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.
His instinct was to do something real, and something local. And real life in his neighborhood had been changed forever during the third season of The Sopranos when two fully-loaded jetliners smashed into the World Trade Center, not two miles from his and Marcy’s apartment in the West Village.
Susan Aston remembers coming to James’s apartment after the planes hit. Power was out in places downtown, but Jim had electricity, and she, her niece Britney Houlihan, Jim, and Marcy hunkered down in front of the television after the towers fell and the tip of lower Manhattan went black with smoke and dust. Michael was still a toddler. They were joined later that day by Marcy’s masseuse, Bethany Parish, and her husband Anthony; they lived in Battery Park City, right next to the towers, and Battery Park was being forcibly evacuated.
Like a lot of New Yorkers, they weren’t sure that the attacks had ended. They saw out their windows the bedraggled lines of people in scorched clothes and with soot-blackened faces as they walked north from Ground Zero, very quietly for the most part, trying to find a way home. The bridges and tunnels were closed and all the subway and commuter trains shut off; Susan’s then-husband, Mario Mendoza, had been upstate, and he’d parked his car north of Spuyten Duyvil and walked across the Henry Hudson Bridge into the city. Mario hitched rides or walked all the way down the island to join them in the Village that afternoon. They thought about getting the raft James had brought into the city from the Shore that summer. They could cross the river to Jersey, make their way quickly enough to friends’ houses. At least there they could be mobile.
“But if we got the raft,” James said, “we’d have to bring guns, too.” They might need some means of defense if there was another attack—but also, perhaps, to ward off stranded commuters anxious to get off the island themselves. Aston says that’s when she really started to freak out about what was happening.
They decided against making a dash across the river. Aston’s mom called from Texas and told her that the Pentagon had been hit and another airliner had been crashed by its passengers in Pennsylvania. And that was it. But no one who was in New York City that day will ever forget the way it felt.
After the cleanup got underway, James, Tony Sirico, Vincent Pastore, and Vincent Curatola went to Ground Zero to meet with firemen, police, construction workers, and other volunteers to boost morale. The actors were mobbed.
“We were supposed to meet the mayor [Rudy Giuliani], but he couldn’t make it, he got delayed, you know what it was like back then,” Tony Sirico remembers. “So we go in, they gave us all these masks to wear, to breathe. There was like hundreds of these guys out there, and it was unbelievable, just unbelievable, what those buildings had become … Just twisted, what all was in it, well, you’ve seen the pictures. Unbelievable. And the guys who were working there were so happy to see us, any break from searching through that mess of wreckage, thinking you’d find a body. Only, they found out, there weren’t many bodies.
“And at one point I took off my mask to light a cigarette, and marone,” Sirico continues. “I almost choked. These guys were breathing that stuff day after day.… It was amazing. And I think [our commitment to do something for people responding to the attacks] all started from that. You just had to do something. We all felt it.”
It’s true, they did. The day after 9/11, Steve Buscemi, who the previous spring had directed Sirico in the acclaimed “The Pine Barrens” episode, in which Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti get lost in the snow, had gone down to his old firehouse and volunteered. He spent a week clearing the rubble alongside his fellow firefighters.
Everything about those days became emotionally freighted for New Yorkers. At The Sopranos, they were careful to remove the brief glimpse of the towers you could catch in Tony’s side rearview mirror as he left the Lincoln Tunnel during the credits sequence. Time was divided between the days when the World Trade Center was there and the days when it wasn’t.
James told Susan that he felt ridiculous going to Ground Zero and just standing there in a mask, without really pitching in and helping, physically. But the overwhelming response of the working guys at Ground Zero, the way they so evidently loved the visit by Tony, Paulie, Big Pussy, and Johnny Sack, revealed another side of this celebrity thing. It didn’t have to be a fire hose aimed at you. It could be a spotlight you used to shine on other people.
Soon Gandolfini was going back to Jersey every fall for the annual OctoberWoman’s Breast Cancer Foundation fund-raising dinner, to help out his old classmate Donna Mancinelli in Park Ridge. The whole cast came out to Bergen County, signing autographs and posing for pictures. Jim spent the night afterward, no matter how long the banquet took, drinking beer and telling jokes with his high school buddies in basements and rec rooms in Park Ridge.
Jim insisted on only HBO cameras, no media. But when the financial crash came in 2008, the cancer fund-raising changed—no one was buying thousand-dollar dinner tickets anymore—and The Sopranos had ended. What hadn’t ended were the two wars sparked by the attack on the World Trade Center.
Those wars were still sending a steady stream of severely maimed and wounded soldiers back home. In 2006, Al Giordano, a former Marine and a veterans affairs activist, had helped found a nonprofit called the Wounded Warriors Project, designed to help returning soldiers adjust to civilian life. Part of the project was an annual summer event at Breezy Point, in Queens, where convalescent soldiers, including amputees, could get out in the sun, learn to use their prostheses, and do water sports—“like, learn to ski on one leg,” Sirico, a vet himself, says. He called to find out if there was anything he could do, and Giordano invited him down.
“I had to do it, I just had to,” Sirico says. “I mean, I play a tough guy, but these guys are the tough guys. After what they had done, I had to.” He told Gandolfini about the event. Soon James was in touch with Giordano. Every July the Wounded Warriors mount a parade from Staten Island across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and down to Breezy Point (the cops shut down the bridge and river traffic for the day). It’s a long march of wounded soldiers, some more ambulatory than
others. Gandolfini became a regular.
“Jim shows up in a red Cadillac convertible with a quadruple amputee, Eighty-second Airborne, his wife, daughter, and his mother-in-law in the backseat with him,” Giordano recalls. This was in 2012. “And he drives them the whole parade route, it takes like two hours, and then spends the day at the beach.… I meet a lot of celebrities in my job, and some want to do this just for the cameras. But that was not Jim Gandolfini.”
Gandolfini and Sirico toured military hospitals together, often with other actors from the show. They’d meet at Walter Reed hospital outside Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Army Medical Center, and in rehab clinics around the Northeast, talking to large groups. Sirico remembers one Veterans Administration facility that had a rock-climbing wall, to help amputees regain a sense of mobility—many of them could climb to the top with just three, even two limbs. Gandolfini insisted on hooking up a belay harness and trying to climb in front of dozens of recovering soldiers.
“HBO woulda had a heart attack if they’d seen this,” Sirico recalls. “So Jimmy gets all hooked up, he’s like a really big guy then, and he climbs two, three, four handholds—and boom, flat on his ass! It brought down the house, I’m telling you.”
They journeyed out to the U.S. military’s chief burn center in San Antonio, always the most difficult place for a morale visit—soldiers with “half their face burned off, limbs burned off, in constant pain,” Sirico recalls. “The trick is, never lose eye contact. I’d grab their arm, you know, where they weren’t burned, touch them, let them know we care.” Jim was representing an expensive watch company, and he would pass out $5,000 watches to the wounded—he’d hint that they didn’t have to treat them like sentimental keepsakes if they needed the money.
James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano Page 14
