James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (23 page)

Thing was, not very many of Jim’s crew liked John that much. He was rather withdrawn; he could be inexplicably rude, and some of the coeds thought he was “creepy.” But Jim sympathized with John. He was always hanging at the Birchwood apartment because Jim told him he was welcome. When John finally had a kind of psychic break, Jim took him over to mental health services. Almost nobody visited John in the convalescent ward, but Jim did, often dragging a friend or two along with him. It was those friends who told me the story of John the Arab, looking back on it as one of the strangest things about their friend Buck.

Tom Richardson says Gandolfini kept bringing John up after breaking through in Hollywood. “Where’s John the Arab?” he’d ask, and when Richardson came to work at Attaboy Films in 2009, he actually started a search. He couldn’t find him. An Italian-American who can imitate the Muslim call to prayer—how hard could it be to find someone like that? But they never did.

Still, that dogged loyalty to the old days is something that evokes loyalty in return. One way friends showed loyalty was by never talking to the press; many of them kept the faith after Gandolfini’s death by refusing to go on the record for this book. Yet even as they refused, they’d shake their heads and wonder out loud why—they really had only the nicest things to say. But really, there were no smoking guns or anything, they all say that with real conviction. The Gandolfinis, the whole family, they’d say, were just “very private.”

“I can’t say I know that for certain, but my impression of him was that as he became more famous he was really uncomfortable with all that attention,” Di Ionno told me. “There was a part of him that I don’t think really, really got it. I don’t think it was a completely false humility. Maybe it was more scary than that. Maybe it was a sense of, like, ‘I’m not really entitled to this … my mother was a cafeteria lady, my father was a school janitor, I know what I am deep down inside—I’m a regular guy who got really lucky.’”

Di Ionno was one of the early crew who’d lost touch, but he was easy enough to find when
The Sopranos
did its location shoot for the pilot episode. Jim invited Mark over to the set, and they had a hugging reunion. It was Hometown Boy Makes Good. Di Ionno says they picked up talking like no time had passed at all, though they hadn’t seen each other for more than a decade.

Many of the others—Richardson, Bellino, Mark Ohlstein, Stewart Lowell, Tony Foster, and some of the Park Ridge friends, like Ken Koehler, Donna Mancinelli, and her two brothers—had kept in touch. They’d come down to the Shore in the summer, had their kids play together. Susan Aston, of course, worked with Jim pretty directly for over twenty-five years, as did Harold Guskin. All of them acted protective of Jim’s memory, as if he were incongruously defenseless or vulnerable. It’s hard to believe that so many people would react so similarly, with such emotional directness, if they were trying to mislead.

Jim gave Di Ionno invitations to
The Sopranos
premiere, and the invites kept coming.
The Star-Ledger
itself sponsored a reception for the whole cast just as the first season ended on air. By then, everybody knew the show was going to be a phenomenon.

“At the second season premiere [in New York City]—and I’ll never forget this—he was walking out, and there’s people lined up behind the velvet rope yelling for him,” Di Ionno remembers. “‘Tony, hey, Tony! Hey, Tony!’ And this cloud kind of passed over his face. He was smiling and stuff, but I just got this sense that he was thinking to himself, ‘They don’t know what the fuck I am, I’m a TV character.’ And frankly even our newspaper treated him like they couldn’t separate Tony Soprano from James Gandolfini.”

It really was a kind of love. The kind an audience enjoys.

*   *   *

“How Italian was he?” one of Jim’s oldest friends once replied, when I asked the obvious question. “Well, he was Italian enough to refuse spaghetti sauce from a can. Wouldn’t touch the stuff. The sauce had to be real. But he was American enough to use ketchup at the table if it wasn’t tomatoe-y enough.”

Food authenticity has become a yardstick of Italian authenticity. Mario Batali, Jim’s old friend from Rutgers, made a very successful career of it. Hand-dipped mozzarella, hand-tied bracciole, hand-cut pastas, and handpicked tomatoes are the secret. The old ways are the best.

As he grew successful, he became a regular at Batali’s restaurants, and he always had an eye for fine food and wine. But he also had simple tastes. Friends told me James liked macaroni and cheese, for example. As someone who lived in the same pre-Giuliani Manhattan in the 1980s, they sound like bachelor tastes to me. He liked to eat, that was clear, but was more a gourmand than a gourmet, with that tinge of overeating the first word implies.

His friends listed a dozen movies as his favorites, more than half of them comedies (
Borat, The Odd Couple, The Great Outdoors, Role Models, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,
the original version of
The Producers
). He also loved Dom DeLuise’s
Fatso,
about an Italian boy who grows up fat because every time he gets upset, his mother calms him down with food.
Fatso
is a bit of a civil rights movie, calling for liberation of the fat people. DeLuise is shown at various stages in his life, struggling to lose weight, until, at the end of the movie when he’s an old man, surrounded by his wife and daughters, he points to his wasting body and says, in effect,
See, I’ve finally lost weight!
And then he dies.

Gandolfini’s weight, like many other actors’, fluctuated over his career. He looks positively slim in
The Mexican,
huge in
Killing Them Softly
. He owned both a motorcycle and one of those Italian Vespa motor scooters—he said once the scooter made him look like “Shrek, you know, a big thing on a little thing?” He injured his knee on the scooter, delaying the shooting for the last season of
The Sopranos
. Ultimately, he had both knees replaced.

He put on weight rapidly in the last year or so of his life. In November 2012, about six months before his death, he described himself to Nicole Sperling of
The Los Angeles Times
as a “300-pound Woody Allen.”

It wasn’t as if Hollywood was the sort of place where people wouldn’t notice, either. It’s the home of mineral water–garglers, as we’ve said, a city famous for its obsession with fitness. Jim’s defiance of all those norms was professionally fraught. He’d worried about it for years. In Susan Aston’s apartment she has the big gold-leafed certificate for one of James’s Screen Actors Guild Awards hanging, with a note from him giving her all the credit, the way he did. And it was signed, “The Fat Man.”

Of course, the same thing happened to Marlon Brando at the end of his life, he became huge, almost spheroid. Maybe some stars are loved because they are fat—Fatty Arbuckle, maybe—but most are loved in spite of being fat. Even now, in the midst of the obesity epidemic, we still have not crossed over into accepting that image of ourselves.

For Jim to act around America’s body image prejudice—well, people talk about Dustin Hoffman in
Tootsie,
but a 300-pound romantic lead would be
acting.

11.

Gotta Blue Moon in Your Eye

Leta Gandolfini, the younger of James’s two older sisters, was on her way to the Boscolo Hotel Exedra from the airport when Michael found his father collapsed in the suite bathroom. Her flight from Paris had landed only a little while before. By the time she got to the Piazza della Repubblica, the paramedics were taking her brother to the hospital; Michael had handled the emergency, language barrier and all.

Marcy Wudarski caught the first flight out of Los Angeles to be with Michael. Gandolfini had been looking forward to Rome as a “boys’ trip,” just him and Michael, and Deborah Lin stayed in L.A., to be with Liliana Ruth, who was just over a year old. Tom Richardson was on the first flight from New York, to help expedite the body’s return and the seemingly endless paperwork required by the Italian state. The paparazzi culture was, if anything, even more intrusive over there than it was here, and his first job would be handling the press.

Everybody was shocked. At fifty-one, Gandolfini seemed terribly young. The first speculations in the media were about drugs, but the autopsy dismissed that as a cause. Besides, a five-star hotel room you are sharing with your thirteen-year-old son after a day of sightseeing at the Vatican didn’t really fit the John Belushi format.

When the cause of death, a massive heart attack, was announced, the next wave of speculation was about Jim’s weight, and the
New York Post
story, based on a conversation with a hotel waiter, helped to push it. Many people took to social media to say they’d told us so. The
Post
story was exhibit A. The family pushed back through a spokesman, saying that not everything on the bill was as it seemed—in particular, the two piña coladas were nonalcoholic, for Michael. But it was true that Gandolfini’s weight had shot up in the past year, possibly exacerbated by his second knee replacement, which had been done in late 2012.

There would be two funeral services: One small, for family and close friends, at the local funeral home in Park Ridge, in a modest white frame building with a big green awning and a little parking lot in front, not far from where the family’s small Cape Cod had stood when Jim was growing up. The bigger service would be on the Upper West Side in Saint John the Divine, the largest church in New York City; HBO would handle all the details.

The funeral at Saint John’s was a real New York event. There were media trucks and police barriers a couple of blocks on either side of the church’s main portal. The nave inside was full, all the way to the doors, with lines of fans still left on the steps outside. HBO handed out press tips. Just before the service ended, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who’d entered through the side door with the other celebs, strode down the nave, through the public pews and out the main entrance, followed by a small spasm of much smaller aides.

The cast of
The Sopranos
was there, of course, writers from the show, actors Jim had worked with, everyone who was in the city or could make it came. All three of the women Jim had lived with, Marcy Wudarski, Deb Lin, and Lora Somoza, were there. Greg Antonacci, the actor who had complained about convertibles and cheeseburgers in the last episode of David Chase’s
The Rockford Files,
was there, gray now but still thin and tight-lipped. Alec Baldwin, attending with his pregnant wife, Hilaria, managed to get into a dispute with a
Daily Mail
reporter over whether or not Hilaria had tweeted during the service; he launched a rant threatening the reporter with violence in a way many people took to be homophobic. That gave the assembled media something scandalous to worry over for a few days. Life goes on.

Another story was building on the Internet, about Gandolfini’s estate. One of America’s most successful representatives of the working class, James Gandolfini, had left behind an estate estimated to be worth $70 million, the reports said, but greedy Uncle Sam was going to seize almost half because of poor estate planning. It was an outrage, like all taxes on the wealthy. The story, which got its start on Web sites like Zero Hedge and other Wall Street–friendly outlets, was creating a minor storm. John Travolta had announced that he would make sure that Gandolfini’s children were “taken care of”—did he say that because the government was putting them in the poorhouse? In the three weeks after Gandolfini’s death, references to his estate tax bill became the most common Gandolfini-related topic on the Web, outrunning “fatty” mentions by a mile.

Exactly one month after Gandolfini’s death, his lawyer, Roger Haber, reached out to
New York Times
financial reporter Paul Sullivan to spike the estate stories. Gandolfini’s will was public, something rare for a celebrity, perhaps because Jim didn’t see himself that way. But the will itself was only part of the story. There were appendices that allocated $1.6 million in bequests to friends, and family members were given percentages of the remaining estate; there may have been trusts set up to hold property, like his homes in New York and Tewksbury, that did not appear in the will. But Haber’s main point was that the figure of $70 million, which came from a Web site that estimates the fortunes of celebrities, was wrong. The estate was worth more like $6 to $10 million.

Haber was miffed that
The Times
failed to exonerate him from the charge of poor estate planning—the article took for granted that we should all think about our estate planning as thoroughly as John Lennon did—but it made the Internet meme of Gandolfini’s rough handling by the IRS go away overnight. Friends who were in a position to know said Jim was very smart about money, but it was never his main focus. He told several of them that “I don’t know where all my money goes.”

He did, actually. Jamie’s dad may have failed to make him see the real value of the change that fell out of his pockets on the sofa, but he and his two sisters both went on to have successful, productive careers. Money was there to support the family. Besides giving fellow cast members $33,000 apiece in the middle of
The Sopranos,
Jim set up funds to pay for the college education of some friends’ kids, and he could be counted on in medical emergencies, too. He was generous with Lora Somoza. He took out a $7 million life insurance policy for Michael.

The money didn’t disappear into paintings or antique cars or other personal property, the sorts of things Hollywood stars sometimes buy. Gandolfini liked art, but he wasn’t a collector. The money was for family and friends. A lot of the people who sat in the family pews at Saint John’s knew that firsthand. When they started to make Jim’s generosities public, in the weeks after his death, it seemed almost too good to be true. It wasn’t Antony reading Caesar’s will or anything, but the record at least seemed refreshingly free of the privileged secrecy in which the 1 percent usually conduct such matters. Haber’s need to tell the world that he’d acted appropriately in planning the estate was a sort of backhand proof of that.