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

by Bischoff, Dan

  So he kept mentioning it to Gandolfini, whenever they were together socially. Jim would tell him, “Yeah, I mean to, I should,” but he never did. Bart didn’t give up.

  Then a funny thing happened. Six weeks after he graduated from Rutgers and had found himself an apartment in Jersey City, Bart got called back for the part of Tom Sawyer in Broadway’s Big River, a musical adaptation of Mark Twain. He had a career in show business.

  Still, the Rutgers crew would get together every now and then, in Jersey and in Manhattan, where a lot of them drifted soon after school. Whenever Bart saw Jimmy, he’d recommend Kathryn Gately. Bart wasn’t sure why Gandolfini didn’t just call her, but he never dropped it. It wasn’t personal, it was just business.

  * * *

  When Gandolfini graduated in 1983, he took an apartment for about a year with his former roommate, Stewart Lowell, in Hoboken. The whole neighborhood all around was undergoing a big renewal, but their apartment was not—it was a tiny tenement hutch carved out of a bigger space to rent to people who couldn’t afford Manhattan.

  It was on the fourth floor. It was very small—two bedrooms, but with only a half wall between them—and hot as an oven in the summer. Anybody who thinks the top floor in a northeastern city tenement has to be the hottest because its roof is exposed to the sun all day just doesn’t understand five-floor walk-up physics. It’s hotter in the middle, where the air circulates like mud. Air-conditioning would have been an extravagance, and anyway they’d have to lug the machine up four flights, as they’d just done with their refrigerator. The boys bought fans and left them on all the time instead. They helped drown out the noises from the building, too.

  Lowell’s first job was at McCann-Erickson, the advertising firm, so he commuted to Manhattan every day. Soon Jim had landed a bartending gig at an expensive wine bar on the Upper East Side, where he could walk away each night with $100 to $125 in tips, very sweet in those days. He did odd jobs, too, worked construction, filled in as a bouncer now and then.

  “He was a survivor,” a friend who knew him in those days says. “He always had a job. He was never lazy, always pitched in, and somehow, whenever he got a job, he’d always be right up there with the owner, or anyway with the most important people.”

  One day, Gandolfini answered a newspaper ad and was offered the chance to manage a pricey New York nightclub.

  It was called Private Eyes, on West Twenty-first Street, in the trendy club district in those days, and it was one of the first video clubs in Manhattan. Every wall was lined with rows of TV sets held by steel and aluminum racks, and they’d play music and art videos all night long. Madonna arranged advanced screenings of videos at Private Eyes; Andy Warhol would show every now and then; at one party an eight-year-old Drew Barrymore was underfoot. Sleek and techno, Private Eyes was large, though nothing like the nearby four-level Area club of the same era. It was the time when video killed the radio star, and Private Eyes took the winner’s side.

  Private Eyes wasn’t cheap—a beer could go for $20, very stiff in those days—and it catered to a wealthy, Long Island clientele. It was a diverse eighties crowd. Gandolfini himself later described the club as being “gay two nights of the week, straight two nights, and then everybody for the last two nights.” The club did downtown mini social events, like hosting the debut of a play for video by The Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto, that kind of thing.

  It was a big job. Gandolfini remembered he might have ordered a whole year’s supply of liquor in his first week, with nowhere to put it all. Still, the owner, Robert Shalom, had faith in the big twenty-two-year-old Gandolfini.

  “I’ve been thinking back to those days, and the fact that he got this job when he was that young to run Private Eyes, which was a pretty big nightclub, shows something about him,” Foderaro says. “I mean, I was just hanging out there with him. But he was managing a really hip, big-deal club, a whole team of bouncers, waitstaff, buying the beer, wine, everything—it was a real job.”

  Gandolfini had been a bouncer at clubs before, and he was obviously the sort of staffer entertainment venues like to have around. Several friends said he “enjoyed” bouncing, because finding the psychological insight that gave you an edge against anyone, no matter how drunk or how big, was fascinating.

  He moved to Manhattan for good, though without taking an apartment of his own. He was making good money at the club, but not that good—and he had better uses for the money he made than paying a mortgage. Managing a club also meant (within reason) being the one person who had to stay sober. It meant assessing a situation quickly, and taking responsibility when things happen that are in no way predictable.

  Running a place like Private Eyes showed you a lot of life, exposed you to people from all over and the vices they indulged in. It’s not quite stand-up comedy, and it isn’t community policing, either, or even the emergency medical service—but it definitely means you versus a crowd, every night.

  “The thing about Jim was he was just fantastically strong, and fearless,” remembers Foderaro. “I remember one time we went to a convenience store in downtown Manhattan after the club had closed, this was like two A.M., and there were some black guys outside the store who started taunting us. And Jim gave right back.… He sort of focused on this one dude, and they started really dishing it back and forth. And Jim, he loved this, you could tell he was really into it.

  “We go into the store and they follow us, so it goes on inside the store, and you could see right away the store owner is not real keen on this,” Foderaro continues. “And all of a sudden Jim goes right up to this one guy who was taunting us, like really nose-to-nose. And he came at this guy, who was bigger than Jim, with such force and determination that he basically just backed out of the store and ran away. Jim projected this monster energy.”

  The gig at Private Eyes lasted a year or so. Gandolfini could have gone on, taken another nightclub job maybe, but he told friends he didn’t want to. He went back to construction and odd jobs for a while. He did a little indoor renovation, he even sold books on the street. He seemed unusually proud of his construction labor. Once, in 2002, he offered to drive a writer home after an interview, one of those spontaneous acts of kindness he seemed prone to take, and as the reporter hopped out Gandolfini leaned over to the passenger’s side and looked fondly up at the building. He recognized it—he “did a little carpentry here” in the old days.

  Roger Bart remembers some kind of job at Astor Place Liquors, on the edge of the NYU campus. He’d see Jimmy lugging mixed boxes of fine wines on the sidewalk—Bart thinks somehow the owner or the staff were friends of Jim’s—and they’d talk. Bart would remind him about Kathryn Gately, who had left Rutgers and was running a conservatory at the Nat Horne Studios in Manhattan (the forerunner of the Gately Poole Conservatory she runs today in Chicago).

  Gandolfini was now twenty-five. He seemed “wide-eyed” at the prospect, but still, Bart had to call Gately and plead for him. She was running an advanced class. Gandolfini hadn’t been on stage since he washed out at summer stock tryouts in 1980. Could she at least see Gandolfini, to take measure of what Roger saw in him? Bart arranged for his friend to call the teacher in her office.

  “And then he asked what no other student before or since has ever asked,” remembers Gately. “He said he wanted to do the interview, but he wanted to do it over a good meal. So I trooped uptown to this restaurant that had white tablecloths and met this well-dressed young man, so tall, towering, I thought. And he conducted that interview. And the food was great. It really was.… It was like a presentation, he told me about everything, it was so Italian. He seemed to have so much dignity. And of course, he was accepted.”

  4.

  Learning How to Act

  Once in Gately’s class, Gandolfini reacted as he often would—with self-doubt. He wondered almost immediately if he was in over his head.

  “When he came to me he wanted to play your average suburban nice guy, the leading-man type,”
Gately says. “I don’t know how to say this—it was like he wanted to be Troy Donahue. And I of course could see that he could be much more than that.”

  Learning you’re not Troy Donahue is not, perhaps, the worst news a serious young actor can hear. But learning that, for stage purposes, you are not you is an essential step toward becoming an actor. As Roger Bart had been trying to tell Gandolfini ever since Rutgers, it’s the strange synergy between an actor and a part that makes a career. What Bart saw in Gandolfini was an ability to play against his intimidating heavy stereotype. And to make that work, he’d need training.

  Gately’s reputation was based on teaching the Meisner technique, a variant on method acting developed by Sanford Meisner after he had worked with Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg at the Group Theatre in New York in the 1940s. It evolved, ultimately, from the Stanislavski system. Meisner became one of the first teachers at The Actors Studio in New York when it was founded, in 1947, by Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis. The technique was first developed for the stage, but like all method acting, its greatest impact has been on film acting.

  Meisner technique begins with a series of exercises that are used to heighten observation and influence actor responses through repetition. Two actors will stand in front of the class and begin a dialogue by repeating each other’s comments—“You’re nervous,” for example, followed by “I’m nervous?” “Yes, you’re nervous,” and so on, in order to elicit spontaneity from the actors. The exercises build over time until they generate enough natural interaction to support a dramatic text.

  One of the first exercises Gandolfini encountered was “threading the needle”—literally, threading a needle in front of the class. It looked a little nuts, but he also thought it was like a challenge, a dare: Could he do something like that? “I was immediately interested and scared to death,” Gandolfini told Beverly Reid of The Star-Ledger. “It really made me very nervous—and I was shocked by that, really. So I ended up staying two years.”

  “He brought just the tiniest needle with the tiniest eye you can imagine,” Gately says, “and he couldn’t do it to save his life.” If you think that should be easy, try it in front of a group of observant strangers. The idea is for an actor to develop an ease on stage or before the camera that make it appear as if he or she is acting as naturally and confidently as they would in real life.

  That sounds all nice and dry and practical, but actors—often the ones who quit the technique—describe the training as difficult and even psychologically invasive.

  The best joke about method acting ever told came from Laurence Olivier, on the set of Marathon Man, as he waited to do a key confrontation scene with Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman had just been running around a track to recreate the situation of his character, who had been pursued through the city only to wind up, sweaty and disheveled, at the mercy of Olivier’s Nazi dentist. As Hoffman sat, huffing and puffing, waiting for cameras to roll, Olivier is reported to have said, “My dear boy, have you ever tried acting?”

  Studying the Meisner system, its practitioners say, isn’t like that anymore, if it ever was; those stories about retrieving buried memories to evoke real emotions, or living like a blind man for a month to play King Lear, are all exaggerated. They are remnants of the 1950s fad for shamanlike authenticity in artistic expression. There are tricks any actor uses—as Gandolfini himself said, staying up all night the night before, or putting a sharp rock in your shoe, will help you simulate anger. What contemporary method actors do have in common is not so much a set of techniques but a conviction that acting has a serious purpose. To do it well you must prepare your mind to convey emotion clearly and immediately. And doing that requires a certain amount of individual psychological integrity, even fearlessness.

  Teaching involved a series of exercises designed to make an actor function in the moment, with lightning-quick responses. Much of the work was deeply psychological—not in an analytical way, but in the sense of finding deep emotions that could, with discipline, be applied to a character on stage or camera. Students were supposed to come in with situations and props that would help them bring out such emotional authenticity. Sometimes a teacher or a student would do something to the actor or to his props to provoke a reaction, and that could, given the tensions in the classroom, unleash unpredictable emotion. That usually accounted for the “psychologically invasive” charge.

  Gately remembers Gandolfini having particular trouble with crying. “His class was full of women, far outnumbering the men, and they of course could cry very convincingly,” she says. Their ease intimidated Jim. “He’d say, ‘I want to cry like Melanie,’ and I’d tell him he could cry, but it would be different.…

  “There was another man, John Hall, in the class, he was big too, six-two or six-three, who had the same problem, and they came to me together to ask for a special class,” Gately says. “So I did it with them. I think it took three hours, and the only way it would work was when they regressed to childhood.”

  Gately describes a hilarious scene with two hulking wannabe actors lying on cots in the studio, struggling to regress to a point where tears would flow, each quietly observing the other while Gately coached them in turn. She could feel the competitive tension, but a breakthrough seemed elusive.

  Finally a way opened up. For Gandolfini, tears were a function of helplessness. He could make them come only when he imagined himself tied to a chair, with something relentlessly bearing down upon him—“Otherwise, I’d do something,” he told Gately.

  While that kind of personal insight was not the main object of the classes, such unexpected truths were often a by-product of the technique. It was a two-way street. Gately told Jim a personal story about her father: When she was a girl in Boston, her dad would often have Jesuit priests over for disputation (Gately was raised Irish Catholic, but her father was a skeptic), and she was always allowed to sit in on the arguments. They were cheerful dinners, full of declarative summations and their ripostes.

  When her father died, for some reason Gately couldn’t cry throughout the family services. When finally she went up to his casket, she saw the ring on her father’s hand, and somehow it reminded her of those Jesuit dinners, to which she had always been welcome, even as a girl. And suddenly the tears flowed. She was surprised that such a small token could provoke such a profound reaction in her. That was the sort of memory that could serve you on camera.

  Gandolfini listened intently, Gately recalls, to that story.

  Training at the Gately Poole Conservatory took two years, in two nine-month sessions. The first session was devoted to developing the various tools of the technique, the second to prepping an actual text. Many of the students actually had Broadway parts already, and were making their way toward careers. Gandolfini had no real acting credits but he threw himself into the process. “He was very competitive,” Gately says. “If he saw good work, he’d either be depressed, thinking he couldn’t match it, or he’d be inspired to work even harder, try to equal it.”

  It was toward the end of the first session when Gandolfini had the breakthrough he described on Inside the Actors Studio, earning the advice he said meant so much to him: “This is what people pay for.… They don’t wanna see the guy next door.”

  “The scene,” Gately explains, “was about a man learning his wife had been unfaithful, and how he reacts. And Jim came in with all these ideas about backstory, all these little props that made his character, in his imagination. But he was doing it as appearance—he was acting as he thought an actor should to present such a character. Not stiff-lipped, exactly, but very controlled in his actions, very, well, Troy Donahue.”

  They did the scene four times, on the last night before the long weekend, and Gandolfini and his acting partner were both deeply frustrated. So was Gately. In fact, so was the whole class.

  “I could tell he was very mad at me,” Gately said. “He couldn’t understand what I wanted. And we were so tired of the scene, we all were. But I said we’d come back to it the
next week, and finally get it right, and you could hear groans.…”

  And, just as his Park Ridge High School friends had jumped in to make sure Gandolfini memorized his lines for Kiss Me, Kate, the class took a hand.

  “I believe they got together over the weekend and worked on it more,” Gately recalls. “And when they came in that [next] week, you could tell they’d put a great deal of work into it. I suggested the actor who was in the scene with Jim should interrupt him or talk over him in some way. And then, wow!”

  “I think [the acting teacher] told a partner to do something to me,” is how Gandolfini remembered the moment. “And he did it, and I destroyed the place. Y’know, just all that crap they have on stage. And then she said, at the end of it—I remember my hands were bleeding a little bit and stuff, and the guy had left—and she said, ‘See? Everybody’s fine. Nobody’s hurt. This is what you have to do. This is what people pay for.… They don’t wanna see the guy next door. These are the things you need to be able to express, and control, work on the controlling part, and that’s what you need to show.’”

  * * *

  Susan Aston came to New York City just as James Gandolfini was leaving school to find real acting jobs anywhere he could. It was April 1987. She had a paying job in a play and an apartment waiting for her—she was already a member of the Screen Actors Guild, for her small part in Tender Mercies, Oscar-winner Robert Duvall’s picture about a country music singer’s come-from-behind comeback. Her father had worked for the air force when she was growing up, everywhere from Guam to back in the States, but to her, Abilene, Texas, where she lived the longest and went to high school, was home.

  Aston has cornflower-blue eyes and a mop of strawberry-blond hair, and the Lone Star twang has never entirely left her voice. She was raised Church of Christ, a Christian sect that thinks the Southern Baptists trend toward sophistication and backsliding. But she loved acting, and being in a play in New York was something she’d always wanted to do.