James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano

by Bischoff, Dan

  But back in 1980 the Rutgers pub was a scene, and Jim Gandolfini seemed to enjoy it enormously. He was, to boot, the kind of strong guy who was amiable enough to defuse any conflict before it got out of hand. He often did front-door ID checking, greeting customers, setting the tone; but he pulled the heavy duty, too, hefting kegs, mopping out, all the drudge work. And, like all good bartenders, he took care of his friends.

  That’s where he met Tom Richardson, also a bouncer at the pub, who became one of Jim’s closest friends and project manager at his film and TV production company, Attaboy Films. Richardson was an Irish guy from West Orange, who had his first taste of mozzarella with tomato and basil leaves plucked from Gandolfini’s father’s garden behind their little two-family summer place on the Shore, in Lavallette (“Marone, where you been all your life, never had tomato, cheese, and basil!”). Richardson’s roommate Mark Ohlstein was a regular, too, along with all the dorm crew. It was almost like forging a new, on-site family, which just happened to have the same all-for-one attitudes, and more often than not the same class origins, as the gang of kids in Park Ridge.

  “For the last two years at Rutgers, Jimmy drove around campus in this black Ford Falcon he’d gotten, from his father, I think,” says a fellow classmate. “He loved that car. Just loved it. In part because it was like a big ‘Fuck you!’ to the guys at Rutgers who drove around in fancy sports cars.”

  The 1962 Falcon had been his father’s car, kept in mint condition, and giving it to Jim was, for Mr. Gandolfini, a test of the boy’s maturity. One that he did not pass with flying colors. One summer Jim drove the whole crew down to the Shore in the Falcon. Just as they picked up one of the guys in front of his parents’ house, the engine caught fire. They had to put it out with a fire extinguisher.

  “Jim really loved his parents,” one of the guys remembers. “Ruining the car’s hood like that was just terrible in his dad’s eyes. I can remember Jim standing with his dad, hanging his head, as Mr. Gandolfini, who was a lot shorter and slighter than Jim, lectured him over what he’d done to his car. But he never had it repainted or anything. He just drove it around like it was.”

  Stories about Gandolfini’s physical fearlessness often go hand-in-hand with tales about his remarkable strength. Not just carrying kegs at the pub, but standing up to challenges. There’d be fights between students every now and then; and he’d break them up, often genially, but with a sobering display of muscle. A couple of Jim’s friends remember two pickup trucks filled with five or six guys squealing their tires in the pub parking lot one night. Jim was just getting off shift, and he went out to tell them off. They surrounded Gandolfini, but he stood his ground until the pub bouncers heard what was happening and scared them off. “He wasn’t afraid of anything,” a friend recalls.

  Sophomore year Gandolfini moved out of the dorms and into the Birchwood Terrace Apartments on Hamilton Street (the building is still there), not far from the Rutgers campus. It became the center of his life for the rest of his years in college. When he graduated in 1983, he’d tell everyone that his degree was in marketing or communications—although his Rutgers transcript actually gives his degree as in “journalism”—but he was quick to say he didn’t remember much about marketing.

  Maybe the most curious thing about his time at Rutgers is he never tried to go on stage while he was there. He told all his friends he was going to be an actor, but he didn’t try out for campus plays. The university, like all major state schools, has an active theater department, with a professional staff, and they mount dramas and musicals every year. But Gandolfini wasn’t a theater major, and the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers restricts roles for its students. The university has no record of Gandolfini appearing in any unaffiliated plays or performances on campus over his full four years.

  It’s rare for a major talent to simply not seek expression, especially in acting, which has many more ingénues than it does older character actors. Was he unsure of his commitment, or did he doubt he could actually make it as an actor?

  Di Ionno remembers one attempt Gandolfini made to land a theater job, after freshman year. When classes ended, Gandolfini asked Di Ionno if he’d join him on a road trip to North Carolina, where students could try out for summer stock. So the two of them, anticipating all the adventures a road trip could offer, loaded up Di Ionno’s car and headed south.

  “And he failed. He failed miserably,” Di Ionno recalls. “He was just very disappointed in how bad he seemed to be.… I remember driving home, he was angry with himself. He felt he’d been unprepared, that he’d given the thing no thought about what he might be asked to do, or something. And he was just very upset that he’d done that.”

  As far as anyone can tell, he didn’t try out for acting again for another five or six years.

  Gandolfini did get serious about a girl in those years, for the first time, really. By the summer after his sophomore year he and Lynn Marie Jacobson, whom he’d met as a bouncer at the campus pub when she was a waitress, were close, even though she was a couple of years older. By 1981, when she graduated, she was always at the Birchwood.

  Friends remember Lynn as “classically beautiful”—so pretty, in fact, that she intimidated some of Jimmy’s buddies. She had auburn hair, dressed more formally than most of the other kids, and was nice, friendly, nothing off-putting about her, but serious, older than most of Jimmy’s crew. She was from West Caldwell, and studied advertising. After she graduated, she got a job in New York City at the Media Management Public Relations and Advertising Company during the day, and several nights a week she also worked late hours as a hostess at The Manor, a sort of banquet room–conference center in West Orange.

  Lynn worked two jobs to help her family with her tuition costs; she had a twin sister, Leslie Ann, and another sister, Gail, who still lived with her parents. She’d pull long hours a few days a week, doing her day job in the city and then schlepping up to The Manor until closing. The hours were a little unpredictable—these sorts of catered complexes are fairly common in Jersey, and they host events of all sorts, with schedules set by the group or firm that rents the space.

  Lynn was driving back to Caldwell on a Sunday morning around 4:45 A.M. when her car crossed Bloomfield Avenue and hit a utility pole. She was almost home—the accident happened right where the road curves to enter Caldwell, just east of 180 Bloomfield Avenue. Lynn’s car, a 1971 Ford Mustang, was cut in half, and the front end smashed into a storefront a few feet farther on. She was killed instantly. She was twenty-two years old.

  The police found no mechanical problem or anything else in the car to explain the crash. Everyone assumed she’d fallen asleep at the wheel after a very long week.

  When you’re just nineteen and a tragedy of such adult scale happens, friends are often so shocked they don’t know what to do. Especially since it seemed sort of out of character for a guy like Gandolfini to be touched by death. He was still a junior in college, majoring in the same practical subject Lynn had studied. The night after Jim learned about Lynn’s accident, just two friends went to his apartment at the Birchwood and let themselves in. Jim was there, drinking wine and watching television. The three spent the night together, now and again smoking marijuana, but mostly just sitting in front of the TV, talking about this and that. Every now and then, for no reason—for every reason—Jimmy would start to cry.

  Everyone came to the funeral, of course, at Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church in Essex Fells. Jimmy was, several friends told me, “the boyfriend” at the funeral, helping the whole family, but trying in particular to console Lynn’s twin sister. The burial was in East Hanover.

  In some sense the shock never left him. When he won his third Emmy as lead actor in a drama in 2003, Gandolfini—after blowing a raspberry into the microphone because he’d promised his son, Michael, that he would—said: “I’d like to dedicate this to the memory of a girl I knew a long time ago who basically, inadvert … I can’t say that word. She made me be an actor. Her name
was Lynn Jacobson, and I miss her very much.”

  It was typical Jim, playing peekaboo with his real life, without really explaining what Jacobson meant to him. People who watched the Emmys that year could be forgiven for assuming she was a favorite drama teacher, or maybe someone who’d convinced him to pursue his true ambitions in life, that sort of typical, celebrity-acceptance-speech sentiment.

  “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 spe
nt 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.