Aahana Swrup
The coming-of-age biopic ‘Tony’ centers around a memorable and transformative summer in the life of the titular Anthony Bourdain. The story begins with the protagonist, a 19-year-old college student aspiring to be a writer, losing out on a pivotal fellowship from his university. In the aftermath, aimless and brimming with no impulse control, Tony ends up booking a one-way ticket to Provincetown, a coastal town in Massachusetts, frequented by tourists. However, once actually there, he realizes that Nancy isn’t available and, more pressingly, he has no money to finance his impromptu vacation.
As a result, Tony ends up washing dishes at a local seafood restaurant, Flagship, where he finds a reluctant mentor in the head Chef. The film tells the tale of a young man searching for love who finds something bigger that changes his life in unexpected ways. Although based on the real-life of celebrity chef and travel documentarian, Anthony Bourdain, ‘Tony’ offers a blend of fact and fiction. This remains evident in the depiction of Nancy, whose off-screen counterpart played a vital role in Bourdain’s real life.
Nancy Putkoski is Partially Based on Anthony Bourdain’s Real First Wife
As a biographical film, ‘Tony’ occupies a unique space. It depicts the life of Anthony Bourdain, but instead of charting his rise to fame, it explores the celebrity chef’s journey as a teenager when he was beginning to discover his love for the culinary arts. The film mines its inspiration and authenticity from the chef’s memoir ‘Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.’ The book, published in 2000, dives into Bourdain’s early life in its first few chapters. These chapters, describing the future chef’s time in Provincetown, where he started off as a dishwasher at Flagship, became the central inspiration for the film. In turn, Nancy Putkoski, Bourdain’s high school sweetheart, turned first wife, to whom this memoir was dedicated, became the inspiration for her on-screen namesake character.
Notably, much like Bourdain’s life itself, ‘Tony’ also takes plenty of creative liberties in its depiction of Putkoski’s cinematic counterpart. Despite being a biopic, the project doesn’t follow the celebrity chef’s early life through a documentarian’s lens. Instead, it amalgamates the story of the real chef’s life from ages 15 to 25, converting ideas, anecdotes, and experiences that span years into one coherent narrative for the screen. As such, it ends up with something close to reality that utilizes a fair amount of fictionalization and speculation. The same is true for the film’s portrayal of Nancy’s character. In real life, Putkoski was a part of Bourdain’s time in Provincetown. Some reports suggest that the latter did find himself in the town in search of his high school crush.
However, over time, when Bourdain visited the coastal town, he would do so with his close friends, which included Putkoski, who eventually became his girlfriend. The duo also went to the same university, Vassar College in New York, before the chef transferred to The Culinary Institute of America. Reportedly, their relationship in those early days remained rocky, frequently going on and off again. At the time, Putkoski worked at Spiritus Pizza as a counter girl. As such, while certain details of Nancy’s on-screen portrayal remain true to reality, the film slightly fictionalizes the course of her relationship with Bourdain.
In real life, the pair got married in 1985 and separated in 2005 after 20 years of marriage. Putkoski spoke to The New Yorker in 2017 about her late husband and the end of their partnership. She shared, “I’m big on shared experiences, which I’d thought had bulletproofed our partnership. . . . We’d been through an awful lot of stuff together, a lot of it not so great, a lot of it wonderful fun. I just didn’t anticipate how tricky success would be.” The celebrity chef, who tragically passed away in 2018 via suicide, described the ultimate end of this marriage as “the great betrayal of his life.”
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