On June 7, 2018, Laurie Woolever sent her boss Anthony Bourdain a text to check in. She and others close to the famed chef turned TV host were worried about him.
He was shooting his CNN series “Parts Unknown” in Alsace, France, and photos of his adored girlfriend, Asia Argento, with another man had surfaced in the Daily Mail.
Colleagues and mutual friends had reported to Woolever that things on set had grown tense.
“Everyone was walking the tightrope, trying to give him both the emotional support he seemed to need and the space to process his pain with a measure of private dignity,” Woolever writes in her new memoir, “Care and Feeding,” (Ecco, out Tuesday).
Despite his personal troubles, Bourdain was in planning mode for his return to New York. He had Woolever schedule various appointments — a haircut, a doctor visit, a personal trainer — for when he was back in the city.
“I hope you’re doing OK,” she texted him.
“I’ll live and we’ll survive,” he wrote back.
But Bourdain would never return to New York City. On the morning of June 8, his friend, Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert, found him dead by suicide in his hotel room.
When she heard the news, Woolever writes that her first thought was, “We can fix this.”
She’d been working for and with Bourdain for nearly a decade, helping him write books and assisting with his day-to-day life. By her accounts, he was a great and generous boss, who supported her as she went through a divorce and quit drinking. Woolever was used to fixing things for him.
She was also used to his gallows humor. Over the years, she writes, he’d joked about offing himself a “million times,” sometimes for reasons as minor as a disappointing hamburger or a delayed flight.
“I’m gonna find a strong beam and throw a rope over it,” he’d quip.
But, by all accounts, Bourdain changed when he fell in love with Italian actress Argento.
Woolever was suddenly tasked with keeping his schedule as clear as possible and sending various gifts to Argento in Rome.
“My job responsibilities became ever-more oriented toward helping Tony revolve like a planet around his girlfriend, the blinding sun,” she writes. “Anything involving Asia was great; anything that kept him away from her was a miserable distraction, evidence of the cruel world conspiring to thwart their beautiful and perfect love.”
At one point, Bourdain had Woolever send a large box of vinyl records that he’d hand-picked for Argento, but the gift was held up in transport because of import duties. Argento refused to pay and sent the box back to Bourdain with “frank annoyance.”
From then on, Woolever had to send packages for Argento to a fixer in Rome that they’d relied on for Bourdain’s TV shows. The fixer would receive the gift, pay any fees and then take the packages directly to Argento.
When Argento was in New York City, Bourdain was uncharacteristically high-maintenance.
“At any moment, he could ask for anything: A reservation at Masa within the hour, tickets and a car service to a movie that started in 20 minutes, a next-day appointment with a famous tattoo artist,” Woolever writes.
Things got worse when Argento was hired to replace a director on “Parts Unknown.”
The actress clashed with the rest of the crew and was “disorganized and out of her depth.” She went so far as to have Bourdain fire a longtime cameramen she didn’t get along with.
“This was chilling,” Woolever writes. “If Tony was willing to trash one of his most fruitful and protected professional relationship because his girlfriend told him to, what chance did any of us have … Asia was the captain now.”
When the Enquirer and other publication reached out to say they would be publishing photos of Argento with the other man, Bourdain told Woolever to ignore them and that disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, whom the actress had accused of sexual assault, might be involved.
“It’s gonna be bad,” he told her.
Bourdain took his own life not long after the exchange.
While Woolever writes that she was “angry” about how Argento “humiliated and devastated Tony,” she asserts that the actress didn’t cause his death, though she may have been the “catalyst.”
“The cause of Tony’s death was Tony, a human, mortal, grown man who loved and suffered so deeply that it killed him,” she writes. “He was lonely and stubborn and delusional, and despite all his intellect and world-weariness, he was a bone-deep believer in romantic old-school fucking Rome and Juliet-style love.
“He’d survived heroin addiction and all kinds of dangerous and terrifying shit all over the world, but in a specific moment in his extraordinary life, he didn’t have the resilience to survive the cruel and brutal end of his last great love affair.”
