James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (15 page)

But other towns, often more affluent ones farther along on the northwestern trail to suburban assimilation—like Montclair, Verona, and the Caldwells—embraced
The Sopranos.
Perhaps they understood it was a parody of movie gangsters; maybe they recognized that a hit TV show filmed in their midst would be good for business. Probably they realized that it was just make-believe. If they did, they were right. In August 2001, Fairleigh Dickinson University, in Madison, New Jersey, conducted a national poll that found that 65 percent of Americans disagreed with the statement that
The Sopranos
was portraying Italian-Americans in “a negative way.” By the end of the series they repeated the survey and found that 61 percent still disagreed with the idea that Tony Soprano was a negative stereotype.

By then, most of the state had swallowed its objections. Anyway, Bloomfield had. The fade-to-black wrap-up was shot in Holsten’s ice cream parlor, one of Bloomfield’s better-known eating establishments.

The towns that welcomed
The Sopranos
also subtly acknowledged the élan of being an outlaw culture. It’s almost as if the Mafia were the Northeast’s version of southern secessionist fantasies: Italian-American culture is fondly portrayed as a law unto itself, outside mainstream American culture, and comfortable with violence as a means to maintain its prerogatives. The
bella figura
of hand-tailored suits and Borsalino hats, Roman Catholicism, and Italian cuisine all exist in opposition to mainstream culture for many Italian-Americans. Especially among men and boys.

Gangster movies do tend to flourish when government is perceived as corrupt or overreaching.
The Godfather
became an antiassimilationist tract for many, an assertion that Italians were not yet melted into the pot. This placed
The Sopranos
at an angle to Italian-American fantasies, in a way. Tony’s ongoing difficulties with blending in were funny, but telling, too. The instant he became successful, he would lose his special identity, his livelihood, his family. But he kept trying.

*   *   *

Not everybody recognized the success of the first season. Only Edie Falco took home an Emmy in 1999 (Dennis Franz of
NYPD Blue
won for leading actor in a drama, his fourth, still a standing record). Falco told
Rolling Stone
she remembered stashing the gold statuette in a big tote bag after climbing aboard a cast bus filled with actors who felt slighted.

But HBO knew what they had, and Gandolfini’s salary took a nice bump. He’d signed a five-year exclusive deal in 1998. But his value had shot up in Hollywood because of Tony Soprano: in 2001,
The Last Castle,
in which he costarred as a repressed military prison commandant with Robert Redford, earned him $5 million for a supporting role. HBO voluntarily increased Gandolfini’s pay from $55,000 per episode to something in the neighborhood of $100,000 in 2000, without negotiations.

Gandolfini won his first of three Emmys in 2000, and after that he signed a new contract with HBO that would give him $10 million for two more (the third and fourth) seasons. His first contract had given him a life-changing financial security, but this, doubling his already bumped salary at one fell swoop, was serious money (though, as his agent said at the time, he was still paid less than Dennis Franz of
NYPD Blue,
Noah Wyle of
ER
, and “every actor but the dog” on
Frasier
). In 2001, he bought a slate-roofed, 150-year-old house on thirty-four acres in Bedminster, in central New Jersey’s Somerset County, for $1.14 million. It was in horse country, not far from a home owned by occasional presidential candidate and publishing heir Steve Forbes. Gandolfini told
The Star-Ledger
that his “two-year-old needs to run on grass a little bit.”

He bought the $15,000 necklace Marcy wore to the Emmys. He began to indulge his private passion for electronic gadgets (Gandolfini was such a frequent customer at B&H Photo in Manhattan that checkout clerks remember him—he’d happily sign autographs and greet fans while he waited). But he didn’t start to collect automobiles, like Jerry Seinfeld, or Art Deco objects, like Barbra Streisand, or Maxfield Parrish paintings, like Jack Nicholson. Friends say as he grew wealthier his biggest splurge would be on time, turning down lucrative acting projects so he could spend time with his family. He rented bigger houses on the Jersey Shore every year.

One thing his success meant right away was better parts in films, and better films, too. In addition to
The Last Castle,
Gandolfini starred in two other movies released in 2001,
The Mexican,
directed by Gore Verbinski and starring Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt, and
The Man Who Wasn’t There
by the Coen brothers, starring Billy Bob Thornton. Both are interesting movies, a cut above the commercial razzle-dazzle of
The Last Castle.
Both earned him considerably less than $5 million. But they were good parts, and he was looking for parts that meant something to him more than he was looking for money.

The Man Who Wasn’t There
is a black-and-white neo-noir movie about murder in a small town and the barber who knows all about it, played by Thornton. Gandolfini played Big Dave, who is running his father-in-law’s home furnishing business and may be cuckolding the barber. The role culminates in Gandolfini smashing his office with Thornton’s passive-aggressive body until the barber stabs him in the neck with a fake Japanese war trophy, which sounds like an odd reprise of
True Romance.
Jim later said it was a fun scene to shoot because Thornton was “so thin.” Tarted up throughout with a dry-as-the-Gobi sense of humor,
The Man Who Wasn’t There
uses Gandolfini’s ticking temper to remarkable effect, and stands out as one of the more intriguing movies of his career.

The Mexican
could be seen more as an actor’s protest against typecasting. Gandolfini played a disillusioned gay hitman named Winston Baldry, who charms Julia Roberts with self-help lore and his own romantic aspirations even as he forces her to help him search for her lover, Brad Pitt, whom he may have to kill.
The Mexican
is the ultimate Gandolfini Effect movie. He is so fascinating, so teetering on the edge between sensitive and lethal, comic and threatening, that when Pitt shoots him three-quarters of the way through the picture it seems as if the heart drops out of the film.

The movie was advertised with the frisson between two of Hollywood’s greatest sex symbols, but in fact Pitt and Roberts only had a few scenes together, while the slimmed-down Gandolfini shares the screen with the then-highest-paid actress in the world throughout most of the movie. That was a little like the surprise awaiting
Sopranos
fans who thought they were watching their favorite mob killer in a beard until Gandolfini came out to Roberts in a roadside diner.

Playing a gay hitman was the ultimate reversal on Gandolfini’s best-known role.
The Sopranos
took up the theme of a closeted gay wiseguy five years later in its sixth and final season, with the sad story of Vito Spatafore, played by Joseph Gannascoli. But in
The Mexican
Gandolfini comes out of the closet with a kind of happy shrug—he and the slightly miscast Roberts undergo the only real psychological development in the movie. Their story so neatly displaces Pitt’s that the Peckinpah-like mytho-comic fade-out, with its cameo by Gene Hackman, seems like an afterthought.

Winston Baldry is a character actor’s triumph. Julia Roberts told the press that the way Gandolfini poor-mouthed his own performance throughout the production made him a “liar,” that he’d been “genius from the start.” In all three of his films from 2001 his characters benefitted from that dense backstory research that he and Susan Aston, who worked with him on each of these roles, thought was a mark of craftsmanship. From little gestures—like Baldry pressing the tips of his forefinger and thumb together and putting them over his eyes to see what he’d look like in glasses—to underlying character traits, like his prison commandant’s interest in entomology, Gandolfini worked to create characters with at least some of the complexities of Tony Soprano.

For two years, James didn’t make another movie (his next picture would be the widely panned comedy
Surviving Christmas
with Ben Affleck in 2004). There were all sorts of reasons for that, ranging from working harder for those two years on
The Sopranos
than he ever had before, to scheduling conflicts, to just not getting the scripts he thought worth doing.

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.