ART, IDEAS, MUSIC, AND COOKING

THE LEONARD COHEN-ANTHONY BOURDAIN TWIN STORY

two icons find their identity in the same way

By Sara Cruz

I was walking along listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Is This What You Wanted” and I saw Anthony Bourdain’s face. As Cohen sang, “Is this what you wanted? / To live in a house that is haunted by the ghost of you and me?” there he was, not actually of course, but in my mind. Yes, his face, was in my mind. I had recently rewatched Bourdain’s hit television series No Reservations but still, why was I imagining Bourdain singing the whole of Cohen’s album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, or for that matter Cohen trying some exotic food on the other side of the world. The answer should have come sooner, but I was slowly figuring out, at first unconsciously, and then, as an unmistakable fact, that Cohen and Bourdain are actually and symbolically cultural twins. What a late afternoon epiphany, I had to sit down and catch my breath.

They both have a certain charm about them. Cohen expresses his need for poetry, love, morality, and philosophy in the same way that Bourdain expresses his love of food, writing, and human connection. In many ways their contradictions are similar. Their work is both polished and rugged, melancholy yet hopeful, and despite their professional achievements, they’re attracted to the streets. But forget all that for a moment, we can start with their looks.

The Guys

Cohen had deep-set hooded eyes, curly hair that he somehow tamed into managed waves, a Roman nose, wide lips, and a pronounced cupid's bow. The combination was quite distinguished and was central to the way he wielded his quiet intensity. Bourdain’s skin was tan and his forearms were adorned with faded tattoos. His silver-curly hair was often combed back (wavy, like Cohen’s) with a cowlick curl that centered his forehead. Add the high cheekbones, deep-set brown eyes, dark bushy brows, and the Greek nose and you get the beatnik of cuisine. Every comparison starts with the superficial, and appearance is as superficial as it gets, but still, there’s more here than meets the eye.

Cohen was born on September 21st, 1934 to Jewish Orthodox upper-middle class family in Montreal. His mother was Lithuanian-Jewish the daughter of a Talmudic writer and rabbi, Solomon Klonitsky-Kline. His Father, Nathan Bernard Cohen, was a clothing store owner (perhaps accounting for Cohen’s crisp style) and died when Cohen was nine. Similarly, Bourdain was born to Jewish and French parents in New York City on June 25, 1956. His father, Pierre Bourdain, was a classical music recording industry executive, and his mother, Gladys Bourdain, was a New York Times editor. Their middle-class New Jersey home was brimming over with books and records.

First Book

By the time both of them were 17, they had enrolled in prestigious colleges. At McGill College, Cohen won an award for his poetry in 1951 and two years later his first poems were published in CIV/n Magazine. By age 22, he had published his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956). That same year, he moved to New York to pursue graduate school for General Studies, but returned to Montreal after a year. In 1973 the 17-year-old Bourdain enrolled at Vassar College, a private liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York, before dropping out after two years to pursue cooking. He worked as a dishwasher in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and attended the Culinary Institute of America, graduating in 1978 at 22. By the time they were in their early twenties, both Cohen and Bourdain had a string of academic accomplishments and showed real talent as writers.

Cohen working hard in Hydra, Greece

What’s fascinating about the two is that they kind of get to the same point in the same way right before they become famous. Both of them struggled with drug addictions. In 1960 the 26-year-old Cohen moved to Hydra, Greece, where he wrote three somewhat famous and controversial novels: The Favorite Game (1963); Flowers for Hitler (1964); and The Beautiful Losers (1966). During his first year living in Hydra, Cohen was part of a colony of eccentric artists. He often fueled 20-hour writing sessions with hash, acid, and amphetamines. Writing to his muse in Hydra, Marianne Ihlen, he described his drug use in these terms:

I have written a lot of wild poems. I hardly understand myself and I prefer to haunt this crumbling house or watch the bad movies on the port. I have even experimented with hashish and opium, but they make me as tired as alcohol. It seems that I can’t get addicted to anything. Nothing can intrude between me and my particular vision of the world, not even cigarettes. I keep wanting to blur myself even though I know I am happiest when I am most sober. My only certainty is that I must keep working and complete this book of mine.

After his drug habit got the best of him, he left Hydra and moved to New York City to join the folk singers.

Pirates of a sort

Nearly 20 years later, in 1981, the twenty-five-year-old Bourdain was a Soho, New York line cook. Climbing the kitchen brigade, Bourdain had his colony of sorts. But instead of drugged-out expatriate artists and intellectuals in Greece, his crew consisted of pirate cooks. Here’s a quote from his first memoir, Kitchen Confidential:

They carried big, bad-ass knives, which they kept honed and sharpened to a razor's edge…these guys were master criminals, sexual athletes…highwaymen rogues, buccaneers, cut-throats.

Drugs influenced every decision he made. At times he would send a busboy to Alphabet City to acquire Cannabis, cocaine, LSD, Mushrooms, Amphetamines, codeine, and heroin. Despite that, he had a tremendous work ethic. He would log 12-hour work days six days a week, chopping, whisking, sauteing, garnishing non-stop, while chain-smoking cigarettes, and going into the freezer room for a bump of cocaine every break he got. He was a drug addict, but, like Cohen, he always showed up to work on time and worked a lot.

I’ve found that all line cooks share the same sense of being outsiders, degraded, beaten-down, underappreciated. Many of us have messy, dysfunctional, chaotic lives outside the kitchen, but inside the kitchen, we have the only order and structure in our lives.

Over the years he ran several kitchens in some of New York City’s most popular high-end restaurants, including the Supper Club, One-Fifth Avenue, and Sullivan's. He’d admitted that he “should’ve died in my 20’s.” He might've dabbled with other drugs, but heroin was the problem. By 1988, he had enough and quit drugs altogether. In 1998, he became the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan.

The kitchen is Les Halles

Today, people know Cohen as the “Poet of Brokenness” and Bourdain as a “hungry ghost,” but before fame they were drifters, drug addicts, workaholics (one in front of the typewriter and the other behind the saucepan), and successful by any normal person’s standards but still far from what they would soon become. For Cohen, Hydra was a place of refuge; for Bourdain, the restaurant industry was his hideaway, the only thing that kept him alive. They spent a quarter of their lives in fragments, not completely seeing their true selves, until all of a sudden both became what they were meant to be, full public personas, artists, and thinkers.

For Cohen, it began when he started reading his poems to folk musicians. These readings soon evolved into songs and soon other artists were singing his tunes. Folk musician Judy Collins recorded and performed several of his tracks, notably "Suzanne," and introduced Cohen to a larger audience. In 1967, he performed at the Mariposa and Newport folk festivals and Expo ‘67. His standout performance at Newport caught the eye of an A&R representative, who quickly signed him to Columbia Records. This was his moment and Cohen became the Cohen we know with the release of his first album as a singer-songwriter, Songs of Leonard Cohen. By 1970 he had his first US and Europe tour and captivated an audience of over 600,000 people at the Isle of Wight festival in England.

Cohen is becoming himself

In 2000, on his first business trip to Tokyo, Bourdain wrote a series of emails to his friend and writer Joel Rose. They are filled with moving descriptions of Bourdain's jetlagged night in the streets of Tokyo and Rose immediately realized just how talented his friend was. Rose printed out the email and showed his wife, the book publisher Karen Rinaldi. When he returned from Tokyo, Rinaldi said, “I gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse” and eight months later, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly was finished and ready for publication. A few months after its release, his hybrid memoir/exposé of the restaurant industry was on the New York Times bestseller list. Bourdain, with 28 years of experience as a chef, was now a best-selling author, a culinary/literary sensation appearing on Oprah and securing a second book deal for, A Chef’s Tour. Suddenly, from barely making rent and living paycheck to paycheck, the 43-year-old Bourdain had become the person we now know from his hit tv show, No Reservations (2005).

About to become an icon

My headphones are blaring Cohen again. “So long Marianne, it's time we began to laugh and cry and laugh about it all again.” But why do I keep seeing Bourdain’s face mouthing the words? Well, the simple answer is that the way Cohen sings about his lovers feels identical to how Bourdain talks about Việt Nam and many of the places he visits: “I love Việt Nam. Maybe it’s a pheromonic thing. It's like when you meet the love of your life for the first time, and she just, somehow, inexplicably smells and feels right. You sense that given the opportunity, this is the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with.” (Nasty Bits, 2006).

They are in many ways traditional romantics in how beauty and yearning are in a never-ending dance, like how in “Suzanne” Cohen doesn’t just want Suzanne, but wants to travel with her. “And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind and then you know that you can trust her. For she's touched your perfect body with her mind.” It’s the same way that Bourdain finds beauty in the world’s most complex and troubling areas, how he drifts beneath the surface attractions to see a city or backroad restaurant as it really is. They both treat love and loss not as simple emotions, but as experiences that transcend time and place. Bourdain’s love for the underdog and his romanticizing of the “outsiders” in the kitchen, the misfits and the rebels echo Cohen’s infatuation with the broken and flawed beauty of human connection: listen to “Famous Blue Raincoat” and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Both men understood that beauty is vulnerable and imperfect, and that they were, too.

They were both authentic and witty and many people related to them in an almost familial way. Bourdain was a gritty, audacious traveler and storyteller who was passionate about the world. His persona was marked by a rebellious spirit, a deep sense of empathy laced with a realist cynicism. He was a man who had struggled and emerged eager to experience what the world and life had to offer. Cohen was a poet, philosopher, and spiritual seeker, who could tap into a mythic sense of experience.

The Young Cohen

While they are very much alike, they did not end as twins. Cohen lived a long and fruitful life until his early 80s. Well into his late seventies, he went on a 100-date tour, The Old Ideas, and performed his last concert in Auckland, New Zealand on December 21, 2013. On November 7, 2016, he died in his sleep after an accidental fall during the night. It was sudden, unexpected, but peaceful. Cohen had been retired for only three years at the time of his death. It was a nice ending. Bourdain’s story is different.

Bourdain’s death shocked the world. On June 8, 2018, working on an episode for his show, Parts Unknown in Kaysersberg, France, a bit shy of his 62nd birthday, Bourdain hung himself. His body was discovered by his close friend, French chef Eric Ripert, who had been traveling and filming the show with him. According to Bourdain’s close friends, they knew he was distressed about his relationship with his partner, the actress Asia Argento, but none thought it had reached the point of even contemplating suicide. His friend, actor and musician, John Lurie commented, “He’s a storyteller for one thing, how does a storyteller check out without leaving a note?” “We are trying so hard to understand,” said Lydia Tenaglia, Bourdian’s creative partner, “because we think if we can understand it, then we’ll be okay with it, and the fact of the matter is, no.” After the heart-wrenching news spread hundreds of thank you notes, poems, and roses filled the entrance of his former restaurant, Les Halles. In the end, every twin must find their own path.

The End

©Sara Cruz and the CCA Arts Review