James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (5 page)

Julie had an off-and-on flirtation with Jamie, “like middle school love,” she said. “It started petering out in high school. He went off to college and I really didn’t see him again.” But she doesn’t remember him ever being serious about a girl.
Girls
maybe he was serious about, but not
a
girl. He never stuck with one girl through a whole year. Gandolfini would be voted “Best Looking” and “Biggest Flirt” in his senior year, and those jokey titles really seem to have been pretty well accepted, at least in retrospect. Whatever his appeal was to girls in those days, it was “nothing like the appeal he had on
The Sopranos,
” Luce says. “That was a role he was playing. It was completely out of character for the guy we knew in school.”

Jamie became “Jimmy” by his sophomore year, then “Jim,” but by senior year he was “Fini”—pronounced “Feeney,” as if he’d assimilated all the way to Irishness. There’s an unwritten rule about high school nicknames to the effect that the more generally they’re used, the more of a character that person is. By the end of senior year, almost everyone called him Fini.

The teachers who knew Gandolfini say he was never trouble in the classroom, never a discipline problem, but nevertheless a cutup with his tight group of friends. They were “their own best audience,” and competed all day long trying to make one another crack up, according to drama teacher Ann Comarato.

Donna Mancinelli was student director in the theater program at Park Ridge, and she decided, with Comarato, to cast Jim in his first speaking role, in
Arsenic and Old Lace,
his junior year. His audition seemed to come out of nowhere. “We were so surprised because he was, like, a jock,” Mancinelli recalls.

Somehow, no one knew he was already a triple threat, having participated in theatrical productions all through grade school. He played Dick Deadeye in a third-grade production of
H.M.S. Pinafore
. He was in the school marching band, sang in the choir, and he’d danced a small part in
Can-Can
the year before.

“He was a complete natural on stage right away,” Comarato says. “We thought, ‘Where have you been all this time?’”

Mostly, he was on the field—freshman year, Gandolfini played baseball, football, and basketball for Park Ridge, and ran some track and field. He could do all those things and, in his junior year, take a part in the seasonal school plays because Park Ridge was so small—a regional high school would have been both more competitive and more specializing. The 165 kids in Gandolfini’s class made up one of the largest in the school’s history, but it’s a lot smaller than those at the other high schools, both public and parochial, nearby in Bergen County. Park Ridge shrunk to as few as forty or so graduates a few years ago, before bouncing back to last year’s class of ninety.

Still, Gandolfini had a pretty demanding schedule. He dropped baseball first, after freshman year. Then football; basketball was Gandolfini’s best sport, anyway. “He was an all-round athlete, but not really a standout,” says Tom Bauer, who was assistant coach of the football team and taught Gandolfini Spanish (“a solid B student,” Bauer says). “But at Park Ridge he could play, and do well.”

The way theater worked was a drama in the fall and a musical in the spring. There’s a pretty little proscenium stage built into the corner of the school building, with a side door that opens a short hop from where Pop’s Sweet Shoppe used to be (the state just helped pay for a renovation that painted over the backstage cast graffiti from Fini’s years). Although there’s a petition going around Park Ridge to name a street after Gandolfini, former mayor Ruschman is trying to get them to name the high school theater for him instead.

In his senior year Fini tried out for the lead in
Kiss Me, Kate,
the Cole Porter hit about a company mounting a musical version of William Shakespeare’s
The Taming of the Shrew.
The plot is a complicated confection of backstage romances, but the underlying themes of male vanity and violence winning female sympathy and support are roughly similar.

In Porter’s version the final eponymous song is almost a kinky demand to be abused, a “hurt me but don’t desert me” number that is meant to show both swagger and real vulnerability. Petruchio, the Shakespeare character, is decked out in a silly Renaissance outfit full of feathers and clashing stripes that’s deliberately comical, yet in that ridiculous getup he gives his most heartfelt and abject declaration of love—and wins the shrew.

Both Comarato and Mancinelli thought Gandolfini was perfect for the role. He shared it with another student, part of Park Ridge’s everybody-plays ethos, but Fini had the prestigious closing-night performance. Yet, to everyone’s dismay, he was having trouble with his first major memorization challenge. During rehearsals he’d shout “Fuck!” when he forgot a line or fumbled a cue, sometimes hitting himself in the head.

“I used to really get on him for that,” says Comarato. (Later, after
The Sopranos
became a hit and Gandolfini met Comarato at one of the OctoberWoman fund-raising dinners, he’d send her a note asking her to count how many times he said “fuck” on the air. “And they’re paying me for it!” he wrote.) “But it got so bad some of his friends in the play were worried he wouldn’t be able to perform.”

Sally Zelikovsky played Kate—she was Buttercup in that third-grade
Pinafore
—and she wrote about it on her blog. Zelikovsky lives in California now, where she writes a community blog and is involved with the Tea Party.

“Two weeks before opening night for
Kate,
Jimmy, yes, Emmy award–winning James Gandolfini, did not have his lines or songs memorized,” Zelikovsky wrote in a memorial to her classmate a week after his death. “We had been covering for him by ad-libbing cues in anticipation of his lines. With two weeks to go, the musical director threatened to call off the production.”

Gandolfini’s closest friends in the cast were furious with him. Zelikovsky remembered him responding to the pressure, coming into rehearsal the next day with all his lines memorized. And the performance went very well—just a hint of Fini’s future struggles with memorization. Still, nobody thought they had a great actor in their midst.

“Jimmy, surprisingly, pursued it as a career—surprisingly—because if you had taken a senior class survey of the ‘most likely to pursue a career in acting,’ I don’t think Jimmy would have won,” Zelikovsky remembered. There were other talents in Park Ridge who seemed much more likely to succeed in the theater, like Karen Duffy, who would achieve a certain fame as a VJ on MTV in the late 1980s (and just happened to move into the same building as Fini in the West Village). Whatever Jim had on stage, it didn’t seem theatrical so much as real. Some people remember Gandolfini’s star performance as more of a marker of how classless Park Ridge was than as an artist’s precocious juvenilia.

Park Ridge High was like any other school, filled with cliques and rivalries, but Zelikovsky thought of them as more “fluid” because it was a small institution. Students couldn’t mount a play if they didn’t get jocks or burn-outs to help. They couldn’t really field a sports team unless artsy students were given a shot.

Placing Gandolfini as a jock or a burn-out or any other binary opposition so popular in high school didn’t quite work because so many hats seemed to fit Fini. Had to fit, really.

*   *   *

Much later, after he’d moved to New York City and started taking acting classes, Jim Gandolfini came back to his parents’ house in Park Ridge to eat a home-cooked dinner and warn his family that he might be pretty good at this acting thing. If he succeeded as he hoped he would, the attention and publicity might get to be “a pain in the ass.” That’s when he was considering changing his name to “Jimmy Leather” to spare them the trouble.

At the time, his mom and dad and two sisters laughed at the very idea that Fini would have to change his name to save them from the press hordes that might one day come.

And yet, damn it, they did. Gandolfini said the way things turned out may have “humbled” his sisters a little bit, which was “a good thing.”

As Gandolfini’s fame grew, especially once
The Sopranos
became a runaway hit, and the reporters did start to come around, James and the family stayed mute. Gandolfini gave very few interviews to the press—you could count the longish ones on one hand—and he insisted on his family’s privacy. Friends were asked to avoid the press, too.

Even in 2001, when Donna Mancinelli first got him involved in the OctoberWoman Foundation annual dinners and Tony Soprano was almost as recognizable nationally as Colonel Sanders, he was still insisting on no press. The OctoberWoman Foundation became
The Sopranos
’ pet New Jersey charity until the banking crash in 2008 forced the foundation to scale back its fund-raising. Some years, much of the regular cast, from Edie Falco and Michael Imperioli to Tony Sirico and Lorraine Bracco, would appear. The $1,000-a-plate dinners drew as many as a thousand people at their height, and Gandolfini would stand for hours signing autographs and thanking donors. But only HBO cameramen were ever allowed in. TV crews from as far away as Australia were turned down.

Most of the people who knew Gandolfini say he and his sisters are just “very private.” Both Leta Gandolfini and Johanna Antonacci declined to be interviewed about their brother; some of his friends also declined, saying Jim had insisted on “almost an
omerta
” when he was alive. And it’s true, whenever he could, Gandolfini dodged personal questions.

The people at HBO who worked in publicity for
The Sopranos
or helped manage Gandolfini’s career say a celebrity press that often distorts reality out of aimless sensationalism would make anyone reticent. The family has denied the
New York Post
’s account of his last meal, for instance, saying the long list of alcoholic drinks is wrong—the two piña coladas he ordered were actually nonalcoholic drinks for his thirteen-year-old son, and nobody would assign everything on a family bill to one person, anyway. The twenty-four-hour media cycle creates an endless series of factual mistakes and false spins.

The fact that Gandolfini went through a painful divorce right in the middle of
The Sopranos
hoopla in 2002 no doubt encouraged him to batten down the hatches even more. Widely broadcast rumors of drug abuse and wild parties on the set were set off by the presettlement legal jousting, which in turn fed a popular perception that actors
are
the characters they play, especially when they play gangsters.

Some of his Italian-American friends shrug and say Gandolfini was so Italian that reticence with strangers is part of the culture. A man is expected to cut a
bella figura,
dress nicely, show manners in public (“Don’t shame the family!”), but draw the drapes at home.

There’s that Jersey Jinx to think about, too. The litany of friends and professional colleagues who say James Gandolfini was “a regular Jersey guy” is deafening, so much so that you wonder if he didn’t subscribe to some version of that “Nobody from Jersey ever gets credit for nothin’” syndrome. Stick your head up and they’ll chop it off. Safer to say you’re just like everybody else.

Others say it’s more a function of when he achieved success. Coming late to movies, when he was thirty-two, and landing his first lead role, as Tony Soprano, when he was nearing forty, meant that the vast majority of Gandolfini’s life was spent outside of the media maelstrom. Young actors often develop a backstory for their offstage persona to help drive interest in their movies, usually one that underlines their stage presence. Jim never had to; by the same token, when he achieved fame, there was no embarrassing “Jimmy Leather” persona to live down, either. You can ask John “Cougar” Mellencamp about what that’s like.

“I got successful at a late age, so I’m under no delusions about what all this is about,” Gandolfini himself said. “Well, I’m sure I have some delusions. But you know, basically, it’s a job. You work hard, and you get tired a little bit, but that’s all it is.” Being a famous actor was a little like being Geppetto. You work at it and work at it, and one day people may think you’ve made a real boy. Nothing to fuss over, really.

And there was such a thing as being a good son, too. Nobody fussed over his father’s labor or his mother’s; whatever Jamie did was all due to them. Success he wanted, of course, most people do, but this sort of monster success, where everyone knows your name and thinks they know
you
—that was embarrassing.

Some of those who knew him the longest say he was always just as shy as he was outgoing, if that makes any sense at all. As a kid, Gandolfini struck some of his friends as particularly gentle and paradoxically solitary. “In sixth grade, when I first met him, what he wanted to be when he grew up was a forest ranger, which seems so kind of low-key and kind of almost quiet and alone,” classmate Julie Luce told the Bergen County
Record
. “And I think a little part of that was sort of with him always. He was somebody who did not like the attention. It’s, like, contradictory because everyone in the entire planet knew who he was, or most of them did, but he was really very private.…

“He was like a really regular person. He tried to live a regular life and I don’t know how he did that, but he was able to a little bit, in between the craziness of being a celebrity.”

It did seem odd that an actor who was so convincing in the most intimate of performances would just stiff-arm almost all requests for interviews. And it made it very easy for his fans to simply assume he
was
Tony Soprano. People who didn’t know him before he got famous slipped and called him “Tony” all the time. After all, he was Italian-American, from Jersey, and he tawked like the Tone. Who else could he be?

And, whatever his reasons were, putting Park Ridge under a kind of media bell jar helped preserve a certain civic pride in appearances. Like a lot of Bergen County, Park Ridge projects an air of being left out of the modern issues roiling America. There are few class conflicts, few ethnic frictions, in Park Ridge. There are also very few African-Americans (one exception was a Park Ridge High School music director, the one who demanded Fini learn his lines or he’d cancel the play). Diversity largely amounts to people with Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish backgrounds. “But we don’t think of ourselves that way,” Dolly Lewis, a former teacher at Park Ridge High, told me by the town pool one day. “We just think of ourselves as Americans.” It’s really just a nice place, with strong civic values.