Anthony Bourdain's final messages revealed
Anthony Bourdain's assistant has shared their final texts messages before he took his own life in 2018 at the age of 61.
Anthony Bourdain's assistant has shared their final texts messages before he took his own life.
The chef and author died in 2018 at the age of 61 and his assistant Laurie Woolever has revealed their final conversation and messages, where they discussed an upcoming National Enquirer report about his girlfriend Asia Argento's alleged infidelity before making plans for the future.
Writing in her new memoir 'Care and Feeding', Woolever explained: "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.'
"A [Parts Unknown] producer Helen had heard that things were apparently tense on set in France, and 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.
"The next day, Tony 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. 'I hope you’re doing OK,' I texted to him, and when he responded, 'I’ll live, and we’ll survive,' I assumed that the 'we' meant him and Asia, their complicated relationship."
However, despite his plans for the future, Anthony left Woolever shocked and distraught when he took his own life.
She wrote: "At 4:25 the next morning, my phone vibrated on the windowsill next to my bed, waking me from a light sleep. It was Kim, Tony’s agent. When I answered the call, she said, 'Tony has taken his 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. We could, we had to, help him un-¬f*** the mess he made when he 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."
Woolever told PEOPLE: "We talked about that and then also about very normal things like, ‘Let’s schedule this doctor’s appointment.’ It’s hard to reconcile that he believed he would be back in New York — and then he wasn’t."
