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“I Knew It Was Doomed; I Knew Someone Was Doomed”: Inside Anthony Bourdain’s All-Consuming Relationship

In an excerpt from Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, friends, family, and colleagues describe the titan of the food world’s obsessive love affair with Asia Argento.

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: I probably talked to Tony for twenty hours, over the course of the year [2016]. And that was the year in which his marriage fell apart, and his show was kind of coming into its own.

Initially, I was gonna talk to both him and Ottavia together; that was something that he said very certainly was going to happen, in the early going. He really wanted me to meet her, and I did, too. I kept pushing for the three of us to hang out. At the time, I figured, Oh, they’re busy, it’s tricky with schedules. It felt to me as though, at the beginning of that year, it was important for him to project an image that this was a relationship that was really working.

OTTAVIA BUSIA-BOURDAIN: I mean, the fact that we had a kid, and got married, in a few months of meeting, in that sense, yeah, he was impulsive. But while we were together, and things were going well, I thought he was actually very levelheaded, and he really had always thought about the well-being of Ariane, or my well-being, before deciding to do something or not.

As a dad, he was always the good cop. I think it was fair, because he was around so little, so when he was home, there was no enforcing homework, there was no discipline. He was 100 percent fun dad, and he called himself “Silly Dada,” cause that’s what he was doing.

ARIANE BUSIA-BOURDAIN: I watched Archer with my dad, which I found pretty funny, even as a little kid. Of course, I still watched the regular kid TV shows, but I wasn’t hearing about anyone else who was playing Grand Theft Auto with their parents. And I kind of realized when I was younger that, Oh, not a lot of kids fall asleep to Dexter.

I remember him struggling to put my Barbie DreamHouse together. Or I’d pretend that he was in a barber shop, and he wouldn’t let me cut it, but I’d just put random soap on his hair. He played with me all the time, he went with it. If I was like, “Hey, let’s pretend to do this,” he’d pretty much do it all the time.

We had this tradition where we’d go to the Palisades, in New Jersey, and we’d climb up all the way to the top of this little mountain. There are perfect stairs, but we decided to just go through the trees and branches and stuff, which you’re not supposed to do. And after that, we’d go to Hiram’s, which is this very low-key spot for hot dogs, that’s their specialty there, and I used to go there all the time with him. We’d go there on Father’s Day. And he’s been going there since he was younger so, of course, he’s very familiar with the place. Every time we’d go to the Hamptons, we’d go to this place called Sip’n Soda, and we’d both always have lime rickeys there. Those two places were our favorites.

In New York, he would usually take me to one of those restaurants, like fast food, that my mom doesn’t approve of. I think my mom knew, but he would make it seem like we were on this mission.

He would say, “All right, let’s tell your mom that we’re going to get the newspaper downstairs, but we’re actually going to go to Papaya King.” We’d get a hot dog and a papaya shake and we’d eat it in this little garden. Then we’d come back and say, “That was an interesting newspaper yeah.” I’m sure my mom knew. Why would it take us twenty minutes to get the newspaper?

Paris, Summer 1973.From the photo collection of Christopher Bourdain.

OTTAVIA BUSIA-BOURDAIN: He really liked making breakfast for Ariane, and then, when she was a little bit older, they started cooking together. And especially in the summer, when we would rent a house in the Hamptons for a month, and they were really cooking together, and spending so much time together, and going to the beach together.

ARIANE BUSIA-BOURDAIN: I always cooked with him. We’d always cook ratatouille, from the movie Ratatouille, and we made it exactly like they made it. We’d cook schnitzel; he’d make little stations: one of them has the breading, one has the flour, one has the eggs, and my dad put it in the pan. He’d cook omelets for me all the time, and I’d help him flip it. He would let me sprinkle chocolate chips or blueberries into pancakes, and then he’d let me flip the pancake a little. When we were in the Hamptons, he’d cook dinner, cook breakfast, so that’s when he really cooked for me.

He taught me how to cut things and not chop off my fingers, to curl my fingers under. He gave me my own little knife, and I still have it, and still use it.

OTTAVIA BUSIA-BOURDAIN: He was a great dad. And he was silly. He was like an overgrown child. They would make videos together. And play silly games, and he would tell her crazy stories, and he always said that we were a family of weirdos, but that was great, you know.

ARIANE BUSIA-BOURDAIN: We had this little thing called the Weirdo Club. And I don’t really know what it was about, it was just us being weird. And I really liked it. He encouraged weirdness. He pretty much encouraged every single thing I wanted to do in my life, and gave me the information to back it up.

OTTAVIA BUSIA-BOURDAIN: He really felt this responsibility to be healthy. He started actually getting checkups, and going to the doctor, and he had a CAT scan of his lungs, and turns out that they were totally fine. He was making an effort to be healthy, because he wanted to be around for Ariane.

But then, once he moved out, he seemed to be really impulsive. Definitely for the last two years of his life, he made many impulsive decisions.

When he told me that he wanted to move out, there was not a big shock. For quite some time, we were basically friends. We didn’t work out as a married couple, but we would get along so well, there was no reason for either of us to move out or change the way things were. Like I said, we didn’t work out as a married couple, but we were doing very well as a family.

But then he fell in love, and his girlfriend told him that she didn’t want to be a weekend lover, so he decided it was the best thing for his relationship to move out. And because of the relationship we had, I couldn’t say, “Oh no, you have stay with us.” You know, it was his prerogative; he was a grown man, and we didn’t have that kind of relationship anymore.

I was worried about Ariane, but I was happy for him, because it was like, “Maybe you’ll find another chance at love,” and I was like, “Go for it,” you know.

He told me, “Nothing is gonna change. I’ll be there every morning to take her to school, and I’ll be there for dinner, and I’ll still sleep over a lot of nights.” And for a bit, it really seemed like things were gonna work out, but then everything changed. And that’s not the way things went.

I feel like, for him, it was very important to have the kind of stability that he had at home. Even if our marriage didn’t work out, there was still routine, and there were people who really cared about him. And Tony, he had this image of, you know, this bad boy, no fucks given, but he was actually really sensitive, and really fragile. And I really think he needed a stable environment around him. When he left, he didn’t have that anymore. It’s weird to say nobody was protecting him, because he was a grown-ass man, but still—I feel like he needed, if not protection, at least stability.

JARED ANDRUKANIS [producer, Parts Unknown]: Near the end, when he was in love [with Asia Argento], he would talk to me more about his personal life. Which he never did before. It was strange.

DAVE CHANG: The last time I saw Tony was when Peter Meehan and I were getting “divorced” [over the fate of their business ventures]. Tony really mentored us, me and Pete. When we would have disagreements over the years, we’d always go to Tony, to be King David and to arbitrate.

It was spring 2017, right before Lucky Peach closed, and I remember he had just moved into the Time Warner Center, and we were trying to catch up for some time. We met at the Coliseum, which was a cook’s bar late at night, and in the daytime it was pretty empty. He ordered the fucking weirdest thing—curry fries. Then we go to Porter House New York [in Time Warner Center] for dinner, and I was like, “Tony, you’re living in a fucking prison.”

I could see how fucking weird and plastic his life was becoming. We sat down ordered an incredibly expensive bottle of wine, like way more than I thought we were gonna spend, and I just started to go into detail of everything that was happening, and just how fucking unhappy I was. Then he starts to tell me about his separation from Ottavia, and he said, “Well, I’m in love again.” It was one of those moments where Tony’s so euphoric in something that you know that it’s irrational. Man, he was fucking madly in love with her. Just the way he was talking about her, I was like, “Tony you sound like a fucking ninth grader! What’s wrong with you?”

But I wasn’t going to tell him anything. It was hard to criticize him, as a friend.

Tony and the author of Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, Laurie Woolever, in 2016, at a day of interviews in Toronto, promoting their cookbook, Appetites.Courtesy of Philippa Croft.

NATHAN THORNBURGH: I remember when he first—We were in Catalonia, filming the [Roads & Kingdoms] series we did out there with him in February 2017. It was the first time he had talked to me about Asia. He started flipping through her Instagram and he was like, “She’s trouble.” Matt [Goulding] and I were just kind of looking at each other like, Are you fucking seventeen? The foment around her, I would say that was a noticeable change in him, and I had been working with him long enough to know that that was unusual.

JOSÉ ANDRÉS: He was in love. He was like a young kid in love.

HELEN CHO: He was the most brilliant person, but when it came to love, it seemed like he was just back to being a seventeen-year-old kid who just couldn’t help himself and wasn’t gonna listen. He pushed people away, people whom he had been loyal to for years. He left his base. He was not in his right mind.

He knew it, too. He was a smart guy. He knew what he was doing, and he couldn’t help himself, and it was paralyzing to witness, and I felt very helpless.

I told him. I said, “You’re playing with fire. You know that, right?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I absolutely know, but what can I do? She loves me.”

That was worth burning everything else to the ground.

ALISON MOSSHART: In Tony, you’ve got this person who is so in control, so opinionated, so quick, so sharp, so observant, and at the same time, someone who is a fifteen-year-old boy, who’s so not observant of what everyone is receiving from you. This is extreme behavior. In a positive, it’s beautiful behavior, but there has to be some sort of a balance. There wasn’t.

Everybody’s guilty of this a little bit, when you start dating someone and you’re in love. You take on some things about that person; you sort of melt into one person. But there’s got to be separation. You are two people, you’ve got two life histories. Some things started to vanish with him. I couldn’t see him.

MARIA BUSTILLOS: The way he was in love, and described being in love, I would have been concerned if I’d been one of his friends. And I’m not saying that in retrospect; I thought it then [in February 2018], for sure. He didn’t go for five minutes without saying, “Asia thinks this” and “Asia thinks that.” He sounded like a person who was deeply infatuated, obsessed, even, and it struck me as a vulnerability in him.

Just the way that the idea of who he was when he was alone was so bound up with this lady, that was concerning. I would have been concerned.

DAVID SIMON: The new romance—all the places where you’ve shit the bed in life, those get scrubbed clean, and you get to start over and be charming and be charmed by the new person. I experienced Tony going through that with Asia, though I never met her.

She was the new person with him, and it was powerful, and it was kid-like, in a way that we’re all kid-like at that moment. Show me an eighty-year-old widower who takes up with a seventy-five-year-old widow at the nursing home in Florida, and he’s going through the same emotions while they play canasta in the community room. That’s just who we are; it’s what long-term relationships are battling all the time. You have familiarity and trust and history and love and shared sense of purpose, but you don’t have new. And the new person, you get to start painting all over again. And so, I saw him in that moment where he was painting all over again with somebody he was in love with.

ALISON MOSSHART: It’s so strange. Tony—as Tony as he was in his work, and his actual personality, and what he’s like with his friends—everything about that guy was like a fucking dream. And then there was 5 percent of him, his psyche, that was strangely not matching with anything else. He wanted to be loved so much, but in this insatiable kind of way. There was that need, or that addict part, that he just couldn’t let go of, that came in to fuck up all the brilliant shit in his life, made it impossible for him to enjoy it.

DAVE CHANG: He told me, “I’m done. I can’t carry the load for everyone; I have to make myself happy. I’m just going to disappear and move to Italy and grow old with Asia, and that’s it. I’m gonna let the guys at ZPZ know. I’m done with it all.”

SANDY ZWEIG: I always felt like we had a relationship of mutual respect, one that was fairly straightforward and honest. I do think that that changed with Asia, because then I felt like there was really only one focus. Certainly, that Hong Kong episode [of Parts Unknown] was another turning point.

[Director] Michael Steed had to have his gall bladder removed, and we needed to replace him as a director on very short notice.

When Tony found out, it became an “It’s my way or the highway” kind of thing. And that meant Asia directing. And the fact that that hadn’t been our first thought, it really angered him. I got a call at eleven something at night, and when I talked to him—I mean, I’d never dealt with him when he was that angry.

I feel terrible saying this, but there did feel like there was some sort of desperation in his voice about, somehow, if she directed, that would kind of solidify something, or they would be collaborating again, and that somehow would make his life better.

LIZZIE FOX: When I sort of had a little alarm ring for me was when he shot Hong Kong, the one that Asia directed. That’s when I was like, “There’s an issue here,” just because of what happened on that shoot, how that all went down. That was my first red flag.

MIKE STEED: I say this jokingly but, having to direct this Hong Kong episode, then me losing the gallbladder—I often blame my gallbladder as the sort of beginning of the end of Tony’s life, weirdly.

The second that I knew that [Asia] was slated to direct, I knew it was doomed; I knew someone was doomed. I had already planned on how I was going to keep Tony’s focus off of having [guest cinematographer] Christopher Doyle take over. I knew [cinematographer] Zach [Zamboni] was not going to be cool with it. But man, once Asia took over, I was just like, Oh boy.

Tony in the Hotel Wales kitchen, circa 1988, New York City.Courtesy of Nancy Bourdain.

JARED ANDRUKANIS: When I met [Asia] the first time, it was in New York, at a VO [voice-over] session. She came in and was wrapped up in this shawl, or giant scarf thing, very quiet. She’s, like, sitting there, and her presence was so—she could expand into this massive fiery thing, and also compress to this weird little dwarf.

Tony was in the booth and just rips through his lines like he always does, just blasts through four pages of narration. Does the whole thing in like fifteen minutes. He comes out of the VO booth and is bouncing around and asks her, “Hey what did you think?” She’s like, “That’s what you fucking complain about all the time?”

When I got to Hong Kong, I met with them in the hotel room that they shared. I walk into the room, it’s a nonsmoking hotel, and the room is a cloud of smoke. There’s just papers everywhere, and she’s full-tilt smoking, going through the schedule, tearing apart all the work that we did, which is fine, I mean she’s directing the episode, and we’re support for her, but . . . I didn’t want to interact with her at all, because I knew it would just be dangerous for my career. It’s a weird feeling, one I never had on any shoot before. She had snapped at me so many times that first meeting.

MATT WALSH: She was not rude to me, but her influence on the whole thing—it was Yoko Ono in a Beatles recording session. She didn’t bring anything to the table.

Things got weirder once we got out to [the fishing village] Tai O. Asia felt that Zach was taking too long to set up the scene. That’s, I think, that was where things broke.

But, Tony being such a fanboy of Christopher Doyle, there’s no—He had extra-thick rose-colored glasses on for the whole experience.

JARED ANDRUKANIS: Tony changed. The way that she operated as a director, which was so opposite to the way the directors he liked to work with acted, showed me very clearly—Actually, in the show, when Asia and Christopher Doyle interrupted him, midscene, to move a fucking light and change the blocking of the scene—if I did that, if any of us did that, he would have wanted to murder us. [In that scene] he was talking to two literal refugees, but he goes, “No, no fix the light.” I see now that the work thing went out the door, for her. And I was like, Oh shit, this is bad. This is one of those kind of relationships that can push someone with a code like Tony’s, like his top ten rules, she could blow that out in a second in front of the entire world. I didn’t really know how to deal with that with him.

MATT WALSH: I understood her frustration with Zach. Many of us got frustrated with Zach, because he’s such a perfectionist. I love Zach, and I learned so much from him. But the deeper he got into feature film work, the more he carried that kind of work approach into the scenes for Tony, and we just weren’t able to do that. I respect what he wanted to do, but we weren’t building sets to work on, or spending tens of thousands of dollars to lock down a set, so you could spend six hours lighting it. The old run and gun [approach] was acceptable-enough quality. Losing patience with Zach the artiste is, I think, reasonable. And Asia lost patience with Zach on that.

JARED ANDRUKANIS: Tony called me a couple of times that night, drunk. He told me I had to send Zach home that night, and I could hear her in the background, just screaming, “It’s me or him!” Pressuring this guy to [fire] one of his friends. Tony knew that this move . . .It’s like, you can never see this person again, you have to fuck up his job, get him fired, and make him embarrassed for the rest of his life. I said, “I’m not gonna send him home tonight. It’s midnight, and I’ve had five beers. We’re going to deal with it tomorrow; please don’t do anything until we talk tomorrow morning,” because I wanted them to sleep it off and maybe change their minds. It sucks, because he was not operating logically, but he didn’t want to upset her.

MATT WALSH: My heart was breaking for Zach. It wasn’t nice to be around.

JARED ANDRUKANIS: I sat and talked with Zach for three hours in his hotel room, then I went to scene. I won’t speak for him, but can you imagine what that felt like for him? In front of everybody? Zach was the senior DP [director of photography] on the Hong Kong shoot, and had brought on the AC [camera assistant] personally. And he ended up getting canned.

Zach and the other DPs were responsible for how the world saw Tony as the show evolved. They had the burden of delivering on higher and higher demands, as the cinematic scope grew and grew. You’ll hear that we all have pretty particular relationships at work, but Tony loved the camera guys. He knew they made him look good. Made us all look good, really. And Zach was one of three people who did that job, consistently, for over a decade. All untouchables, really. Or so I thought. The only good part was that we clearly could figure out a way to utilize this newfound enjoyment of making television; as Tony had said on Twitter [about shooting in Hong Kong], “Making TV is fun again.” Christopher Doyle shot Tony riding in the back of the Star Ferry. I mean, no one lives that life, and that’s amazing. I’m happy that he was happy. His happiness was also a wonderful thing for us to see.

JARED ANDRUKANIS: Shortly after Zach was fired, Asia wanted to walk Tony through a throng of tourists [for a shot] because it looked cool. Usually [with Tony] that’s a “No, you’re fucking crazy.” You might even get fired if you suggest that at this point in his career. And he didn’t know that this was coming up—another rule was “No surprises”—so he’d gone to his hotel for downtime. And another rule was, “Don’t fuck with my downtime.” I call him, ready for some pushback, and he answers right away, and I’m like, “Asia was wondering if you could maybe take a walk from your hotel?” He’s like, “Yep, when do you need me there? I’ll be ready.”

We meet at the hotel; I’m there in five minutes, and he’s already ready. We’re walking under this underpass to get to where Asia is waiting for him. He turned to me and said, “I had to do it.” It was the first time he had ever said anything like that to me; I knew what he was talking about, because clearly it’s been on his mind, that he had to fire his DP whom he trusted for a good twelve years. Zach was one of the biggest heads you could go after. He’s like, “I had no choice. I love her.”

I told him, “I know you had to, and I understand why you did it . . . but it doesn’t make it OK.” He was like, “I know, I know, I know.” But he didn’t get mad at me for calling him out on that part. We were all like family at that point, especially the people who had been with him for so many years, but now we were all of a sudden expendable, if his girlfriend hates us.

He put a lot of everything in that basket—he shoveled his work life, his personal life, he shoveled his persona into his relationship, and that is a recipe for fucking disaster, no matter who you are.

From Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography by Laurie Woolever. Copyright © 2021 by Anthony M. Bourdain Trust UW. Excerpted with permission of Anthony M. Bourdain Trust UW and Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.


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