Biography offers raw details of Bourdain’s life
But TV star’s family and friends criticize unauthorized book
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.
That silence continued until 2021, when many in his inner circle were interviewed for the documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” and for “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography.” The two works showed a more complex side of Bourdain, who had become increasingly conflicted about his success and had in his last two years made his relationship with Italian actor Asia Argento his primary focus. But neither directly addressed how very messy his life had become in the months that led up to the night he hanged himself at age 61.
On Oct. 11, Simon & Schuster is publishing what it calls the first unauthorized biography of the writer and travel documentarian. “Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain” is filled with fresh, intimate details, including raw, anguished texts from the days before Bourdain’s death, such as his final exchanges with 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,” Bourdain wrote to Busia-Bourdain in one of their text exchanges. “I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.”
Drawing on more than 80 interviews, as well as files, texts and emails from Bourdain’s phone and laptop, journalist Charles Leerhsen traces Bourdain’s metamorphosis from a sullen teenager in a New Jersey suburb that his family couldn’t afford to a heroin-shooting kitchen swashbuckler who struck gold as a writer and became a talented interpreter of the world through his travels.
Leerhsen said in an interview that he wanted to write a book without the dutiful sheen of what he called “an official Bourdain product.” Indeed, he 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.
“We never had that big story, that long piece that said what happened, how the guy with the best job in the world took his own
life,” said Leerhsen.
The book has already drawn fire from Bourdain’s family, former co-workers and closest friends. His brother, Christopher Bourdain, sent Simon & Schuster two emails in August calling the book hurtful and defamatory fiction, and demanding that it not be released until Leerhsen’s errors were corrected.
“Every single thing he writes about relationships and interactions within our family as kids and as adults he fabricated or got totally wrong,” Christopher Bourdain said in an interview.
Felice Javit, vice president and senior counsel for the publisher, responded to Bourdain with an email: “With all due respect, we disagree that the material in the book contains defamatory information, and we stand by our forthcoming publication.”
Leerhsen said Anthony Bourdain’s inner circle and even some of his international fixers and former line cooks refused to speak with him for the biography, in part because Bourdain’s longtime agent, Kim Witherspoon, told them not to. Witherspoon did not respond to a request for an interview for this article.
Leerhsen said that such resistance 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.
One person close to Bourdain who hasn’t pushed back against the book is his wife, Busia-Bourdain, who controls his estate. The book’s most revealing material comes from files and messages pulled from Bourdain’s phone and laptop, both of which are part of the estate.
Leerhsen said he got that material from a confidential source, but added that “the estate has not objected, and I don’t anticipate any objections.” He wouldn’t say whether he interviewed BusiaBourdain, but she is quoted in parts of the book. She said through a friend that she would not comment for this story.
Chef Eric Ripert, a close friend who found Bourdain dead in his Alsatian hotel room after a day of shooting for an episode of his CNN show, “Parts Unknown,” said he did not provide information for the book, although he has read it. He said he found many inaccuracies, but was surprised that it contained intimate details from those days in France that he had told only to a few people.
The book starts with Bourdain’s early years, analyzing his parents’ marriage, his performance in school and his relationship with 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 College. His grades there were terrible, and he was happier during the summers he worked in restaurants in Provincetown, Massachusetts. After two years, he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America, 5 miles north of Vassar in New York.
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 New Yorker editor David Remnick, who ran it in the magazine.
The story turbocharged Anthony Bourdain’s writing career, leading to his bestselling book “Kitchen Confidential.” That piqued the interest of the fledgling media company Zero Point Zero, which developed his first show, “A Cook’s Tour,” and subsequent programs.
The book delves deeply into Bourdain’s relationship with Argento. The two were involved for about two years in a tumultuous and very public relationship that, Leerhsen writes, 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 reporter Ronan Farrow in 2017 that Harvey Weinstein had sexually assaulted her.
Leerhsen said he had exchanged a few emails with Argento, who he said quoted Oscar Wilde to him: “It is always Judas who writes the biography.”
In an email to the Times, Argento said she had not read the book, adding, “I wrote clearly to this man that he could not publish anything I said to him.”
Leerhsen is not the first person to try to explain the unknowable: why Bourdain killed himself. His book offers a theory.
Two days before Bourdain died, he joined Ripert for a meal at JY’s, a two-starred Michelin restaurant owned by an old 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 saw the 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. “I don’t respect him killing himself, but he did realize, and he did ultimately know he didn’t want to be that person he had become.”