Unrequited Infatuations

by Stevie Van Zandt

  And Dino. What can I say? Read Nick Tosches’s book about him.

  The first bio I ever read was Edmund Morris’s first book about Teddy Roosevelt. Loved it. Teddy became a controversial hero. I wonder how that holds up.

  Dave Marsh’s book about Bruce, Born to Run, and his book about the Who were great also. As was Tim White’s book on Bob Marley.

  Bruce’s Born to Run is an exception, but biographies are almost always better than autobiographies, aren’t they?

  So much for the ’90s. Almost.

  “Stevie,” Zoë said to me on my way out of the office. “Somebody named David Chase on the phone.”

  twenty-four

  A Night at the Opera

  (1998)

  In the world of show business—no news is always bad news.

  —THE UNWRITTEN BOOK

  The saga of The Sopranos began in Frank Barsalona’s office one late summer day in 1997.

  Frank wanted to discuss the annual meeting of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee. He was an important member and wanted my opinion on who he should be politicking for induction.

  “How many years will go by before they put the Rascals in?” I said.

  “They should be in,” he said. “But so should Connie Francis!” He lit another More Red cigarette. “For fuck’s sake, these guys forget how this whole thing started!”

  “Frankie!” I said.

  “OK, OK,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  A few years later, he put me on the nominating committee, but back then I needed him to argue my case—meaning the Rascals’ case.

  Do you believe in Destiny? I don’t know if I do either, but let’s pretend for a minute. Because if what happened isn’t Destiny, I swear it’s her stunt double.

  Let’s count the number of weird things that led from that moment in Frank’s office to the Sopranos gig.

  Frank gets the Rascals into the Hall of Fame by arguing their case at the nominating committee meaning. That’s number one.

  Then he told me that I should do their induction.

  “No fucking way! They deserve better than me!”

  He kept asking, and I kept turning him down. That’s called ignoring Destiny’s advances.

  As the ceremony approached, Frank made one final appeal. “You have to do it,” he said. “There’s nobody else left.”

  “Alright,” I said. “But goddamn it, it’s a shame you couldn’t find a real celebrity.” That was number two.

  I had been to a few inductions. They could be pretty grim, overly serious and overly long. I decided to do a little comedy to break the monotony. And because that year, for the first time, the ceremony would be televised—that’s number three—I settled on a sight gag. I had one of my wardrobe girls make the same Little Lord Fauntleroy knickers and frilly shirt that the Rascals wore, and I hid the outfit under a long black coat like people were used to seeing me in so nobody would suspect anything.

  At that point, the Rascals hadn’t spoken to each other for twenty-five years or so. The conventional wisdom was that Eddie Brigati, one of the two lead singers, was the bad guy who had broken the group up, leading to a circular firing squad of lawsuits among him, Felix Cavaliere, and the other band members. I would eventually find out the real story, but that was still fifteen years away.

  When I got to the hotel, I saw Dino Danelli, the original Rascals drummer and one of the first Disciples. He was packing his bag. “What’s going on?” I said.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. During soundcheck, the band had started squabbling, and Dino had decided he had better things to do. “Listen,” I said. “It took a lot to get you in. It’s gonna make me and Frank look very bad if you guys don’t perform. The show is in a few hours, and then you’ll never have to see them again!”

  He stayed. I delivered my speech, which was full of silly punch lines like “To sound that black you had to be Italian!”

  The wardrobe reveal got a big laugh.

  And who do you think was flipping around and caught the whole bit? David Chase, a television writer and Director looking for new faces for what he swore would be his last TV show. That was number four.

  Chase told his people to call me. Georgianne Walken, a prominent casting Director (and wife of Christopher) told me later that she did a Hercule Poirot and tracked me down through the corporate papers of my Solidarity Foundation. That was number five.

  Someone at Solidarity brought me a message. “They want you for a TV show,” I was told, though I wasn’t told which show, what exactly was wanted, or who “they” were.

  “Tell them to send a script,” I said, knowing it would be as terrible as the scripts I got every day.

  At the time, a Native American man named Alex Ewen ran Solidarity for me. His main researcher was a Rhodes scholar named Jeff Wallich, who we called Doc, him being a doctor of probably several disciplines. Doc was one of those eccentric intellectuals, a bizarre and not-quite-socialized genius. At that point he had been in my office for five years, and I didn’t remember him ever speaking a word. Maybe he had said hello once.

  One afternoon I went to see a movie by myself to clear my head. As the lights went down, the phone rang.

  “Steven?” It was a voice I didn’t recognize.

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Doc.”

  Oh my God, I thought. The office must be on fire. I ran out to the lobby.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Well,” he said. It was already our longest conversation. “I read the script” (number six).

  “You what the what?”

  “The script on your desk,” he said.

  I racked my brain. What the fuck?

  “You know: The Sopranos.”

  It clicked, vaguely. The new thing that someone had sent over. “Oh… OK?”

  “It’s great. You’ve got to consider this.”

  It was one of the strangest phone calls I had ever gotten. The office burning down would have made more sense. The guy had nothing to do with show business. He was an academic. Why he would even pick up the script was beyond me, let alone call me to offer career advice.

  Because the call was so bizarre, I read the script. Doc was right. It was good (number seven)!

  But I still wasn’t sure why they wanted me. I assumed it was music supervision, or maybe writing original music.

  That’s when the call came from the man himself. David Chase turned out to be a fan, not only of my work with the E Street Band but also of my solo albums. He told me that he liked the fact that the E Street Band were not nameless, faceless sidemen. “You were the Rat Pack of Rock and Roll,” he said. We talked a little more, and then he sprung a question. “So, do you want to be in this show?”

  “In it?” I wasn’t being slow. Everything else moving a little too fast.

  “Yeah, in it. Like an actor in it.”

  Wow.

  “Uh… wow.” I had a pretty good imagination, but I’d never pictured being an actor. “That’s really flattering, but no, not really.”

  “What do you mean no?”

  “I mean I’m not an actor.” Maybe I had been in a play or two in junior high, and there was the Men Without Women movie, but the closest I had come to real acting was reading for Marty Scorsese for his first attempt at The Last Temptation of Christ. Guess which part? A disciple.

  “You are an actor,” he said. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  I had to think. Did I hear Destiny calling?

  “Let’s have lunch,” I said (number eight).

  We really hit it off. Chase was a huge music fan, had drummed in a band when he was young. And I knew some of his shows. I had never seen Northern Exposure, but I had watched a few episodes of The Rockford Files and I really liked Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

  At lunch, we got around to talking about the script. I said that I liked it, and he said that he wanted me for the lead, Tony Soprano.

  Wow. The lead.

 
; I was interested in the whole Mob thing. I had grown up around it, the suburban side of it anyway. Like knowing where Vito Genovese’s summer house was in Atlantic Highlands, bodies washing up on Sandy Hook, running into low-level gangsters running clubs on the Jersey Shore. I had seen every movie, read every book, and gotten a glimpse of the real thing in Vegas.

  Other than the obvious jail-and-death part, I never really had a problem with Mob stuff. If the Beatles and the Stones hadn’t come along when they did (and if it hadn’t been for the end of Angels with Dirty Faces where Jimmy Cagney pretends he’s gone chicken and begs as they put him in the electric chair), it probably would have been a viable career choice.

  I always thought Italians who pretended to be insulted by the association were hypocrites. Like the assholes that banned all of us Sopranos from the Columbus Day Parade and the next year made Paul Sorvino the grand marshal!

  The truth is that I never saw the downside of people thinking you’re in the Mob. You can get palpable respect just from playing Mob guys!

  Everybody thought Frank Barsalona was Mob. Of course, my referring to him as “the Godfather” helped perpetuate that fantasy. But it never hurt him.

  My friend Tommy Mottola was always rumored to be Mob. That hurt his career all the way to him running Sony!

  Morris Levy, the famous music publisher and label owner, wasn’t Mob per se, but he definitely did business with them, and he did just fine for thirty or so years before he got busted. (Read Tommy James’s excellent book Me, the Mob, and the Music for more about that subject.)

  Chase and I talked like we had been friends for years, shooting the shit about music and the ’60s. I didn’t know enough about the acting world to be nervous. I felt very easy come, easy go.

  “Not for nothin’,” I said, somewhere between the first and second bottle of Brunello. “There is one thing in the script struck me as kind of strange. I grew up in an Italian family. I had a lot of Italian friends. But this mother character? I’ve never seen any kind of Italian mother like this. I mean, I don’t think it’s believable.”

  The mother in the script, Livia, was the most evil, passionless, manipulative character I had ever read, up there with the worst Shakespearean villains. It felt over the top.

  “That’s my mother,” he said.

  Stunned silence.

  “Uh, what do you mean?”

  “That’s my mother.”

  “That’s your mother??”

  He nodded solemnly.

  A million thoughts went through my head. First of which being, That’s the end of this gig. My second thought was that if this guy hadn’t gone into show business, he would’ve been a serial killer. Which is almost the same thing except there’s less blood spilled in serial killing.

  Not only did Chase not fire me even before he hired me, but as we were leaving he said he was more convinced than ever I could do it (number nine). Maureen, the real actor in the family, had studied with both Stella Adler and Herbert Berghof and had continued taking classes at HB for years. I read the scene with her, she gave me a few tips, and by the third time through, she thought I could handle it.

  My friend Jay Cocks was the film critic at Time before he became the Rock critic, and his wife, Verna Bloom, was an acclaimed actress who had worked with Frank Sinatra and Clint Eastwood. I read with Jay and Verna, too, and they also were encouraging.

  Frank Barsalona was careful, as always. He didn’t trust any Artform he didn’t control, and he knew he would not be there to protect me. “Do you think you can do it?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “This first script is good, yeah, but what if the next one blows? What do I do then?”

  He thought about that. “You tell them to fuck themselves and you split! What can they do? Make you act?”

  Lance Freed was dead set against it. “You can’t do this,” he said. “You’re an important Rock Artist. You are Mr. Credibility. You could throw away everything you’ve worked for your whole life!”

  Peter Wolf tipped the scales. He had been one of my best friends for years. He left J. Geils at around the same time I left the E Street Band, and we both had Frank as a mentor. Plus, he had seen the film and TV business from the inside when he was involved with Faye Dunaway. We went to dinner and he thought about my plight.

  “The thing about TV is, nobody remembers anything,” he said. We were somewhere between our spaghetti and our second bottle of wine. “If it’s a success, great! If not, no one will even know about it! Do you think anybody remembers Steve McQueen’s TV show? Clint Eastwood? Jimmy Stewart? Lee Marvin? Warren Beatty was on Dobie Gillis for crissake! Definitely do it. Don’t overthink it. If it bombs, it bombs. Nobody will care.”

  So now I had to figure out a philosophy of acting, a concept to make up for my lack of experience. I had heard all the accepted theories from Maureen—Stanislavski, Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, Hagen—frankly, they were beyond my intellect. So I had to make up my own.

  I thought about it and decided that every human characteristic exists in everybody. From Gandhi to Hitler. From Wavy Gravy to Trump. The craft of acting (for me anyway) would be digging down and finding the appropriate characteristics of the character to be played. I then inhabit that part of me and bring it to life.

  For me there would be one more necessity that lifelong actors may not need, and that was the physical transformation. I knew if I could look in the mirror and see the man, I could be the man.

  I went to the gym and put on twenty-five pounds, eventually going to fifty. De Niro made the concept famous, but let me tell you, it worked for me. I said goodbye to the skinny Rocker, figuring I’d never need him again. I walked different, talked different. I didn’t want anybody watching the show associating me with my previous profession.

  I knew some guys who knew some guys, and I found out where John Gotti got his clothes made. He had just gone to jail, so the tailor suddenly had a lot of time on his hands.

  The way I saw the character, he was a traditionalist, so I added a hairstyle that reflected his romantic reverence for the past.

  I went down and read for Chase. He loved it. The part was mine. Almost. “We have to go to the West Coast and read for HBO,” he said. “It’s just a formality.”

  HBO’s LA lobby was filled with other actors reading for various Sopranos parts. One guy, I recognized. Younger than me, a little heavyset, balding. I had seen him in a couple of movies. True Romance, Get Shorty, not big parts but memorable ones. He stood out.

  I quietly pointed him out to the casting girl, Sheila Jaffe, Georgianne Walken’s partner at the time.

  “Do you know who that is?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Did you see True Romance?”

  “Nope.”

  “Man! Nobody saw that movie! It’s a supercool classic!”

  “I’ll rent it.” Sheila was half a wiseguy herself.

  “That’s the guy who should play Tony Soprano.”

  Soon enough she would learn this journeyman character actor’s name: Jimmy Gandolfini. But when I pointed him out she just looked at me like I had three heads.

  And I did, in a sense. The acting world was very different than the music world, far more competitive. In Rock you go to a bar and say that you want to play. If they already have a band, you just go to the next bar. In the acting world, there are only so many parts, and way too many people want them. I’m quite sure no casting person had ever heard an actor say someone else should play the role they were reading for!

  “Schmuck!” Sheila said. “You’ve got the friggin’ part!”

  “OK, OK, just saying…”

  I read.

  It was a mini–Roman Colosseum vibe, fifteen or twenty HBO people looking down from bleachers and me in the pit waiting for the lions to be released. I wasn’t nervous going in, but the environment got me there pretty quick. Still, I got through it.

  The next day, some of those bleacher people got back to David. “He’s good,” they s
aid. “He can be in it. But no way are we giving the lead to a guy who’s never acted before. This show is our biggest investment ever!”

  The pilot had ended up at HBO because network after network had passed for one simple reason. David insisted on shooting in New Jersey rather than LA or New York. This simply was not done.

  David called me to meet him somewhere, maybe the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Sorry,” he said. “They won’t let me give you the lead. But you can have any other part you want.”

  “That’s OK,” I said. The whole thing was still completely surreal. I had spent the time since my Roman Colosseum experience running the opportunity by the people I trusted.

  “Listen, David,” I said. “I appreciate this opportunity, but I’ve been thinking about this, and I’ve got to tell you I’ve got mixed feelings about taking an actor’s job. They train their whole lives. They take classes. They dedicate their lives to this craft. I’ve seen my wife do it for years. So maybe it’s better I say thank you and go back to where I belong.”

  He was unmoved. “I’m determined to have you in this,” he said. “It just feels right to me. Your relationship to New Jersey is unimpeachable, and Jersey is going to play a major role in this thing. You don’t want to take anybody’s job? OK, I’ll write you in a part. What do you want to do?”

  Wow. You gotta love this guy, I’m thinking. He’s nuts!

  “Well…,” I said. Over the years, I had entertained fantasies about TV and the movies, though they ran more to writing and maybe directing. “I’ve got a treatment I had written about a character named Silvio Dante, an independent hit man, now semiretired, who owns a nightclub but still does diplomacy, conflict resolution, and an occasional special hit for the bosses.”

  My treatment was set in contemporary times, but both the character and his club lived in the past: big bands, Catskills-type Jewish comics, dancing girls, the whole schmear. All the Five Families had tables at Sil’s place. The police commissioner and the mayor too. The intrigue began in the club. It was kind of like a Mob version of Casablanca.

  David took my idea to HBO and then came back to me with good news, bad news. “They think the nightclub idea is too expensive. So we’ll make it a strip club. You’ll run it for the family, and you guys will use the back room as your social club / office.”