Dan Pashman: This episode contains profanity, discussion of suicide, drug and alcohol addiction, and sex, so please take care when listening.

Laurie Woolever: “In different ways, my two mentors, Mario and Tony, built their careers and reputations on the glamorous appeal of wild excess. And for a long time, this gave me a plausible excuse to live the same way.”

Dan Pashman: This is Laurie Woolever, reading from her new memoir, Care and Feeding.

Laurie Woolever: “This is my story of being a (relatively) high-functioning addict in a world of temptation, led by a desire to emulate the successful, troubled men who guided my career. I was given a number of opportunities, and I kept it together until things fell apart. It would take several successive implosions—careers, marriages, reputations, lives—for me to recognize, as I now do, that I am in control of almost nothing beyond how I choose to care for (and feed) myself and others.”

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Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies it’s for eaters, I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people.

Dan Pashman: Today I’m talking with Laurie Woolever. She’s a food writer in New York, but she’s probably best known for two other jobs she’s held: an assistant to Mario Batali, and an assistant to and collaborator with Anthony Bourdain. Laurie was working with Bourdain when he took his own life in 2018. After his death, she published a book she’d been working on with him called World Travel, as well as one she wrote herself, Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography. 

Dan Pashman: Now she’s telling her own story in a new memoir called Care and Feeding. And as you heard in the excerpt at the beginning of the show, much of that memoir deals with her own addiction, and how it relates to her work with both Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. We know the story of Mario’s downfall: sexual assault allegations that led to the end of his career. And we know that Bourdain took his own life in 2018.

Dan Pashman: But as you’ll hear, in a lot of ways, there was only a thin line between what happened to them, and how Laurie’s own story unfolded.

Dan Pashman: Laurie first got interested in food when she was at Cornell, living in a co-op where people cooked for each other. After graduating in 1996, she moved to New York City -- her goal was to be a writer. But one of her first jobs was as a private chef to a wealthy Manhattan family -- The Smiths.

Laurie Woolever: You know, they were nice enough. They were weird in the ways that I think people can become weird when you've got a lot of money and no one's ever telling you no or pushing back on any of your ideas.

Dan Pashman: Like, like what's an example of that?

Laurie Woolever: Well, there was a real value put on not wasting time and being extremely efficient with the way that time was used. So they wanted to have a lot of like raw vegetables on hand that they could just snack on. But for them, they didn't want to have to stop and peel something or break something apart or… and everything had to be washed. There was also like a real premium on, you know, germ management. So they insisted that I wash the button mushrooms. They wanted to have, you know, raw button mushrooms as a snack, which is like the saddest sentence I've ever uttered in my whole life. 

Dan Pashman: Even among vegetables, that's a sad one.

Laurie Woolever: Yeah. And I, and, uh, I was like, well, you know, if you wash them, then they break down really quickly, you know, a wet mushroom… you know, how about I just brush off the dirt and then just leave them intact and you can rinse them before you have a snack. No, no, no, no, no, we would rather have, you know, two pounds of mushrooms go bad because we don't eat them all than to have to stop and, and, and rinse them off ourselves.

Dan Pashman: You talk about the Smiths being these people who were not accustomed to ever hearing the word no. What did you make of it?

Laurie Woolever: I think it was funny for a long time and the people that I worked with, you know, we would all kind of roll our eyes and, compare notes and tell each other stories. And then I think as time went on, it got a little tiring and a little, I knew that this was not a long-term job for me just because it felt so, um, crazy making, you know, you get into these worlds where you're doing things that you know are crazy. It starts to make you feel a little crazy yourself.

Dan Pashman: One day, Laurie read an article saying that restaurant chefs make decent money, she quit the job with the Smiths and went to culinary school. 

Dan Pashman: One day, a culinary school classmate told her about his internship at an Italian restaurant in New York called Babbo. This was the first Laurie had ever heard of the place – but at the time, in the late ‘90s, Babbo was one of the hottest restaurants in the country, with a three-star review from The New York Times that praised its risk-taking and eccentricity. It was co-owned by the restaurateur Joe Bastianich and a TV chef whose star was on the rise: Mario Batali. This classmate of Laurie’s was all in on Mario Batali.

Laurie Woolever: He was really excited to have this internship and he was like this guy is amazing, he's so smart, he can just rattle off facts about food, he can give you a whole dissertation about, you know, ten different types of pasta or salumi, and, uh, when he cooks on television he's got a map behind him and so he's referencing the different regions of Italy. He's really the real deal.

Dan Pashman: Laurie didn’t think much more about any of that – she finished culinary school, and landed a job as pastry chef at a new restaurant.

Laurie Woolever: And I think I lasted about three days, maybe four days. And then they were like, you're not, this is, this is not, not working out. Which was great for me, honestly. I was so relieved.

Dan Pashman: Relieved because it was confirmation of something Laurie had already suspected: Working as a restaurant chef wasn't for her. She’d found culinary school physically exhausting, and working in a restaurant kitchen wouldn’t be any easier. But she liked being around food. So she turned her focus back to writing, and set her sights on being a food writer, combining her interests. 

Dan Pashman: That’s when she heard that Mario Batali was hiring an assistant. She remembered what her classmate had told her about how amazing he was. So she applied, and got a job interview.

Laurie Woolever: I showed up, uh, I was supposed to meet him at Babbo at, I don't know, 6 p. m. on a Thursday evening. And so I sit at the bar, I wait for him. The maitre d sends the host back into the kitchen. And then she comes back and whispers something to him. And he comes over and says, Mario went home. Sorry, he went to go, uh, cook dinner for his kids. Okay, so do I not have an interview? Am I, should I just forget it? You know, it was just, it was very disconcerting. He called the next day and said, meet me at, you know, 2 o'clock on Saturday at Babbo. So then I showed up. He was there. 

Dan Pashman: He didn't apologize for…

Laurie Woolever: No.

Dan Pashman: Okay. So, uh, he says, uh, come this Saturday at two o'clock at Babbo.

Laurie Woolever: Yes. Yes.

Dan Pashman: This is, you know, this is sort of job interview take two, as you understand it. 

Laurie Woolever: Right, yes. Yeah.

Dan Pashman: And what happens? 

Laurie Woolever: And it was, it was pretty quick. You know, we had a, we had a brief conversation just kind of going over my resume, asking me why I wanted the job and, you know, what I'd been reading. And I was introduced to the chef de cuisine. I was introduced to the general manager. And that was kind of it. And he offered me the job. Uh, what I didn't realize at the time was that no one else had applied for the job. [LAUGHS] You know, he offered me a salary. I didn't negotiate. That was not something that anyone had ever told me I ought to do. And that was it. I started the job, I think, a week after that.

Dan Pashman: It was 1999, and Laurie was 24. On her first day, Mario asked her to accompany him to a TV shoot. He hailed a cab for them to go to the studio; the cab pulled up, Mario got in first.

Laurie Woolever: He said, slide those thighs on over. [LAUGHS] It still makes me laugh. It's so ridiculous. Uh, and you know, I was like, what? What is, does he want me to sit on his lap? Like, what's, what's going on here? You know, this is, I, okay. So I didn't. I, you know, the, the bench seat of the cab, he was sitting on one side. I put my bag in the center and then I sat on the other side. So, but it was, uh, you know, it set a tone for being around him.

Dan Pashman: And you say in the book that him standing you up for the first job interview, him making this comment your first day on the job, that all that was the real job interview was that it was about boundaries. 

Laurie Woolever: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which I did not realize for several years, but looking back, I can see now that it was like, I'm going to show you who I am. I'm going to show you what, you know, how I move through the world. And I think you're going to either take it and run with it or you're, this is, you're going to decide this isn't for you and you're going to cut bait. So it never occurred to me to question any of it.

Dan Pashman: And what were those first few months in the restaurant working as Mario's assistant like?

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Laurie Woolever: Really fun, really exciting.We went to a shoot at Martha Stewart's studio. At the time she was still shooting her television show in Connecticut. You know, I was starstruck, it was really exciting. And then after that, we went to do an event in Atlantic City, which was totally debauched and crazy and fun. And it was just, you know, for me, a young person straight out of cooking school who liked to party. It was like, great, you know, and I don't have to stand in a kitchen and sweat for 12 hours and, you know, and I'm probably making the same amount of money as a line cook, like, great, I'm in.

Dan Pashman: In the book, you say you were ready to work hard and get fucked up.

Laurie Woolever: Yeah, 100%. That was my attitude.

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Dan Pashman: Everyone seemed to be in on the party, including Mario –  casual sex among the kitchen staff, a lot of drinking, and a lot of eating. Laurie traveled with Mario for various events. He gave her a nickname, Woolie, short for her last name, Wooliver. She remembers one time they were out for dinner on one of these trips, and she wasn't that hungry. She was just going to order a salad. Mario wouldn’t have it.

Laurie Woolever: He's like, no, absolutely not. No fucking way, Woolie. So it was like, if you're going to go out with me, you know, you're going to get an app, you're going to get a pasta, you're going to get a main course, we're going to have dessert, we're going to have amaro, we're going to have grappa, we're going to drink a shitload of wine. You're not here to have a spinach salad. Um, and that was a real eye opener. And in some ways it was like, great, someone else is telling me to, you know, indulge all the appetites that I know are within me and it's part of my job, like, then I don't have to, you know, feel bad about it.

Dan Pashman: Other perks of the job, I mean, Mario would hook you up with concert tickets, Knicks tickets, all kinds of fun perks like that, but also he was helping your career.

Laurie Woolever: Yes.

Dan Pashman: He was giving you introductions and, uh, helping your writing career.

Laurie Woolever: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, part of my job interview was, well, I want to be a food writer. Uh, and he said, well, you know, I know all the editors, everyone wants to come in to dinner. Basically the subtext was I've got a lot of power, I've got a lot of leverage and you know, I don't mind sloughing off a little bit of that to you and helping you get connected to the people that you need to know.

Dan Pashman: Mario kept that promise. He introduced Laurie to influential people in food media. When he was asked to write an article for someone, he’d have her write it, and share the byline with her, so her name appeared with his. He even brought her in to help on The Babbo Cookbook, suggesting she might get her name on the cover when it came out. So there were pros to working for Mario. But Laurie also became more aware of the downsides.

Laurie Woolever: He showed me who he was from, from day one. And as time went on, I grew a little tired of that. And I want to be very clear that in my time there, I did not see the more outrageous things that came to light much, much later in 2017 when a lot of different publications investigated him. What I saw was you know, ass grabbing and general groping and, you know, a lot of dirty talk and things that you can sort of laugh off to a point, uh, it doesn't feel great when it happens to you.

Dan Pashman: As it did. 

Laurie Woolever: As it did. Yeah. And it didn't feel great. It happened pretty early on. He did grab my ass and I'd said to him, like, Hey, please don't do that again. And to his credit, I guess, he didn't. I think it is a very scary thing to push back on somebody that has that much power over you and has that much power over the industry. I didn't even think about it. I didn't stop to think about whether or not I should. I just did. I did just confront him at that moment. But I certainly understand why not everyone did.

Dan Pashman: Laurie was also sometimes a target of Mario’s temper. At Babbo, everyone knew he was the only one allowed to select the music to play in the restaurant. He was so serious about it that he kept the CD player in a locked cabinet, so nobody could touch it. But one day a CD was skipping, and Mario wasn’t there. Laurie had the key, and gave it to one of the managers to remove the bad disc. When Mario found out what she had done, he called her a, quote, “pathetic moron.” Later that day, he tossed a bouquet of flowers on her desk and said, “Sorry.” I asked Laurie to read a passage from her memoir about this time.

Laurie Woolever: “Deflecting his intrusions and absorbing his rage was the price of admission to a pool I nonetheless felt very fortunate to swim in. I had jumped into the water, and I knew it was wet. If I suddenly realized that I couldn’t swim, I thought, it was on me to find the ladder and climb out. I was one of dozens of women in his orbit who would laugh off his suffocating hugs and suggestive comments, the occasional tongue in the ear, the lacerating, humiliating verbal kicks in the back. We were too dependent on our jobs, too invested in maintaining a friendly atmosphere, to ever raise an objection, and anyway, wasn’t it just the nature of the rough-and-tumble restaurant business we all loved? Would things really be any different anyplace else?”

Dan Pashman: You spend time in the book kind of wrestling with your position both as a victim of his abuses but also as someone who looked the other way when others were targeted, someone who could have left earlier, but didn't, as you say. How do you think about your place in all of that today, as you look back?

Laurie Woolever: Well, I want to push back a little bit, both on the idea of, you know, I sort of hesitate to identify as a victim. Yes, technically, in the sense that, you know, he grabbed my ass, and that was wrong. But there are people who are truly victimized, and I don't necessarily count myself among them. And also the idea of looking the other… I mean, well, I wouldn't say it's looking the other way as much as just sort of being a little bit paralyzed by fear of what to do and I guess maybe that is a form of looking the other way, but, this was the prevailing weather. This was the environment we were in. And I can't go back and change how I reacted to things or didn't react to things and it's hard to explain, I guess, that sense of, of how much the deck is stacked against you as a, not even necessarily as a woman, but just as an employee in an organization that is so top-heavy and so led by, you know, two men who wield all the power. So, I did the best I could, you know, I tried to be a good supportive friend to the other women there. I tried to talk about things, but I also, you know, I had, I had rent to pay. I had a job to keep. And again, I didn't see getting my ass grabbed as a reason to leave the job until I was ready to leave the job.

Dan Pashman: After about three years with Mario, Laurie was ready to leave. She felt she’d learned all she could from working for him. Plus, she writes in the book: “I had drunkenly slept with too many coworkers, and now I wanted to meet someone nice, someone whose heart hadn’t been corroded by restaurant life. I was always broke, and I was drinking a lot, all the time.”

Dan Pashman: In the end, her name never made it onto the cover of The Babbo Cookbook. 

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Dan Pashman: In the early 2000s, Laurie found herself in a period of transition – in her career, in love, and with her relationship to alcohol. 

Dan Pashman: In terms of career: She would now have to make it as a freelance writer without a day job. She started getting writing gigs here and there, and did some private chef work. She also met with Anthony Bourdain for the first time -- he was looking for someone to help write his cookbook. This was after his book Kitchen Confidential had made him a star. Tony hired Laurie for the cookbook, but they rarely saw each other -- he was always traveling or in his restaurant’s kitchen. 

Dan Pashman: So that was her career. As for her love life: Laurie started dating more seriously, rather than going for casual flings. Around this time is when she met her future husband, Alex.

Dan Pashman: Also around this time, Laurie started to question her drinking. There was one incident in particular. She went back to where she grew up, near Syracuse, New York, for a high school reunion. Before she got on the train back to New York City, she grabbed a travel mug and filled it with vodka and ice. When she got back to the city, her travel mug was empty. She called her friend Ann.

Laurie Woolever: She had talked to me about getting sober and, and joining a 12 step program and so I thought, you know, let me just, let me see how it's going for her and maybe she can, she can talk me into going to a meeting or take me to a meeting or tell me that I don't need a meeting. Uh, I wanted to touch base with somebody who had gone through that.

Dan Pashman: And what did she tell you?

Laurie Woolever: She's like, yeah, come to a meeting. You know, I'm going to one tomorrow, in the neighborhood. Here's the address and I'll meet you there.

Dan Pashman: And did you?

Laurie Woolever: No, I didn't. That night I was like, oh, well, I might, I might quit drinking tomorrow. So I better really, you know, make, make the most of my last night. And I got so wasted that night that I couldn't really function the next day. And I couldn't go to the meeting.

Dan Pashman: But it did lead you to stop drinking for six weeks.

Laurie Woolever: Yes.

Dan Pashman: Which led to what conclusion?

Laurie Woolever: Basically like, okay, great. I can do this. I did it for six weeks. I have control over this situation. I don't think I need to stop on a permanent way. I've, I can clearly stop if I need to.

Dan Pashman: So I'm fine. 

Laurie Woolever: So I started drinking again. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Not only did she start drinking again… Laurie got a job at a wine magazine. Which in her mind gave her permission to drink more.

Laurie Woolever: But something I realized when I stopped drinking is that not everyone around me was drinking as much as I did, and I saw this with my own family. I would go home for holidays, and I would drink a lot, and I was just like, everyone's drinking a lot. And then once I stopped drinking, I realized it was just me. You know, my mom would have a few, my dad would have one, my sister would have one, and that was it. You know? So I had this haze, this idea, and this probably delusion so that I could justify it to myself that everyone was drinking. 

Dan Pashman: Over the next few years, Laurie got married to Alex, and they had a baby boy. When she went back to work, she wanted a more flexible job – so she reached out to her network to tell them she was looking. Within a few hours, she got a response… from Anthony Bourdain. He was looking for a new assistant. Was she interested?

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Dan Pashman: Coming up, Laurie takes the gig with Bourdain, which leads her into parts unknown. Stick around.

+++ BREAK +++

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Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. Listen, you’re not gonna believe it but this month we’re celebrating cascatelli’s FOURTH birthday! They grow up so fast. In celebration, Sfoglini is running a special sale - 25% off site wide with no minimum. The sale starts this Thursday, March 13th and runs through Sunday March 16th. So stock up on all my pastas! No code needed, the discount is automatically applied at check out, so head over to Sfoglini dot com that’s SFOGLINI.com and place your order!

Dan Pashman: One more quick note -- Last week on the show we spun the Salad Spinner – we talked about some of the biggest and weirdest food news of the moment, from the price of eggs to raw milk to new packaging for Capri Sun. That one’s up now, check it out. 

Dan Pashman: Now, back to Laurie Woolever, author of the new memoir Care and Feeding.

Dan Pashman: It was 2009; Laurie was 35 years old. She jumped at the chance to work with Anthony Bourdain. From her first experience helping him with his cookbook years earlier, she knew what he was like to work with: soft-spoken, professional, paid her on time, no drama… In other words, nothing like Mario Batali, at least in the way he treated his employees. Sure, he’d had his bad boy days -- he detailed his past as a heroin addict in his bestselling book Kitchen Confidential. But he was a good boss.

Dan Pashman: When Laurie started as Tony’s assistant, he was hosting his food travel show No Reservations, so he was on the road a lot. Laurie handled his affairs, mostly from afar. But sometimes, she’d get to go too.

Laurie Woolever: Basically it was a really nice perk of the job where he said why don't you look at the schedule for the year for the show and choose a location that you'd like to go to. So I would choose a location and I would, uh, at his, uh, encouragement, I would pitch a story to a magazine. You know, I'm going to Hue. I'm going to Okinawa. Let me do a, you know, a cooking story and I would go and just hang out and, and be there with them while they shot the episode.

Dan Pashman: You talked about kind of meals with Mario, the way that he pushed you to, like, you must order every course. How would you characterize meals out with Tony?

Laurie Woolever: So, with Tony, I think he was slightly fatigued at this point by knowing that if, if they knew if the chef or the anyone knew he was in the restaurant, he was gonna get what he called food fucked or, you know, murdered with food.

Dan Pashman: Right. They send out all these freebies from the kitchen. 

Laurie Woolever: Yes. 

Dan Pashman: 'Cause they wanna impress the celebrity.

Laurie Woolever: Exactly. So he would order probably a moderate amount, but he would be like, just wait, you know, they're gonna kill us. And this was typically the case. Anytime that you were out with him and he was known, it would be, it would be too much, you know, but it was an act of love and an act of respect from the kitchen.

Dan Pashman: After working with him for a while, you write, “I was aware that I wanted to please Tony, but increasingly I also kind of wanted to be Tony.” What was it about him that made you want to be him?

Laurie Woolever: I saw this, from my perspective, what looked like absolute freedom to do whatever he wanted to do creatively and professionally. And that was really very appealing. The idea that you can just call the shots and say, I want to make, uh, you know, a black and white film shot on these very expensive, unusual cameras when we go to Rome, that's going to really hone in on this idea of historical fascism. What a gift, you know, to be able to, to see your vision executed. You know, honestly, like the money, the fame, and the respect. I think at the time I didn't realize how complicated that could be or how limiting in some ways that could be. It was just like, this guy is the shit. He's the top of the heap and who… I want that too.

Dan Pashman: And it's interesting because anyone listening to this is going to be able to hear clear differences between Mario and Tony. 

Laurie Woolever: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: And the way that they treated you. 

Laurie Woolever: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: Uh, and the way that they acted in general. But if there's a similarity, it's that in, in different ways, they both were people who wanted to be able to do what they wanted.

Laurie Woolever: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: They didn't want anyone to ever tell them no.

Laurie Woolever: Correct. Yeah.

Dan Pashman: I get the impression that living that way also appealed to you.

Laurie Woolever: Oh yeah. Yeah. I think Tony, if anybody ever did say no to him or did push back, you could see him expressing this appreciation or this kind of respect. I don't know that it always worked out well for anyone to push back against him, but I think he had enough self awareness to recognize that there's value sometimes in being pushed back against. Whether or not he would listen is, you know, is another question.

Dan Pashman: Even though Tony could pretty much do whatever he wanted, he still struggled with his demons. He talked about some of them openly, like in an episode of his TV show Parts Unknown in Argentina that interspersed scenes there with scenes of him in his therapist’s office. 

Dan Pashman: Laurie was in Tony’s orbit, as his assistant and eventually collaborating closely with him on book projects. But there was no mistaking it: He was the star. The same people who’d do anything he asked had no problem saying no to Laurie. One time there was a possibility she’d go on The Today Show with him to talk about the cookbook they’d co-written. The show’s producers put the kibosh on her appearance.

Dan Pashman: So Laurie sought out other situations in her life where people wouldn’t say no. She continued drinking to excess, and smoking weed to stave off anxiety. She also regularly cheated on her husband, sleeping with men in New York and when she was on the road for work. In her memoir, she writes: “I avoided talking about this feeling of bottomless need in therapy, because I didn’t want to examine it, or be encouraged to make better choices. I wanted to keep pushing, see how weird and dark it could get.” 

Laurie Woolever: There were plenty of nights of bad decision making and, uh, you know, stuff that I feel ashamed about now. There was a night, there was a charity event that both Mario and Tony were participating in and I was there and there were, you know, the room was packed with celebrities and, you know, obviously just tons and tons of cocktails that I was availing myself of and, uh, I was sort of nervous about being together with Tony and Mario, although, honestly, like, nobody cared, you know, nobody was thinking about me and the fact that I had worked for both of them. This was just me in my own, you know, increasingly kind of addled mind. And then it was over. Everybody went off in their town cars and… But I was drunk and I was the kind of drinker where the motor would get started with the first drink and then it would just rev up and rev up and rev up, and I would just have all this kind of toxic energy to burn off somehow. So I ended up in a bar and ended up, you know, having a, having a hookup with, with, with a stranger. You know, it was awful, horrifying to me, you know, when I kind of came back to my senses that this is how I had chosen to blow off steam. And yet it wasn't, you know, I would like to say that was my, it was my rock bottom, but it wasn't, you know, it was just like, well, wait, okay, I'm okay. I'm still alive. I got away with that. All right, I guess I'll just keep going.

Dan Pashman: What did finally get you to an AA meeting?

Laurie Woolever: So I went to a conference. And I started to notice that weekend that in the morning when I woke up after drinking a lot all day long the previous day and the day before that and the day before that, that my hands were shaking in the morning and I had never seen that before. And you know, I had had hangovers for years, but this was the first time that I saw one of these like cliched signs of like, you know, this is now how your body is, is metabolizing alcohol, or not. And that kind of scared me. 

Dan Pashman: Laurie still drank her way through the rest of the weekend. But a friend there asked her: do you think it’s time to stop?

Laurie Woolever: And I don't know that anybody had asked me that, or if they had, I just hadn't listened. Uh, but it was like, I was ready to hear the question and I was ready to, you know, say the answer that I had been thinking about for a while. 

Dan Pashman: That night, Laurie got drunk again. She returned to her hotel, and set her alarm to get up early for her flight. But actually, she was so drunk that she’d set her phone’s calculator instead of her alarm. She missed her flight home, and had to pay a thousand dollars for a new ticket. 

Laurie Woolever: And I just thought, wow, I think, I think I'm done here. I think I need to try not to drink anymore because this is just, I can see the angle is starting to get a little steeper. The downhill is starting to feel a little, you know, faster.

Dan Pashman: When she got home, Laurie went to her first AA meeting, and this time she stopped drinking for good. But it wasn’t like it solved all her problems. She was still having sex with people who weren’t her husband, and still smoking a lot of weed.

Laurie Woolever: I think there's this misunderstanding sometimes that once you quit drinking, suddenly everything changes and, you know, and… 

Dan Pashman: The clouds part. 

Laurie Woolever: Yeah. And I, maybe that's, I think that is true for some people, but it's not true for everyone. And I think sometimes it's a longer process of letting go of all of your addictive behaviors. So for me, personally, it took some time to give up weed and to get, you know, truly, truly sober.

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Dan Pashman: At the end of 2017, Laurie got a call from Mario Batali. He was working on a new cookbook celebrating 20 years of Babbo. He invited her to write an essay for it, and to be in a big photo with a bunch of other people who’d worked at the restaurant over the years. She said yes -- she says she was flattered to be included.

Dan Pashman: A day or two after the photo shoot, Laurie got a phone call from a friend.

Laurie Woolever: And he said, well, I just, I think you should know that there are some publications that are investigating Mario. And from what I've heard, there's some bad stuff that's being alleged. So I just want you to be aware of that. 

Dan Pashman: This was at the height of the #MeToo movement. 

Laurie Woolever: My friend said, listen, like, just be careful. You know, if you haven't signed a release yet, you might want to think about maybe not signing.

Dan Pashman: You might not want to be in that photo. 

Laurie Woolever: You might not want to be in that photo. You might not want to be in that book.

Dan Pashman: How surprised were you?

Laurie Woolever: I was pretty surprised. I really, it was surprising to me that people would go forward and break the silence around Mario because he had so much power.

Dan Pashman: So you were more surprised that people were speaking out than by the nature of the allegations.

Laurie Woolever: Yeah, well… you know, I knew what kind of behavior he indulged in but I hadn't been around him in a long time. I hadn't… of course you hear things and people talk and there's gossip, but I hadn't – I don't think I fully understood how much more egregious things had gotten. So it was a combination of, Wow, I can't believe people are willing to talk about this and also like, Oh my god, you're talking about you know, not just some ass grabbing, but something that somebody would call assault. That took me by surprise in that moment. Yeah.

Dan Pashman: At that point, Laurie didn’t actually know the details of the allegations, just that they were worse than anything she had witnessed with Mario. She clued Tony in on what was going on.

Dan Pashman: And it's interesting to me that Tony encouraged you to speak to reporters, at least anonymously, to share information, you know, he was arguing to you, like, the more people who share stories, the harder it is to disbelieve any of the people stepping forward, but you were reluctant at first to speak up. Why?

Laurie Woolever: I think my first impulse was like, I don't want any part of this, you know. I think because of that gray area sense of, well, look at how long I was there. Look at how… I felt like if you were going to speak to the press and you were going to get involved in something like this, it had to be very black and white in your mind. And I, because of the ways in which I had benefited from working for Mario, and I think also not really yet having a full picture of how many allegations there were and how truly egregious some of them were. I just thought, you know what, the easiest thing for me and the cleanest thing for me is to just sort of sit back and let this happen and I don't need to be a part of this and I don't really want to be a part of this. I just felt very conflicted about it.

Dan Pashman: Conflicted about getting involved, but also conflicted about whether you kind of had a right to be one of the people speaking out against him.

Laurie Woolever: Yeah, I didn't feel like a victim. I was like, what do I have to say? And I was scared, to be honest. I was just like, even if I'm speaking anonymously, I'm still, you know, my name's going to be in somebody's email or in somebody's phone, and I just, I didn't want to cross Mario. [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Uh, but eventually you did.

Laurie Woolever: Yeah. I mean, Tony made a convincing case, and I talked to a lot of other people, and it's hard to say no to Tony, too. It was hard to say no to Tony. And he wasn't wrong, you know? I do see now that you know, there is safety in numbers. I did, say what I knew, which I really didn't think was that much. But I didn't, you know, my name wasn't in any of the stories.

Dan Pashman: Laurie writes in her book that while Tony was a real advocate, he also may have had other reasons for wanting her to speak up. He was in a new relationship with the actor and filmmaker Asia Argento. Asia was one of the women accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct – and Tony was completely devoted to Asia. 

Laurie Woolever: You know there was a moment where I was, it wasn't clear to me, you know, what his motivation was. And, you know, like with all of this, I think it was not just one thing. I think, you know, I think that he was a champion of women and he, you know, he had a strong sense of, you know, right and wrong and, and justice. And you know, his girlfriend was a Weinstein accuser, and so it was top of mind for him.

Dan Pashman: The stories about Mario came out, alleging he’d engaged in abusive behavior at his restaurants, made sexual comments, and groped women. The New York Times reported that a former manager at a restaurant called The Spotted Pig saw him, quote, “groping and kissing a woman who appeared to be unconscious.” His company paid a settlement to twenty employees who were sexually harassed at his restaurants. Mario also personally settled two civil suits against him. In the one criminal case filed against him, for indecent assault and battery, he was acquitted. 

Dan Pashman: When the stories and lawsuits came out, Mario apologized, in an email newsletter that also included a recipe for pizza dough cinnamon rolls. He then stepped away from his restaurants, lost his job on the talk show The Chew. The Babbo 20th anniversary cookbook was never published.

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: Meanwhile, Laurie continued working with Tony. Around that time, she started to get a clearer picture of Tony’s relationship with Asia, but she still hadn’t met Asia. That changed on a shoot in Hong Kong for his CNN show, Parts Unknown. The director for the episode needed emergency surgery, so Tony asked Asia if she would direct it instead, given her past work as a director.  The first night of the trip, Laurie met up with the two of them at the hotel bar.

Laurie Woolever: Tony was very, very well known for always being, not only on time, but often, you know, psychotically early to any meeting. And in this case, they came in late, you know, probably 15 minutes later than they had asked me to meet them.

Dan Pashman: So it was very out of character for him.

Laurie Woolever: Very out of character for him, yeah. And it was clear that they had both been drinking a lot and they continued to, uh, to drink a lot. You know, it was not an unusual thing for Tony to have drinks, but they drank a lot. And yeah, the dynamic was really interesting because in all of my experiences, you know, with him socially, he was the guy he was running the table. He was telling the stories, and that wasn't the case, uh, in this instance, you know, she really, she had a lot more to say, and I saw him deferring, and it was a very unusual dynamic that I had never seen before with him and another person.

Dan Pashman: Laurie stayed away from the shoot. But the crew told her that with Asia as director, there were problems on set. They said Asia was volatile and defensive, which they saw as a sign she was out of her depth. Tensions came to a head when Asia demanded that Tony fire his longtime director of photography, a key member of the team that the whole crew respected. Asia gave Tony an ultimatum -- it’s him or me. Tony chose Asia. 

Dan Pashman: This decision alarmed the crew, and Laurie. It made them all feel suddenly expendable. And it pointed at what Laurie saw as a deep dysfunction in Tony and Asia’s relationship. She describes Tony’s attitude towards Asia as a, quote, “slavish devotion.” A mutual friend of the couple’s would later recall Tony saying of Asia, he had never met anyone who wanted to die more than he did.

Dan Pashman: A few months after those issues with the crew in Hong Kong, Tony was on set in France. Tabloids began reporting that Asia was seen in Rome with another man. There were photos of the two together. It seemed to crush Tony. When he contacted Laurie to ask her to set up some appointments for him when he got back to New York, Laurie texted him to say she hoped he was okay. He responded: “I’ll live, and we’ll survive.” The next morning, Anthony Bourdain was found dead – he’d taken his own life.

Dan Pashman: At first, it was easy to blame Asia. But Laurie soon came to believe it wasn’t so simple. She writes, “Asia may have been the catalyst, but she was not the cause. She didn’t kill Tony. The cause of Tony’s death was Tony, a human, mortal, grown man who felt and loved so deeply that it killed him.”

Dan Pashman: One of the things that I know people often say to themselves when someone close to them, dies by suicide is, is there something that I could have done?

Laurie Woolever: You want to know if I felt that way? [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Well, I assume you felt that way.

Laurie Woolever: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: But like, what in your mind… When you go to that place in your head, what do you wish you had said or done?

Laurie Woolever: I don't know. I mean, it's, it's something I've thought about a lot and, uh, and talked to other people about a lot who were, you know, in Tony's orbit. And I think I've come to the conclusion that for the reality of the way Tony had things structured, for the reality of the way that we all related to him, I don't believe that there is anything that I could have said or done that would have changed. When it was clear that he was having a tough time that week, you know, I just said, I hope you're okay, and you know, let me know what I can do. Uh, and lots of people did that, and it didn't, it didn't change anything. It didn't change the decision that he made. So, you knew where you stood with Tony, and you knew that if you overstepped, you could see it, other people, if they, if they overstepped or they gave him advice he didn't want to hear, it was like the gate went down.

Dan Pashman: In the oral history that you wrote, you know, I think a lot about this sort of the canonization of Tony. 

Laurie Woolever: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: I mean, to the point that like, now that people are, there's this sort of unofficial Bourdain day. 

Laurie Woolever: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: You seem to think that a lot of the reverence that he gets is deserved. 

Laurie Woolever: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: But you learn things about him doing the oral history that even you didn't know 

Laurie Woolever: Mm-hmm. 

Dan Pashman: And I don't know that any human being is fully worthy of being canonized and revered and deified. 

Laurie Woolever: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: So when you see that level of adoration, as much as it may to some degree be deserved, what do you also know about Tony that maybe those people don't know? Like, what would you add to the picture that is being left out?

Laurie Woolever: First of all, I want to say I completely understand why people canonize and deify him. It's a pain reaction and it's a missing him reaction and it's a, it's a way to sort of find community with other people. Maybe the thing that gets lost is that he was a fully human person with contradictions and complications. And, he was human. He was fallible. And like all of us, you know, he, he made, he made some bad decisions. He made one spectacularly bad decision. To see him literally called St. Tony, you know, and on the side of one of those candles that you can get in a shoppy shop. It's like, okay, you know, he might have taken issue with that. [LAUGHS] But it's hard to find true fault with it because it's, I know it's an expression of love and of pain.

MUSIC 

Dan Pashman: Tony’s death was not the only loss that Laurie suffered in 2018. About a month before, her husband found out about her affairs, and they got divorced. Because of the divorce proceedings, she had to get life insurance – and that was actually what spurred her to quit smoking weed. The insurance broker said it would help reduce her premiums.

Dan Pashman: She’s been sober since 2018.

Dan Pashman: And how are you doing, Laurie?

Laurie Woolever: [LAUGHS] Uh, I'm good. I think being sober, dead stop, has made me so much more calm and appreciative of what I've got in my life, and like, broke as hell, and you know, my neighbors are annoying, and whatever, the country is falling apart, but like, I know that like, minute to minute, like, my life is great. So I feel really, you know, I feel really lucky that I was able to, to find that peace. 

Dan Pashman: I'd love to ask you to read one more excerpt from the book. In this excerpt, you reference a prayer that many people who've gone through AA recite. “Thank you, God, for keeping me sober today.”

Laurie Woolever: “I used to believe that the only way to do things was to ruinous excess. And then I believed that my relatively mild rock bottom moment, just some alcoholic shaky hands and missing a flight, was sort of weak bullshit. I couldn't see then how lucky I was to have pulled out of the nosedive long before the ground became visible, though I did plenty of damage to my doomed marriage and my mental health on my way down. Thank you God for keeping me sober today. Reminds me to be grateful for the fact that I didn't have to lose it all before I found another way to live. It is a privilege to be upright, happy, and alive.”

Dan Pashman: We've talked about how Mario and Tony both glamorized excess in a way that was very appealing to you. 

Laurie Woolever: Mm hmm. 

Dan Pashman: In a way that you wanted to emulate. And in your own way, you did emulate it for years. Drinking, sex, drugs. Like them, you went a long time without ever really saying no to yourself. When you had an urge to fill. It was occurring to me that that approach to life eventually destroyed Tony and Mario. Perhaps in different ways. How does it feel to think that you're the one who survived?

Laurie Woolever: I guess I feel lucky. You know, there's a, there's a part in the, in the introduction to the book where I quote Dwight Garner of the New York Times, uh… “Most human beings have more desires than opportunities in life. Those whom the gods will destroy are provided with desire and opportunity in equal measure.” So, yeah, I don't think everyone who gets everything they want eventually gets destroyed, but there were some hard limits on my life and, for whatever reason, I was able to recognize the path I was on before it was too late.

Dan Pashman: Well, I'm glad you made it.

Laurie Woolever: Well, thank you. Me too.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: That’s Laurie Woolever, her new memoir is called Care and Feeding, it’s available wherever books are sold. 

Dan Pashman: I want to add, if you, or someone you know, is facing mental health struggles or emotional distress, you can reach care counselors 24/7 by calling or texting 988. You can find more information at 988lifeline.org.

Dan Pashman: Next week on the show… I’m taking YOUR calls with Katie Nolan, host of the podcast Casuals, it’s a super fun show about sports and culture, Katie has lots of opinions, we’re gonna have a blast. That’s next week.

Dan Pashman: While you’re waiting for that one… check out last week’s Salad Spinner where we tackle tariffs, egg prices, and… Capri Sun. That’s up now.