James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (6 page)

Though, as former mayor Don Ruschman likes to point out, there was that guy who lived in the Gandolfinis’ neighborhood, whom everybody knew was a lieutenant in the mob. Not that anybody made a big deal about it. As Ruschman says, chuckling, “He kept his lawn beautifully.”

3.

Romantic Lead

After graduation from Park Ridge High in 1979, Gandolfini’s mother, Santa, insisted that he go to college. He’d be the first Gandolfini boy to go (both his sisters had attended Rutgers); they thought he should study something useful, like marketing. He didn’t want to.

“But then I got there and I thought, jeez, fifty thousand eighteen-year-olds in one place—what the hell was I complaining about?” he said much later. “This is great. I was around a lot of fun people and I had a ball. I had more fun than somebody probably should have and I learned a lot—although I don’t think I remember anything from communications.”

Gandolfini thrived at Rutgers’ flagship campus in New Brunswick, a small former industrial city on the Raritan River. He started to move beyond the quiet, skinny kid he’d been in Park Ridge.

“He told everyone he wanted to be an actor,” says Mark Di Ionno, now a columnist and Pulitzer finalist at
The Star-Ledger
. In the fall of 1979, Di Ionno was a four-year naval veteran who had just doffed his uniform to enroll as a freshman. “Frankly, I didn’t recognize his talent at the time. He seemed like just a regular Jersey guy.… He was like a lot of us, like I wanted to be a writer. You know, college freshmen in the middle of New Jersey, how the fuck you gonna get there?”

Di Ionno recognized Gandolfini’s natural leadership, and that he was often up and down—ebullient, but occasionally moody, like any teenager. Selfish, undisciplined.

But he also saw the beginnings of Gandolfini’s first adult crew, the group of guys who would wind up hanging out together all through college and beyond: Jim’s roommate, Stewart Lowell, now an accountant for a New York firm, and Di Ionno’s roommate, Tony Foster, another Bergen County kid, were among the first. Tom Richardson, who would later work at Gandolfini’s production company, Vito Bellino, now an account executive at the
Ledger,
and Mark Ohlstein, a chiropractor, would soon join the group and remain good friends with Gandolfini until his death.

The friendships developed as you might expect, over beer and games; the guys would sometimes engage in a sort of half-comic “fight club” in the halls, whaling on each other. (This is something of a New Jersey tradition—my ten-year-old son did the same thing with his pals in the garage behind our house in South Orange, much to his non-Jersey-born parents’ consternation. Everybody seemed to enjoy it tremendously.) Among the inner core of friends, Gandolfini was known as “Buck.”

One night, about two or three weeks into freshman year, Di Ionno was awakened by pounding on his door. “Buck got arrested, Buck got arrested!”

Gandolfini had broken one of the wooden traffic barriers that protect the parking lots at Rutgers. “He didn’t even have a car,” Di Ionno recalls. “The worst thing was that it happened on campus, but somehow he’d been arrested by New Brunswick police, not campus cops.

“I put my uniform back on, because I know they’re not going to release him to another student,” he continues. “And I go down to the New Brunswick police station and I say, ‘I’m here to get James Gandolfini.’ So they release him, and I think I wound up going to court with him, too … he ended up paying a fine.”

The year went on like that. A few months later someone bought a bunch of spring-loaded dart guns—novelty toys that shot little plastic sticks with rubber suction cups on one end—and they started having
High Noon
gun battles throughout the dorm.

After removing the suction cups, of course, so they’d hurt more when you got hit.

“So [Gandolfini] runs into his room, he doesn’t see me,” Di Ionno says. “I come up behind him, just outside his door, gun in my hand, and I kick it—Bam!—and the metal doorknob smashes right into his face. I had no idea he’d turned back. I open the door and he’s knocked out, he’s unconscious, blood all over, and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, what did I do?’ I thought I fucking killed the kid. I ended up taking him to St. Peter’s [hospital].”

Jim got a few stitches, for which Di Ionno paid the $25 fee. But that scar on Gandolfini’s forehead, the one that became so expressive on
The Sopranos
when he was angry at another mobster or begging for respite from his wife’s impatience? That was a Rutgers dorm gun battle wound.

Di Ionno said Gandolfini always had a kind of mutual loyalty bond with his friends, an understood promise that they’d always be there for each other. Even after freshman year, when many of the guys, including Gandolfini, moved off campus, the group hung together, adding members now and then.

Buck took a job at the campus pub as a bouncer and bartender, at $3.50 an hour. In those days, campus pubs were a much bigger deal than they are today. The Vietnam War had set up the irony that eighteen-year-olds could be drafted and killed or maimed abroad, but could not order a Budweiser at home. So the drinking age was lowered in most states to eighteen in the late 1960s, and four-fifths of the student body qualified. The pubs grew until they seemed to absorb the student centers that had established them. The Rutgers pub would invite musical acts—real acts, not one guy with an acoustic guitar—and major speakers. After the Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaign began in the mid-1980s, states raised the legal drinking age back to twenty-one, and campus pubs shrank back to their larval stage as if they’d eaten magic mushrooms.

But back in 1980 the Rutgers pub was a scene, and Jim Gandolfini seemed to enjoy it enormously. He was, to boot, the kind of strong guy who was amiable enough to defuse any conflict before it got out of hand. He often did front-door ID checking, greeting customers, setting the tone; but he pulled the heavy duty, too, hefting kegs, mopping out, all the drudge work. And, like all good bartenders, he took care of his friends.

That’s where he met Tom Richardson, also a bouncer at the pub, who became one of Jim’s closest friends and project manager at his film and TV production company, Attaboy Films. Richardson was an Irish guy from West Orange, who had his first taste of mozzarella with tomato and basil leaves plucked from Gandolfini’s father’s garden behind their little two-family summer place on the Shore, in Lavallette (“
Marone,
where you been all your life, never had tomato, cheese, and basil!”). Richardson’s roommate Mark Ohlstein was a regular, too, along with all the dorm crew. It was almost like forging a new, on-site family, which just happened to have the same all-for-one attitudes, and more often than not the same class origins, as the gang of kids in Park Ridge.

“For the last two years at Rutgers, Jimmy drove around campus in this black Ford Falcon he’d gotten, from his father, I think,” says a fellow classmate. “He loved that car. Just loved it. In part because it was like a big ‘Fuck you!’ to the guys at Rutgers who drove around in fancy sports cars.”

The 1962 Falcon had been his father’s car, kept in mint condition, and giving it to Jim was, for Mr. Gandolfini, a test of the boy’s maturity. One that he did not pass with flying colors. One summer Jim drove the whole crew down to the Shore in the Falcon. Just as they picked up one of the guys in front of his parents’ house, the engine caught fire. They had to put it out with a fire extinguisher.

“Jim really loved his parents,” one of the guys remembers. “Ruining the car’s hood like that was just terrible in his dad’s eyes. I can remember Jim standing with his dad, hanging his head, as Mr. Gandolfini, who was a lot shorter and slighter than Jim, lectured him over what he’d done to his car. But he never had it repainted or anything. He just drove it around like it was.”

Stories about Gandolfini’s physical fearlessness often go hand-in-hand with tales about his remarkable strength. Not just carrying kegs at the pub, but standing up to challenges. There’d be fights between students every now and then; and he’d break them up, often genially, but with a sobering display of muscle. A couple of Jim’s friends remember two pickup trucks filled with five or six guys squealing their tires in the pub parking lot one night. Jim was just getting off shift, and he went out to tell them off. They surrounded Gandolfini, but he stood his ground until the pub bouncers heard what was happening and scared them off. “He wasn’t afraid of anything,” a friend recalls.

Sophomore year Gandolfini moved out of the dorms and into the Birchwood Terrace Apartments on Hamilton Street (the building is still there), not far from the Rutgers campus. It became the center of his life for the rest of his years in college. When he graduated in 1983, he’d tell everyone that his degree was in marketing or communications—although his Rutgers transcript actually gives his degree as in “journalism”—but he was quick to say he didn’t remember much about marketing.

Maybe the most curious thing about his time at Rutgers is he never tried to go on stage while he was there. He told all his friends he was going to be an actor, but he didn’t try out for campus plays. The university, like all major state schools, has an active theater department, with a professional staff, and they mount dramas and musicals every year. But Gandolfini wasn’t a theater major, and the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers restricts roles for its students. The university has no record of Gandolfini appearing in any unaffiliated plays or performances on campus over his full four years.

It’s rare for a major talent to simply not seek expression, especially in acting, which has many more ingénues than it does older character actors. Was he unsure of his commitment, or did he doubt he could actually make it as an actor?

Di Ionno remembers one attempt Gandolfini made to land a theater job, after freshman year. When classes ended, Gandolfini asked Di Ionno if he’d join him on a road trip to North Carolina, where students could try out for summer stock. So the two of them, anticipating all the adventures a road trip could offer, loaded up Di Ionno’s car and headed south.

“And he failed. He failed miserably,” Di Ionno recalls. “He was just very disappointed in how bad he seemed to be.… I remember driving home, he was angry with himself. He felt he’d been unprepared, that he’d given the thing no thought about what he might be asked to do, or something. And he was just very upset that he’d done that.”

As far as anyone can tell, he didn’t try out for acting again for another five or six years.

Gandolfini did get serious about a girl in those years, for the first time, really. By the summer after his sophomore year he and Lynn Marie Jacobson, whom he’d met as a bouncer at the campus pub when she was a waitress, were close, even though she was a couple of years older. By 1981, when she graduated, she was always at the Birchwood.

Friends remember Lynn as “classically beautiful”—so pretty, in fact, that she intimidated some of Jimmy’s buddies. She had auburn hair, dressed more formally than most of the other kids, and was nice, friendly, nothing off-putting about her, but serious, older than most of Jimmy’s crew. She was from West Caldwell, and studied advertising. After she graduated, she got a job in New York City at the Media Management Public Relations and Advertising Company during the day, and several nights a week she also worked late hours as a hostess at The Manor, a sort of banquet room–conference center in West Orange.

Lynn worked two jobs to help her family with her tuition costs; she had a twin sister, Leslie Ann, and another sister, Gail, who still lived with her parents. She’d pull long hours a few days a week, doing her day job in the city and then schlepping up to The Manor until closing. The hours were a little unpredictable—these sorts of catered complexes are fairly common in Jersey, and they host events of all sorts, with schedules set by the group or firm that rents the space.

Lynn was driving back to Caldwell on a Sunday morning around 4:45
A.M.
when her car crossed Bloomfield Avenue and hit a utility pole. She was almost home—the accident happened right where the road curves to enter Caldwell, just east of 180 Bloomfield Avenue. Lynn’s car, a 1971 Ford Mustang, was cut in half, and the front end smashed into a storefront a few feet farther on. She was killed instantly. She was twenty-two years old.

The police found no mechanical problem or anything else in the car to explain the crash. Everyone assumed she’d fallen asleep at the wheel after a very long week.

When you’re just nineteen and a tragedy of such adult scale happens, friends are often so shocked they don’t know what to do. Especially since it seemed sort of out of character for a guy like Gandolfini to be touched by death. He was still a junior in college, majoring in the same practical subject Lynn had studied. The night after Jim learned about Lynn’s accident, just two friends went to his apartment at the Birchwood and let themselves in. Jim was there, drinking wine and watching television. The three spent the night together, now and again smoking marijuana, but mostly just sitting in front of the TV, talking about this and that. Every now and then, for no reason—for every reason—Jimmy would start to cry.

Everyone came to the funeral, of course, at Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church in Essex Fells. Jimmy was, several friends told me, “the boyfriend” at the funeral, helping the whole family, but trying in particular to console Lynn’s twin sister. The burial was in East Hanover.

In some sense the shock never left him. When he won his third Emmy as lead actor in a drama in 2003, Gandolfini—after blowing a raspberry into the microphone because he’d promised his son, Michael, that he would—said: “I’d like to dedicate this to the memory of a girl I knew a long time ago who basically, inadvert … I can’t say that word. She made me be an actor. Her name was Lynn Jacobson, and I miss her very much.”

It was typical Jim, playing peekaboo with his real life, without really explaining what Jacobson meant to him. People who watched the Emmys that year could be forgiven for assuming she was a favorite drama teacher, or maybe someone who’d convinced him to pursue his true ambitions in life, that sort of typical, celebrity-acceptance-speech sentiment.