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

by Bischoff, Dan

  11.

  Gotta Blue Moon in Your Eye

  Leta Gandolfini, the younger of James’s two older sisters, was on her way to the Boscolo Hotel Exedra from the airport when Michael found his father collapsed in the suite bathroom. Her flight from Paris had landed only a little while before. By the time she got to the Piazza della Repubblica, the paramedics were taking her brother to the hospital; Michael had handled the emergency, language barrier and all.

  Marcy Wudarski caught the first flight out of Los Angeles to be with Michael. Gandolfini had been looking forward to Rome as a “boys’ trip,” just him and Michael, and Deborah Lin stayed in L.A., to be with Liliana Ruth, who was just over a year old. Tom Richardson was on the first flight from New York, to help expedite the body’s return and the seemingly endless paperwork required by the Italian state. The paparazzi culture was, if anything, even more intrusive over there than it was here, and his first job would be handling the press.

  Everybody was shocked. At fifty-one, Gandolfini seemed terribly young. The first speculations in the media were about drugs, but the autopsy dismissed that as a cause. Besides, a five-star hotel room you are sharing with your thirteen-year-old son after a day of sightseeing at the Vatican didn’t really fit the John Belushi format.

  When the cause of death, a massive heart attack, was announced, the next wave of speculation was about Jim’s weight, and the New York Post story, based on a conversation with a hotel waiter, helped to push it. Many people took to social media to say they’d told us so. The Post story was exhibit A. The family pushed back through a spokesman, saying that not everything on the bill was as it seemed—in particular, the two piña coladas were nonalcoholic, for Michael. But it was true that Gandolfini’s weight had shot up in the past year, possibly exacerbated by his second knee replacement, which had been done in late 2012.

  There would be two funeral services: One small, for family and close friends, at the local funeral home in Park Ridge, in a modest white frame building with a big green awning and a little parking lot in front, not far from where the family’s small Cape Cod had stood when Jim was growing up. The bigger service would be on the Upper West Side in Saint John the Divine, the largest church in New York City; HBO would handle all the details.

  The funeral at Saint John’s was a real New York event. There were media trucks and police barriers a couple of blocks on either side of the church’s main portal. The nave inside was full, all the way to the doors, with lines of fans still left on the steps outside. HBO handed out press tips. Just before the service ended, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who’d entered through the side door with the other celebs, strode down the nave, through the public pews and out the main entrance, followed by a small spasm of much smaller aides.

  The cast of The Sopranos was there, of course, writers from the show, actors Jim had worked with, everyone who was in the city or could make it came. All three of the women Jim had lived with, Marcy Wudarski, Deb Lin, and Lora Somoza, were there. Greg Antonacci, the actor who had complained about convertibles and cheeseburgers in the last episode of David Chase’s The Rockford Files, was there, gray now but still thin and tight-lipped. Alec Baldwin, attending with his pregnant wife, Hilaria, managed to get into a dispute with a Daily Mail reporter over whether or not Hilaria had tweeted during the service; he launched a rant threatening the reporter with violence in a way many people took to be homophobic. That gave the assembled media something scandalous to worry over for a few days. Life goes on.

  Another story was building on the Internet, about Gandolfini’s estate. One of America’s most successful representatives of the working class, James Gandolfini, had left behind an estate estimated to be worth $70 million, the reports said, but greedy Uncle Sam was going to seize almost half because of poor estate planning. It was an outrage, like all taxes on the wealthy. The story, which got its start on Web sites like Zero Hedge and other Wall Street–friendly outlets, was creating a minor storm. John Travolta had announced that he would make sure that Gandolfini’s children were “taken care of”—did he say that because the government was putting them in the poorhouse? In the three weeks after Gandolfini’s death, references to his estate tax bill became the most common Gandolfini-related topic on the Web, outrunning “fatty” mentions by a mile.

  Exactly one month after Gandolfini’s death, his lawyer, Roger Haber, reached out to New York Times financial reporter Paul Sullivan to spike the estate stories. Gandolfini’s will was public, something rare for a celebrity, perhaps because Jim didn’t see himself that way. But the will itself was only part of the story. There were appendices that allocated $1.6 million in bequests to friends, and family members were given percentages of the remaining estate; there may have been trusts set up to hold property, like his homes in New York and Tewksbury, that did not appear in the will. But Haber’s main point was that the figure of $70 million, which came from a Web site that estimates the fortunes of celebrities, was wrong. The estate was worth more like $6 to $10 million.

  Haber was miffed that The Times failed to exonerate him from the charge of poor estate planning—the article took for granted that we should all think about our estate planning as thoroughly as John Lennon did—but it made the Internet meme of Gandolfini’s rough handling by the IRS go away overnight. Friends who were in a position to know said Jim was very smart about money, but it was never his main focus. He told several of them that “I don’t know where all my money goes.”

  He did, actually. Jamie’s dad may have failed to make him see the real value of the change that fell out of his pockets on the sofa, but he and his two sisters both went on to have successful, productive careers. Money was there to support the family. Besides giving fellow cast members $33,000 apiece in the middle of The Sopranos, Jim set up funds to pay for the college education of some friends’ kids, and he could be counted on in medical emergencies, too. He was generous with Lora Somoza. He took out a $7 million life insurance policy for Michael.

  The money didn’t disappear into paintings or antique cars or other personal property, the sorts of things Hollywood stars sometimes buy. Gandolfini liked art, but he wasn’t a collector. The money was for family and friends. A lot of the people who sat in the family pews at Saint John’s knew that firsthand. When they started to make Jim’s generosities public, in the weeks after his death, it seemed almost too good to be true. It wasn’t Antony reading Caesar’s will or anything, but the record at least seemed refreshingly free of the privileged secrecy in which the 1 percent usually conduct such matters. Haber’s need to tell the world that he’d acted appropriately in planning the estate was a sort of backhand proof of that.

  As with The Sopranos pay negotiations, the money was there, but it wasn’t as much money as much more conventional careers command, and anyway money was not the ultimate measure. You didn’t become the kind of actor Gandolfini was in order to get paid more than Frasier’s dog.

  * * *

  The public service was as Catholic as it could be—Psalm 23, a choir singing “Ave Maria” during communion service, Lennie Loftin, Michael’s godfather, reading from Revelations. Tom Richardson and Susan Aston eulogized their friend from the pulpit at Saint John the Divine, Susan saying he always had the “strength to keep his heart open.” So did Deborah Lin, thanking her husband for “believing in me.”

  David Chase spoke, too.

  David Chase had dreamed up Tony Soprano and then partnered with Gandolfini to bring him to life, but no one on Gandolfini’s team ever thought of it as an equal partnership. “Chase was the creator, he was the showrunner,” Mark Armstrong says. “He was the boss.”

  After Gandolfini’s death, Chase refused to be interviewed about him; he reportedly felt any addition to his eulogy might be promoted as his last word on Gandolfini. So he couldn’t be asked directly whether Tony Soprano was, in some way, David Chase, too.

  He really isn’t. Chase (the family name had been originally DeCesare, “of Caesar”) was raised Italian in Newar
k, in a U-shaped, postwar development in Little Italy that has long since disappeared, replaced with newer versions of city renewal. His father owned a hardware store.

  Chase wasn’t even Catholic; he was raised a Protestant. He had Italian uncles and Italian aunts, but Italian macho the way Jersey guys think of it wasn’t second nature to him. He’d call Maria Laurino, Jersey-born author of Were You Always Italian?, to make sure he was pronouncing the names of Italian-American dishes correctly. Chase left Jersey early, when he was still a kid, for California—he studied filmmaking at Stanford University, in Palo Alto. He never forgot the Garden State, but he wasn’t circumscribed by it, either.

  Chase was a writer on The Rockford Files, and wound up running Northern Exposure, a hit TV show in the mid-1990s. He was successful, by Hollywood standards. But everybody who knows him says he’s a “glass-more-than-half-empty” kind of guy. At Silvercup Studios for HBO, he would occasionally interrupt meetings to say “I’m so fucking depressed” that another episode seemed impossible. He’d always make one, anyway, but expressions of creative joy were not in his line.

  In earlier days, when he was working on Northern Exposure, Chase would come home to Santa Monica, where he lived with his wife, Denise, and fall on the floor to play Barbie dolls with their daughter, Michelle. Only, as an old friend who wrote three Sopranos scripts told journalist Peter Biskind, “he turned it into Perp-Walk Barbie—District Attorney Barbie, Parole Officer Barbie.… I think he is a little obsessed with law and order. I think he gets angrier than most of us at the miscarriage of justice, at the injustice of the world.”

  In that sense, Chase was the opposite of Tony Soprano—he was on the side of the law. In real life, the law has far more Italian-Americans in its ranks than the Mafia does. Maria Laurino’s brother Robert, for example, is a prosecutor in Essex County; for that matter, James’s oldest sister, Johanna, runs the Family Court in Hackensack. Chase was careful to make several of his F.B.I. agents Italian-American, too.

  It’s more like crime has special meaning for Italian-Americans, because they have been blackened by American stories about the Mafia and because they have such high standards of community. Catholicism preaches a vision of civic responsibility that is modeled on the perfect family, each member defined by a series of mutual commitments to the other. Recreating that in a place as diverse as the United States is like herding cats: anybody who tries better have firm control of his temper.

  Chase told Biskind that he and James were alike in that they both took out their frustrations on inanimate objects. But their active sense of injustice, which fed a smoldering anger, was another thing they had in common—like the “dark” undercurrent Chase says Hollywood detected in both men, and the work ethic that drove them both to never stop.

  Chase’s mother is, rather famously, the model for Livia Soprano, the operatic complainer whose emotional needs control much of her family. Livia was also the name of Augustus Caesar’s wife, who killed him by painting the plums on his favorite tree with poison. DeCesare, indeed.

  But Jim’s mother was entirely different. She could make Jamie do things, of course; he once said he went to college just to “keep Mama happy.” He was always trying to do that. He needed to reassure the woman whose desire to become a doctor had been thwarted by World War II that the life he had chosen would work out, as Lennie Loftin’s story about their visit to Jim’s beach house during the Crimson Tide shoot suggests. But their relationship was a kind of partnership—no doubt here, either, as to who was the junior partner—not some extended manipulation. Remember, when he was asked what he thought he’d inherited from his mom, Gandolfini said, “I don’t know—introspective, depressed, a little judgmental, kind of smart about people.”

  Not a bad description, by all accounts, of David Chase.

  The partners who made Tony Soprano were thinking about mother-son relationships from the beginning, but The Sopranos was essentially a long-form video meditation on growing up male. Manliness feels quite devalued today, and Italians often seem to feel this with a special intensity.

  Chase wrote his eulogy to Gandolfini in the form of a letter addressed to Jim. After talking about how Jim’s father and uncles had worked in construction, just as David’s uncles had, Chase directly addresses Jim’s doubts about his profession, his desire to be real, and most of all, his sense of masculinity:

  The image of my uncles and father reminded me of something that happened between us one time. Because these guys were such men—your father and these men from Italy. And you were going through a crisis of faith about yourself and acting, a lot of things, were very upset. I went to meet you on the banks of the Hudson River, and you told me, you said, “You know what I want to be? I want to be a man. That’s all. I want to be a man.” Now, this is so odd, because you are such a man. You’re a man in many ways many males, including myself, wish they could be a man. The paradox about you as a man is that I always felt personally, that with you, I was seeing a young boy. A boy about Michael’s age right now. ’Cause you were very boyish. And about the age when humankind, and life on the planet are really opening up and putting on a show, really revealing themselves in all their beautiful and horrible glory. And I saw you as a boy—as a sad boy, amazed and confused and loving and amazed by all that. And that was all in your eyes. And that was why, I think, you were a great actor: because of that boy who was inside. He was a child reacting. Of course you were intelligent, but it was a child reacting, and your reactions were often childish. And by that, I mean they were preschool, they were premanners, they were preintellect. They were just simple emotions, straight and pure. And I think your talent is that you can take in the immensity of humankind and the universe, and shine it out to the rest of us like a huge bright light. And I believe that only a pure soul, like a child, can do that really well. And that was you.

  You can’t help but think that the boy who was voted “Class Flirt” at Park Ridge High School must have had some sort of special charm—it’s actually not easy to flirt and fail to offend when you’re a teenager. “Oh, he was always a magnet for women,” T.J. Foderaro told me; Susan Aston said, “Women were always very attracted to James.” Even as Gandolfini flopped so terribly at summer stock tryouts back in 1980, Mark Di Ionno told me he nevertheless found a girl, and made an annoyed Di Ionno cool his heels for a while until they’d said their good-byes. More than one buddy fell out with Jim for a time over a wandering girlfriend.

  And yet, there is that image of Wudarski, Somoza, and Lin all sitting within a few yards of one another in the pews of Saint John the Divine. Maybe they felt, like his other friends, that Jim never left you, exactly. Once you’re family, you’re always family. Always there for each other.

  Of course, there was that “enduring sex symbol” thing. Woody Allen once said that Humphrey Bogart was short and kind of ugly, but as long as he had women like Lauren Bacall or Ingrid Bergman falling in love with him on the screen, nobody noticed. We saw Tony Soprano with lots of beautiful women on TV. They didn’t seem to mind that he was balding and developing a paunch. Why should anyone else?

  Before he died, Gandolfini had several projects in various states of completion. He was hoping to narrate documentaries, and he was beginning to work as a producer. He was reading more and more books “mostly for plot,” he said. In 2012 he produced HBO’s Hemingway & Gellhorn, about the novelist and his journalist wife during the Spanish Civil War, after he turned down the part of Hemingway.

  But his big project in his final year was Enough Said, a movie written and directed by Woody Allen protégé Nicole Holofcener. It would be Gandolfini’s first romantic comedy, and only his second romantic lead in a feature film, after Guskin and Jennings’s Kiddie Ride/Down the Shore. Enough Said was being prepared for a 2014 release when Gandolfini died, but Fox Searchlight put it into an accelerated postproduction schedule and premiered it in September 2013.

  Enough Said stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Eva, a divorced masseuse in Los Angeles who stumbles
into a bittersweet romance with a divorced TV librarian while unwittingly becoming good friends with his former wife (Catherine Keener), a successful poet.

  The genre form is romantic comedy, but Enough Said swerves from rom-com conventions. For one thing, it can be scathing toward its female characters. Eva’s inability to set boundaries between her love life, family life, and friendships is the source of the plot’s conflict; as Albert, Gandolfini is quite aware of his flaws, but trying, with extraordinary dignity, to risk love again. He winds up, rather amazingly, as the only adult in the film.

  The film was treated as a posthumous triumph; New York Times movie critic A. O. Scott called Enough Said “one of the best-written American film comedies in recent memory and an implicit rebuke to the raunchy, sloppy spectacles of immaturity that have dominated the genre in recent years.”

  Jim had his second knee replacement surgery shortly before shooting, and for a while was getting around the set with a cane. He was working on a project full of women, in a genre aimed largely at women, out among the expensive bungalows of Malibu. It would be hard to get farther from Guinea Gulch and the pack of boys who held sway at The Sopranos.

  “He was very nervous about playing a romantic lead,” Holofcener told me. “He asked me to come into his trailer because, he said, he wanted to be sure I knew what I was getting into. And so I follow him in, he asks me if I’m ready, and he takes off his shirt.

  “My first thought was, dude, I know what you look like. But I told him he was fine, I thought he looked great, that was what I wanted. Then he had the confidence to go on.”

  She says there was no indication that Enough Said would be his last role. “You knew he had had a really risky past, with alcohol and everything,” Holofcener says, “but he’s there, he’s very alive, you don’t think he’s going to die. It was a huge shock.

  “You know we had fights,” she adds. “Directors and actors have fights. There were things he found hard to do. There was one scene, his big confrontation and declaration scene with Julia, and he said, ‘You got me crying like a bitch in the kitchen!’ I just never forgot that. Like, the place where you cry makes a difference. ‘You got me crying like a bitch in the kitchen!’ We fought about it for a while, but I just kept at him. And then he did it, and he was great.”