James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (17 page)

“When people want to ask you to dinner sometimes and they don’t know you,” Jim told
GQ
’s Chris Heath in 2004, “they want Tony Soprano to come to dinner. They don’t want Jim Gandolfini to come to dinner. I would bore the fucking tits off them.”

Method actors have a long history of consternation over their talent, particularly as they grow older. Marlon Brando was famously contemptuous of the profession he had mastered and changed so fundamentally: His movie sets had to be plastered with dozens of giant cue cards just out of sightline of the cameras because he found memorization such a drag. Some actors think the whole thing is a fluke, a vacation from their real job. Robert Mitchum (who was working as a machinist when he started looking for acting parts) once stumped a BBC interviewer who was gushing over his professional achievement by interrupting to say, “Look, I have two kinds of acting. One on a horse and one off a horse. That’s it.”

Lee Marvin perhaps said it best: “You spend the first forty years of your life trying to get in this business, and the next forty years trying to get out. And then, when you’re making the bread, who needs it?”

It is, as Roger Bart says, all just “make-believe,” and sometimes a man wants to be real. Or he wants this thing that he does, that captivates so many people, to break down the fourth wall and become something as real as real. Asked by Heath why he became an actor, Jim said this:

“To maybe vomit my emotions out of me,” he says, an answer both flip and serious. He smiles. “Am I making this hard for you?” he asks. And he offers a more considered reply: “I think I feel a lot. I never wanted to do business or anything. People interest me, and the way things affect them. And I also have a big healthy affinity for the middle class and the blue-collar, and I don’t like the way they’re treated, and I don’t like the way the government is treating them now. I have a good healthy dose of anger about all of that. And I think that if I kept it in, it wouldn’t have been very good. I would have been fired a lot. So I found this silly way of living that allows me to occasionally stand up for them a little bit. And mostly make some good money and act like a silly fool.”

Gandolfini—who will vote for John Kerry in November—offers examples: health care, the removal of sports from many Oregon schools, corporate tax avoidance. “The money that goes to these islands offshore!” he exclaims. “I paid more taxes than Enron one year—what the fuck is that about?”

What indeed? The kind of success he’d had was almost unimaginable—although, truth be told, he
did
imagine it, back when he was thinking of creating a stage persona named Jimmy Leather, and tried to warn his mom and dad and two sisters that his fame might get to be “a pain in the ass.” It just took so long maybe he’d forgotten about it. He certainly lived his life as if he had just kept doing his work as dutifully as he could and then fame happened, like a pile of old newspapers falling on a hoarder.

“He charmed a lot of people in the industry with that ‘humble craftsman’ thing,” says his Meisner technique teacher, Kathryn Gately. It played into another perception of Jim, that he was “grounded,” that he had no starry-eyed illusions about a life in the theater.

Some of this is what being “a regular Jersey guy,” as everybody called him all his life, means. But Gandolfini had a special quality of “regularness.” In almost every job he ever had he seemed to effortlessly attract attention from the boss—whether the job was delivering soda water for Gimme Seltzer or managing Private Eyes’ bouncers or playing a slightly jaded, philosophically inclined hitman in
True Romance
for director Tony Scott.

And bosses—not just Hollywood directors, but bosses—liked him. Not always, of course, because Jim could be difficult, moody, and demanding. But generally, they accepted him for what he was.

If that seems at odds with his union-loving, working-class-sympathizing affect, well, you think about class as if it were all about money and never about values. Take, for example, what Jim told Heath about his father and privilege, one of his most-cited quotes at the time of his funeral:

Gandolfini seems suspicious of the position that
The Sopranos’
success has put him in. The topic of his own celebrity is one that makes him nervous. He doesn’t want to seem ungrateful. “I find fame ugly,” he says. “My father always said a million times, ‘We’re peasants.’ His concept of life was, ‘No one’s better than anybody else.’ And, ‘The rich are thieves,’ pretty much. To find yourself being treated in a different bit of status, even in the small amount that I have compared to Brad Pitt or … it’s just a little odd for me, to get that slightly different treatment sometimes. And I’m uncomfortable with it.”

Does it feel like you’ve betrayed your natural team, the peasants?

“I want nothing to do with privilege. That’s basically what it is. I don’t like privilege. That’s all I’m saying. Take that as you want.”

Spoken like a true citizen of Park Ridge. But, as an expression of ideology, it’s very rooted in Old Worldliness. Peasants? In America? Well, in New Jersey?

Actually, you put it that way, maybe it does make some sense. Maybe growing up Italian-American west of the Hudson, Gandolfini saw a world of peasants and nobs. Members of both classes had different responsibilities. You measure the person by how well he or she played their role. You could be a good worker or a bad manager, or vice versa. He himself was a guy who took pride in his work and tried to do a good job, and doing it well was much more important than his own feelings.

You can easily underestimate just how appealing that attitude is in an often unpredictable industry. It’s like the time the twenty-four-year-old Brando went up to Provincetown to audition for Stanley Kowalski in
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Brando did a reading for Tennessee Williams, and then hung around for a couple of days to do some badly needed house repairs.

He got the part.

And Jim understood that everybody is flawed. Hamlet said, “Use every man after his deserts, and who shall ’scape whipping?” Close friends of Gandolfini’s in Hollywood told me that Jim could not warm to anyone who seemed too perfect. But confess to him some overpowering weakness—for anything—and he was loyal. The deal was the same as it was with the Rutgers crew: we’ll always be there for each other.

It’s almost a character actor’s approach to life: find the flaw that explicates the character, then understand him. Once you do that, you can love him, and make everybody else love him, too. That’s what Gandolfini did with Eddy in
The Juror,
and Winston Baldry in
The Mexican
. With Tony perhaps most of all.

Being a great character actor doesn’t reward going it alone or developing grand theories of human nature. It’s
about
observing others to understand them, and seeing the fullness of their character in relationship to their society. T. J. Foderaro says Jim could fix you with a look across a crowded room that implied life was crazy, but you and he knew it. There was something a touch fatalistic about that attitude—it isn’t in our power to make the world less crazy: We can just make it a little better for those we care about by letting them know they’re not alone.

*   *   *

I haven’t come across a single person involved in the production of
The Sopranos
who doesn’t think it was a wonderful experience, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for actors, writers, directors, PR folks, agents, producers—everybody is misty-eyed about being part of the art project that was that show. Toward the end, Edie Falco told
Vanity Fair
about moving on as an actress (before her opportunity for
Nurse Jackie
came along), looking at possible scripts, and just being horrified—“It’s all terrible. It’s scary.”

Everyone, that is, except Jim Gandolfini and David Chase.

Chase, of course, is a pessimist’s pessimist—if something is going well, it’s probably a trap. When he admits that he was very lucky to have
The Sopranos
turn out so well, he almost makes it seem grudging, like it was a fluke. What would you expect from someone raised in downtown Newark’s Little Italy whose mom once threatened to put out his eye with a fork if he asked for a Hammond organ? Good things are not for this person.

But for Gandolfini, there was the pressure to perform, over and over. He had his tricks—the pointy stone in his shoe, staying up two nights in a row, whatever’s best for conveying anger. But those things are like drugs, they wear off, or demand greater intensities for the same effect. And as everyone tells you they love what you do, and strangers stop you on the street calling out your character’s name, and you have more money than you ever expected to earn, well, some of those emotions become harder to summon, especially violent anger.

“I worried about the toll playing Tony took,” says Kathryn Gately, who watched
The Sopranos
from the very beginning and was thrilled by her former student’s riveting performance. “I saw the weight gain. You could almost feel the stress.”

The stress was sort of the point. In his few interviews, Jim would often deride questions about how he was adjusting to success as “princess problems,” far less meaningful than the problems of real people in the real world. There was all that money, after all. He didn’t want to seem “ungrateful.”

But people loved seeing a semipowerful character (Tony was always enmeshed in a pecking order, like any corporate goon) barely control his frustration and anger. They could sympathize. Portraying Tony started to become a personal reversal, a daily journey into a world of perilous doubt and fear that was the opposite of his real life. The conflict was symbolized physically by his circumstances, going each day from his West Village apartment or, later, his horse country colonial or Tribeca condo, across the Queensboro Bridge to the old bread factory by the off-ramp that housed Silvercup Studios and
The Sopranos
sets. There, amid crumbling walls, plastic folding chairs, and wastebaskets full of used Styrofoam cups (we won’t try to number the mice population) were perfect reproductions of Tony’s West Caldwell manse in all its beige spotlessness. The actors themselves—and the writers, too—hung out all day in rooms that made an inner city hospital look like a five-star hotel.

It was his breakthrough role and it was hard, emotionally grinding work. Not to mention, it made some people go white when they saw him coming.

Gandolfini came to want more than anything, like other TV stars before him, to live down the role that made millions of Americans believe they knew him like they knew their brother-in-law. Tony wasn’t him, and he could do so much more.

He’d always been a fan of
The Honeymooners
—“I can’t tell you how much I heard that ‘To the moon!’ thing,” Aston says—but as
The Sopranos
matured and his fame grew, Gandolfini began to study the career of Jackie Gleason. Jim wanted to do more comedy, for one thing. He liked, he said, “stupid comedies” that the uninitiated might think beneath his skill level.

But there were limits: He was offered the part of Don Lino, the godfather shark in DreamWorks’
Shark Tale,
a 2004 hit, but turned it down because it was too much like a parody of
The Sopranos.
(Michael Imperioli took the part of Frankie, the mob hit-shark, and Don Lino was voiced by Robert De Niro who, after
Analyze This
and
That,
had no qualms about sending up his career as a mobster.) Gandolfini was offered Curly in the
Three Stooges
remake, and wanted to do it, too, but never thought the script was good enough. (Showbiz body-type irony: Will Sasso, who ultimately played Curly in the 2012
Three Stooges
revival, had himself done an absolutely dead-on parody of Tony Soprano on
MADtv
—he made himself look more like Gandolfini than he did Curly, which is saying something.)

Gleason was more than just another fat comic. He was a talent maker, for one thing, able to use his place in show business to help others, like Art Carney as Norton, or Frank Fontaine as Crazy Guggenheim, make a name for themselves. He always seemed rooted to a particular place, too—his native Brooklyn at first, then Broadway, and finally Miami Beach—not unlike Jim the Jersey Guy. Gleason had his serious side, and did a number of movies with claims to deep angst (
Gigot,
anyone?), but he was beloved as an ensemble comedian, and especially for his bus driver protagonist Ralph Kramden from
The Honeymooners.
Most of Gleason’s characters gave voice to common men, but Ralph was an icon.

On break from
The Sopranos
in 2004, Gandolfini took on his first really Gleasonesque role, Nick Murder in
Romance & Cigarettes
, written and directed by actor John Turturro.
Romance & Cigarettes
was orphaned by a Hollywood merger and only got limited distribution in the United States in 2005. It has an all-star cast, with Susan Sarandon playing Gandolfini’s wife, Kate Winslet as his mistress, and Aida Turturro, Elaine Stritch, Eddie Izzard, Christopher Walken, and Steve Buscemi all doing memorable cameos. It’s a kind of opera based on Top-40 pop songs, which the characters lip-sync and then take over as their own, belting their hearts out from a cul-de-sac tract house in Queens near the JFK airport. Walken’s version of the Tom Jones hit “Delilah” is usually thought to be the best set piece.

Gandolfini played an Italian-American ironworker, tempted to leave his family for a younger woman, who is surprised to learn he’s got terminal cancer. He does suburban ballets with a chorus of garbagemen, a telephone repairman, a welder, and later cops and firemen. Every male, from six to sixty, in this middle-class neighborhood of vinyl-sided single-family homes joins him in Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Lonely Is a Man Without Love” as they roll through their daily routines. It’s absolutely zany, a bit undisciplined as a film, but Gandolfini shows a comfort with the material and his own physicality that promises a great deal. His willingness to do things other actors might find humiliating—like producing a long, excruciating fart before he collapses—is fantastic. The dance numbers are often hilarious. Plus, he sings, rather well, and wears a pencil mustache for half the film.