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

by Bischoff, Dan

  Throughout the run of The Sopranos, network executives worried that David Chase’s bleak sense of humor would ruin the whole thing. Early in the first season they knew they had in Tony a character Americans found fascinating, even lovable. Then Chase had him murder that Mafia snitch he’d glimpsed while driving Meadow to visit potential colleges, or had him beat one of his big, genial, but terminally stupid wiseguys unconscious with a phone. How could a television audience continue to love Tony after he did something like that? Archie Bunker would not have survived turning Meathead in for smoking pot in the basement—would folks tune in after their hero had murdered somebody, or terrified them with his uncontrolled viciousness?

  They stayed with Tony, of course, in spite of the violence. And that’s largely because of Gandolfini’s remarkable ability to grab your sympathy. But it was also because the audience The Sopranos had found was not the same as the audience that watched Bonanza or The Brady Bunch. For that matter, the United States wasn’t the same country that produced those shows. We weren’t all riding some wagon train to the stars together anymore; there was a lot more sympathy for the devil then there used to be.

  The key to Tony’s appeal was explicitly defined in the third season, during an episode called “Employee of the Month,” which dealt with the rape of Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco. Her brutal rape was one of those signature Sopranos scenes of scarifying violence, the sort you almost never see on TV. Dr. Melfi files a complaint, and the rapist is arrested. But the cops have to let him go because of some technicality, and when Melfi sees him working in a fast-food restaurant, she’s shocked to see his picture framed on the wall as “Employee of the Month.”

  Later she meets her own analyst, Dr. Elliot Kupferberg (played by director Peter Bogdanovich), and tells him about the anger and frustration, not to mention simmering fear, that the experience left her. And she goes on to describe a strange dream in which she walks out of her consulting office and tries to get a soda from a vending machine, but it doesn’t come and she gets her arm trapped in the opening. There’s a Rottweiler barking nearby. Suddenly she sees her rapist in the room, he begins to assault her again, and the dog leaps on him as he cries in fear and pain.

  “Oh my god, the dog,” she says to her analyst (the script is by Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess). “A Rottweiler, Elliot. Big head, massive shoulders, the direct descendant of the dogs bred by Roman soldiers to guard their camps.”

  Bogdanovich murmurs, “I didn’t know that.…”

  “Who could I sic on that son of a bitch to tear him to shreds?” she continues. “Let me tell you something, no feeling has ever been so sweet as to see that pig beg and plead and scream for his life. Because the justice system is fucked up, Elliot.… Who’s going to fix it, you, Elliot?”

  Of course, no shrink could fix anything in the way her psyche wants revenge—no modern, civilized male could do it for her, either. But Tony Soprano could. He would want to do it for her. All she needs to do is tell him.

  It’s an echo of the famous wedding scene in The Godfather, when Don Vito Corleone agrees to have the man who beat up the undertaker’s daughter severely beaten himself, in return for a service the Godfather will ask for later. (That service turns out to be fixing up Sonny Corleone’s machine-gunned corpse for burial.) Private justice has always been the mob’s self-justification—they police the crimes the mainstream courts can never adequately address.

  This is where gangster movies meet a deep American need to explain the country’s failure to achieve perfect justice. If democracy and civic education are so wonderful, if the Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution that perfects the hodgepodge of inherited political traditions brought here from Europe, why is there crime at all? At least, why is there so much crime?

  All American antiheroes claim vigilantism as an excuse sooner or later—they all want to be the Batman. The Mafia does, too. But they’re not Bruce Wayne. Gangsters have achieved a certain social position at different times in history. When the British annexed Singapore, they decided to exclude the Chinese tongs from the mines, reasoning that they exploited the workers and made their lives miserable. But without the Chinese gangsters, the labor markets became unmanageable. There were strikes, violent struggles between factions, pitched battles in the mines themselves. Quietly, the British invited the Triads and their enforcers back. Gang kingpins took to nice estates in the hills, and had toddies with their British neighbors out of sight of either community.

  The Mafia was never that important to American labor, but at the height of unionization after the war, they counted for something. Today, that whole world of unionized labor, big pension funds—pensions themselves—is gone, or disappearing. People loved Tony Soprano because he seemed to be able to do something about all that, maybe turn the clock back a little. Even if it was only to highjack a shipment of flat-screen TVs that would otherwise have gone into shopping centers for the rich. It was nice just to imagine a working-class guy with power.

  Dr. Melfi’s moment of Mafia sympathy passes. She tells her analyst, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to break the social compact,” and she never tells Tony about her rapist.

  But some of the affection for that “big head, massive shoulders” that she expressed in “Employee of the Month” underwent a kind of psychological transference to James Gandolfini. Because even if he had the bottomless hurt and hair-trigger temper of Stanley Kowalski, deep down you knew he was Mitch. Sweet, dependable, respectable Mitch.

  * * *

  New York had a white Christmas in 2010—a really white Christmas. After a dusting, a few inches, fell on Christmas Eve, the day after the holiday it started to snow. And snow. The city plows were overwhelmed; Bedford Street in Tribeca went unplowed over the weekend. Monday night around 8:00 P.M., a driver tried to use Bedford to make a shortcut onto Christopher Street that turned into spinning wheels in what amounted to a three-foot drift.

  Luckily for the driver, right behind him in his four-wheel-drive SUV was Tony Soprano. James Gandolfini climbed out of his car and started rocking the stranded driver’s car back and forth to give him traction. There was so much snow it didn’t help much at first. People along Bedford started gathering to watch—it wasn’t every day you saw a TV and Broadway star looking for cardboard scraps to put under a back tire. A handful of folks started to help. Almost by main force, forty-five minutes later they got the car out of the drift and moving unsteadily down the street. Cheers. Then Gandolfini ducked into the nearby Daddy-O tavern and broke a $100 bill to give $20 tips to all the guys who helped.

  Cheers again.

  It’s not much, really. Any of us would do the same, especially if our car was behind the stranded driver. James would never have mentioned it.

  But the New York Post did. And then, so did the TV stations and gossip channels. Sometimes fame is ugly, but sometimes it’s just mindless chatter about everyday events that nonetheless undermine or confirm a larger sense about a celeb. Saving the driver in a Christmas week snowdrift became one of those stories.

  No one knew, at this point, about James giving every regular actor on The Sopranos a $33,000 personal check in 2004. The OctoberWoman’s Foundation fund-raising for breast cancer research was only dimly perceived, largely because James himself had forbidden journalists and TV outlets from covering it. His work with Wounded Warriors was public, of course, but not that well known in 2010. But the snowdrift on Bedford Street went around the world in an instant.

  Actually, James’s friends had noted this public citizen thing of his for a while, sometimes with mild annoyance. T. J. Foderaro recalls going out with his friend for long walks in Manhattan after closing time and dreading the possibility of coming across a wino lying on the sidewalk; Jim might very easily decide that it was going to get cold, or rain that night, and they should stop and help the guy get home, or to a shelter. There went the night’s conversation.

  All those years as a bouncer may have had something to do wi
th it. Club managers see all kinds of people in all kinds of states, and their job is to make sure every customer has a good time but can get out the door in one piece. The job itself is about taking responsibility.

  Anyway, James was the kind of person you could count on in a pinch like that, and he took it with him to Hollywood, too. Tony Lipin is a film producer in Los Angeles now, but when he first met Gandolfini, on the set of Crimson Tide in 1994, he was working as a costumer. He dressed Jim as a Navy lieutenant. Lipin worked with Gandolfini a few times more as a costumer.

  In 1997, William Friedkin signed on to do a remake of Twelve Angry Men for television featuring Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott, and Lipin was hired to do the costumes. That was a good year for Jim, before his breakthrough on The Sopranos but after he felt he had a solid career going as a character actor. He got the part of juror number six, the house painter who tries to get everyone to stay calm and get along.

  “I had a chance to see he had a big heart at a cocktail party when we finished shooting Twelve Angry Men, a party held really to celebrate a great cast,” Lipin says. In addition to Lemmon, Scott, and Gandolfini, Hume Cronyn, Edward James Olmos, Ossie Davis, Tony Danza, and William Petersen are among the actors. “Bill [Friedkin] wanted us to mark it somehow, so the whole crew gathered for drinks.”

  Scott was great in his part, the small businessman who holds out for a guilty verdict because of his personal regret about the loss of his own son (Lee J. Cobb in the original). But these were the years, toward the end of his life, when Scott was pretty lost in his alcoholism.

  “The party was winding down, really there were almost no people left, but Scott was totally out of it, lying on a couch,” Lipin recalls. “And it came down to Jim, Petersen, and me to carry Scott out to the town car the production had provided for him. There was no way he could get home on his own. What struck me was the quiet way Jim helped Scott to his feet and got us to take him down and gently lay him in the backseat, no fuss, just simple acceptance.…”

  One of Gandolfini’s favorite writers was Charles Bukowski, the Los Angeles poet of the poor, drunks, and the drudgery of taking a straight job. But Jim’s solicitousness for another actor in his cups wasn’t literary. Clearly he understood drunkenness, not just from his time in the clubs but from personal experience (1997 was also the year Gandolfini got arrested for drag racing while drunk).

  Part of Gandolfini’s charisma flowed from a romantic fatalism, a kind of hoping against hopelessness. Several of Jim’s Rutgers friends mentioned his affection for a fellow student back then who everyone knew as “John the Arab.” John actually had an Italian surname, but his father worked for an oil company in Saudi Arabia when John was growing up, and when the kid enrolled at Rutgers one of his distinguishing accomplishments was the ability to imitate the muezzin’s chant from a minaret perfectly. At least, perfectly as far as the ears of a bunch of Jersey sophomores in New Brunswick could discern. Hence, John the Arab.

  Thing was, not very many of Jim’s crew liked John that much. He was rather withdrawn; he could be inexplicably rude, and some of the coeds thought he was “creepy.” But Jim sympathized with John. He was always hanging at the Birchwood apartment because Jim told him he was welcome. When John finally had a kind of psychic break, Jim took him over to mental health services. Almost nobody visited John in the convalescent ward, but Jim did, often dragging a friend or two along with him. It was those friends who told me the story of John the Arab, looking back on it as one of the strangest things about their friend Buck.

  Tom Richardson says Gandolfini kept bringing John up after breaking through in Hollywood. “Where’s John the Arab?” he’d ask, and when Richardson came to work at Attaboy Films in 2009, he actually started a search. He couldn’t find him. An Italian-American who can imitate the Muslim call to prayer—how hard could it be to find someone like that? But they never did.

  Still, that dogged loyalty to the old days is something that evokes loyalty in return. One way friends showed loyalty was by never talking to the press; many of them kept the faith after Gandolfini’s death by refusing to go on the record for this book. Yet even as they refused, they’d shake their heads and wonder out loud why—they really had only the nicest things to say. But really, there were no smoking guns or anything, they all say that with real conviction. The Gandolfinis, the whole family, they’d say, were just “very private.”

  “I can’t say I know that for certain, but my impression of him was that as he became more famous he was really uncomfortable with all that attention,” Di Ionno told me. “There was a part of him that I don’t think really, really got it. I don’t think it was a completely false humility. Maybe it was more scary than that. Maybe it was a sense of, like, ‘I’m not really entitled to this … my mother was a cafeteria lady, my father was a school janitor, I know what I am deep down inside—I’m a regular guy who got really lucky.’”

  Di Ionno was one of the early crew who’d lost touch, but he was easy enough to find when The Sopranos did its location shoot for the pilot episode. Jim invited Mark over to the set, and they had a hugging reunion. It was Hometown Boy Makes Good. Di Ionno says they picked up talking like no time had passed at all, though they hadn’t seen each other for more than a decade.

  Many of the others—Richardson, Bellino, Mark Ohlstein, Stewart Lowell, Tony Foster, and some of the Park Ridge friends, like Ken Koehler, Donna Mancinelli, and her two brothers—had kept in touch. They’d come down to the Shore in the summer, had their kids play together. Susan Aston, of course, worked with Jim pretty directly for over twenty-five years, as did Harold Guskin. All of them acted protective of Jim’s memory, as if he were incongruously defenseless or vulnerable. It’s hard to believe that so many people would react so similarly, with such emotional directness, if they were trying to mislead.

  Jim gave Di Ionno invitations to The Sopranos premiere, and the invites kept coming. The Star-Ledger itself sponsored a reception for the whole cast just as the first season ended on air. By then, everybody knew the show was going to be a phenomenon.

  “At the second season premiere [in New York City]—and I’ll never forget this—he was walking out, and there’s people lined up behind the velvet rope yelling for him,” Di Ionno remembers. “‘Tony, hey, Tony! Hey, Tony!’ And this cloud kind of passed over his face. He was smiling and stuff, but I just got this sense that he was thinking to himself, ‘They don’t know what the fuck I am, I’m a TV character.’ And frankly even our newspaper treated him like they couldn’t separate Tony Soprano from James Gandolfini.”

  It really was a kind of love. The kind an audience enjoys.

  * * *

  “How Italian was he?” one of Jim’s oldest friends once replied, when I asked the obvious question. “Well, he was Italian enough to refuse spaghetti sauce from a can. Wouldn’t touch the stuff. The sauce had to be real. But he was American enough to use ketchup at the table if it wasn’t tomatoe-y enough.”

  Food authenticity has become a yardstick of Italian authenticity. Mario Batali, Jim’s old friend from Rutgers, made a very successful career of it. Hand-dipped mozzarella, hand-tied bracciole, hand-cut pastas, and handpicked tomatoes are the secret. The old ways are the best.

  As he grew successful, he became a regular at Batali’s restaurants, and he always had an eye for fine food and wine. But he also had simple tastes. Friends told me James liked macaroni and cheese, for example. As someone who lived in the same pre-Giuliani Manhattan in the 1980s, they sound like bachelor tastes to me. He liked to eat, that was clear, but was more a gourmand than a gourmet, with that tinge of overeating the first word implies.

  His friends listed a dozen movies as his favorites, more than half of them comedies (Borat, The Odd Couple, The Great Outdoors, Role Models, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the original version of The Producers). He also loved Dom DeLuise’s Fatso, about an Italian boy who grows up fat because every time he gets upset, his mother calms him down with food. Fatso is a bit of a civil rights
movie, calling for liberation of the fat people. DeLuise is shown at various stages in his life, struggling to lose weight, until, at the end of the movie when he’s an old man, surrounded by his wife and daughters, he points to his wasting body and says, in effect, See, I’ve finally lost weight! And then he dies.

  Gandolfini’s weight, like many other actors’, fluctuated over his career. He looks positively slim in The Mexican, huge in Killing Them Softly. He owned both a motorcycle and one of those Italian Vespa motor scooters—he said once the scooter made him look like “Shrek, you know, a big thing on a little thing?” He injured his knee on the scooter, delaying the shooting for the last season of The Sopranos. Ultimately, he had both knees replaced.

  He put on weight rapidly in the last year or so of his life. In November 2012, about six months before his death, he described himself to Nicole Sperling of The Los Angeles Times as a “300-pound Woody Allen.”

  It wasn’t as if Hollywood was the sort of place where people wouldn’t notice, either. It’s the home of mineral water–garglers, as we’ve said, a city famous for its obsession with fitness. Jim’s defiance of all those norms was professionally fraught. He’d worried about it for years. In Susan Aston’s apartment she has the big gold-leafed certificate for one of James’s Screen Actors Guild Awards hanging, with a note from him giving her all the credit, the way he did. And it was signed, “The Fat Man.”

  Of course, the same thing happened to Marlon Brando at the end of his life, he became huge, almost spheroid. Maybe some stars are loved because they are fat—Fatty Arbuckle, maybe—but most are loved in spite of being fat. Even now, in the midst of the obesity epidemic, we still have not crossed over into accepting that image of ourselves.

  For Jim to act around America’s body image prejudice—well, people talk about Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, but a 300-pound romantic lead would be acting.