Anthony Bourdain’s former assistant is sharing new insight into the final days before his June 2018 death.
Laurie Woolever is opening up about her time working with the late chef and TV personality in her upcoming memoir, Care and Feeding, which hits bookshelves on March 11. In an excerpt shared by People on Friday, February 28, Woolever recalls what would become her final text conversation with Bourdain.
Days before his death, paparazzi photos leaked showing Bourdain’s girlfriend, Asia Argento, allegedly having an affair. The National Enquirer reached out to Woolever at the time for comment. “When I asked Tony what he’d like me to do about the Enquirer, he said, ‘Ignore it, and ignore any similar queries from other pubs. But let me know when the Enquirer piece drops,’” she writes in the book.
Woolever notes that a producer on Bourdain’s show Parts Unknown “had heard that things were apparently tense on set in France,” adding, “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.”
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One day after news of Argento’s alleged affair broke, Woolever says Bourdain “asked me to schedule a number of things for him — a lunch, a haircut, a doctor appointment, a private session with his jiu-jitsu trainer — for the week after his return to New York.”
Sharing their final texts, Woolever writes, “’I hope you’re doing OK,’ I texted to him, and when he responded, ‘I’ll live, and we’ll survive.’”
In the book excerpt, Woolever says she assumed Bourdain was referring to himself and Argento, 49, when he wrote “we.” The next day, Bourdain’s agent, Kim, called Woolever to inform her that he had taken his own life.
“I thought, we can fix this. I’d spent the last nine years, and Kim much longer than that, helping Tony meet his obligations, get where he needed to be,” she says in the book. “We could, we had to, help him un-f— the mess he made when he f—ing hung himself in his hotel room, just like he had glibly threatened to do a million times, in the face of something as minor as a bad hamburger or a delayed flight.”
Bourdain died by suicide at age 61 in June 2018. Argento, for her part, refuted the cheating allegations, telling DailyMailTV that September that she and Bourdain “cheated” on each other. “It wasn’t a problem for us,” she told the outlet. “He was a man who traveled 265 days a year. We took great pleasure in each other’s company when we saw each other. But we are not children. We are grown-ups.”
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In an interview with People published on Thursday, Woolever revealed that Bourdain’s death came three weeks after she and her ex-husband separated after he learned she was having an affair. “[It was] a one-two punch,” she said.
Woolever also joked that her role as Bourdain’s assistant was more like being his one-person “Chief of staff.”
Bourdain became one of the most recognizable figures in the food world through his work as a chef, author and TV host. At the time of his death, Bourdain had been in his fifth year of hosting his CNN series Parts Unknown. The docuseries, which premiered in 2013 and aired 12 seasons, followed Bourdain as he explored culinary culture in lesser-known places.
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