James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (7 page)

“She was a smart, lovely girl who worked two jobs to get her way through college and help her family,” Gandolfini told
GQ
correspondent Chris Heath in 2004, in the only interview that ever got Jim to open up about Jacobson. Her sudden death “made me very angry … I think I was studying advertising or something before that, and after that I changed a little bit. You know, it must have changed me a little bit.

“If anything, it was ‘Why plan for the future? Fuck it.’ It was like, ‘Fuck this.’”

That’s the most he ever said about Lynn in public. According to friends who knew him at the time, he said little more in private. But in his stiff-lipped, understated way, Gandolfini saw her death as a turning point. It left him with something inside he could not express, something that could not be assuaged by roughhousing or parties or, well, anything less than artistic expression.

“Yeah, I think I might not have done what I’ve done,” he told Heath. “I don’t know what I’d have done. I think it definitely pushed me in this direction. I don’t know why. Just as a way to get out some of those feelings. I don’t know.”

*   *   *

At the same time that Gandolfini was going through Rutgers, a true revolution in American cooking was moving east from California. As late as the mid-1970s, salad dressing in the United States was, like fried potatoes, usually called “French,” and most sauces were just “gravy” (which to most Italian-Americans meant tomato sauce—Jerseyans like Paulie Walnuts still call it that). But on the West Coast there were already fads building for fresh ingredients, traditional recipes, and “artisanal” (as they’d come to be known) cheeses, sausages, coffees, you name it.

More than many students, Gandolfini wanted to earn extra money, but like most, he really wasn’t qualified to do much more than tend bar. But by 1982, Gandolfini applied for a job at Ryan’s, a new bar/restaurant in New Brunswick that tried to set a higher standard—and promised better tips.

New Brunswick in the early 1980s was still, even near the campus, rather run-down. Customers complained about the street Ryan’s was on, about parking in a dingy nabe that had some of them darting to their cars when they left. But they came anyhow. It was a white-tablecloth kind of place, with the start of a decent cellar and an interest in trends that were only then starting to be called “foodie.” Gandolfini tended bar there for two years, beginning a pretty serious involvement with nightlife that would be a part of his working life for years.

“We met shortly after Lynn died,” says T.J. Foderaro, a wine critic and journalist who back then worked as a waiter at Ryan’s. Gandolfini and Foderaro became good friends; five nights a week they spent late nights closing down the restaurant and then wandering out for a nightcap. They’d talk about books, poetry, philosophy. Foderaro says he was in his “serious young man” stage, reading Dostoyevsky and the like, bringing a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in to read aloud while the waitstaff cleaned the grill. He presented a copy as a gift to his new friend, who seemed to really get a kick out of it. But Jim also had a blue edge, as T.J. soon discovered.

“He was in the throes of [mourning for Jacobson] for years,” T.J. remembers. “Sometimes he’d talk about it—I remember, every now and then, at a party or after everyone had left the restaurant, he’d be sitting there alone, with tears running down his face.

“Occasionally he’d start to talk about her, but the second he felt you might think he was exploiting it, or you tried to console him, that was it.”

Foderaro remembers Jim keeping a yellow Labrador retriever at the Birchwood apartment building. Gandolfini had shared him with Lynn when she was alive, and for Jim, the dog seemed to keep her alive, too, somehow.

It wasn’t as if her death doomed his chances at love, exactly. Women were always attracted to Jim, T.J. says, and not just because he was tall and good-looking back then.

“He was the most complex and demanding relationship I ever had,” Foderaro says. “Because he didn’t want to have any kind of superficial relationship. He wanted to talk to you honestly, and when he locked eyes with you he wanted you to connect to him on a very deep level, and he didn’t tolerate bullshit. He didn’t want you to put up defenses, or pretend to be something you weren’t. He wanted to get you, and he wanted you to get him, and he really meant it.

“And girls loved that.”

Toward the end of their years at Rutgers Foderaro became the manager at a new restaurant, The Frog and Peach (named for a Peter Cook/Dudley Moore sketch, but also a four-star, white-tablecloth kind of place—it’s still open). The chef was another Rutgers guy, an out-of-state student (they pay a much higher tuition) named Mario Batali, whose family had been involved in making and selling Italian cuisine on the West Coast since 1903. The foods his family championed required hand labor—Italian sweet sausages, fresh pastas, hand-dipped cheeses, that sort of thing. The labor made them expensive, but insisting on traditional methods was a mark of quality in a country taken over by food production on an industrial, corporate-run scale.

Foderaro introduced the rotund, red-haired Batali to Gandolfini, and they became good friends, too. The three of them would talk food and wine in the same way T.J. and Jim talked books and philosophy. Later, when Batali became an expert on classical Italian cuisine and a famous chef with restaurants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, Gandolfini became a regular on both coasts. Rutgers decided to include both Gandolfini and Batali in an award ceremony for distinguished graduates a couple of years ago, and the two old friends trooped on stage relatively abashed. Most of their fellow honorees were scientists and historians, a computer whiz, that kind of thing; Gandolfini, always self-deprecating, would tell the press that he and Batali had followed all these brainiacs to the podium with some trepidation, like “Heckle and Jeckle” bringing up the end.

But Jim really did learn his wines in those years, and a lot about food. It was a foundation for earning a living, of course, but it was also a real education, one earned in good company and with plenty of real experience. Italian-American food in New Jersey is not quite the same thing—actually,
The Sopranos
would devote an episode to the difference, distinguishing between classical cuisine and dishes like “gabagool.” We’ll come back to this topic later, since it cycles through Gandolfini’s life at every stage, but it’s important to understand that it’s a more serious issue than the actor himself ever acknowledged in public.

Foderaro hired another student, Roger Bart, a senior at Mason Gross School of the Arts, to act as bartender at The Frog and Peach. Late each evening Gandolfini would drop by to help close the place, drinking wine for free and schmoozing with the staff, before wandering off into the night with T.J. Maybe because he was tending bar himself at Ryan’s, Jim gravitated to Bart, and they struck up a friendship.

“I grew fond of Jim right away,” Bart recalls. “He was an affable guy, you could see how he might be a bartender. But he had this way of looking down when he talked to you—there was this vein of sadness in him.”

Bart found Gandolfini’s presence striking, but kind of hard to place. “He was also very smart, he and T.J. would have very intellectual conversations, they were both very well read, even though he had this Jersey working-class image going, too,” Bart says. “And he was just very sharp, he had a really sharp sense of humor.… I’m a pretty funny guy, but Jimmy was always right there with it. And I think I could tell there was this volcanic temper just underneath.… Oh, yeah, you could see that, even then.”

Bart asked Gandolfini if he’d ever thought of acting, and he replied, “No,” pretty gruffly, as if that were somehow out of the question. Bart had spent the past three years learning the stage at Mason Gross, and he was consumed with worry about how he would ever find his footing as an actor when he graduated. There seemed to be a huge gulf between doing a school play and building a career.

“You’ve got to remember, I was twenty-one, twenty-two; most of what I talked to Jimmy about was type,” Bart recalls. “You know, stereotype? At that age, you’re wondering what you can play, what sort of part you can get, that might add up to a living. Being cast in a conservatory school like Mason Gross is such an easy thing, you ask a guy you know or sometimes you just read your name on a list. But out in the real world, how do you get on stage?

“I was like, a hundred and thirty pounds, with this voice that gets so high,” Bart says, demonstrating. “So I was kind of mystified about how to make it myself. But I could see Jimmy’s type right off. He was tall, six-one or six-two, obviously just really strong physically. And he was a real Jersey guy, but I kept thinking to myself that New Jersey could use its own Gene Hackman. So I told him so, and I think some of the comparisons I made maybe resonated with movies he’d liked and things he’d admired. It wasn’t like I was telling him, ‘Oooh, you could be in commercials!’”

Bart thought in particular about a teacher he had at Rutgers, Kathryn Gately, and the patient way she’d worked with a big slab of an Irish guy who Bart thought hadn’t half the spark Gandolfini did. She’d been patient and supportive, using the Sanford Meisner method to promote immediacy and bring out a deep-buried forcefulness in his performance. Bart could imagine her working with Jim and finding it much more rewarding.

So he kept mentioning it to Gandolfini, whenever they were together socially. Jim would tell him, “Yeah, I mean to, I should,” but he never did. Bart didn’t give up.

Then a funny thing happened. Six weeks after he graduated from Rutgers and had found himself an apartment in Jersey City, Bart got called back for the part of Tom Sawyer in Broadway’s
Big River,
a musical adaptation of Mark Twain. He had a career in show business.

Still, the Rutgers crew would get together every now and then, in Jersey and in Manhattan, where a lot of them drifted soon after school. Whenever Bart saw Jimmy, he’d recommend Kathryn Gately. Bart wasn’t sure why Gandolfini didn’t just call her, but he never dropped it. It wasn’t personal, it was just business.

*   *   *

When Gandolfini graduated in 1983, he took an apartment for about a year with his former roommate, Stewart Lowell, in Hoboken. The whole neighborhood all around was undergoing a big renewal, but their apartment was not—it was a tiny tenement hutch carved out of a bigger space to rent to people who couldn’t afford Manhattan.

It was on the fourth floor. It was very small—two bedrooms, but with only a half wall between them—and hot as an oven in the summer. Anybody who thinks the top floor in a northeastern city tenement has to be the hottest because its roof is exposed to the sun all day just doesn’t understand five-floor walk-up physics. It’s hotter in the middle, where the air circulates like mud. Air-conditioning would have been an extravagance, and anyway they’d have to lug the machine up four flights, as they’d just done with their refrigerator. The boys bought fans and left them on all the time instead. They helped drown out the noises from the building, too.

Lowell’s first job was at McCann-Erickson, the advertising firm, so he commuted to Manhattan every day. Soon Jim had landed a bartending gig at an expensive wine bar on the Upper East Side, where he could walk away each night with $100 to $125 in tips, very sweet in those days. He did odd jobs, too, worked construction, filled in as a bouncer now and then.

“He was a survivor,” a friend who knew him in those days says. “He always had a job. He was never lazy, always pitched in, and somehow, whenever he got a job, he’d always be right up there with the owner, or anyway with the most important people.”

One day, Gandolfini answered a newspaper ad and was offered the chance to manage a pricey New York nightclub.

It was called Private Eyes, on West Twenty-first Street, in the trendy club district in those days, and it was one of the first video clubs in Manhattan. Every wall was lined with rows of TV sets held by steel and aluminum racks, and they’d play music and art videos all night long. Madonna arranged advanced screenings of videos at Private Eyes; Andy Warhol would show every now and then; at one party an eight-year-old Drew Barrymore was underfoot. Sleek and techno, Private Eyes was large, though nothing like the nearby four-level Area club of the same era. It was the time when video killed the radio star, and Private Eyes took the winner’s side.

Private Eyes wasn’t cheap—a beer could go for $20, very stiff in those days—and it catered to a wealthy, Long Island clientele. It was a diverse eighties crowd. Gandolfini himself later described the club as being “gay two nights of the week, straight two nights, and then everybody for the last two nights.” The club did downtown mini social events, like hosting the debut of a play for video by
The Village Voice
gossip columnist Michael Musto, that kind of thing.

It was a big job. Gandolfini remembered he might have ordered a whole year’s supply of liquor in his first week, with nowhere to put it all. Still, the owner, Robert Shalom, had faith in the big twenty-two-year-old Gandolfini.

“I’ve been thinking back to those days, and the fact that he got this job when he was that young to run Private Eyes, which was a pretty big nightclub, shows something about him,” Foderaro says. “I mean, I was just hanging out there with him. But he was managing a really hip, big-deal club, a whole team of bouncers, waitstaff, buying the beer, wine, everything—it was a real job.”

Gandolfini had been a bouncer at clubs before, and he was obviously the sort of staffer entertainment venues like to have around. Several friends said he “enjoyed” bouncing, because finding the psychological insight that gave you an edge against anyone, no matter how drunk or how big, was fascinating.

He moved to Manhattan for good, though without taking an apartment of his own. He was making good money at the club, but not that good—and he had better uses for the money he made than paying a mortgage. Managing a club also meant (within reason) being the one person who had to stay sober. It meant assessing a situation quickly, and taking responsibility when things happen that are in no way predictable.