by Dick Cavett
Frighteningly, history will record that Edie Falco almost didn’t get to be Carmela Soprano. She tells of how one more tiring audition seemed just too much that day, and besides, the show sounded, from the title, like some odd sort of musical production. But, lucky us, she did go, “and got the part of a lifetime.”
What a wife she was to Tony and what richly complex characters they both were. And how miraculous that Nurse Jackie bears no more resemblance to Carmela Soprano than I do.
And I owe Edie an apology. Chatting, I misattributed to Hemingway a line from the great war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s most famous and most widely reprinted column, on the death of Captain Waskow.
The dead officer was deeply loved by his men. All tears and grief, each one came up and stood by his corpse, laid out on the ground in the moonlight. One looked down and said, simply, “God damn it to hell, anyway.” Pyle writes, “Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: ‘I sure am sorry, sir.’”
It’s strange, isn’t it, how, in the presence of a dead person lying in the street, or one in a coffin at a funeral, you can feel for a moment not so much lucky as a little bit ashamed of being alive.
My last significant meeting with James—I’ll get to the first in a moment—was in his dressing room on Broadway. My wife and I saw him in God of Carnage. Our front-row seats were so close to the stage you could lay your hand on it, and the light spill from the stage lighted me. Later in the dressing room, he said, “I kept seeing you. I almost said hello.”
Then he described an attack of terrible anxiety that overtook him as beginning work on the play approached, with deep fears over—of all things—ability to learn and retain his lines. He said he’d actually entered a hospital for a few days of anxiety treatment. (Shades of Tony in Dr. Melfi’s office.)
Meeting him, by the way, was initially a slight disappointment. Because he wasn’t Tony. He didn’t talk like Tony at all. He himself was no more Tony Soprano than Jackie Gleason was Ralph Kramden, or Jean Stapleton Edith Bunker.
He was an actor.
The subtlety, the darting bits of humor, the variety of facial and body movements and gestures, and especially the number of what you might call emotional and intellectual octaves available to this so richly gifted actor—too many wonders to gather and appreciate in a single viewing.
(David Chase, incidentally, probably owes the world the secret of how to produce episodes and, in fact, season after season of, to me, TV’s best series. Whole seasons without a single—and I dare you to find one—dull moment. And cast to perfection. Not a clunker in that vast and varied troupe of splendid players. Chase might also reveal how you can mix humor and killing so expertly that the question has even been raised, was The Sopranos a comedy?)
Gandolfini’s great feature was his eyes. For a man of unremarkable physique and features, the eyes were pure magic. They were soft, twinkly, cuddlesome, and loving. At other times, frozen, menacing, cruel, and murderous, shifting suddenly from one expression to another with startling impact. Those eyes were the outstanding, endlessly versatile feature of this gifted actor’s arsenal of talent. He never made a false move.
Now: how I first met James. Years ago, in the midst of the series, a new friend, Michael Imperioli, Tony’s problem nephew in the show, one day asked if I’d like to visit the set. It was among life’s easiest decisions.
While standing on the sidewalk outside the studio in Queens, here Gandolfini suddenly came, strolling on break with Steven Van Zandt.
Not expecting to meet him so suddenly, I’d prepared no conversational gambit, coming up feebly with nothing more substantial than “Mr. Gandolfini, where I come from in Nebraska, your last name would be pronounced ‘Gandol-finny.’”
He either politely showed, or skillfully feigned, interest in this pallid subject.
“The way my fellow Nebraskan, Johnny Carson, always said ‘Hou-dinny’ for ‘Houdini,’” I added.
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that,” he said, being a nice man.
Shooting resumed, he went away. And I felt the need to make a stronger impression on this hero of mine.
Inside, during a break, I’d been talking to a man in a martial arts T-shirt about the wonders of aikido and how I’d learned the “stunt” from a sensei in Tokyo of—by an almost mystical technique—making yourself unliftable. By anyone on earth. And how I had befuddled the giant footballer Mark Gastineau with it on TV.
I hadn’t noticed Gandolfini passing by. “Did I hear you say you can’t be lifted if you don’t want to be?” he asked, politely, but brimming with skepticism. I admitted as much.
With about twenty cast and crew members watching, he, facing me, gripped me under the armpits, and lofted me up in the air as if I were a bed pillow.
I invited him to duplicate the feat. He resumed the grip, and with a mighty effort, grunting and groaning and with some perspiration, emitted a strained “Aarrgh!” and a guttural, “No way!” My feet never left the ground. There was good-natured jeering from the onlookers.
Afterward, some kind soul sent me a snapshot of the failed lifting moment. A puzzling picture of a large, tall man, oddly gripping a much smaller man’s underarm areas for no apparent reason. (The large man is not as large as he later became.)
We did have one other, brief meeting, by pure chance. It was in the locker room at Wollman skating rink in Central Park. I’d gone there with a friend and he asked if I knew his friend Gandolfini. James, preparing to skate, greeted me warmly and said, “Thanks to you, all the guys on the set call me ‘faggy’ now because I couldn’t lift Dick Cavett.”
“Mr. Gandolfini, I almost never think of you as ‘faggy,’” I offered.
“Thanks, Dick, I really needed that,” he grinned. And, to the delight of the onlookers, rewarded me with a great big kiss.
John Donne reminds us that “any man’s death diminishes me.” James Gandolfini’s sure did. He had so very much more to give us.
So long, James.
And God damn it to hell, anyway.
JULY 12, 2013
As Comics Say, “These Kids Today! I Tell Ya!”
The scene is a well-known Eastern college campus in the United States. A few weeks ago. Freshmen are arriving, many with parents but some alone, to begin one of life’s greatly significant adventures. College.
And college life. With all that that entails.
Watching the arrivers and wondering if I could possibly have looked this young when transported from the plains of Nebraska to the world of ivy, I ask a student where a restroom is. I hate that word. As a precocious euphemism resister, I am supposed to have asked my grandmother at age six why you never saw anyone resting in there.
Anyway, there in the sleek, modern facility I checked out various notices taped to the walls. Useful information for the new student. Nothing very exciting. Then I saw it.
The Racy News.
I expected I’d discovered a student humor publication, tailored to the tastes of young folks and perhaps, judging by the title, of a slightly bawdy nature.
It would be hard to have been more wrong.
Dating myself by allowing some unruly element of prudishness to surface in me (old-fashionedness?), the mind rejected what it clearly was.
The subtitle: “Everything you ever wanted to know about effective consent.” A clue hard to miss.
So what was the sheet about?
A vulgarian might blurt, when asked that question, “It’s about screwing at school.”
A more respectful description would be to call it a sensitive, respectful treatment of the fact that, unlike in my day, alas, with young people of college age today, sex is a feature of life. You’d have to be deeply mired in fogeyism to be shocked by the reality that sex-plus-campus is a fact.
And a fact vastly beyond what it was for those of us who were undergrads back in, and I hate to call it this, “olden times.”
It goes on:
[The college] sees unwanted sexual contact of any form as a violation of a student’s personal integrity and his or her right to a safe environment, and is therefore a violation of our college’s values and honor code. The college defines sexual misconduct as any sexual activity “without effective consent.”
Let’s assume, just for fun, that you are well past your college years. Did you have anything like that at your school?
The sheet is a product of a campus entity calling itself the Center for Sex and Gender Relations. The consent material is presented in such a way as not to sound like old folks talking to youngsters, so for example, “hooking up” is used instead of “intercourse.” (“Hooking up” confusingly can also mean a range of activity from going together to the big bang itself.)
The sheet states, under “A Little Advice from Our Sexperts”:
It’s your choice to engage in sexual activity! If you aren’t ready, don’t do it. It’s okay to say no or wait.
If you are ready, make sure what you are doing is safe and consensual.
It’s okay to be nervous. It’s natural. It’s also pretty cute.
[I could do without the “cute” part.]
Don’t rely on drunk hookups to get you by in college. Sure having a little fun once in a while isn’t a problem … but we bet that you and your partner are better lovers sober!
They suggest telling your partner that you “haven’t done that yet.” That being a virgin is “not a mark of shame, and communication is the key.”
Another section supplies dialogue suitable to the occasion. It states that it’s “easy to get consent without ruining the moment.” They recommend:
Can I kiss you here?
Do you like it when I touch you there?
How are you doing?
Should I keep going?
Does it feel better if I do it this way?
Are you into this?
Of course, a smart-ass could deface the poster with some suggested answers by witty young women to the above questions. Like:
Can I kiss you here? [No. Only in Cleveland.]
Shall I keep going? [Who knew you’d started?]
They also define “ineffective consent.” Bad consent. It includes:
Silence.
No eye contact; pushing someone away.
Not asking simply because you’ve hooked up before.
Consent given for one sexual act does not mean that your partner is consenting to everything.
Given when under influence of alcohol or drugs …
God, how I wish my college years had had something like that. My guess is that the amount of sexual activity on campus back then would be at about a ratio of thirty to one. (The “one” being my “then.”)
I don’t want to embarrass my former roommates, so I’ll use no names, but I’m fairly sure I was the first and perhaps for a while only one of us to bid virginity good-bye as an undergrad. And it wasn’t until my sophomore year. (It was awkward and without distinction.)
A long wait. And, to quote Miss Bette Davis on a show of mine, when I impulsively inquired about her own virginity, “The wait damn near killed me!”
All of this makes me feel quaint. It’s hard to read and think about it without remembering the pains of that less liberated time. I can’t help wondering how different a person I might be if I’d had the benefits of the present age, where sex is not a big deal. Just one of many things you do. Where sex imaginable and unimaginable is available on your computer screen. Including “Live from Sweden.”
Would I have had a different character or outlook on life if my school years had been adorned—as school years are today—with regular pleasurable hot-bedding in college, high school, and, as we are repeatedly told, junior high?
Mother Nature’s nasty little trick of giving the male of the species his sexual peak roughly between ages fourteen and eighteen was particularly hard on my contemporaries when getting into someone’s underthings—and I don’t mean wearing them—was something you didn’t do on pain of death.
How wonderful if there had been available relief of a two-person (at least) sort. If only so you could concentrate on your studies and dream about something else for a change. And those godawful necking sessions, pleasant for a while, but resulting, for the male, in a crippling case of azure gonads. (I believe there was another term.)
Mightn’t today’s way have made me a much happier and maybe even better individual?
You tell me.
SEPTEMBER 13, 2013
More Sex, Anyone?
You made me laugh. You, the reader who wrote that, on the subject of sex before marriage, your mother asked your father the farthest he had gone with his before-marriage girlfriend. “Poughkeepsie,” he replied.
My last column inspired a remarkable number of thoughtful replies. I wish I had space and time to deal with all of them.
The college I wrote about that posted information and advice on sex at school is, I learn, hardly unique. And many readers wonder what took so long. If only we had had that as a theme.
Only a handful could be considered shocked or disapproving of the practice. Many worried about the possibly lost distinction between sex and true affection.
I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered grasshoppers. Or Dick Cheney.
Undoubtedly this sometimes reliable practice urged on the young, combined with forbidding them contraception, has accounted for a hefty portion of the income of the baby-shower industry.
Abstinence. What sex-drive-free human specimens dreamed this one up? Were, or are, they utter strangers to the turmoil of the storming erotic drives of the young? And, as several fortunate readers attest, some lucky members of the old?
If there is an Abstinence League, my image of its leader comes from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”: “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.”
Remember when the “one true church” was heavily promoting the “rhythm method” of pseudo-contraception? Of course the jokes came thick and fast about inability to keep a beat, etc. I still wonder what wit first labeled the fiasco “Vatican roulette.” A daredevil version, it proved to be, of roulette with about four chambers loaded.
I liked the reader who admitted quite frankly that, yes, she did think additional sex experience would have been a good thing in her case, probably producing a more successful marriage.
Several people referred, or at least alluded, to the danger of a wrecked school life and education from an unwanted pregnancy.
No small concern. More so in my day, when detailed knowledge of the traps and pitfalls of the loins was often sparse.
I received zero sex knowledge at home. Had my mother lived, I might well have, but my dad merely worried that I was going to impregnate someone in high school. But no advice. No instruction.
Considering the thinness of my sexual activity at the time, the odds against the calamity that haunted A. B. Cavett were somewhere below zero. I wouldn’t be surprised, such was the extent of my dad’s concern, to learn that he might have had some such related experience himself.
In college, where the odds favoring inadvertent calamity at least climbed to just above the freezing point, I can still recall a stabbing and chilling moment of angst, fear, and trembling.
The previous night had included a rare episode of pneumatic bliss, properly conducted, safety-factor-wise.
The next day, as chance would have it, Fate, or one of my roommates, placed in my hands one of those pamphlets for boys. It at least felt as if my hair stood up at reading the icy words: “Be careful not to touch the end of your penis to the wrong side of the condom, then turn it over and…”
It went on to make it clear that the not inconsiderable frequency of this inadvertent “transfer” mishap could account, accidentally, for an addition to the population.
At that, the black-and-white tile floor of the
dorm bathroom where I was standing seemed to zoom up at me as in an early film noir special effect.
Had I done that? Had I wrecked my life? Cold sweat.
Was there a preacher in my immediate future? Would I be on a train back to Nebraska? Would I be home, saying “Hi, folks. Meet Janie”?
For a good time thereafter, sleep was fitful and sometimes impossible without a mild sleeping potion and a page-or-two dose of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene—a sure-fire soporific.
Why tell this? As an argument for sex education? Surely no one with a measurable IQ is still against that, although in fact you can still hear folks with but ten watts upstairs say, “Why put ideas in kids’ heads?”
My wondering about whether more sex in school, in my part of the Olden Days, would have made me a better person seemed to divide the audience.
I was assured it would have and that it emphatically would not. I suppose all we can say here is, how will we ever know?
Some readers made the distinction of how different things always are for boys and girls. A female reader, disputing assumptions about the time, wrote of the incredible pressure “in the 60s even” for girls to “keep your knickers on” or be looked down on by female classmates. But that now, she says, the pressure is to “lighten up, get with it.” To shuck ’em.
She feels the school’s enlightened document I quoted is spot on.
Some urged that doleful term “waiting,” maintaining that “character” is built by biting the bullet and waiting.
Poppycock.
The great Marlene Dietrich told me that in her German upbringing, she was commanded to go without a drink of water when thirsty “to build character.” Did it? I asked. “Not one brick’s worth of character was built. It probably injured my kidneys.”
One reader, Joe of Brooklyn, touchingly wonders if, as a schoolkid, that certain gorgeous dream of a teacher ever fancied him, envying those fifteen-year-old students these days taken “twixt the sheets by a comely and passionate high school teacher.” (Who subsequently does time.)
Poor Joe has never gotten over it. He thinks in today’s atmosphere, the “it” he longed for just might have happened. She was thirty-three then—she would be ninety-two now—and “she is still more enticing than any other woman I have ever encountered.”
