TUCSON, Ariz. - Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain was found dead in a French hotel Friday. He had killed himself.
Bourdain was shooting another episode of his popular food and travel show that airs on CNN.
An earlier version of Bourdain’s show, which aired on the Travel Channel brought him to an unexpected spot in Tucson.
Anthony Bourdain did cooking shows but his menu was much broader than deep discussions of special sauces. He looked at society and history and politics and that's what brought him to Tucson's Titan Missile Museum.
The museum has a photo of him in the command chair of the control room where Air Force Missile Crews were ready to send a giant nuclear warhead rocketing toward the old Soviet Union.
Museum director Yvonne Morris remembers getting a call from the Air Force.
“My contact in LA called me and he said, Yvonne, I can't tell you the name of this guy. But there's a celebrity chef, he's got a show on the travel channel, and they want to come to your site, would you be interested in that? And I said, I that Anthony Bourdain?! And he said, You know, this guy, and I said, Well, I know of him. I'm a big fan of his show.”
Since the show had to have some sort of food or drink connection they talked about a powerful martini called the Titan-tini but Bourdan was interested in more than a chilly cocktail. He wanted to talk about the Cold War.
Morris says, “What you saw of Anthony Bourdain on TV is what I believe Anthony Bourdain was in real life. He had an interesting way of drawing things out of you that you wouldn't think you were going to talk about. We're here talking about the possibility of World War Three and we're walking down the cable way getting ready to take a look at the missile and he says, what's your favorite movie."
Morris says Bourdain's drive to dig deeper into the places he profiled really helped people understand the world better. She's sad that he's gone but hopes the stories he told, and the lessons they taught will stay on the air
