James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (2 page)

And Snooki is a real person.

The tight braiding of banality and art was
The Sopranos’
signature. At a time when most scripted TV shows were still shot on soundstages in Los Angeles or gussied up with exotic locales,
The Sopranos
featured video shoots on city street corners, in the Meadowlands swamp, at mall parking lots—it looked like it was shot out of your car window. When the audience watched Tony’s crew threaten to toss a persuadable civilian off the bridge over the Great Falls in Paterson, folks around the country saw a dramatically dark and craggy waterfall, but Jerseyans saw a place they’d all trooped through on school day-trips.

The show’s creator, David Chase, is himself a son of New Jersey, with his own complicated relationship to his Italian heritage and his home state. Back in the late 1970s, when Chase was starting out, he produced a genial but often topical private-eye show starring James Garner called
The Rockford Files.
He wrote an episode titled “Just a Coupla Guys,” about aspiring Italian-American mobsters from New Jersey who would stand out like black socks on a beach in L.A. It said a lot, even then, about the sour state of mind his native state puts David Chase in.

The plot had Garner landing at Newark airport as a fellow passenger tells him how nice the city really is, that it’s gotten an unfair rap. In short order, after getting off the plane, Rockford’s watch, luggage, and rental car are stolen, and a little later the character is mugged on the street. The easy freedom of the California lifestyle and American abundance seem suspicious in a Jersey setting, like some kind of con. The germ of the mob comedy that
The Sopranos
would become was in a line spoken by the dead-eyed wannabe hitman (played by Greg Antonacci) to Garner: “I hate you guys with your convertibles and your cheeseburgers.” The new suburbia was ruining America for the mob.

Native New Jerseyans have a sort of sad-sack, also-ran, second-rate phobia as their birthright, because they live on the wrong side of the river from Manhattan. It’s a bit of a jinx, like the little raincloud over Al Capp’s Joe Btfsplk. When David Chase finally got his mob comedy on the air at HBO, it was incredibly annoying that so many people assumed it was a knock-off of the Robert De Niro/Billy Crystal vehicle,
Analyze This,
which opened earlier the same year. Like
The Sopranos, Analyze This
was a comedy about a mob boss in therapy, only this time he’s a New York kingpin who grows dependent on his nebbishy Jewish shrink and needs to consult him in moments of unexpected crisis.

Cue the laughing trombones. In real life, Chase’s wife, Denise, had been telling him to make a movie about his tortured relationship with his Italian-American mother in Jersey for years. Chase had been steadily pitching the idea of an Italian mob boss trying to cope with his mom and suburban assimilation before HBO signed on, and before Harold Ramis got a green-light for
Analyze This
.

It’s like a conspiracy: nobody from Jersey ever gets credit for nothin’. Especially if they’re Italian.

And yet, they’re proud of it. It’s just the strangest thing, that New Jerseyans believe this wellspring of bitterness and disappointment allows them to see the truth clearer, unblinkingly, while the rest of the world goes around seeing blue skies and opportunity everywhere. It’s a kind of moral superiority. A kind, of course, that is in no way dented by stealing your watch.

As
The Sopranos
took off and drew a global audience, the intertwining of fact and fiction became even tighter. Chase hired actors from an A-list of tri-state–area Italian-American actors who, over many years and many productions, had become a kind of repertory theater of big-city mobsters for Hollywood. But he hired a lot of near-amateur actors from Jersey as well, to add local color. Several of them happened to get arrested during the series, for misdemeanors and felonies. Assault, drug possession, insurance fraud, hiring someone to beat a man for not paying a debt, even second-degree murder charges were leveled against
Sopranos
actors. Robert Iler, who played A.J., Tony’s son on the show, was arrested and pleaded guilty to mugging a pair of Brazilian tourists. The press loved these stories—it was life imitates art.

But the main claim
The Sopranos
laid to Jersey authenticity and art was Tony himself, or really, James Gandolfini. Like Tony, Gandolfini was born and raised in the Garden State. His father was born in Italy, outside of Milan, and his mother was born in New Jersey but raised near Naples. They spoke Italian in the home, though not to their kids.

Jim and his two sisters, Leta and Johanna, never learned Italian, but Jim said he could tell when his parents “were mad at me” in Italian.

His family had followed the great migration from Newark to the suburbs that began in the late 1950s, all the way out to Park Ridge, in Bergen County. James Joseph Gandolfini, Sr., was a World War II veteran, with a Purple Heart to show for it, despite his Italian birth. He became a bricklayer and cement mixer who wound up head custodian of Paramus Catholic High School. Jimmy Gandolfini’s mother, Santa, was a school lunch lady. His father would set up loudspeakers outside the house every summer and mow the lawn in his boxers to the accompaniment of blaring Italian songs. “He was a real Guinea,” his son recalled.

And maybe it was the vast conspiracy—against Italians from New Jersey, against big guys with big personalities, against the working class—that made Gandolfini reluctant to ever talk about this rich personal life, so intimately bound up with his greatest artistic creation, in public. He rarely gave interviews to the press.

“I’m not trying to be difficult,” he told one of the few journalists he would open up to,
The Star-Ledger
’s Matt Zoller Seitz, in 1999. “It’s not that I’m afraid to reveal personal stuff.… It’s just that I really, genuinely don’t see why people would find that sort of thing so interesting.”

He’d interrupt journalists who asked about him by saying “Boriiiing!” and try to change the subject. For an actor who appeared so unguarded on the screen or stage, his reticence about his background seemed like a mystery.

And yet, he acknowledged several times that he’d made Tony up out of his own biography. “The character is a good fit,” Gandolfini said. “Obviously, I’m not a mobster, and there’s other aspects of the guy I’m not familiar with, like how comfortable he is with violence. But in most of the ways that count, I have to say, yeah—the guy is me.”

How he got that across on the home screen was a private matter, however. Like a lot of serious dramatic actors, he hated the froufrou and flattery of publicity and promotion. That stuff seemed to eat away at his self-esteem, rather than buck it up (in that he was again like Brando, and a lot of other tough-guy male leads, including Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin). There was something that kept him from wholeheartedly accepting his celebrity or the privileges it could command.

Well, some of them. The ones that weren’t, you know, Jerseyan.

Vanity Fair
once asked him about what it was like to go from being working class to international celebrity wealth (he left an estate valued in the press at anywhere from $6 million to $70 million at his death). Gandolfini mulled the question, hemmed and hawed. “Money is good! So I’m very happy about that,” he announced at last. “All the fuss during
The Sopranos
really was pretty ridiculous. None of us expected it to last, and it lasted almost ten years. Honestly? I don’t think I’m that different. I’ve lived in the same apartment for years. I’ve kept a lot of the same friends. I’m still grumpy and miserable.… But in a good way!”

It was as if, after thinking of himself as a struggling actor for so long, Gandolfini didn’t want to lose touch with who he was. He did stay loyal to old Jersey friends, even as he started hanging out with the likes of Alec Baldwin and Brad Pitt. Friends like Tom Richardson, now an executive at Attaboy Films, Gandolfini’s production company, and Mark Ohlstein
,
a chiropractor, and Vito Bellino, an ad executive for
The Ledger.
They’d hang out with each other and their families, go to the beach, and watch Rutgers football together.

Gandolfini did TV commercials for Rutgers’ Scarlet Knights football team as
The Sopranos
was reaching the height of its popularity. In 2002, he got Michael Imperioli, who played his nephew, Christopher Moltisanti, on
The Sopranos
, to direct one that showed Richardson, Ohlstein, and Bellino coming out onto the field at the fifty-yard line, congratulating themselves on how Gandolfini’s celebrity had gotten them “real close” to the action. They ask what it had cost him to get them there, and Gandolfini says, “Me? Nothing.” A moment later they’re shown holding the Scarlet Knight mascot costume, plus the two halves of the costume for his horse. Ohlstein looks into the camera and says, sarcastically, “Close. Real close.”

Nobody escapes the Jersey curse—I don’t care who they think they know.

Never hitting the top of your arc, always bumping against some invisible ceiling, is what Tony, and
The Sopranos,
was all about. James Gandolfini symbolized that inbred New Jersey pessimism, and made the rest of the world love him for it. Add a few more pounds and a hint of the anger and you’ve got Chris Christie, who may run for president in a few years, something I doubt anybody his size and temperament could have done before Tony Soprano.

Most of the planet lives with its nose against the glass today, looking, the way New Jersey looks across the river to Manhattan, at someone’s more successful life somewhere on the other side of the screen. For white men of a certain age it’s almost endemic. The paradox of James Gandolfini’s life is that by expressing that feeling with frustrated passion, by making us care for the inarticulate longing of a very conflicted but common man, he was able to pass through the screen, move to Tribeca, become rich and famous—for about thirteen lucky years.

*   *   *

He didn’t make it look easy. In fact, Gandolfini, who decided he wanted to be an actor as early as high school, made it look very hard—like labor, actually. As if carrying Tony Soprano around inside you was like hefting a hod of bricks.

On the set he’d hit himself, hard, in the back of the head, if he flubbed lines or missed his mark. As time went on the actor found it got more difficult to bring the same level of kinetic authenticity to the role. Sometimes he’d just hunker down in his Tribeca apartment and miss a whole shoot, only to show up the next day with gifts, like a masseuse for the crew, or some fabulous caterer for the lunch table. Once, after he’d landed a huge raise, he showed up and peeled off $33,000 apiece for everybody he saw, telling them, “Thanks for sticking with me.”

Fellow actors did stick with him. They saw something special about his talent almost from the beginning. After he’d gotten his first real break, in the 1993 crime thriller
True Romance
(written by Quentin Tarantino), and developed the reputation as an actor with an absolutely fascinating emotional range, Gandolfini seemed oblivious. He would have an acting coach, Susan Aston, with him on nearly every set, something hotshot movie stars rarely do.

Aston met him in the eighties, when Gandolfini was working construction and as a bouncer in nightclubs in New York City. They became acting partners and friends. They met when they were both studying at Actor’s Playhouse, a center for method acting, and specifically the Meisner technique. They worked together until she delivered a eulogy at his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in June 2013.

Meisner’s technique involves a series of interdependent exercises intended to use the actor’s life experiences to obtain spontaneity and emotional coherence. It’s a stage technique but, like all American method acting, it achieves its greatest effects in film. Sanford Meisner developed his method in the 1940s after leaving Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg’s Group Theatre in New York, which taught a variant of the Stanislavski system. Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, James Caan, Jeff Bridges, Alec Baldwin, and James Franco have all been trained in the Meisner technique, and it is often described as intense and demanding. Some actors, often those who wash out, describe it as abusive and psychologically invasive.

In 2004, Gandolfini made an appearance on
Inside the Actors Studio,
a program on Bravo hosted by James Lipton, and gave the longest discussion in public he’d ever offered on acting as a profession.

“I remember one thing [an early acting teacher] did for me that got me to a new level was—I had such anger back then,” Gandolfini said. “When you’re young, a lot of people do, everybody does. You’re pissed. And you’re not sure why.…’Cause you want to express something and you’re not sure what it is. Something happened, I think [the acting teacher] told a partner to do something to me. And he did it, and I destroyed the place. Y’know, just all that crap they have onstage. And then she said, at the end of it—I remember my hands were bleeding a little bit and stuff, and the guy had left—and she said, ‘See? Everybody’s fine. Nobody’s hurt. This is what you have to do. This is what people pay for.… They don’t wanna see the guy next door. These are the things you need to be able to express, and control, work on the controlling part, and that’s what you need to show.’”

The distinguishing mark of James Gandolfini as an actor was his ability to find sympathy for the devil within the characters he played without, somehow, suppressing the deviltry. He learned to let people glimpse the monster of his temper as an actor and it was thrilling, so real did the emotion seem.

There’s a single, twelve-minute-long scene in
True Romance
in which Gandolfini viciously beats Patricia Arquette to get her to tell him where she’s hidden the cocaine he wants. The scene—it took five days to shoot—is incredibly brutal. He pounds her face, throws her through a glass shower door, and repeatedly, gently, tells her why he is in complete control of the situation. Until, that is, she sets him on fire and kills him with his own shotgun.