James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (12 page)

Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who played Tony Soprano’s daughter, Meadow, once told
Rolling Stone
that Gandolfini would get on the phone with her boyfriend and ask him if he was treating her right. She wasn’t a child star, exactly, but started on
The Sopranos
as a teenager, and came of age on the set. “He’s actually just like a teddy bear,” Sigler said of Gandolfini. “I think of him as my second father. You can sit down and have the nicest conversation with him, and then he’ll get up and punch walls and beat someone up.”

But
The Sopranos
family chart was more complicated than any real family’s. David Chase was originally a writer, and in many ways always has been. And writers are not usually at the top of any chart except one made up of other writers. But Chase was a good manager, he’d produced several commercial TV hits, and he changed how writers were viewed in the industry. Through the idiosyncratic success of
The Sopranos,
Chase became the first of a series of “showrunners” who were responsible for creating a new golden age of serious, adult drama on cable TV at the turn of the last century.

And that meant putting great authority in the hands of former writers. Cable dramas are writer-driven because each episode, while containing a ringing climax for its own story, was simultaneously part of a longer arc of thirteen episodes that were supposed to build dramatic tension and provide a satisfying cumulative climax as a finale. This gave TV drama some of the qualities of nineteenth-century serial fiction, like the novels of Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, all of which were written to appear in newspapers or magazines.

Like
Les Misérables, The Sopranos
could introduce minor characters that act as leitmotifs inside the larger story, but seem fully rounded dramas all their own;
The Sopranos
could start and drop themes, return to them, and consider them from every possible angle. But to make sense, those many interwoven threads had to be judged for tone from a single viewpoint, and that, in the case of
The Sopranos,
was David Chase’s.

Chase had never believed TV could be anything more than a commercial medium. Growing up in New Jersey, he idolized rock stars like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as the “real artists,” who made art out of their everyday experiences without reference to any academy or theory of practice. Behind the camera, he lionized New Wave auteurs and the rebellious European filmmakers of the 1960s whose work defied all convention. For Chase, working in TV was a compromise, because every episode had to have a neat resolution that encouraged viewers to “go out and buy stuff.” It was something he did for money, almost a mark of shame.

Cable TV offered an escape from such limitations. HBO didn’t sell ads against
The Sopranos.
They sold subscriptions, which were more like movie tickets. Actors could say “fuck” on the air—in fact, they said it so often, and to such hilarious effect, that the writer in Chase worried they were using it too much, like a crutch. Themes that are almost never explored on network television, like the economics of hospital care, or the ambiguities of senile dementia, were fit topics for
The Sopranos
. Chase could use the show to examine aspects of family life that were becoming rare in movies, too.

As creator and showrunner, Chase was the ultimate dad of
The Sopranos,
but at the same time, Gandolfini became his avatar. The extraordinarily talented actor made the scripts come alive; he made Chase’s long-running angst about his New Jersey mom—so different from James’s deep affection for his own—into art millions could enjoy, even identify with. (Joe Pantoliano, who played Ralph Cifaretto for two seasons, once observed to Peter Biskind that every Italian family he knew was run by these very strong mothers, and that was what struck him about
The Godfather.
In that movie, “everybody is always worried about him,” and that seemed totally weird after growing up under his mother’s thumb—and then he heard that Mario Puzo had based the character of the Godfather not on his dad, but on his mom, and it all fell into place.)

But as cable dramas spooled out into multiyear events, running the show became a massive job. There were hundreds of employees, costume designers, prop men, photographers, writers for spin-off productions (the video games, for example), and assistants for every one of them, all trying to clear their concerns through the office of the showrunner. He’d conceived the whole show, he’d chosen the actors and the writers, he even said yes or no to how fat an actor was supposed to be (he made Vincent Pastore wear a fat suit until the second season). And yet, he was so busy and preoccupied, he sometimes seemed unreachable.

Is there any other kind of organization—besides an actual family, that is—with such ambiguous lines of authority? Or any other that allows, maybe encourages, such waves of insecurity?

“By the end, I had a lot of anger over things and I think it was just from being tired, and what in God’s name would I have to be angry about?” Gandolfini wondered years later to
Vanity Fair
. “The man gave me such a gift in terms of life experience, in terms of acting experience, in terms of money, too. At the beginning, David came to the set a lot, but once it got bigger and it became this thing, you know, he was a little more standoffish. He was harder to talk to. I understand that. The pressure that he had to continue to create, to continue to do great work, was hard. Everybody starts to want something, everybody starts to call, and this one needs this, and can we talk about that? And then there’s money, and so you have to pull back and try to protect yourself in a way. I had to learn it and I wasn’t very good at it. But then it starts to take its toll. The first couple of years, it was easier. It wasn’t such a huge deal. I’ve said this to him, but maybe not so clearly. I got it. He had to be a little bit of the ‘Great and Powerful Oz.’ There was no choice.”

And as the ultimate cast father figure became increasingly remote, his time budgeted among various constituencies like a Chinese emperor’s time was divvied up among court ceremonies, the family members grew anxious. At the same time, the more Gandolfini made the cast and crew his family, replacing Chase as in loco parentis, the more he worried about his ability to deliver for them.

You can easily see echoes of Tony Soprano’s problems everywhere, almost like the show was teasing everybody, the actors, the writers, the producers, the network suits,
everybody,
including the viewers, as to what was real and what was art.

Getting whacked became the ultimate symbol of losing the family. Because, for the actors, it was indeed the same thing as getting fired from the family. “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero’s death at the conclusion of the second season (Tony discovered he’d become an FBI informant) became the template: The cast took actor Vincent Pastore out for a send-off dinner after his fictional death—a sort of Irish wake for a dead Italian (who wasn’t really dead). Many of
The Sopranos
’ crew said the day Big Pussy was whacked was the first time they had ever felt serious tension on the set.

And out of that tension, out of that desire to save all the wild ducks who filled the staff and crew of
The Sopranos,
grew a weighty paranoia.
Rolling Stone
told the story this way in 2001:

[Gandolfini] realized what was going on: David Chase was planning to have Tony Soprano whacked. “I had an unusually belligerent day,” Gandolfini says, “and I went home and I was sitting there and I was struck with the realization.… I said, ‘David’s going to kill me.’”

The next morning, he called Chase at home. “He said that during the night he was not able to sleep,” says Chase, “and he said to me, ‘I realized: Oh, shit, I know what he’s doing—he’s going to kill me off.’” Listening to Gandolfini, Chase realized “something like how much I value this show, how great it’s all been. And that it would be entirely possible to do that—would actually make for an interesting surprise. I just felt very warm toward him. And I thought to myself, ‘Man, actors, we forget what it’s like to be an actor.’ How little they have to hang on to, in a way. What they do is so ephemeral. Here he is, a huge star, the most popular guy, and that he would think that. You know what else I thought? ‘That guy’s an artist.’ Because even if it went through most TV stars’ minds, they’d never make that call. Even if it flitted through their mind, they would say, ‘Well, I’m indispensable, there’s no show without me.’ And that’s why he’s an artist. Theoretically I think we should believe that it could happen. I think if you start to think that Tony is not in jeopardy, that’s not a good thing.”

Chase told him he was “a fucking lunatic.”

This would not be the last time Chase had to tell Gandolfini something like that. In fact, as the show went on, and the accolades for both men kept rolling in, Gandolfini’s confidence, if anything, got worse. He’d beg for time off, miss takes, sometimes disappear for a day, two, even three, when he had some difficult scene that required an emotional push.

It happened because it was good. Because everyone working on
The Sopranos
knew they had lucked into that sweet place where they had freedom, money, control, and an audience for everything they did. For an artist, it doesn’t get better than that.

It doesn’t get worse, either.

*   *   *

In a show about family, if it’s going to be true to life, everything will be about compromise.

The character of Tony Soprano was hemmed in by his families: nuclear, extended, and criminal, and by the much larger dysfunctional family of his country, which was attacked on September 11, 2001, just as
The Sopranos
was hitting its stride. The show at first seemed to be about American economic dysfunction: the only families that make it in middle-class America anymore have to be doing something illegal, or anyway something that should be illegal. But as America went on a ten-year-long hunt to whack enemies and disloyal allies around the world, the footprint of
The Sopranos
inevitably grew.

That was in the accordionlike nature of what David Chase had created. A satire of American family life would naturally reflect all the changes shaping the larger culture, just as Carroll O’Connor had reflected the working class’s conversion to Ronald Reagan on
All in the Family
or Homer Simpson reflects the obesity epidemic (and so much else) on
The Simpsons. The Sopranos
would adapt itself to reality like a vine does to the stake it curls around—this kind of average family depiction is what TV has always done best. But the process of creating a cable series had another layer of complexity. The show would adapt itself to the qualities brought to it by its lead actor, too.

In the very beginning, when Chase was talking with Fox TV about developing the show, Broadway star Anthony LaPaglia (who won a Tony for his role in
A View from the Bridge
in 1998) was the leading candidate to play the mob boss on Prozac. But LaPaglia couldn’t commit, and in the end Fox passed, as all the broadcast networks did. When finally HBO gave the greenlight in 1998, Chase brought three actors to the company as possible Tony Sopranos: Steven Van Zandt, former guitar player for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, character actor Michael Rispoli, who’d played Aida Turturro’s husband in
Angie,
and James Gandolfini.

Chase had been intrigued by Little Stevie Van Zandt after watching his speech for the induction of The Rascals into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on VH1, but HBO was worried about him because he’d never acted before. Van Zandt wound up, of course, as Tony’s consigliere, nightclub impresario Silvio Dante. Rispoli was thought to be much funnier than Gandolfini, more charming. But that wasn’t ultimately what Chase was looking for—Rispoli took the part of the Jersey don dying of cancer in the early episodes, whose death clears the way for Tony’s rise.

“The show I envisioned is the show that’s got Jimmy in it,” Chase told Alan Sepinwall for his book,
The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever
. “It’s a much darker show with Jimmy in it.

“At one time, I had said that this thing could be like a live-action
Simpsons,
” Chase continued. “Once I saw him do it, I thought, ‘No, that’s not right. It can be absurdist, it can have a lot of stupid shit in it, but it should not be a live-action
Simpsons
.”

It was the astonishing immediacy of Gandolfini’s temper that made him stand out (one of producer Brad Grey’s assistants had sent Chase that twelve-minute clip from
True Romance
before the auditions). But it was the way he tried to stifle his anger, to keep it from breaking out, that made the part perfect for him. Gandolfini was unmatched in his ability to show bridling impatience with his loved ones turn almost instantaneously into heartfelt sympathy. He was a poet of the emotional burdens of long-term loyalty. He
wanted
to be a perfect dad. In just the worst way.

And that was another stake for the vine to curl around, because the success of
The Sopranos
echoed through Gandolfini’s personal life, and in several different ways.

For one thing, it meant a serious boost in his income. Remember, just two years before he tried out for the part of Tony, when Sidney Lumet called Jim to offer the role of a corrupt cop in
Night Falls in Manhattan,
Gandolfini was working a part-time job planting trees in the sidewalk when he took the call on his cell. A TV series meant steady work. More work, as it turned out, than anyone expected. He stood to make more money in the first year than he had on all his movies combined.

Gandolfini was thirty-eight years old when he auditioned for Tony Soprano, getting into middle age by most definitions. Yet he had not had the lead in a film or TV program until Tony Soprano came along. And even then,
The Sopranos
was not a network show. Back in 1999, the big earners on TV were network comedians, like Ray Romano, Kelsey Grammer, and Tim Allen who was pulling down $1.6 million per episode of
Home Improvement
as early as 1996. The quartet on
Friends
were getting $750,000 an episode by 2000, and as much as $1 million per by 2002.