Charles Leerhsen - Down and Out in Paradise : The Life of Anthony Bourdain

Down and Out in Paradise

The Life of Anthony Bourdain

Charles Leerhsen

For Frankie

AB: Is there anything I can do?

AA: Stop busting my balls.

AB: Okay.

THE FINAL TEXT EXCHANGE BETWEEN ANTHONY BOURDAIN AND ASIA ARGETO ON THE NIGHT HE KILLED HIMSELF .

He was the epitome of cool, a sad-smiling Jersey boy who combined supremely high standards with the underappreciated art of not giving a shit in ways that seemed to excite both sexes. You wanted either to be him or to do him, especially if youd heard the gossip about his gargantuan member. He had the best job (if you could call it that) in the world, the best life in the world, applauded wherever he went. Cigarettes, booze, and time all looked good on him. So the question is, how did he get to the point where he wanted to kill himself? How does that scenario even begin to make the slightest bit of sense?

It all came down to the woman, or so the supposedly wise ones said. Darkly beautiful, you had to admit, and certainly no dummy, but trouble with a capital T, an old-fashioned femme fatale. Cocktail for cocktail, she could keep up with him all night long and then pull away like Man o War in the rosy-fingered homestretch. He loved that about her, that she was tough and independent and always thirsty; he loved that fresh mouth. Ive never felt like this about anyone before, he told anyone within earshot. But her ballsiness also happened to be their biggest problem. Because for one thing it meant that she would screw anyone she pleased, sometimes, it was said, anyone within reach. Of course, hed been around the block himself, and came from a world in which sex often didnt mean much, but since he was head over heels for her and had big plans for the two of them, and was such an incurable romantic at heart, such a goddamn Jersey boy, even the possibility of her sleeping with other people mattered to the point of making him physically sick. So many long, tortuous calls to Rome from which he would stagger back to the days business pale and shaken, the people whod been waiting around for him unable to look him in the eye. He could feel her slipping away. Why dont you just get on with your fucking life! she had screamed at him one night. As one of his friends said, A billion fucking broads in the world and hes got to pick one who will take him or leave him!

His fans hated her, refused to even say her name; he didnt care. His best pals were fed up with the teenage boy crap and at the same time nervous wrecks. Since leaving his first wife, Nancy, he had flirted with suicide several times. Would he take another shot at ityou know, once more with feeling? Yes, as a matter of fact, one especially drunken night he would.

Sirens, cops, reporters on the line. A complete fucking mess. When the sun came up, Frank Sinatra was still alive, but the whole world knew that he had tried to kill himself over Ava Gardner.

We actually can learn a lot from celebrities, who after all travel the furthest and the fastest in life and therefore accumulate the most edifying scrapes and bruises. A normal persons scars speak strictly of his or her probably prosaic personal history; the celebritys, on the other hand, show what can and inevitably (and reassuringly) does go wrong even when one has money, beauty, and adulation in extravagant supply. Anthony Michael Bourdaina chef, writer, and the host of a cable TV travel show who died by his own hand on June 8, 2018, at the age of sixty-onewas a crash test dummy extraordinaire. He didnt hide his scars and other imperfections as most celebrities do, and he told well, not quite everything, as it turns out, but a good deal about his history of poor decision-making and worse luck and especially about what having the best job in the world meant when you were, like most of us, still caught up in the common comedy. From Tony we can learn not just practical tidbits like why you probably shouldnt order fish on a Monday (his single most famous piece of advice, related in Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, the 2000 bestseller that first made him a star) and nuggets of wisdom like travel isnt always pretty; you get scarred, marked, changed in the process; it even breaks your heartbut also things about life that you didnt even know you didnt know. For example, if we really do wind up with the face we deservein Tonys case, a big, beautifully cragged-out Easter Island mask through which he somehow both eagerly and warily surveilled the worldthe funeral we deserve is another matter entirely.

Consider: in the hours and days after Anthony Bourdain died, things did not proceed as they normally do in terms of arrangement making. No one called the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel, the 120-year-old Upper East Side mortuary to the stars that three decades earlier had buried Tonys beloved father, Pierre (as well as Rudolph Valentino, Judy Garland, and Jackie O), to enlist its help in getting Tony into the ground or an urn or at least out of France, where hed hanged himself on a bathroom doorknob. Nor, alternatively, did anyone from Tonys inner circle start pulling together a less formal but more colorful and celebratory ceremony inspired by one or more of the cultures hed traded paint with in the course of his televised travels, an option that the deceased might well have found appropriate andthis was always important for himamusing. After more than 250 episodes of, depending on how you count them, at least four cable shows, the possibilities were plentiful: New Orleans brass band festive, Japanese Zen, a traditional Maltese ceremony in which mourners sprinkle salt on the exposed stomach of the deceased, a Hindu pyre, one of those fantastic Taiwanese obsequies where the survivors hire strippers to ensure a strong turnout, a Kenyan wake where the eulogies are purposely strewn with liesor even a Jewish service, for which Tony qualified as the son of the former Gladys Sacksman of the Bronx.

Yes, ethnically speaking, Tony identified as Jewish, and the traditional levaya with its ritual rending of the black ribbon, its Mourners Kaddish and symbolic spadefuls of dirt, while it may not seem so exotic to people from the New York City areawhere Tony grew up and maintained a home baseis both as spiritually riveted and heartbreakingly universal as anything he experienced in his seventeen-year career as a curator of far-flung ports. If in the end the Jewish option would not have flownand it almost certainly would not havethat was only because of the fervor with which Tony detested his then-eighty-three-year-old mother. Although Gladys, like him, was nonobservant, any ceremony that seemed to acknowledge her influence on him, or even her existence, would have been rejected by Tonys true intimates as being insensitive to his presumed wishes. But were getting tangled in hypotheticals here. In fact there was no oneneither intimates nor professionalsmaking any sort of arrangements for Tony. Nothing in the way of memorial planning was going on.

Instead, while the world gasped and grieved at the news of Tonys sudden death; and Google searches for Bourdain suicide spiked to more than one hundred million; and Donald Trump and Barack Obama proffered regrets and sympathies in uncharacteristically similar tweets; and thousands of mourners flocked spontaneously to the site of Les Halles, the already long-since shuttered steak frites place on Park Avenue South where Tony had once worked as head chef, to leave handwritten notes and bunches of flowers or affix greeting cards to the window with chewing gum and Band-Aids (