a beer’—and then, pow, he’d get a piece of fan mail from someone who said, ‘I went to my local Chinatown for the first time because I watched your show.’ Or ‘I never thought I’d visit my kid who’s a backpacker in Australia but now I’m going because of you.’ Or a stranger would come up to him in a bar and say, ‘You inspired me to get my first passport!’ And all that sentimental horseshit pulled on his heartstrings and he’d turn around and go right back out on the road. It came down to that, really.”
“We all worked while wearing cassette tape Walkmen turned up very loud,” Schnatterly said. “The Ramones and the Ventures were very big for Tony, and if a song came on in the middle of the rush that was really cranking him, he’d pull out the plug from my headphones and put them in his Walkman, so I could experience the same song. There was very little verbal communication because if you wanted to talk to someone you had to go pull their headphones off, so we did a lot of gesturing and pointing.” Now and then Tony would come as close as he would ever get to public dancing. “The idea,” Schnatterly told me, “was always to get as much joy out of this day as you can and then, well, tomorrow’s another day.”
Over the years he did show up now and then at Narcotics Anonymous meetings, but his behavior there could be distracting. A woman friend of his who accompanied him to several NA meetings in New York City told me, “When he got up to speak, he always sucked the oxygen out of the room. Partly that was because he was famous by then, but part of it was because instead of baring his soul the way that other speakers did, he would challenge what was being said. He certainly didn’t want to hear talk about alcohol and how it related to drug addiction—he felt very strongly that drinking was a separate issue. Tony didn’t have the humility and gratitude part down. There was always a feeling of thinly veiled anger whenever he spoke—and in the program you often hear that behind anger there is fear.”
“Tony was a tortured soul but not a tortured writer,” Joel Rose told me. “He would sit down and there would suddenly be this whoosh—just pages and pages being produced.” In a 2003 interview, Tony said there was “an element of shame” to his success as a writer, “because it’s so easy. I can’t believe that people give me money for this shit.” Christopher Hitchens wrote just as easily and with that same whoosh effect, but for him that was more or less the end of the process. In Tony’s case it was just the start. It was good that he tolerated editing so well because he often needed a good bit of it. He would write in a spasm of creativity and then move on to other things, as he always felt compelled to do, letting others—the people who do for a living what his mother did—tidy up after him. Ruth Reichl, when she was the editor of Gourmet magazine in the early 2000s, remembers him turning in what’s known in the business as a “vomit draft” of an assigned article that her subordinates had then to sort out and shape into a finished piece with his good-natured but sporadic assistance.
“What do you do,” Tony says just before the credits roll, “when all of your dreams come true?”
His relationship with Argento was nowhere nearly as healthy as he, probably in all sincerity, insisted it was. The word “happily” for example was a whiff of wishful thinking that was contradicted by their increasingly frequent fights about how their lives might or might not fit together; disappointment and anxiety were much more common feelings for him (and perhaps for her, too) than serene contentment. They were already at, or getting close to, the point where Tony would tell Ottavia that Argento was “a cancer that has taken over my whole body and which I can’t get rid of.”
In general he was falling apart, but those last weeks were up and down. Just before he got on the plane to Kaysersberg, the CNN publicist Karen Reynolds called him to say that the Hong Kong episode had premiered to terrific reviews and ratings and he was “so happy—I mean giddy,” she said. He texted her saying, “This is the high-water mark, this is the best thing I’ve ever done.” But it was difficult for him to sustain good feelings. Between the lines, Argento’s emails were telling a sad and, to him, frightening story. There were no more “I love yous,” no more “I’m forever yourses” coming his way. “She just constantly asked him to do things for her, to fix her issues, help her with her ‘activist career,’ ” Ottavia said. “And she wasn’t even nice about it. She would tell him her life would be over if all of her issues weren’t taken care of immediately and he of course would be terrified.”
The last batch of quotes are from the Leehrsen book.
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.
This quote is from Woolever's oral-history book.
I mean make no mistake, Bourdain was a brilliant writer, unlike a lot of people, while he was also vain (had a google alert for his own name) and deeply flawed in other ways, just like a lot of people, but he had a way of expressing himself that was always extremely human and recognisable. I really love that about him. He did many things for which he will rightly be remembered for a very long time. He was fantastic and made life better for a lot of people, including those whose lives he made worse. In other words, Bourdain was human.