In the Weeds Read online

  Out of an abundance of caution certain names were changed in order to protect the innocent as well as the guilty.

  Copyright © 2021 by Tom Vitale

  Cover design © Ben Wiseman

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: September 2021

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vitale, Tom, author.

  Title: In the weeds : around the world and behind the scenes with Anthony Bourdain / Tom Vitale.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Hachette Books, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021022682 | ISBN 9780306924095 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780306924071 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bourdain, Anthony—Travel. | Vitale, Tom—Travel. | Television cooking shows—United States. | Travelogues (Television programs)—United States. | Food habits—Anecdotes. | Anthony Bourdain, parts unknown. | No reservations (Television program)

  Classification: LCC TX649.B58 V58 2021 | DDC 641.5092—dc23.

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022682.

  ISBNs: 978-0-306-92409-5 (hardcover); 978-0-306-92407-1 (ebook)

  E3-20210826-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  PART ONE Chapter One Aftermath

  Chapter Two Ready for Prime Time

  Chapter Three Appetizer

  Chapter Four Heart of Darkness

  Chapter Five Signs You’re in a Cult

  Chapter Six Kill Your Darlings

  PART TWO Chapter Seven High-Risk Environment

  Chapter Eight Shiny Objects

  Chapter Nine Fame

  Chapter Ten Jamaica Me Crazy

  Chapter Eleven Shooting Nightmares

  Chapter Twelve Roman Holiday

  PART THREE Chapter Thirteen The Quiet American

  Chapter Fourteen Playing with My Food

  Chapter Fifteen Polite Dinner Conversation

  Chapter Sixteen Karma

  Epilogue

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  To my loving family, for their unwavering support and steadfast belief I was worth the effort, despite all evidence to the contrary

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I DON’T KNOW IF MY LIFE ENDED OR IF IT BEGAN WHEN I STARTED WORKING with Tony. Whatever the hell I did for a living was so vivid and spectacular, it all but consumed me. Then, without warning, it was over forever, reduced to nothing more than a memory.

  In my case the old cliché that life has a funny way of turning the tables when you least expect it rang uncomfortably true. Each two-week shoot contained a lifetime’s worth of adventures, and there’d been so many trips, I’d lost count. Accustomed to the adrenaline rush of making split-second decisions with far-reaching consequences, I now found myself unemployed, with nowhere to go and poorly suited to handling simple everyday tasks. I still wrote 2006 on checks. I still wrote checks, for Christ’s sake. Even more disorienting, I went from the comfortable position of hiding behind the camera to struggling to articulate my own story.

  And by struggling to articulate, what I really mean is that I found every excuse not to write this damn book. I grew a pandemic mustache. I consolidated, then organized, my extensive matchbook collection. I researched the nesting habits of a threatened species of birds that I didn’t have the heart to evict from my chimney. I learned how to make mulberry jam. The one thing I didn’t do was write.

  It’s not like I had a lack of stories to tell. In fact I had too many and spent almost all of my waking hours silently reliving them. Truth told, I was afraid I wasn’t up to the challenge, worried I’d get the story all wrong. When I eventually did the math and realized procrastinating would only lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, I stayed awake for days straight in an attempt to make up for lost time. In the process I inadvertently discovered the only way I could get anything down on paper was by replicating the extreme intensity and overstimulation of my old job. Like an unhinged detective determined to crack a case, I surrounded myself with souvenirs from my travels, scoured the four corners of my house for transcriptions, travel itineraries, even old receipts. I cross-referenced everything against shoot notebooks, logs, schedules, and emails. But none of it compared to my vast archive of unedited raw film footage. Much of my entire journey with Tony, my whole life really, had been recorded. It was a TV show, after all. I sat, curtains drawn, oblivious to the passing of time, obsessively watching my life play back on an endless loop.

  Some memories were so powerful that I was convinced they should have yielded documentary evidence; but of course not everything was filmed, or preserved via email or text. What follows is my best attempt to paint an honest picture of my experience traveling with Tony, the highs and lows, and the bizarre as shit situations in which we constantly found ourselves. It’s a story told by someone who is still trying to make sense of it all.

  P.S. INCIDENTS INCLUDED IN THIS book are not intended to glamorize or endorse acts of cannibalism, drug use, smuggling, torture, extortion, bribery, wire fraud, attempted vehicular manslaughter, or the poaching of endangered species.

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  AFTERMATH

  JUNE 8, 2018, I WOKE UP AT FIVE A.M. TO MY CELL PHONE AND LANDLINE ringing at the same time. It was Chris, owner of the production company. In a quivering voice he said, “Tom, I’m so sorry… Tony killed himself last night…”

  Hanging up the phone, I couldn’t make sense of what he’d just said. Tony had just emailed me a routine note about the edit we were wrapping up; he’d confirmed a haircut appointment, leaving as we were in a few days for India. When I’d seen him last week for a voice-over session, he’d been jovial, asked me to join him for a smoke in the men’s bathroom. “What are they gonna do, fire me?” he’d said.

  I stumbled over to the TV, turned it on, and there was Tony’s smiling face along with an incongruous banner headline reading, “CNN’s Anthony Bourdain Dead at 61.” My hand shaking, I lit a cigarette, called the producer Josh on location with Tony in France, and asked him what the fuck was going on.

  “Tony’s gone,” Josh said through tears. “He hung himself; we’re flying back to JFK.”

  The room started spinning. Tony was bigger than life. Superhuman. This couldn’t be happening, but somehow it was.

&nbs
p; “I’m going to hang myself in the shower stall” had been one of Tony’s longest running jokes, the sort of dark humor he might have interjected on any occasion he found even mildly uncomfortable or displeasing. As in, “My hotel room is so awful I’m going to hang myself in the shower stall if the cheap-ass curtain rod doesn’t collapse under my weight.” When he said that sort of thing, I’d always laughed.

  THERE WAS NOBODY ELSE LIKE him. College dropout, sharp-tongued, anti-host, Tony was the accidental celebrity, an honest voice in a field of saccharine, an “I’ll do whatever the fuck I want,” wild kind of guy. God forbid the network conducted a focus group; he’d instinctively go the opposite direction. But whatever he was doing, it was working. Tony had transformed himself from chef to author, then again into a television personality, ultimately maturing into something resembling an elder statesman, all while maintaining a countercultural New York City punk rock hard edge.

  Starting life as the Food Network’s redheaded stepchild—low-budget and almost exclusively about food and travel—the show had shape-shifted into a bizarre cinematic geopolitical mashup that won Emmy Awards for CNN. Tony was constantly increasing the stakes. Each season he pushed further, slowly steering toward less traditional (and often riskier) destinations. For those of us on the show, Tony wasn’t just the guy with his name in the title, he was a friend, mentor, and more.

  I didn’t know who Tony was when—back in 2002, fresh out of college—I got a job on his first TV show, A Cook’s Tour. At the time Tony was new to TV as well. The surprise success of his book Kitchen Confidential, an insider exposé on the restaurant industry, had landed him a deal with the Food Network. Tony wasn’t famous yet, at least in a recognizable TV personality sort of way. Bondain, Bonclair—back then everyone always messed up his name.

  My official title was “Edit Room Assistant,” a fancy name for logger, which meant I made notations on the raw footage for the editors. It was an entry-level position, but I was electrified at having landed a job in the industry so quickly. From pretty much the first tape, I was hooked. I remember watching Tony fight with the producer over a walk-in shot at a beach bar in St. Martin.

  “Walk-in shots are totally conventional man, free your mind,” he said in a mock hippie falsetto. But Tony lost his cool when the producer made the mistake of asking for the shot a third time. “Oh my god! Why can’t you get this through your thick little dinosaur skull?!” he shouted. “Film the kids playing by the fishing boats, the surf, or even a fucking palm tree, for Christ’s sake. Literally everything else here would make a better and more interesting introduction shot than my bony ass!”

  Tony was naturally telegenic, possessing an unmistakable star quality; that much was clear. But even more alluring was his antagonistic, devil-may-care, combative relationship with the very machine that created his fame. The more Tony shirked the camera, the more I wanted to see. It wasn’t that I enjoyed watching him squirm; he was just so brilliantly witty and sarcastic when backed into a corner.

  In addition to logging tapes, my job responsibilities included doing anything else I was asked. Pick up dry cleaning for the producer, manufacture props for a fake infomercial, and on occasion assist with research for upcoming shoots. I didn’t have to wait long for the most exciting assignment yet. When I heard that a rough cut of the St. Martin episode I’d been working on needed to go to Tony’s apartment, I jumped at the chance. Naïve, impressionable, twenty-two years old, and desperate to make a good impression, I spent the whole taxi ride clutching that VHS tape for safekeeping while nervously rehearsing what I hoped was something intelligent to say.

  Arriving at Tony’s rent-controlled Morningside Heights walk-up, I took a deep breath, but before I even knocked the door opened. There he was, barefoot, wearing a black Ramones T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, looking just like he did on TV. Tony never looked up; instead he took the tape from my outstretched hand, and before I could say a word, slammed the door in my face. Despite that inauspicious first impression, I would work my way up the ladder, ultimately producing and directing nearly 100 episodes of TV with Tony. In the process I traveled to more than fifty countries and won five Emmy Awards. It was pretty much the definition of a dream job.

  On paper I would’ve seemed like an unlikely candidate: a camera-shy introvert desperately afraid of flying, meeting new people, food with bones, and terrified of things with scales. Like snakes, and fish. Yes, fish. Yet somehow I ended up spending my entire adult life working on the four incarnations of Tony’s ever-evolving travelogue, flying on countless puddle jumpers of questionable airworthiness to almost every snake-infested corner of the globe, constantly meeting strangers, often at some sort of barbeque involving ribs or a seafood extravaganza. Though the job required regular exposure to all of my known phobias (and added a few new ones to the list), the whole insane adventure beat the hell out of working for a living. I felt like I’d run away with the circus; I realized I’d been living my whole life in black-and-white.

  Growing up, my sister Katie and I replayed The Wizard of Oz from a well-worn cassette tape. It was my favorite movie despite my problem with the ending. Thirty years later and I still didn’t believe anyone would choose to go back to Kansas after having experienced Oz in Technicolor. That’s what travel was like for me. Transported by mechanical tornado to adventures through colorful, amazing, and sometimes scary lands, I hadn’t worried about a return to black-and-white because the trips to Oz didn’t end, and Tony was the wizard. But better. He was a humbug with a supernatural power to control the forces of nature and alter reality. All the dazzling places we went seemed like a fitting backdrop for the most fascinating person I’d ever met.

  This isn’t to say the job was all tap dancing on sunshine, but I worked well under pressure and found the emergency-room intensity addictive. I guess in a way the whole thing gave my life purpose. Although I wouldn’t have dared admit it, deep down I was Tony’s number one fan. Which was sort of a precarious place to be, because he didn’t really like adoration. But over the years I became adept at rationalizing a host of seemingly mutually exclusive contradictions.

  “How do I get a job like yours?” is something you get asked a lot when you travel the world for a living. Roughly five times a year I experienced the sort of trips that someone might work their whole life to experience even once. From the outside it looked like an all-expenses-paid vacation—and in a lot of ways it was—but watching the show was nothing like living it. For all the outward simplicity of the show’s concept—a camera crew and I followed Tony around the world while he basically did whatever he wanted—it was actually quite complicated behind the scenes. By the time I worked my way up to the role of senior director, “just another day at the office” had come to include a host of wildly varying responsibilities depending on the time of day, type of scene, country, Tony’s mood, or even the prevailing headwind. It kept you on your toes and required a strong stomach, a tremendous amount of planning, negotiating, cajoling, and winging it off camera. Basically, each shoot often meant actual blood, sweat, tears, and doing absolutely anything that was necessary to get the best results. Between all the high-octane escapades in far-flung locales, navigating a constant minefield of “international incidents,” not to mention countless other challenges involved with working in a new and unfamiliar environment each episode, the job demanded I be part diplomat, part labor leader, and part strike buster. Oh, and as the director, the ultimate creative success or failure of the show was riding on my shoulders.

  We regularly worked in unstable or outright hostile countries. Each year we took Hazardous Environment Training that included checkpoint exercises and hostage-situation training. It was a given that the production team would be followed by government minders in communist countries and harassed by tourism boards in others. I found myself in morally dubious positions when our objectives were at odds with the locals who helped us make the show; in fact, sometimes just our presence could endanger their lives.

  At
the beginning, at least, I either didn’t mind or didn’t realize how isolating, all-consuming, overstimulating, and morally taxing it could be having “the best job in the world.” Growing up, I’d been a quiet kid without a lot of friends, so being part of Tony’s pirate crew was an alluring proposition, to say the least. But traveling for work is a lot lonelier than you would imagine, especially when you get home. Frankly, the whole thing was a mind-fuck. I’m fully aware how many people would kill to have these sorts of problems, but I’m not sure the human brain was designed to handle such a rapid succession of extreme experiences and emotions. For me—as well as for Tony and other longtime members of the crew—the show increasingly seemed like a one-way ticket to insanity. By the end, the work was taking a heavy personal, physical, and emotional toll, and it felt like there was no escape, even if I wanted one. But who could walk away from a job like this? Who on the outside would even understand?

  AFTER NEWS OF TONY’S DEATH broke, it didn’t take long for the condolences to start pouring in from everyone I knew as well as a significant number I didn’t. When my message icon blinked above 100, I turned off my phone.

  That afternoon I headed to our production office just off Herald Square. The new grand entrance framed an impressive Apple Store–like floating steel staircase, and light from two-story-high windows shined off highly polished concrete floors. The reception kiosk was empty, and I’d never heard the place so quiet. There was the distant hum of midtown traffic, and from somewhere down a hallway lined with framed posters of Tony I could hear the repetitive whirrrshhhhhhhcccchhh of a document shredder. Zero Point Zero, or ZPZ, as everyone called it, had grown over the years as the company branched out to produce other food- and travel-centric shows and had recently completed an ambitious expansion and renovation project. There was a staff of about seventy-five now, including a full-on equipment department, accounting, and office management in addition to countless other changes. But Chris and Lydia, the husband and wife team who’d worked with Tony since A Cook’s Tour and subsequently started ZPZ, were still in charge. From across the atrium I stood staring up at them in the fishbowl conference room one floor above. The plate glass walls did a good job of isolating sound, but seeing Chris pace and Lydia with her head in her hands, I could imagine what was being discussed.