The Life and Death of Anthony Bourdain: What Really Happened?

Just before his death, Anthony Bourdain called up a friend and the last two words he spoke were utterly heartbreaking. During his all too brief life, Anthony Bourdain was a fountain of wisdom and wit, not just about food, but about life. However, as much as he shared with the world, he also kept a lot hidden. When he was born in New York City in 1956, his father was working two jobs to make ends meet. But as Bourdain grew up, his parents went from working class to cultural elite. His father became a record company executive and his mother an editor at the New York Times. While he would eventually make his mark in the same realm, one experience as a teen forever changed the course of his life. While visiting France in his youth on a family vacation, a local fisherman plucked an oyster from the water, shucked it, and handed it to him. The single experience was the starting point for Bourdain’s love for food. While he grew up with a passion for books, movies, and music handed down from his parents, this moment put him on a path toward the culinary arts.

While many of the other students at his prep school in New Jersey came from broken homes or had absentee parents, Bourdain’s home life was quite comfortable in comparison. However, he eventually came to resent that he didn’t have to face the same difficulties as his peers or his rock and roll idols. So, he took a turn onto a dark path. Even before he hit his teens, a dangerous obsession plagued him. He said that beginning at the age of 10, he’d been wildly fascinated with drugs. And when he finally had access to them, he dove in head first. Bourdain claims he took his first hit of acid when he was just 12. It was just the beginning of a long and nightmarish battle with substance abuse that would follow him for the rest of his life.

As soon as he hit high school, Bourdain fell in with a bad crowd. Unlike his jaded peers and idols, he had an unexpected reason driving his rebellion. He was in love. Her name was Nancy Ponski. She was older than him and she and her friends partied very hard. Unlike other high school crushes, this one didn’t fade with time. And it ended up driving some major life changes. Despite his extracurricular activities, Bourdain finished high school a year early. All the better as Pukosski had already graduated and gone on to study at Vasser. He followed her there but quickly bristled at the hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness he saw in his fellow students. Within 2 years, he shocked his parents by dropping out so he could study at the Culinary Institute of America. In his words, they reacted as if he’d chosen to pursue a life of crime.

After graduating from culinary school, he and Picoski moved to New York and settled down in a sense. While they found jobs and an apartment, there was a dark side to their relationship. They still partied just as hard as they had in high school and college. More than that, Bourdain tried to get involved in the occasional deal himself. He claimed that he’d once been driving with 200 hits of acid in the car when the police pulled him over. Another time he was at the post office when he noticed DEA agents watching him. He was on a destructive path and it was about to get worse. Within 2 years of moving to New York, Bourdain’s life was going off the rails. Back home, his parents had separated after 26 years of marriage. At work, he was climbing the ranks. After becoming a sue chef for the first time, he worked in a series of failing restaurants, which only served to intensify his addiction issues. He would frequently disappear to buy drugs between kitchen shifts.

He remembered once being in a cab with friends going out to score and jokingly quoting the statistic that only one in four addicts will ever get clean. Looking around, he made a grim realization. There were four of them in the cab. At that moment, he decided that he wanted to be the one to survive, but it wouldn’t be easy. After deciding to clean up his act, Bourdain quit heroin by entering a methadone clinic. But he still parttook in other substances. During a particularly dark time, he turned to crack. He described experiences where he would be so desperate that he would dig through the carpet looking for any small remnants. During this period, Bourdain would still make it to work. However, things got worse and worse outside of the kitchen until he reached a low point. One Christmas completely broke, he set out his beloved record collection on a blanket on Broadway to sell it just so he could get a fix. That’s when he finally decided he’d had enough.

Bourdain finally quit, but his troubles were far from over. He wound up working in a restaurant empire run by mobsters. The lane cooks who were meant to help him were actually the boss’s coke dealers. And the proximity to drugs meant it wasn’t long before Bourdain was back at square one. While shucking oysters at a raw bar in the East Village, Bourdain received devastating news. His father had suffered a heart attack at home and died suddenly at the age of 57. Bourdain always spoke highly of his father’s sense of intellectual curiosity and adventure and how it influenced him. It was a heartbreaking loss, but to stay afloat, he had to keep moving.

By the late 1990s, things were looking better. The management at the popular Brazerie Lale in New York City brought him on as executive chef and finally after nearly two decades of toil, Bourdain found his niche. He was able to run the kitchen the way he wanted, hire the people he wanted to work with, and cook up food he was proud to serve. But he’d also found time for a little side hobby which would soon take over his life. Bourdain had spent the better part of the last decade putting pen to paper in his off time. One day he wrote an essay about the inner workings of a kitchen, something of a caution to the city’s restaurant guests. He tried to get it published but didn’t have any luck at first. Without the persistence of Anthony Bourdain’s mother, he may never have become the cult figure we know today. She was still working as an editor for the Times when she read his essay, and it was those instincts that told her it was special. She knew someone who was friends with an up and coming editor at the New Yorker. So, she passed it on and urged him to run it. The editor immediately knew he had to publish it, but he had no idea just what kind of phenomenon he was starting.

Within a week after The New Yorker had run the essay, a publisher had already signed Anthony Bourdain to write the book that would become Kitchen Confidential. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. Despite his cushy position at Lal, he was still struggling after years of spotty employment. He was in terrible debt, had no insurance, and was behind on both taxes and rent. Catching Confidential changed all that. But it also came with troubles. Before Catching Confidential, one constant had defined Bourdain’s home life. Through the years, the addictions and the bad jobs, Nancy Posski had stuck by his side. Their hard partying in the 1980s had turned into a life of takeout and reruns of The Simpsons in the 1990s. Every year they took a trip to the Caribbean and spent blissfully happy nights sipping cold beer and eating fresh seafood. But now Bourdain’s success upturned their longtime stability.

With the publication of Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s life changed. Picoski had stood by his side through failures and success in both the restaurant and literary worlds. But when TV producers began approaching Bourdain to host a show, she had a bad feeling. The fame that followed tore apart his 20-year marriage to Nancy Picosski. Their lives were suddenly on different paths, and so they separated before eventually divorcing in 2005 after 20 years of marriage. Bourdain was bereff. On the outside, Anthony Bourdain was one of pop cultures new stars with legions of fans. On the inside, he was suffering. The end of his marriage had left him devastated. And one night, whilst visiting St. Martin, a place he’d often vacationed with his wife, he was drinking and taking a drive, when he decided to drive off the edge of a cliff. At that moment, a song he liked came on the radio. He thought it was a sign, so he turned the wheel at the last minute. Still, he’d learned that there was a dark price to fame.

In 2006, Bourdain traveled to Beirut, Lebanon, to film an episode of his hit show, No Reservations. While there, he got way more than he bargained for. Israel launched a series of missiles at the city. Bourdain and his crew retreated to their hilltop hotel where they watched the city burn. Eventually, they were transported to a local beach where a marine ship picked them up. On the beach, they saw locals crowded on the sand with their belongings, fleeing from their burning homes. It was among the most harrowing and memorable experiences Bourdain encountered while filming his shows.

Bourdain and renowned French chef Eric Repair became fast friends after Kitchen Confidential, and Repair knew how lonely Bourdain had been after his divorce. He decided to set him up with Otavia Busia, a hostess from one of his restaurants. On their second date together, Bourdain and Busia got matching tattoos. It was the beginning of a beautiful and intense relationship. Bourdain and Busousia had been dating for 8 months when he went to Beirut. When he returned shaken, he was ready to make a drastic change. He’d never had any children with his first wife, but as Busia puts it, they decided to spin the wheel. She got pregnant, giving birth in 2007 to a daughter they named Arianne. Eleven days later, they tied the knot. Family life gave Bourdain a newfound lease on life where he’d never expected to find one. But he still struggled.

One of the biggest problems with Bourdain’s fame was the demand. He’d spent years struggling to make ends meet. So when people asked him to do things, he said yes, even when he was stretched thin. Between filming, book tours, and other commitments, he was traveling for more than 250 days a year. When his daughter started elementary school, his family could no longer join him on the road. Just as it had in his first marriage, the distance and time apart took their toll. The couple separated in 2016, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. He announced it right before he began promoting a cookbook that featured a number of recipes he made for his family titled Appetites.

After a trip to Vietnam where he ate with President Barack Obama, Bourdain went to France to work on a book plagued by a nasty skin infection. After three painful days there, he went to a doctor who prescribed him medication. Within hours, Bourdain woke up in the doorway of a restaurant after blacking out with a frantic waiter trying to revive him. He’d taken too many pills on an empty stomach. The incident reminded him of his father’s sudden death and caused him to take action. Terrified, Bourdain sat down that night and wrote a long email to his first wife, Nancy, apologizing for all the ways he’d wronged her. His romantic failures haunted him, but it soon became clear that was something he hoped to change.

In 2017, he began dating Italian actress and director Azia Arento. And from the beginning, he poured all of his efforts into making it work. They were a striking couple and clearly in love, but there was a lot about their relationship they kept hidden. Later in 2017, at the height of the MeToo movement, Bourdain stood by Arento’s side as she came forward with her harrowing story of an assault at the hands of Harvey Weinstein. He became a fierce supporter of the movement and was one of the first people to name and shame Mario Batali for his alleged sexual misconduct. As time went on, balancing his TV shows, writing, relationships, and his role as a father began to wear on Bourdain, and his behavior began to scare those closest to him. He became more erratic and more prone to darkness. Bourdain’s ex, Busousia, worried, but was comforted by the fact that he was seeing a therapist. Still, the pressures didn’t let up. Bourdain was dedicated to making his latest relationship work after a string of failures and he took drastic measures to make sure he had time for Azia Arento.

Parts Unknown was supposed to film an episode in Hong Kong when the show’s director fell ill. Bourdain hit two birds with one stone by suggesting that they bring on Arento as director for the episode, but from there things quickly spun out of control. After Argentto argued with the show’s longtime cinematographer, Bourdain fired him. While the situation in Hong Kong was uncomfortable, other crew members recalled how happy Bourdain was to work with Arento, and many of his friends shared stories of how in love he was with her. However, in early June of 2018, tabloids published paparazzi photos of Arento in the arms of another man. Bourdain had been filming in France with close friend Eric Repair when the tabloid photos had come out. The episode they were working on would never air. On June 8th, Bourdain missed dinner and breakfast, so repair went to his hotel room. There he found that Bourdain had taken his own life. He was 61.

For those close to him, as well as his many fans the world over, the heartbreak was immediate, and so were the questions. Following the tragic loss of Bourdain, many were quick to point fingers at Arento. The heartbroken director spent months grieving until she finally broke her silence and revealed the whole truth about their relationship. She claimed that the pair had an open relationship and admitted that she cheated on Bourdain, but that he had cheated on her, too. In August of 2018, the New York Times published a story that claimed that Arento had sexually assaulted one of her former co-stars, Jimmy Bennett, when he was 17 years old. Bennett claimed that after Arjento spoke out about Weinstein, she offered him a $380,000 settlement. She denied any inappropriate contact with Bennett, but did admit that Bourdain had paid Bennett off in order to avoid any negative publicity. People speculated on how this had affected Bourdain, and as the months wore on, more of those close to him began to speak out about his final days.

There was much speculation about Bourdain’s state of mind and the condition of his relationship in his final days, but very few answers. However, one of Bourdain’s close friends spoke about their final phone conversation, and what he said was simultaneously devastating and heartwarming. When author Michael Rman spoke to his friend on the phone for the last time, he said that Bourdain seemed to be happy and in love. One of the last things that Bourdain told him was both simple and poignant. Love abounds.