Anthony Bourdain’s former assistant has revealed the final text message the chef, writer, and TV personality ever sent her.
On June 7, 2018, Laurie Woolever reached out to her boss to check in on him ahead of the publication of a story about photos of his girlfriend, Asia Argento, kissing another man, she writes in her upcoming memoir, as reported by People.
“I hope you’re doing OK,” she texted him.
“I’ll live, and we’ll survive,” Bourdain wrote back.
The next day, Bourdain took his own life. He was 61.
Woolever says she interpreted the “we” as referring to Bourdain and Argento. She was shocked when she received a phone call telling her about Bourdain’s death.
“I thought, we can fix this,” she writes. “I’d spent the last nine years... helping Tony meet his obligations, get where he needed to be. We could, we had to, help him un-f--- the mess he made when he f---ing hung himself in his hotel room.”
While the reasons for Bourdain’s suicide are not definitively known, many have speculated that his tumultuous relationship with Argento played a part.
In Care and Feeding, Woolever writes that the chef, who was beloved for his exploration of the world through cuisine in shows like Parts Unknown, was obsessed with Argento, an actress and filmmaker.
“He had me frequently ship gifts to her home, the first of which was a large box of vinyl records, hand-selected from various record stores around town, a sweet and geeky gesture of love,” Woolever writes.
In this case, though, Woolever didn’t anticipate the import taxes of shipping such a gift to Italy, which made it difficult for Argento to collect it.
“‘Find another way to get them to her,’ said Tony, who didn’t have to curse or yell for me to know that he was deeply disappointed by my f--- up,” she wrote.
Following Bourdain’s death, there was an outpouring of support from his fans and admirers across the globe.
“It was all quite a lot,” Woolever writes, “the T-shirts, the candles, the posters, the bake sales and cookouts and Negroni specials to raise money for suicide prevention work. The restaurant that created Bourdain Fries topped with escargot, Pernod, absinthe, butter, and shredded Gruyère? I could almost hear Tony groaning and speculating about the tensile strength of the overhead beams, using his comedy voice.”
