Tony Bourdain: 'Lonely and Living in Constant Uncertainty'

God gives us meat, but the devil sends us cooks,” Anthony Bourdain told the Observer two decades ago. He viewed the phrase as a compliment, and considered kitchens second homes for damned souls and “the degraded and the debauched”.

At that moment, he was already well-known in New York, as author of the scandalous bestseller Kitchen Confidential and as chef and co-owner of Les Halles, a French brasserie on Park Avenue that for a time became the favored spot for the creative demimonde.

His notoriety was soon to soar: he refashioned the job of the celebrity chef, puncturing the self-importance of the species; he infused the job with sex appeal and with intensity. He produced three seasons of globe-trotting food adventure, a run that made him a global star.

Yet 17 years later, Bourdain met his end in a provincial hotel in Kaysersberg, France, killing himself at the tail end of doomed relationship with Asia Argento, the actor and daughter of an Italian horror film director.

Bourdain’s charismatic approach to cooking and to life, and his spiral down, will be revived four years after his death on publication next week of Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain.

The book is already setting off a wave of controversy among Bourdain’s huge fanbase, as well as his friends and relatives, who claim that journalist Charles Leerhsen’s account of Bourdain’s life is a slur on his memory. But it has also been praised as a frank retelling of a complex man’s life.

Either way, it will still keep Bourdain firmly in the spotlight – something that he perhaps once sought but came to hate.

Some are in uproar about the book “as if it was their job now to protect him and remember him in an artificial way”, Leerhsen says. “There’s a self-righteousness about that, but if you’re curious about Anthony Bourdain, here’s a book.” (...)

The objections center around the publication of intimate details, text messages and last words that offer harrowing insights into Bourdain’s final days in which a collision occurred between conflicting interior and exterior lives that, at 62, he no longer had strength to address.

“I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job,” Bourdain wrote to his estranged wife Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, with whom he remained close, shortly before he took his life. “I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.”

In the prelude to Down and Out, Leerhsen writes that Bourdain knew when he started out in television that he didn’t want to become a creature of it. “Here’s my pitch,” he said to a cable executive. “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit and basically do whatever the fuck I want.”

“That turned out to be a winning formula, and it left Tony with the distinct impression that, as he more than once said, ‘not giving a shit is a really fantastic business model for television’,” Leerhsen writes.

At the height of his career, Bourdain was traveling 250 days a year, visiting far-off lands, meeting folks, and eating all manner of unusual food. His screen presence was compelling: Bourdain became an unconventional TV star traversing the world in a quest for adventure that, at its core, was as old as the Odyssey.

“It’s an age-old story of being careful what you wish for, of dealing with success and love in oceanic proportions,” Leerhsen says.

When success came, he says, Bourdain was considered about it. “But he became someone that he hated. By the time he realized that, he was too physically exhausted to straighten things out. He thought it simpler to seek what is famously called ‘a permanent solution to a temporary problem’.”

by Edward Helmore, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Naashon Zalk/AP