After Anthony Bourdain took his own life in a French hotel room in 2018, his close friends, family and the people who for decades had helped him become an international TV star closed ranks against the swarm of media inquiries and stayed largely silent, especially about his final days. Neither of the two documentaries about Bourdain since then have directly addressed how very messy his life had become in the months that led up to the night he hanged himself at age 61.
An upcoming unauthorized biography of the writer and travel documentarian is filled with fresh, intimate details, including raw, anguished texts from the days before Mr. Bourdain’s death, such as his final exchanges with Ms. Argento and Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, his wife of 11 years who by the time they separated in 2016, had become his confidante. “I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job,” Mr. Bourdain wrote to Ms. Busia-Bourdain in one of their near-daily text exchanges. “I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.”
Drawing on more than 80 interviews, and files, texts and emails from Bourdain’s phone and laptop, the journalist Charles Leerhsen traces Bourdain’s metamorphosis from a sullen teenager in a New Jersey suburb to a heroin-shooting kitchen swashbuckler who struck gold as a writer and became a uniquely talented interpreter of the world through his travels. Leerhsen portrays a man who at the end of his life was isolated, injecting steroids, drinking to the point of blackout and visiting prostitutes, and had all but vanished from his 11-year-old daughter’s life.
According to Leerhsen, non-cooperation from the Bourdain camp helped open other doors for him. “A lot of people were willing to talk to me because they were left behind by Tony and by the Tony train,” he said, adding that some were moved to speak by their anger over the damage Bourdain had done to his daughter.
The book starts with Bourdain’s early years, analyzing his parents’ marriage, his performance in school and his relationship with his first wife, Nancy Putkoski, who Leerhsen said was a helpful source. Bourdain graduated from high school a year early so he could follow her to Vassar. His grades there were terrible, and he was happier during the summers he worked in restaurants in Provincetown, Mass. After two years, he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America, five miles north of Vassar in Hyde Park, N.Y.
The book traces Bourdain’s career in New York restaurants, and his relationships with the intimidating chefs who molded him. It includes the well-known tale of how his mother, Gladys Bourdain, then an editor at The New York Times, handed an article he had written about the ugly secrets of a Manhattan restaurant to Esther B. Fein, the wife of the New Yorker editor David Remnick, who ran it in the magazine. The story turbocharged Bourdain’s writing career, leading to his best-selling book "Kitchen Confidential," which lead to his first show, “A Cook’s Tour,” and subsequent programs. At this point, the story takes an unknown turn.
The book delves deeply into Bourdain’s extramarital relationship with Italian actress Asia Argento. The two were involved for about two years in a tumultuous and very public relationship that Bourdain seemed willing to do anything to preserve. “I find myself being hopelessly in love with this woman,” he wrote to his wife. Bourdain spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Argento, providing financial support for her, her two children and sometimes her friends, according to the book. He insisted to co-workers that she direct and appear in the show, and became a fierce advocate for the #MeToo movement after she told the reporter Ronan Farrow in 2017 that Harvey Weinstein had sexually assaulted her.
At one point, Leerhsen writes, Bourdain hired a private detective to investigate Jimmy Bennett, a young musician and actor who was 7 years old when he was cast as Argento’s son in “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” a 2004 film she directed and starred in. After Argento came forward in 2017 with her account of sexual assault by Weinstein, Bennett (who by then was 20 years old) filed a notice of intent to sue for what his lawyers claimed was sexual battery: He and Argento had sex when she was 37 and he was 17, still a minor. Bennett asked Argento for $3.5 million-- Bourdain quietly arranged to pay him $380,000.
Five days before Bourdain's death, Argento was photographed dancing with the French reporter Hugo Clément in the lobby of the Hotel de Russie
in Rome, where she and Bourdain had stayed together. According to the book, Bourdain
was incensed that she was seeing another man, and over the course of the next few days, he
searched her name online hundreds of times, and the two argued over text
and phone. The book then offers a theory on the unknowable: why Bourdain took his life.
Two days before Bourdain's death, he had lunch at with friend Eric Ripert, a fellow chef who was the one who eventually found Bourdain dead in his Alsatian hotel room. The two ate JY's, a two-Michelin-star restaurant owned by another friend, chef Jean-Yves Schillinger. After the meal, the three men headed to Freiburg, a German city 30 miles away, for late-night beers. Schillinger said Bourdain was welcomed like the star that he was, and seemed his old self.
Leerhsen asserts that after that trip, Bourdain finally realized the true cost of his demanding emotional pursuit of Argento. “I think at the very end, in the last days and hours, he realized what he had become,” Leerhsen said. “He did ultimately know he didn’t want to be that person he had become.” Bourdain’s mind-set in his last days and hours will forever be a matter of speculation. But there is no doubt his friends were concerned, and his last texts shed some light on his state of mind.
When the three men returned from Freiburg that night, a worried Ripert, who was staying in the room next door to Bourdain’s, put his ear to the wall and to his relief heard his friend snoring peacefully. The next day, the book says, Bourdain and Argento fought again. “I am okay,” he texted her. “I am not spiteful. I am not jealous that you have been with another man. I do not own you. You are free. As I said. As I promised. As I truly meant. But you were careless. You were reckless with my heart. My life.”
The only thing that hurt, he wrote, was that the tryst took place in the Rome hotel they loved. He asked for her mercy. She wrote, “I can’t take this.” She told him she couldn’t stand his possessiveness, and could no longer stay in the relationship.
After the next day’s filming, Leerhsen reports, Bourdain went out by himself, and ate and drank a lot. He and Argento then had their last text exchange, which Leerhsen places at the start of his book:
Bourdain: Is there anything I can do?
Argento: Stop busting my balls
Bourdain: OK
That evening, he hanged himself.
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