James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (18 page)

Turturro said he wanted Gandolfini for the role because no other actor had “the heart” it needed. But whatever hopes James had that
Romance & Cigarettes
would send Tony to sleep with the fishes were disappointed—though Walken’s version of “Delilah” became a minor YouTube sensation, the movie itself made little impact. As the final season of
The Sopranos
approached, he was still Tony to everyone.

*   *   *

At least from the outside,
The Sopranos
professional family was a happy family by 2004, and all happy families are alike. Gandolfini’s personal life in those years was, if not unhappy, at the very least happy in its own way.

Gandolfini had met Lora Somoza in the production offices of
The Mexican
back in 2000, just before shooting started, on the day he dropped by to try to quit. Director Gore Verbinski was out, and Somoza, who was working as his assistant, wound up on the receiving end of James’s self-doubt. He couldn’t get the part, was he really right for it, there were other guys who could do it better; she listened sympathetically while trying, as calmly as she could, to get Verbinkski on the phone to ask what to do.

By the time Verbinkski caught up with Lora, her job had become keeping the star of
The Sopranos
in the picture.

Over the next couple of years, Gandolfini and Somoza were photographed together frequently, in New York and Los Angeles, as a couple. By the time of his divorce in 2002, he told the
Daily Mail
that she was his date to industry premieres and awards ceremonies. Somoza, who was born in 1973, says Jim always called her “Fatty”—she’s quite slender—and he used to say that standing together, they looked like the “number ten.” Somoza has dark eyes and full lips, and tends to favor an unaffected, natural look most of the time. In 2004, he proposed, and they were officially engaged for two years.

Like Marcy, Somoza was from a working-class family, but hers had immigrant roots, too—her father was Mexican. She brought out his childlike qualities—Somoza told the
Daily Mail
tabloid that Jim “was always a smart-ass, playing practical jokes and doing silly things in order to embarrass me. He would sing silly songs and goof around.”

Somoza was with Gandolfini when
The Sopranos
was at the height of its popularity and his celebrity as an actor at its brightest. When she met him, he had already become, much to his amazement, an American sex symbol in his early forties.

The year the couple got engaged, Chris Heath asked how he was enjoying his enduring status as one of the sexiest men alive.

“There is no enduring status,” Jim answered. “I have no answer to any of that, and I don’t see it in my life. I think I play a character that likes to fuck and happens to fuck a lot on the show, and that might be something people enjoy, but other than that … I mean, the guy has a healthy libido. That’s about all that’s healthy about him. I don’t have anything to say about that. It’s flattering that anybody could—at a certain age and a certain paunch and a certain baldness—the fact that anyone would suppose their attention on you is extremely flattering.”

This was the sort of question he didn’t like to answer—you can tell when he starts stumbling his words at the end. Gandolfini refused to do on-camera interviews about himself or his series all through its run (at the very end, he did an appearance on
Charlie Rose,
but that was with all sixteen regular cast members, and a couple of years later he did
Inside the Actors Studio
with James Lipton, for the students and for Susan Aston, who teaches there, but that was about it). He gave a handful of print interviews (Chris Heath’s was the best) from time to time, but he usually avoided personal questions in those.

He told his staff in Hollywood that he wanted the audience to focus on the character of Tony Soprano, not him, so media appearances were a distraction. But then, after
The Sopranos
had become show business legend, it became an excuse. He’d never done interviews during
The Sopranos
—what about his latest project or his personal life now merited a public discussion if the most revolutionary TV show of all time did not?

A good question, but Somoza believed it went deeper than that. She did not think James enjoyed fame, not only because he was shy but because fans often left him nonplussed (like the guy who pulled up his shirt to show Jim that he had Tony’s face—really, Gandolfini’s face—tattooed all over his back). Seeing Jim as a “sex symbol,” like his friend Brad Pitt, was similarly ridiculous. He was a regular guy doing his job, like his dad before him.

He couldn’t help it if being recognized on the street was the definition of success in this business he had chosen. That is why actors get paid so very well, by the way, whenever they do—because people know who they are and want to see them perform again.

The kind of actor Jim had always wanted to be was the kind that took the role seriously, the kind that sought truth in the performance, not the performer. Somoza said that the pressure of playing Tony Soprano was constant. He would “be” Tony from the moment he went out the door in the morning, throughout a twelve- to sixteen-hour day, and then come home with seven pages of Tony’s dialogue to memorize.

Asked directly if she thought the pressure drove him to drink and use drugs, Somoza would only say she’d be surprised if anyone keeping such a schedule didn’t seek relief somehow. And the story of his four-day disappearance from the set in 2002 confirms what he told
The National Enquirer
years later, that his claims of being “clean and sober” since 1998 were, well, exaggerated. He admitted that his drinking and cocaine use got worse during his marriage.

It’s not much of a news flash:
CREATIVE ARTISTS LIKE TO GET INEBRIATED
. Actually, that’s a fair headline for most professions. But because some artists have laid claim to a special dispensation, there is a subgenre of artist biographies that focuses on substance abuse. John Cassavetes’s script for
She’s So Lovely,
in which Gandolfini played the heel back in 1997, would fit in such a story, since it’s a long paean to the beauties in the bottle.

Jim had enough of a problem that he went to Alcoholics Anonymous now and again, though he never really was consistent in his attendance. After one of the early seasons of
The Sopranos
wrapped he went off to a farmhouse-style rehab center in upstate New York. In 2009 he acknowledged he’d had problems since that first
Enquirer
interview, but insisted he was clean once more. What we know for sure is that Gandolfini functioned as an artist throughout—that same year, he went back to Broadway, as one of four actors in
The God of Carnage,
to rave reviews.

Jim and Lora never set a date. “Sometimes love does not conquer all,” Somoza told a British tabloid about their breakup. “Sometimes you really want something but life gets in the way and it doesn’t happen.

“There was no animosity, no acrimony,” Somoza continued. “In fact, my grandmother eventually died from Alzheimer’s and Jim knew how much the Alzheimer’s Association meant to me and he lent his name, and face, to the Forget-Me-Not Ball—a big fund-raiser” for the charity.

In 2005 his father, James John Gandolfini, died; he’d been in assisted living for some time. Somoza’s grandmother began suffering from Alzheimer’s disease around the same time, and Somoza left New York to care for her back in California. Jim and Somoza never really got back together after that.

Several years after they broke up, Somoza became a sex therapist and Huffington Post blogger—she calls herself “the naughty Dear Abby”—and she’s been hosting the podcast
Between the Sheets with Lora Somoza
in California since 2010. She offers relationship advice and sex tips in a friendly, but very West Coast–oversharing way. At his death, she memorialized Gandolfini in an episode of her show, promoted on her Web site as “a split personality show: We’ve got the worst book on ‘how to get you laid,’ foot orgasms you may or may not want, and my special good-bye to my dear friend Jim Gandolfini.”

They remained friends, and talked even as recently as a few weeks before his trip to Rome. Somoza said she learned of Jim’s death through a phone call from the
New York Post
. She attended Gandolfini’s funeral service at Saint John the Divine in New York City, sitting with friends and family.

*   *   *

Before
The Sopranos
ended in 2007, Gandolfini did two more films, both period pieces that cast him, if not as a mobster, as a tough guy. He played Tiny Duffy, a political bagman in Depression-era Louisiana, in
All the King’s Men,
starring Sean Penn and Jude Law (released in 2006, it had originally been scheduled for 2005, and was shot earlier). It’s the Huey Long story, this time told in a way closer to Robert Penn Warren’s novel than the 1949 version with Broderick Crawford. Although Gandolfini deployed another intermittent southern accent, you couldn’t help wishing he’d been cast in the Crawford-Penn role. The scene in which Willie Stark, who’s only just learned he’s being used to split the vote, stands up to Tiny Duffy in front of a crowd of dirt farmers lets Jim do a very funny deflated blowhard. Gandolfini certainly looked the part more than Penn, and Willie Stark could have used some of Jim’s roguish charm. For all its good intentions and professional pedigree, the movie was a critical and box office failure.

In
Lonely Hearts
(2006) he played police detective Charles Hildebrandt, partner to Elmer C. Robinson, played by John Travolta, on the trail of psychotic murderers Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, played by Salma Hayek and Jared Leto. Gandolfini tells the story in the voiceover, but it’s a drab little tale, as sepia-tinted as the cinematographer’s tonal palette, based on a true story that’s been made into a movie more than once before. Oddly enough, its ending is similar to that of
The Man Who Wasn’t There
, with a smoking electric chair of roughly the same vintage, and the same creepy bondage-mask grace note.

As the final, 2006 season of
The Sopranos
approached, Jim was still Tony. Just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in.

After two years of salary peace, the actors recognized an opportunity to renegotiate their contracts. HBO had decided to redefine the word “season.” Instead of thirteen one-hour-long episodes, they would make twenty, and show them in two “mini-seasons” of twelve and eight episodes each, separated by several months. It was like getting two seasons for one, the actors felt—though in fact, what the network was getting was two-thirds of a season in extra episodes.

Sirico and Van Zandt immediately demanded $200,000 per episode for the extra six; HBO said it was reluctant to go over $90,000 (the two actors were getting $85,000 and $80,000 per, respectively, for the first twelve). The rest of the cast began to demand renegotiations, too. As things began to go public, Gandolfini called a meeting in his apartment in Tribeca to smooth things over.

Season six would consist of twelve episodes that would start airing in November 2006, and nine more episodes that would begin to air in October 2007. HBO agreed to double Sirico’s and Van Zandt’s salaries, and made similar deals with the thirteen other regular actors. Smaller parts got comparable boosts.

Gandolfini had already settled on a contract: he would make $1 million an episode for the last half season—that is, $9 million, however you want to count your seasons. He was part of the one percent. He’d crossed the river, and for good.

At the New York City premiere of the second part of the sixth season in October 2007, the last premiere
The Sopranos
would ever have, James Gandolfini walked the red carpet with a pretty former model and actress from Hawaii named Deborah Lin.

9.

After T

“Who am I?” is always a great question, but for actors it’s a tease, a commercial challenge, and a personal problem all at once. Especially if you are a famous actor, like the forty-seven-year-old James Gandolfini was in 2008, the first year in almost a decade when he would not be playing Tony Soprano.

In 2001,
Rolling Stone
asked Gandolfini whether his reluctance to talk about himself in public reflected his desire to live an unexamined life, if he preferred to just “get on with things” rather than talk about them—you know, like Tony. But he said he thought of himself as more like another iconic figure.

“Yes, I would do that,” he replied initially. “But only because I’m a neurotic mess. I’m really basically just like a 260-pound Woody Allen.… There are some days when you say, ‘Oh, fuck it,’ and some days when I think way too much. As does everybody. I’m no different than anybody else. But you know what? Unless you have some deep problem, I don’t know.…” He stops himself. “You know what, I shouldn’t be talking about therapy. I don’t know a thing about it.”

Well, he had to know a little about it—at least, about pretend therapy, because that’s what he and Lorraine Bracco had been doing then for two years on the set. There had to be a few places where they scratched the overlaps between Tony and Jim. Even mooning her during her reaction shots had to have some kind of therapeutic meaning.

His fame gave him much more leeway to pick and choose the roles he would take and ultimately his onstage identity, the sort of power you work long years in the business to develop. He was in control, but only up to a point. He still could not change his “type,” though he could play against it; he could not easily appeal across generational divides, though he could try.

Many people would have taken a vacation after nine years as the most intense antihero in TV history—not a month at the Jersey Shore, but some sort of getaway reward for all the hard work. Jim rented a bigger beach house, but he didn’t exactly go on vacation. Although, after
All the King’s Men
came out in 2006 and
The Sopranos
wrapped the next year, Gandolfini didn’t appear in any films for a couple of years, he didn’t really take a break. What he did was start the effort to reinvent himself after Tony Soprano in earnest.