James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (10 page)

For the people who knew Buck in life, however, it was almost a disappearing act.

“I swear to God, I saw him in that movie and I didn’t recognize him,” says Mark Di Ionno, the columnist for
The Star-Ledger
who drove Gandolfini to summer stock tryouts after freshman year at Rutgers. “I hadn’t seen him for ten years at that point, and man, he’d changed.”

We’ve already described the balletic beating Gandolfini gives Patricia Arquette in
True Romance,
and the ordeal of filming that twelve-minute scene over five days. It says something about Gandolfini’s courtliness, and maybe about his sense of gender stereotypes, that he begged Aston not to go see it (she still hasn’t). Gandolfini is brutal and terribly convincing in that scene. What gave the beating its dramatic punch, however, was the writing by Quentin Tarantino.

William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay for
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
once described that entire movie as a series of reversals of audience expectations. Almost from the beginning, the film sends up the conventions of previous horse operas about the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang: The heroes are betrayed by their trusty sidekicks, the posse doesn’t give up when the going gets rough, Butch actually welcomes the bicycle as a potential replacement for his horse—scene after scene upending stereotypes and updating the western in the process.

Quentin Tarantino writes that way, too, only more so. The big reversal in Gandolfini’s scene is, of course, that Arquette shoots him with his pistol-grip shotgun at the end. But each little segment along the way twists expectations, too—Arquette doesn’t wail and beg for mercy, Gandolfini doesn’t just kill her when he finds the suitcase, the tiny corkscrew he mocks becomes an effective weapon, and so on. And until he feels that corkscrew bore into his foot, Gandolfini wears a tight but playful smile that became almost the actor’s trademark. He does wince-worthy things throughout the scene, like putting a pretty girl through a glass shower door, for example. And the biggest reversal of all is how we feel about him for it.

Virgil is not a leading character, and he isn’t on screen for very long, but he’s unforgettable because of that genial air of menace. It’s almost a meta performance in that way, a picture of an actor
enjoying
his twists on other actors playing heavies. When Virgil’s anger is loosed, it’s thrilling because we’ve been waiting for it, almost hoping for it, to clear the air of ambiguity. And the premonition of Tony Soprano is unmistakable.

“The boys” in that film are all, more or less, graduates of what we might call the
Streetcar
school of male sexuality (Gary Oldman is an exception, perhaps, but is Joe Orton really so different from Tennessee Williams?). Slater is the only real romantic lead. The rest are character actors who, here and there, had breakthrough roles that made them leads—usually roles that allowed them to show an unexpected tenderness or courage or vulnerability.

The Hollywood tradition of turning tough guys into leads is venerable, beginning, you could say, with Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney, and continuing through Lee Marvin, Warren Oates, Charles Bronson, and on and on. Maybe we should think of it as an inevitable kind of type reversal that comes after committing X number of murders on the screen.
True Romance
put Bucky’s foot firmly on that ladder (even though, without getting all Anthony Weiner about it, he didn’t actually murder anyone in
True Romance
). There was no guaranteed career, exactly, but you could not mistake the ladder presented. Combined with that physical fearlessness he displayed again and again as a young man, and the affability that won him friends wherever he went, Gandolfini might have seemed a good bet to become a star even when he had so few credits to his name.

Anyway, after
True Romance,
acting really seemed like a grown-up career choice for a thirty-two-year-old single guy. Gandolfini wasn’t ready to quit any part-time day job quite yet, but he at least felt sure enough to actually rent a place to live on the West Coast, too. He had started signing leases for his own apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1989. In 1994, he rented a place in Malibu (he would rent apartments in Sherman Oaks the next year, and a house from 1996 to 1998 in Mount Olympus, in the Hollywood Hills, but he never changed his official residency from New York City throughout his career). For five years he bounced from one coast to the other and from Tennessee to Boston to Florida to the south of France, depending on the production.

Wherever the movies were set, Gandolfini alternated between playing thoughtful, reluctant, bipolar, or just plain likable brutes, and portraying average working-class guys for whom violence was contemptible, or at least, unthinkable.

Sometimes he played characters that weren’t killers, exactly, but brought a similar kind of animal ferocity to the screen. In
Le Nouveau Monde
, released in the states as
The New World
in 1995 but shot much earlier, he played an army sergeant with American occupying forces in 1950s France who likes to pick fights with blacks but loves jazz. He helps a sixteen-year-old kid from Orléans learn to play drums “like Gene Krupka” even as he seduces the boy’s local girlfriend and goes into an alcoholic tailspin. It’s a major if little-known performance, one of his first near-leads, in a French-based production directed by Alain Corneau and costarring Alicia Silverstone. Gandolfini completely dominates the film, showing off his peculiar mix of menace and likability—and standing in for American culture in a way he wouldn’t again until Tony Soprano.

One year after
True Romance
comes
Terminal Velocity,
starring Charlie Sheen. Gandolfini played Ben Pinkwater, a seemingly mild-mannered district attorney who turns out to be a violent Russian mobster, a brute in disguise.

That same year, in 1994, Gandolfini took the part of Vinnie, the rejected suitor to Geena Davis, in
Angie,
a twisted romantic comedy. Based on the novel
Angie, I Says,
by Avra Wing, which was listed as a notable book by
The New York Times
in 1991,
Angie
does serious damage to the conventional Hollywood happy ending. Vinnie is a plumber—there’s a
Home Improvement–
style send-up of early housing-bubble hardware commercials that gives Gandolfini one of his first comic bits in a movie—and a loyal Bensonhurst boyfriend who can’t understand why she won’t marry him. Especially since Angie is pregnant with his child. Instead, she has a fling with an international lawyer she meets in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who of course rabbits when she goes into labor.

It’s a story about love and class and being a single mother, and about deciding to stay single even though there’s a perfectly suitable husband-in-waiting right in front of you.

Susan Aston says she never saw
Angie,
either—Jim told her Vinnie didn’t need any backstory preparation because he’d already done it, with her, in
Tarantulas Dancing.
Shot in New York City,
Angie
had the same sort of dynamic as Bucky and M’Darlin’, in the sense that the male character is shocked to find the girl rejects him, and then struggles to accept it. “I was always so happy for him for his success,” Aston says, “but that was hard. Not now—now I love teaching acting [she is on the full-time faculty at The Actors Studio Masters of Fine Arts program, which is part of Pace University in lower Manhattan], but then, for a while, it was.”

Vinnie was a major part, the biggest Gandolfini had landed to date in an impressive production with Hollywood stars, with real sympathy for a working-class guy. It was the kind of role he’d always wanted, and in a big-budget movie that is actually pretty successful as a drama.

But the movie didn’t do as well as expected. Young women, including single mothers, didn’t like Geena Davis leaving her sick baby to search for her own mother at the end of the movie. And they just couldn’t understand why, when she comes back and devotes herself to raising her child, she doesn’t just accept Vinnie, too. Like, what was wrong with big, sweet, lovable, rock-solid James Gandolfini?

Maybe, the audience decided, there was something wrong with Davis.

Angie
was a preview of what Gandolfini could bring to a movie, and the effect he could have on an audience well beyond the confines of the script. Even though it was something of a disappointment financially,
Angie
went a long way toward making James a star. Not quite a romantic lead, but certainly a serious character actor.

His way of celebrating was to rent a really big beach house at Mantoloking, on the Jersey Shore, for the summer of 1994, and invite everybody he knew for a month-long party.

T.J. Foderaro came down. He was about to begin working as a wine critic. It was the last time they really hung out. T.J. remembers getting phone calls from Jim on the West Coast afterward, often at two thirty or three o’clock in the morning, around midnight in L.A. T.J. would tell Jim he had to work the next day. Could they talk in the morning some time? The phone would just click off.

*   *   *

If the nights grew long on the far coast, it had to be heady, anyway. Just a couple of years after
Angie
he’s doing scenes with Hollywood royalty like Travolta, Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Rosanna and Patricia Arquette, even the actor Roger Bart had recommended as a role model, Gene Hackman. Gandolfini didn’t take it for granted, though—he was too “grounded,” as theater people say, to make that mistake. He’s making character actor money, remember, never more than low-to-mid-five figures for any role. When Sidney Lumet called to offer him a part in
Night Falls on Manhattan
in 1996, Jim took the call on his cell phone while planting trees for the city in the sidewalk.

By 1995, Gandolfini seemed on the verge of breaking through. He had major parts in two widely anticipated Hollywood all-star productions:
Get Shorty,
based on the Elmore Leonard novel, and then
Crimson Tide,
a submarine-borne national security thriller starring Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington. He hired a new assistant, a pretty blonde who happened to be between jobs, named Marcy Wudarski. She’d never heard of Gandolfini. Marcy had been working for movie companies for a while, and like Aston, she was a military brat from the South (Florida, if that counts). It wasn’t long before the two were dating.

In
Get Shorty,
Gandolfini appears as Bear, a gentle leg-breaker working for drug dealers who wants to be a good father. He gets beaten up twice by New Jersey neighbor John Travolta in the film, and yet comes around to join Travolta’s Chili Palmer at the end—quite the character reversal in itself. Bear’s change of allegiance is the emotional hinge of the movie, turning on his desire to protect his family, and confirming Chili’s defeat of the main villain, played by Delroy Lindo.

Get Shorty
was a hit, and Bear (for whom Gandolfini attempted his first southern accent in a film) is one of the most memorable characters in the movie. Even more than
True Romance, Get Shorty
is a meta take on Hollywood success, a send-up of industry hype, the feckless dreamers that feed showbiz sharks, and the grubby details of financing that make it all possible. And it’s full of questions about traditional movie stereotypes—like the character of Bear himself.

Crimson Tide
should have expanded the triumph of
Get Shorty
. Gandolfini played Lieutenant Bobby Dougherty, a crewman caught in the conflict between his two superior officers. The part carried much of the emotional stress of the plot, not unlike the way Bear in
Get Shorty
prefigured the audience’s approval of Chili Palmer. Director Tony Scott wanted Jim to do it right after he was finished working in France on
Le Nouveau Monde
, which gave him very little time to prepare. He’d only read the script through once, weeks before. According to Lennie Loftin, a character actor who befriended Jim in the early 1990s, Jim was worried about getting in front of the camera so soon after flying back to the United States. But he didn’t want to disappoint the director of
True Romance.

Scott made four movies with Gandolfini, and the roles he did for the British director (who committed suicide about a year before Gandolfini’s own death) were intrinsic to the kind of star James would become. Unfortunately, Virgil in
True Romance
was not exactly the kind of thing you wanted your mother to see, especially if your mother was like Jim’s mother.

“Keeping Mama happy” was more than just Gandolfini’s off-hand explanation for why he went to Rutgers. It was a real concern of his, all his life, and a particular sore spot was his choice of career. The slightly formal dignity that his colleagues remarked upon in the jokey and irreverent James probably was handed down from Santa; at the same time, the “Class Flirt” in Gandolfini wanted to be loved for his own insouciance. There was a constant tension.

Once, when a local Florida reporter asked Gandolfini to describe Santa Gandolfini, he simply sat bolt upright in his chair and closed his fist in front of his chest, miming a person of great propriety and dignity. Her family ran a small bar in Milan, and even though she’d been born in New Jersey, she had gone back as a child before the war.

“She went through the war in Italy—I think she was about eighteen when the war happened,” Jim said later. “She was going to be a doctor. And everything got all screwed up and she had to come to America. I mean, think about this—this was the forties, and she was going to be a doctor.”

At just about the same time Gandolfini got back from France, Loftin had decided to move out to Los Angeles to try his hand at acting. (Loftin has appeared in several major films, including
The Sleeper
and
3:10 to Yuma.
) “He knew I was moving out and called to ask when,” Loftin said in an e-mail relayed to me by one of Jim’s oldest friends. “I said I was coming out with my bull terrier, Millie, in mid-October. I was planning on sleeping on a couple of couches ’til I found a place, but he told me he’d just arrived for
Crimson Tide
and that he had an extra bedroom in a furnished beach condo on the L.A.–Ventura County line, across from Neptune’s Net, and I could stay with him while he did the film.”