James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (21 page)

Gandolfini plays Gilbert with a wonderful ambiguity. Gilbert himself never made another film after
An American Family
: The series was a huge ratings success, but it also led to a heavy round of media condemnation, for the Louds as a family but also for Gilbert, his methods, and the meaning of what he had achieved. Was an entertaining documentary on the breakup of a successful, liberal California family worth the breakup itself? Was the American fame culture corrosive of family values?

The fact that eldest son Lance Loud came out as gay on the show—essentially the first openly gay man on American TV—and ended up as an editor and writer for Andy Warhol’s
Interview
magazine only underlined the profundity of these themes. Lance died of AIDS in 2001, and, as
Cinema Verite
reveals in its credits, his last wish was for his parents to get back together. And they did.

There were all sorts of fascinating aspects to the story of the making of
An American Family
, but what everyone in the media has always agreed about was Craig Gilbert’s role: he was the serpent in the garden.

Gandolfini said he saw the man differently. “I’ve gone to lunch with [Gilbert] a few times in New York City,” Jim, ever diligent about his research, told the press at the premiere. “He’s a wonderful man, smart, honest, incredibly intelligent. Old-fashioned way about him, graduated from Harvard. He was an ambulance driver in World War II—he’s old school. I enjoy him immensely. I love the guy.

“This experience really hurt him,” Gandolfini continued. “I think he was so astounded that the Loud family got so destroyed and he got so destroyed by people. They went after the Loud family so viciously. All they were really were regular people and their family was not that much different than anybody else’s. He was just trying to document it and they went after both of them so viciously that he said, ‘The hell with this.’”

As it happened,
Cinema Verite
hurt, too. As written, the script broadly hinted that Gilbert and Pat Loud had an affair during the filming of
An American Family.
Before shooting began Gilbert hired a lawyer to watch over his and the Louds’ interests, but there is nonetheless a scene in which Diane Lane, as Pat Loud, follows Gandolfini, as Gilbert, to his hotel room to see evidence of her husband’s infidelity. And in a gesture familiar from scores of movies beginning with D. W. Griffith, Gandolfini reaches out and places his hand on Lane’s. Fade to black.

HBO paid the Louds a settlement with the stipulation that they never discuss the film, but Gilbert refused. It didn’t help that suspicion about his relationship with Pat Loud had been part of the original controversy in 1973. Gilbert was bitter about how it turned out, and complained to
The New Yorker
about
Cinema Verite
in April 2011. Now eighty-five and living in the same one-room apartment on Jane Street in Manhattan that he’d had for twenty-one years, Gilbert said he’d told Gandolfini at dinner “no in twenty ways” about the old rumor of an affair. Pat Loud has also consistently denied the rumors.

Truth, art, privacy, telling a good story—they can get tangled up so easily. You can use the word “damn,” but there’s no question that
An American Family
did something with four letters to the Louds. So it’s a metaphor, allowed under an artist’s license.

In
Cinema Verite
there’s a scene in which Gandolfini-Gilbert meets with a tableful of suits from PBS about his cost overruns and dull drama—would the show end up ten hours of “pass the salt?” Gandolfini wears a flippy seventies-era toupee, and struggles not to sound unctuous as he asks for patience. You have to build trust with a family before the drama begins, he says. Gandolfini, as a character actor, was stretching himself to portray the man whose work, inadvertently or not, had helped create “reality TV” and all its attendant assaults on norms of privacy. He was, in a way, siding with the “vampires” in the press—and at the same time invading the privacy of a creative filmmaker, albeit one who could never work again.

“[Gilbert] tried to do something that nobody else had ever done,” Gandolfini said. “It ended up this exceptional thing. Then they threw out all the rest of the footage, hours and hours, they threw it all out—and he was incredibly hurt by all of it.

“He’s a bit of a freak—but a great guy. He tells me what an asshole I am every time he sees me. ‘You’re an asshole Jim, you’re an idiot.’ I say, ‘You’re absolutely right,’ and I laugh—he’s a charming man.”

*   *   *

The reminder of the sharp edge of fame
Cinema Verite
delivered was ironic, perhaps, but it may have left a bruise. The next year Gandolfini took a small part, as C.I.A. chief Leon Panetta, in the celebrated movie about SEAL Team Six and the killing of Osama bin Laden,
Zero Dark Thirty
. Gandolfini did his research, and achieved a plausible resemblance to the former California congressman. The movie was controversial, however, for the suggestion that torture had led to cracking the bin Laden case (it’s a long and complicated argument that in no way hurt the box office). But Jim took no chances.

When Panetta retired from his subsequent post as President Barack Obama’s secretary of defense, he told ABC News’s Martha Raddatz that Gandolfini actually wrote him a note apologizing for his portrayal. Panetta recalled the note saying, “As an Italian I’m sure, you know, you probably have a lot of concerns about how I played your role.” Panetta had questioned the accuracy of the overall film, but as far as Jim was concerned, he was simply glad that “thank God it was an Italian.”

“The reality is, I like him, I like him as an actor,” Panetta told Raddatz. “I’ve met him before, and he did a great job in the movie.”

Remember, even as
The Sopranos
fell four or five years into the past, every time a former cast member picked his nose (or, okay, stood by while a New York City police officer was shot, or hired a Gambino family goon to collect a debt) there would be a headline about life imitating art again. Having played Tony Soprano so well for so long was like sowing a minefield through your future. You could not do anything in public that might in even the wildest imagination seem vaguely Tony-like without getting accused of imitating art. Or worse, justifying the way people sometimes looked frightened at your approach.

Guskin says that Gandolfini came to him in 2012 about a part in a movie that Brad Pitt had asked Jim to do,
Killing Them Softly,
that he’d agreed to as a favor but wasn’t sure he really wanted to go through with. The movie is based on a novel by George Higgins, a bleak chronicler of the Irish mob in Boston best known for
The Friends of Eddie Coyle,
a 1973 movie with Robert Mitchum. Higgins’s vision of a criminal is much more Whitey Bulger than Bobby Baccala.

Killing Them Softly
is set in New Orleans, where Pitt lives. He plays a hard-bitten hitman for the mob who prefers to kill his victims “softly,” by shooting them when they won’t see it coming and will feel no pain or panic. But he happens to know his next victim personally, so he hires Mickey Fallon, played by Gandolfini, to do it for him.

Guskin says Gandolfini thought he was “done” with such violent characters forever, but as he thought about the alcoholic, dissolute nature of the part, he began to see how the role might whack the very idea of his playing a mobster ever again. Mickey Fallon (Fini’s Irishness is entirely notional here) takes shape in two long, rambling conversations with Pitt, in a bar and in Mickey’s hotel suite, where they discuss means and methods of the trade. Fallon’s lechery and drunkenness is so grotesque that Pitt’s character tips off the police, who nab Mickey on an old weapons charge before he can attempt a kill.

Like everything based on Higgins’s writing, the movie is sourly depressing—not inappropriate for a picture about murder for hire, surely. And Gandolfini works hard to expunge the least wisp of charm from his presence: pale, puffy-faced, and breathing stertorously, he’s a study in depravity. It was, indeed, the last hitman he would ever play.

On October 10, 2012, James and Deb had a baby daughter in Los Angeles. They christened her Liliana Ruth. Jim told Armstrong and Sanders he liked working on movies that his kids would want to see—that was the original idea he had for
Where the Wild Things Are
.

He’d been working at the end of that year on a big Hollywood comedy,
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
, with Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi, and Jim Carrey. It was about the way magic acts were becoming weird endurance feats, a kind of performance art for hip audiences, leaving established Las Vegas magicians looking lame. Gandolfini plays an increasingly frustrated agent for Carell and Buscemi.

“It was a chance to work with two of the biggest comedians in Hollywood,” Armstrong says, “and it was a character.”
Wonderstone
got disappointing reviews, and had the worst opening box office of any Carell or Carrey movie yet. Gandolfini was filming, but in March 2013 Armstrong went with Michael to the red carpet premiere of
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
in Los Angeles. They were already planning their trip to Rome that June.

10.

Beloved

How do you describe what
The Sopranos,
and in particular Tony Soprano, meant to New Jersey?

Of course there were the politicians who paid tribute when Gandolfini died, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey first of all. He had all state flags flown at half-mast, called Gandolfini “a true Jersey guy” in the official statement, and showed his respect at the funeral at Saint John the Divine in Manhattan. Christie is forever auditioning for the role of “regular Jersey guy” himself, and there are those who question whether a politician with, shall we say, so well-rounded a personality could have been elected in the twenty-first century without the example of a certain 270-pound Woody Allen. Newark mayor and now senator Cory Booker tweeted that Jim was “a true NJ Great and NJ Original.” Secretary of State John Kerry helped expedite the body’s return from Rome; many others expressed their sorrow and shock in different ways.

Bruce Springsteen was playing a concert in London when he heard the news, and he dedicated a straight play-through of his breakthrough album,
Born to Run,
to Gandolfini from the stage, the New Jersey equivalent of a twenty-one-gun salute.

Great honors, all of them, but not exactly the final word. Holsten’s ice cream parlor in Bloomfield made a shrine of the table where Tony and his family faded to black, putting a
RESERVED
sign on the Formica with a vase of flowers and a copy of the Thursday afternoon
Star-Ledger
carrying front-page notice of Gandolfini’s death in Rome.

The Star-Ledger,
the newspaper where I worked for fifteen years, covered both the private funeral service in Park Ridge and the public one at Saint John’s like they were writing about JFK’s coffin on Lincoln’s original catafalque. It’s not surprising really. The newspaper itself was a character on
The Sopranos.
Tony ambled down his driveway in that bathrobe to pick it up at the start of many episodes. One of the show’s neatest reversals was having Carmela run down the drive to get the Sunday
Ledger
first, so she could sift through all the sections and pluck out the lifestyles feature showing Uncle Junior was living in a state home for non compos mentis patients. She didn’t want to upset Tony, who at that point wanted to have his uncle killed.

The mutual admiration between the newspaper and
The Sopranos
was part of the satire, part of the show’s wink at reality. But it was also a natural fit, both institutions seeing themselves as being in the business of bringing unpleasant truths to a broad middle-class audience (one perhaps more entertainingly than the other). David Chase had gotten his start in Hollywood with a TV series called
Kolchak: The Night Stalker,
about a Chicago newspaperman who keeps uncovering unbelievable supernatural events. For
The Sopranos, The Star-Ledger
was credited for technical advice; many of the plotlines seemed to come straight from newspaper stories, like Big Pussy’s idea to create fake HMO clinics to defraud Medicaid, or padding downtown esplanade contracts with no-show jobs for wiseguys.

There was, as well, the odd coincidence of all those old friends of Gandolfini’s who worked at the paper, like account executive Vito Bellino, who held that horse’s costume in the Rutgers football ads, and T. J. Foderaro, who was wine critic at the paper for a time. Not to mention Mark Di Ionno, in his columns often the voice of exactly those same regular Jersey guys that Gandolfini said he wanted to stand up for.

“He never left New Jersey,” Di Ionno says of Gandolfini. “That’s how he came and went. I think that’s an interesting aspect of his power.… I don’t think that James Gandolfini would have ever chosen to reinvent himself. There’s too much in his wake, there’s too many people who know the real man.”

He was grounded, in other words, by his native state. When he was asked once whether it made any difference to him, shooting in places where he grew up and had so much personal history, Gandolfini said, “it maybe makes it a bit less glamorous.” Not being glamorous is a good working definition of “grounded.”

“But the most interesting thing about
The Sopranos
in this state was the way they accepted it,” Di Ionno continues. “It’s like the way my father and my uncle went to see
The Godfather.
They saw it as [about] Italians first, and gangsters second.… There were protests, sure, and some towns wouldn’t let
The Sopranos
shoot within their districts. But in the end, it didn’t matter.”

Giovanna Pugliesi is a librarian at
The Star-Ledger
, and her family had a direct experience with the show in a way you always hear about along Guinea Gulch. One day around Christmas, a site finder stopped in to ask Giovanna’s parents if they’d let
The Sopranos
film a scene in their house. I ask Giovanna why they chose her parents’ house, and she says, “Because it looks so Italian.”