Anthony Bourdain’s former assistant and cowriter is revealing the last text sent to her by the beloved chef, author and TV host hours before his 2018 suicide.
The “Parts Unknown” host hanged himself in June 2018 in his room at a hotel in Alsace, France, where he was filming the hit CNN travel series. He was 61.
Laurie Woolever elaborates in her new memoir, “Care and Feeding,” hitting shelves March 11, on the circumstances of his death, according to excerpts published by People.
The tragedy occurred on the heels of the National Enquirer asking Woolever for comment after Bourdain’s long-term partner, Asia Argento, was reportedly photographed kissing a French journalist.
“Ignore it, and ignore any similar queries from other pubs. But let me know when the Enquirer piece drops,” he’d told Woolever, who remembers Bourdain to be in “obsessive love” with the actress and filmmaker, 49.
Woolever writes that she got word of an “apparently tense” set in France as “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,” writes Woolever.
Bourdain responded: “I’ll live, and we’ll survive.”
The message proved to be his last to Woolever, who assumed “‘we’ meant him and Asia, their complicated relationship.
“At 4:25 the next morning, my phone vibrated. … It was Kim, Tony’s agent. When I answered the call, she said, ‘Tony has taken his life.’”