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

by Bischoff, Dan

  But surely one reason had to do with family crises—successive crises, really, in both his real and his professional families.

  * * *

  In the week before he died in June 2013—mind you, this was almost six years after The Sopranos had ended—food-writer-turned-Sopranos-chronicler Brett Martin published a story in GQ magazine that described an epic four-day AWOL Jim went on as the crew was trying to shoot a complicated scene for the 2002 season finale. The scene required a helicopter (the sine qua non of expensive action thrillers) and the rental of the Westchester County Airport. It was a Friday night set, and the crew spent their time switching the schedule to shoot the handful of scenes that didn’t require Tony Soprano. But he never showed up.

  Missing a big scene was not unheard of. People on The Sopranos crew had first gotten used to the sounds of farm animals—chickens, horses, that sort of thing, pigs were rare, though—coming out of Jim’s trailer before he did a scene. Animal sounds were part of his warm-up for performing. And everybody knew he could destroy refrigerators and telephone booths, and put his fist through stage-set walls, when he couldn’t remember his lines. He’d been late, or gone missing, before.

  “His fits were passive-aggressive,” Martin wrote. “He would claim to be sick, refuse to leave his Tribeca apartment, or simply not show up. The next day, inevitably, he would feel so wretched about his behavior and the massive logistical disruptions it had caused—akin to turning an aircraft carrier on a dime—that he would treat cast and crew to extravagant gifts. ‘All of a sudden there’d be a sushi chef at lunch,’ one crew member remembered. ‘Or we’d all get massages.’ It had come to be understood by all involved as part of the price of doing business, the trade-off for getting the remarkably intense, fully inhabited Tony Soprano that Gandolfini offered.”

  But this disappearance spooled out into two, three, four days. Scriptwriter Terry Winter told Brett Martin he was so worried that when he heard a radio report while driving to work that began, “Sad news from Hollywood today…” he immediately thought Gandolfini was dead.

  That proved to be greatly exaggerated. On the fourth day, the production company got a call from Jim, from a beauty salon in Brooklyn, asking someone to send a car to pick him up. He’d walked in with no money and no ID and asked the owner to call the only number he could remember for the offices.

  They sent a car.

  GQ’s timing for this article was uncanny. Combined with the utter shock of Gandolfini’s sudden death, it seemed to establish a sort of James Dean-too-reckless-to-live scenario for another uncommonly electric actor. Soap and success may not be as quick as a massacre, but they are just as deadly in the end.

  The pressure was intense, of course, but it wasn’t entirely coming from the need to prepare for the next pretend murder or apt malapropism. On February 1, 2001, Gandolfini had left Marcy’s duplex in the West Village. He never went back. A year later, in March 2002, he filed for divorce.

  Going through a New York City divorce while starring in the hottest television show in the country is something shy people should avoid. In the same way the press would love the stories of Sopranos actors getting pinched for felonies and minor mischief, they adored the idea of James Gandolfini with marriage troubles. Some papers and TV gossip shows, naturally enough, led their accounts with comparisons of Tony’s marriage to Carmela with the Gandolfinis’ relationship in real life.

  For James, it was excruciating. Marcy told friendly outlets that she was mystified by his decision, and wondered darkly about “something bipolar or manic depressive.” Then, in October 2002, The National Enquirer published a story based on a source who claimed to have seen legal papers prepared for the divorce case. The Enquirer wrote that Marcy claimed Gandolfini had entered drug and alcohol rehabilitation in 1998, and that costars like Julia Roberts and Edie Falco had both tried to get him to stop using drugs. It quoted Marcy naming fifty-two people who were aware of James’s drug use, including everyone from other Sopranos actors to Steve Tyler of Aerosmith.

  The Enquirer has since taken the story off its Web site, but an October 17 Daily News account summed it up:

  Marcy kept a diary that included claims that “Jim would go on a drug binge every 10 to 14 days.” … He [often] woke up somewhere not knowing his whereabouts. [Marcy] later found out he would do drugs with various bimbos and women and have sex with them.

  She also said in her diary that “James would get drunk and make a fist and punch himself repeatedly in the head to see if he could get a reaction from [Marcy] during a quarrel.”

  Marcy said her husband bought a gun for protection while traveling to Harlem to buy drugs.

  Marcy’s lawyer, Norman Sheresky, acknowledged that the claims were contained in papers not filed in court, but were “attorney-client correspondence that was private.”

  Such charges are often the stuff of celebrity divorce. Wudarski later claimed that she was “annoyed” those charges went public, saying she never intended for that to happen. And of course it is an old tabloid tactic to run negative stories unless the star does an on-the-record interview.

  And that’s what happened, after a special PR consultant was hired to guide the star through this ordeal. Gandolfini, who hated giving interviews, especially about his personal life, sat down with The National Enquirer in October 2002, to admit he’d had a problem with cocaine and alcohol four years earlier.

  He started out with a criticism of celebrity culture itself, saying, “God, I can’t believe I’m doing this.… I’ve watched celebrities doing this. It’s like a rite of passage. But I’m clean and sober now. I’m done with everything.”

  Drugs were part of the nightclub scene where he’d worked in the 1980s, Gandolfini said, and that was where he’d first encountered them. He insisted that it was all over now, that he’d gone to Alcoholics Anonymous from time to time, and that his problems were in his past, from a period before he was an international star and he’d had a son. The Associated Press ran an item, GANDOLFINI ADMITS PAST DRUG ABUSE, on October 17.

  Friends and professional associates of Gandolfini’s say the experience was harrowing. To get married just as this incredible fame had descended and then divorced as dealing with it became a daily routine was an assault on Gandolfini’s dignity like none he’d ever endured. And it left him snakebit as far as the press was concerned for the rest of his life.

  Particularly galling was the way the press got hold of intimate details of his personal life by playing sides in the divorce. Jim had never had anything to do with the New York Post, the Rupert Murdoch tabloid that thrived on scandalous celebrity stories. (That may have been his mistake—the Post can treat celebs well or nastily, but the tone of their coverage is pretty much determined by whether or not the subject gives them access.) Now, Marcy was willing to sit down with Post columnist Cindy Adams to say she “always believed Jim would be there for me. That he’d take care of me and love me, as I did him. That we’d be together ninety years.

  “I became close to his father, his sisters, Leta and Joanne [sic], his brother-in-law, Eddie,” Wudarski continued. “They became my family. He gave me a family and now he’s taken them from me. I won’t have them anymore because they’ll back him, as they should. That’s even though his father said to me, ‘I know Jim’s a handful.’ And, ‘I’m sorry. This is not the way we raised him.’”

  One of Jim’s best friends told me that he had always advised Gandolfini to handle the press gently, because anything else wasn’t worth it. “I told him it was like he was on guard duty,” the friend says, and takes the pose of a soldier stiffly holding a rifle. “Don’t slap that mosquito, because you’re not supposed to move, and if you slap it the sergeant major will come along and make you dig a six-by-six-foot-deep hole to bury that mosquito in. It’s not worth it.”

  When the case went to court, the celebrity media were disappointed. The settlement was amicable, the press was shut out, and Gandolfini has consistently pointed out how famously he and Michael�
��s mother have gotten on ever since. In December 2002, Gandolfini and Wudarski were divorced. She kept their adjoining condos in the West Village, worth an estimated $2 million, and Michael, then three years old, continued to live with her. James bought a condo downtown in nearby Tribeca, the neighborhood where Robert De Niro lived.

  And then, of course, art imitated life. The Sopranos being what it was, the 2004 season opened with Tony in the middle of an angry separation from Carmela, which would become one of the main plot lines for the rest of the season.

  “Having gone through something similar personally, [it] was a little difficult to have to dredge those things up sometimes,” Gandolfini later told a local Florida reporter. “In terms of acting, anything that’s huge [personally] just makes you dig real deep.

  “It’s going to just take you to places that you haven’t been before. Sometimes it was hard. It was very difficult some of those days to do some of those things and to continue on into it.”

  Writers for The Sopranos, like everyone else on the set, knew what Gandolfini had been through. They gave Tony lines—“I’m old-school. I don’t believe in this separation … and divorce,” he screams at Carmela—that didn’t take much imagination to assume echoed the actor’s own feelings. Unlike Jim, however, Tony went straight to coercion, threatening to end Carmela’s nice suburban lifestyle and personal security. “He’s got a lot of rage,” Gandolfini said.

  Aston told me that Gandolfini usually called writers “vampires,” because they’d listen to you sympathetically, like any friend, and then turn around and use what you’d told them in a scene. It was the Post that made the meanest play on this game of real and false, quoting Marcy saying you could tell Jim wasn’t Tony Soprano because “Tony would never hurt his family.”

  * * *

  When an actual family fights about money, they’re usually really fighting about love. But when a theater family fights about money, it’s about money—and love, too, just not for each other, but for the audience.

  In 2003 the cast of The Sopranos started a fight about money that threatened, for a time, to end the show. When it was over, it turned out all along to have been about the audience for The Sopranos, which happened to be the most multiplatform-accessible hit TV show in history. They were a different kind of audience for a different kind of show, and they suggested new possibilities for entertainment that aspired to art.

  It started when four of the show regulars banded together—an idea inspired by four regular players on The West Wing, who had recently done the same thing with great success—to demand more money per episode. Jamie-Lynn Sigler (Tony’s daughter, Meadow), Robert Iler (his son, A.J.), Drea de Matteo (Christopher’s girlfriend Adriana), and Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) were all getting $20,000 to $30,000 per episode, and they wanted an increase to $100,000. That would add up to $1.3 million for each per year—maybe not Kelsey Grammar money, but more than the dog got on Frasier.

  The West Wing quartet had more than doubled their per episode salaries to over $70,000 after missing a couple of early read-throughs, so the demands weren’t beyond reason. Even more troubling to HBO executives, however, were press reports that they weren’t facing just the Four Horsemen in supporting roles. Lead actor James Gandolfini was waiting to hear how their negotiations went before he decided to set an asking price of his own for the next season.

  This smelled terribly of unionization, employees banding together to demand higher wages—something that had not been happening much in America for some time in 2003. The year before, at the behest of Steve Buscemi, who would both perform as an actor and direct some of The Sopranos’ best-known episodes, Gandolfini had made radio ads for the New York City Uniformed Fireman’s Association in their contract dispute with the city. Buscemi used to be a fireman himself. The suits at HBO worried that they might be cast in the same light as city union-busters. It left hurt feelings, and the dispute became public very fast.

  HBO said publicly that Gandolfini was being “greedy,” that he was more interested in his own ability to earn big money than in the rest of the crew. At one point HBO shut down production for a week, throwing all the grips and caterers and cameramen out of work with no pay, blaming the show’s star for it in the press. Gandolfini filed suit to dissolve his own two-year $10 million contract. HBO felt it had no choice but nip this sort of thing in the bud, and it responded with a $100 million lawsuit of its own against Gandolfini, charging him with trying to break a legitimate contract and destroy what together they’d made into a very lucrative property.

  Jim tried several personal overtures to calm the waters, one at the Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony in March, walking over to the gathered HBO execs and telling them how much he “appreciated” what the company had done for him, and again at a private meeting later in that week. The response every time was pretty stony. Producer Brad Grey—who had noted that contract negotiations at The Sopranos had started sounding like a Mafia shakedown—did a last-minute negotiation that found a compromise.

  Gandolfini’s salary was more than doubled again, to over $800,000 per episode; all told, he stood to earn more than $13 million for the fifth season, more than the $11 million HBO had first offered, but less than the $16 million he’d initially demanded. The rest of the cast and crew went back to work immediately, with back pay for the week they’d missed. That meant a lot to Gandolfini at the closing.

  And the four regular players who’d started the whole thing? Their salaries more than doubled too, to around $75,000 per episode.

  But the story doesn’t end there. After the brinkmanship of the 2003 salary negotiations, things were quiet on the money question for two years. But only a very few people knew that some of that quiet had been bought by Jim personally.

  “He was a really good guy,” actor Steve Schirripa, who played Uncle Junior’s right hand, Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri, told New York’s WFAN radio station after Gandolfini died. “A really good guy. As good of an actor as he was, he was a better guy. A generous guy. The guy gave us $33,000 each—sixteen people. There’s a lot of people who made a lot more money than him. In season four he called every one of the cast members and gave us a check. He said, ‘Thanks for sticking by me.’ It’s like buying sixteen people a car.”

  The other way of looking at it is $528,000 out of Gandolfini’s $13 million for the fifth season went to his fellow Sopranos cast members. While it’s probably true that other actors have done extremely generous things with the money they’ve received, stories like this one have few if any contemporary precedents. Certainly not at that amount. And it goes a long way toward explaining the loyalty—extending to their own sort of omerta about James’s personal life and his behavior on the set—that his cast mates and friends consistently express for James.

  It definitely set a tone on the set—the play was the thing, not the ego of the individual actors. Aston told Gandolfini in those years that he’d be able to work as an actor as long as he wanted to, for the rest of his life, after The Sopranos. But he knew some of his fellow actors weren’t so lucky. And it was the ensemble that made it work, that gave them all the best career opportunity they’d ever likely have.

  The 2003 negotiations happened when the revolutionary impact of The Sopranos was only just beginning to be understood. Nobody thought a show like it could ever be syndicated on basic cable (it was, in an expurgated version—the actors really didn’t say “fuck” as much as everyone thought—earning an initial $195 million from A&E less than two years later). All the books, DVDs, video games, spin-off merchandise, and promotional publicity HBO got from its signature series were only beginning to be totaled up.

  And, more important, the negotiations acknowledged something fundamental about American cultural habits in the new century. Movies were once group cultural events, part of a night out on the town, done in public in the great gathering places like downtown movie palaces and suburban cineplexes. And those places are dying.

  Actually, public space in the United
States has been defunded and marginalized since the early 1980s, and by the turn of the century we were only beginning to understand the impact of those policies. But one effect was declining movie ticket sales and the explosion of big, flat-screen TVs in living rooms around the country. The “theater crowd” was becoming virtual. Cable TV was a new medium that had different ways of finding an audience for serious art—it could conjure that paying audience out of the living rooms into which they’d retreated. Soon they’d be able to watch The Sopranos in an eighty-six-hour marathon on DVD, or on TiVo, or any other on-demand service, and while the producers made money off those forms, they didn’t show up in TV ratings or audience share stats.

  The sour blossom that David Chase had fashioned out of frustration for his native state, which James Gandolfini helped turn into a vehicle for sympathy and pathos, had found a huge audience out there. Because the world really was filled with simulated New Jerseys: Everywhere you had a corporate back-office securing profits by shaving labor costs and dodging regulations, whether in the United Kingdom or Fujian province or the suburbs of Sydney, you had a little piece of Jersey. Really, they were everywhere you looked.

  As Tony said in the first episode, “It’s good to get in on something on the ground floor.” And in the matter of finding a new audience, The Sopranos did not come too late.

  Even though he compromised for his crew at the very end, the 2003 negotiations were a personal triumph for James Gandolfini. Tony had been helpless to save his wild ducks, but Jim saved his, and gave them a nice raise to boot. At least, all the wild ducks in his professional family.

  In four years, Gandolfini had leaped from working class to the 1 percent, but he had not forgotten where he’d come from, or all the people he was constantly thanking for his own success. “All the fuss during The Sopranos really was pretty ridiculous,” he said much later. “None of us expected it to last, and it lasted almost ten years. Honestly? I don’t think I’m that different. I’ve lived in the same apartment for years. I’ve kept a lot of the same friends. I’m still grumpy and miserable.… But in a good way!”