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

by Bischoff, Dan

  All the soldiers knew who Tony Soprano was. DVDs of The Sopranos were popular items in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  * * *

  In 2006, HBO aired Baghdad ER, a documentary about life in a U.S. military trauma ward in Iraq, directed by Jon Alpert. The documentary was intense, heartbreaking, and profoundly honest, and it won a Peabody Award. Alpert wanted to do the obvious sequel, a documentary about soldiers returning and the work being done by Wounded Warriors. But HBO, perhaps understandably, thought however honorable the idea was, it was unlikely to draw an audience—eat-your-spinach TV is a euphemism here. Besides, the Pentagon had not liked Baghdad ER, and they decided to revoke the filmmaker’s access to Walter Reed hospital just as he was about to shoot there.

  That was when Gandolfini got involved. Although he didn’t want to be on camera, an odd compromise evolved. The vets would come into New York City, to an empty stage set, and sit on a chair; Jim would sit off the dais, with the camera shooting over his shoulder, and interview them about their “Alive Day,” the day they were wounded but survived.

  Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq became the first project Gandolfini put before the public after The Sopranos ended. He interviewed ten wounded soldiers, many of them missing two or three limbs, some with severe head trauma or post-traumatic stress syndrome. You don’t hear much from Jim; occasionally you see him get up and hug the soldier when the interview is done. One of the subjects, former army first lieutenant Dawn Halfaker, a pretty redhead, had lost her right arm and shoulder to a rocket-propelled grenade. During their talk Halfaker wonders aloud whether her child, if she ever has one, could truly love her now. There’s a long pause.

  Gandolfini waits, waits a little longer, then quietly asks, “What were you just thinking about?”

  “The reality of, will I be able to raise a kid?” she answers. “I won’t be able to pick up my son or daughter with two arms.”

  Jim was committing a kind of journalism, though probably not the sort he’d imagined when he was getting that Rutgers degree. And it was also a kind of reversal on the celebrity journalism Gandolfini hated—he, the celebrity, out of the lights, real tough guys onstage and bearing witness to the awfulness of violence. Gandolfini kept in touch with some of the soldiers over time. He asked Giordano to help him find ways to help out. He wanted a Wounded Warrior driver for when he was in Los Angeles, and Giordano found him a marine vet who had once driven for a general.

  Wounded Warriors became part of his crew. He filmed a series of public service announcements for the project just before he died, to help with fund-raising. (Wounded Warriors has now grown from Giordano and his two buddies into an organization with 421 direct employees and an annual budget of $200 million.) Giordano says he’s not sure what to do with the PSAs now that Jim has died. But he remembers, when they were shooting the commercials and asked if he could do another take, Gandolfini replied, “Sure, this is way more important than the shit I usually do.”

  One of the wounded soldiers in Alive Day committed suicide a few years later. Jim had kept in touch. The vet set up his computer to send out farewell notes after he’d died, and Jim was one of the recipients.

  Gandolfini teamed up with Alpert for a second documentary, this time as executive producer and narrator, on the history of wartime post-traumatic stress, Wartorn 1861–2010, in 2011. Tom Richardson of Attaboy Films says they were preparing a documentary on American prisons when Gandolfini died, and talking about a documentary on for-profit prisons. Alpert, like Sirico, became a regular visitor at the Jersey Shore in the summer, and Gandolfini took a seat on the board of his New York City documentary company.

  In all his work on the documentaries and for charity, Jim was pretty consistent about trying to fade into the background.

  “I grew up not so different than Jim,” Al Giordano says. “I’m from Long Island. My dad was in the marines, I was in the marines, my brother went to West Point. Military service is in my family. I worked with Jim all these years, he was like a regular guy, you could talk with him about anything, he loved his Jets, Rutgers football, his son, his family, all of that, just like anybody. But I didn’t know until I read about it, after he’d died, that his father had gotten a Purple Heart in World War II. He never mentioned it. And that kind of makes it all come together for me. He was quiet about certain things.”

  It’s a reminder of what T. J. Foderaro called his “bullshit meter”—the way Jim would be embarrassed by any mention of his own problems, or any note of sympathy you might offer him (even about Lynn Jacobson’s death). Gandolfini, Sirico, and Richardson—who’d met Buck twenty-five years earlier at the Rutgers pub—visited Iraq and Afghanistan together on U.S.O. tours. At first the U.S.O. put them up in a five-star hotel in Kuwait City, but Gandolfini wanted to see the war. They took off, first for a police station in Mosul, in Kurdistan, which had been taken back by American troops just the day before. They saw enough to make guys who play tough guys on TV respect the tough guys who were protecting them in the desert.

  But they impressed everybody, even General Ray Odierno, a Jersey guy himself, who would later become commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Giordano and the Wounded Warriors Project have decided to create an annual James Gandolfini Award, dedicated to the celebrity who does the most to support them in any year.

  * * *

  Gandolfini made two movies, too, in 2008, first David Chase’s semiautobiographical Not Fade Away, about a young Italian-American growing up in Newark in the 1960s in love with the Rolling Stones. Gandolfini plays the slightly mystified father, whose son throws caution to the winds and heads to California with his upscale Jersey girlfriend—who promptly leaves him behind at a Malibu party to run off with Mick Jagger.

  And Gandolfini played a world-weary American general in the British satire of the political shenanigans leading up to the Iraq war, In the Loop. The movie did rather well, appearing just as the American presidential elections were gearing up and the consensus that the war had been a huge mistake had hardened into a wide conviction. Gandolfini’s is a supporting role, but one crucial to the plot, a U.S. general who knows the war will be a disaster but cynically comes out in support to help his career when he realizes Washington has already decided to go to war.

  While he was filming In the Loop, Gandolfini caught some theater in the West End of London, including The God of Carnage, by French playwright Yasmina Reza. Carnage had debuted in Zurich, and it was being done in English by film star Ralph Fiennes, which was why Gandolfini chose to see it in the first place (well, that, and the fact that the play is only an hour and a half long). Gandolfini came out of the theater laughing and inspired. He met with the producers and broached the subject of bringing the play to Broadway.

  He hadn’t been on the New York stage since A Streetcar Named Desire with Alec Baldwin in 1992; he hadn’t actually been on stage since 1997, when he did a short play at a ninety-nine-seat theater in Los Angeles run by Sean Penn’s parents. But The God of Carnage was in many ways perfect: An ensemble piece with four equal parts, it tells the story of two fairly well-off couples who come together after their eleven-year-old sons have a fight at school. Gandolfini wanted to play the least neurotic character in the piece, a small-business owner married to an artsy wife (played by Marcia Gay Harden). Jeff Daniels played the Fiennes part, an arrogant lawyer, whose wife (Hope Davis) “manages” her husband’s wealth. The play is a high-voltage, quick-riposte comedy laced with raucous social satire (Daniels’s character repeatedly talks on his cell phone with more attention than he does in person). Harden won the Tony, but it was Gandolfini who got the audience to show up. And he was very funny.

  What happens in The God of Carnage—four adults coming together to discuss a fight between eleven-year-olds, who then wind up acting like middle-schoolers themselves—brought out his appealing childishness. Gandolfini was able to explode with deep frustration (something he did again and again on The Sopranos) to get laughs. And the play bristled with character reversals, the most impor
tant being the audience’s sense that the lawyer’s marriage was shaky is transferred to the small businessman’s marriage over the course of the play.

  But more to the point, The God of Carnage helped change Gandolfini’s image in the business. “Comic roles started coming to him after Carnage,” Mark Armstrong says. “He was offered the lead on The Office for its third incarnation, the part that ultimately James Spader took. He was very tempted, but it probably wouldn’t have worked out, he had an exclusive contract with HBO. But we were getting more offers for comedy, and we were very happy with that.”

  In October 2009, Gandolfini married Deborah Lin in her native Honolulu, with hundreds of guests attending. The groom was forty-seven years old, the bride forty. They had just bought a colonial on almost nine acres for $1.5 million in the rolling hills around Tewksbury, New Jersey, about an hour from New York City. The house was new, built in 2007, and it won the New Jersey Builders Association Custom House of the Year Award, in part for its geothermal heating and cooling and the recycled, antique hardwood floors. Gandolfini commuted from Tewksbury to the city most days during The God of Carnage.

  After taking a supporting role the next year as a New York City mayor in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Gandolfini and Sirico had finally met Rudy Giuliani after the mix-up just after 9/11, and Sirico says they became good friends), Gandolfini returned to another childlike role. He played the voice for Carol, the big striped Wild Thing in Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze and adapted from the children’s book by Maurice Sendak.

  If The God of Carnage treated adults like children, Where the Wild Things Are treated children’s fantasies like adult neuroses, and the little boy’s relationship with Carol is key. Carol is sort of the child’s id. We meet Carol (the character was played by another actor in a giant suit, and Jim synced his lines) as he’s destroying the Wild Things’ hivelike houses made of sticks; Carol shows Max his artwork, a stick-built version of the island where everyone can be happy. When Max finally leaves the island to go home, a tearful Carol begs him to stay, but knows he must go. All of this is only hinted at in Sendak’s book, and the film adds a suggestive prestory about Max and his single mom, Connie (played by Catherine Keener), who is trying to date again (Mark Ruffalo). Gandolfini’s sorrow over childhood’s disappointments and ultimate loss is oddly powerful in the maw of the giant suit, and the message is more Eugène Ionesco than Lewis Carroll.

  Gandolfini’s friends say he was beginning to accept his status in Los Angeles now, too—the reflexive doubts about his ability to perform particular roles, and the letters to directors recommending other actors, had begun to fade from his practice. In 2010 he rented a house in Laurel Canyon, a twisting arroyo that is lined with expensive homes tucked into the sere California landscape. It’s a relaxed enclave for movie business people, a beautiful section of green-friendly but often unpretentious houses that bring nature into their designs.

  For the first time, Gandolfini begins to really go native in California. “Moving out here after those years in New York,” says his manager Nancy Sanders, “he had a hard time with California for a while. Even at his Laurel Canyon home he’d see his neighbor just staring at the mountains for hours, and Jim would say, ‘What the fuck is he looking at?’

  “But he started to relax, I think,” Sanders continues. “He was settling into the California lifestyle and caught himself enjoying some of it … except the driving. The thing about Jim was his mind never stopped. He’d think about things, sometimes too much. He was very bright, and with that comes a bit of being tortured and hard on yourself and others. I think in those last years he started to settle down and accept things a little better, realizing that he couldn’t control it all.”

  “The doubts calmed down,” says Mark Armstrong, Sanders’s partner. “Jim was a pretty driven guy in some ways. He could yell at you when something went wrong, but he’d hug you when it was over, that was his way of communicating, you know? But he seemed much more accepting in those last couple of years.”

  And in 2010 Gandolfini released a film that reads like an act of love, Welcome to the Rileys, about a small businessman from Indianapolis and his wife of thirty years (Melissa Leo) whose daughter died in a car accident years before. The couple has drifted apart as the wife’s guilt turns into an intense agoraphobia, and Doug Riley wanders into an affair with a waitress. On a convention trip to New Orleans for his plumbing supply business, Riley meets a sixteen-year-old stripper and runaway (Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame) and decides to sell his business and live with her, platonically, almost like a replacement dad. When his wife overcomes her lassitude and joins him in New Orleans, she, too, accepts the stripper, and they form an uneasy pseudo-family until the girl bolts. But the effort reunites the older couple, and allows them to accept life once more.

  Directed by Jake Scott, the son of Ridley and nephew of Tony, Welcome to the Rileys debuted at the 2010 Sundance Festival, where some critics cited it as part of Gandolfini’s continuing effort to “whack Tony Soprano.” It is that, of course, but it’s also an extension of his everyman persona, another small businessman (like his part in The God of Carnage) and a confused soul lost in the middle of his life. Tony without the gang and violence, you have to say.

  Gandolfini had contemplated the problem of how to make his break from the gangster genre during The God of Carnage, telling The Los Angeles Times that the audience might not have accepted him “in a wig as Ferdinand II” right after The Sopranos ended (“I’d pay to see that,” costar Jeff Daniels quipped). Generals and big-city mayors were not that far from Tony, in some ways; small businessmen from Brooklyn and then Indianapolis were yet another step away.

  There was still a problem of scale, somehow, with Gandolfini’s presence in a film. A lot of TV stars have difficulty transferring to the movies—it’s like the audience doesn’t want to let you disappear into a different character. They think they know you, and they want to see you, not someone else. Gandolfini could overcome this problem to an extent; he could bring an audience to a sophisticated comedy, as The God of Carnage showed. But as part of a coequal quartet, he was like a bass player doing lead guitar. The contemporary movie with a character actor as its lead was a rare thing, and finding just the right part was harder than it looked.

  * * *

  After studying the problems of runaway kids for Welcome to the Rileys, in 2011, Gandolfini heard a radio report about a home for runaways and abused kids in Toms River, near the Jersey Shore, called Ocean’s Harbor House. It’s a twelve-bed shelter that’s open twenty-four-hours a day every day, with medical services and counseling as well as food and clothing for ten- to nineteen-year-olds.

  Michael’s school in L.A. had asked its students to do some form of community service in the summer and report on it in the fall. So Gandolfini called Harbor House to see if he and Michael could help out in any way. The director said they had no computers for the kids—would Gandolfini care to contribute toward that?

  Jim took Michael, who was eleven at the time, to a nearby electronics outlet and bought thirteen laptops, which he and Michael loaded with software and drove over to drop off. While Michael showed the computers to the kids and counselors, Jim walked the grounds. The garden and property were scraggly with weeds after the Jersey summer.

  The next day Jim hired workmen at a nearby lawn center to pull the weeds and vines, and then he and Michael trucked over with eight yards of mulch. The image of Jamie helping his father at the Catholic high school in Paramus with maintenance and painting chores comes immediately to mind. They spent the afternoon spreading the mulch with the help of facilities director Ken Butterworth.

  Gandolfini was, Butterworth remembers, “completely down-to-earth, really likable. Approachable, you know? You could tell he really loved his kid, and wanted him to know that not everybody is lucky with their families.

  “And so we were working together, and I asked him, ‘Where’d you go to college?’” Butterworth says. “And he looked aw
ay, I think he said Rutgers, but I thought, ‘Ah, so we’re not going to talk about you, huh?’”

  Knowing where the boundaries should be was becoming more important every year. Gandolfini had been working with his acting coach, Harold Guskin, on an independent film, called Kiddie Ride, written by Guskin’s wife, Sandra Jennings, that was all about boundaries. Set at the Jersey Shore and debuting at a 2011 film festival, it got limited release as Down the Shore in 2013 (though that was not Guskin’s edit). Jennings wrote the script with Gandolfini in mind. There were autobiographical elements—the Shore of course, the working middle-class milieu and so on. The conflict stems from the hero’s sense of loyalty and friendship, which keep him from claiming what’s rightfully his.

  Bailey (Gandolfini) runs the merry-go-round and kiddie train concession in a cheap seaside carnival. His best friend owns it all, including the girl next door, Mary (Famke Janssen), who was Bailey’s first love.

  Most of the movie takes place in the little step-back houses built chock-a-block in Keansburg, not so different from those in nearby Lavallette, where Jim’s parents summered when he was a kid. (Half of Keansburg’s 3,300 houses were destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, lending the film an archival sadness.) Bailey and Mary used to crawl across the tiny gap between their houses on a ladder laid across their bedroom windowsills.

  The plot turns on family secrets, a murder, financial schemes, and drugs, all familiar Jersey themes from The Sopranos, but here the crime occurred years before our story begins. At the conclusion Bailey, Mary, and her mentally handicapped son are in a truck with a bag full of money and the highway in front of them, about as Elmore Leonard-y an ending as you could want (Gandolfini loved crime novels and thrillers, Leonard’s and Stephen Hunter’s most of all). Unlike The Sopranos, there is hope, but only in escape from New Jersey—Bailey and Mary have a second chance at happiness if they drive all night.