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

by Bischoff, Dan

  But plays close, as hers did, and she found out that her apartment, which someone in the theater had arranged for her, was an illegal sublet and she had to leave. She spent a few months sleeping on friends’ floors; she slept on a futon behind a row of filing cabinets for a while. Then a friend asked her to help find an actor for a one-act play, Big El’s Best Friend, about a woman in love with Elvis Presley and an Elvis impersonator. She went around to a cattle-call audition for another play in search of an Elvis.

  There on stage was a six-foot-tall skinny guy with slicked-back black hair and a booming nasal voice. The accent was New Jersey, but the honking sound penetrated. Everybody at the audition thought he was completely wrong for the part they were casting, so Aston introduced herself to James Gandolfini and asked if he’d like to impersonate Elvis.

  Big El’s Best Friend became Gandolfini’s first appearance on a New York stage. Aston got cast, too, as a friend of the Elvis fan who was herself slightly smitten. Aston says his southern accent wasn’t key to the part, he just imitated the King’s slurred Memphis drawl and the way it could turn whole sentences into a single word. According to a memoir by actress Melissa Gilbert, who played the Elvis-loving lead, Big El’s Best Friend was part of a night of one-acts in which everybody got black eyes: an actor in one of the other plays walked into an open cupboard, Gilbert’s boyfriend elbowed her in the eye in his sleep just before opening night, and at some point Aston and Gandolfini got into a stage fight and accidentally gave each other shiners, one apiece.

  The play got some notice on the Lower East Side, where it was performed on a basement stage—Elvis, really the cheesy Pop Elvis of painted plaster busts and sequined jumpsuits, was an iconic figure for hip downtowners in those days. Big El wasn’t a breakout hit by any means. But it did make an acting team out of Aston and Gandolfini, one that would endure, with gaps here and there, until his death.

  Back then, Aston and Gandolfini were Gotham outsiders together. He didn’t have a place to stay, either, and bridge-and-tunnel people were tolerated by Manhattanites in ways similar to the forbearance shown Southerners. In 1988, T. J. Foderaro’s sister Lisa Foderaro, then an entertainment writer for The New York Times, wrote a feature about young people trying to move to the city as rent-stabilized apartment rules began to evaporate and prices soared. Illegal sublets were the norm, with all their unpredictability, but preferable to being on the hook for $1,500 a month for a legal space the size of your mother’s sewing room back home. The story cited a struggling actor’s unusual achievement of living in the city for four years without ever putting his name on a lease.

  Then there is Jim Gandolfini, who seems to thrive on the apartment-hopping life. Since moving to New York City four years ago, Mr. Gandolfini, 26 years old, has never had his name on a lease, never paid more than $400 a month in rent and never lived in one place more than 10 months. His wanderer’s existence has given him sojourns, some as brief as two months, in Hoboken, N.J.; Astoria, Queens; Clinton and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Park Slope and Flatbush in Brooklyn.

  “Moving, to me, is no big deal,” said Mr. Gandolfini, whose calling is the theater but whose living comes mostly from bartending and construction. “I have a system down. I throw everything in plastic garbage bags and can be situated in my new place in minutes. Without my name on a lease, I’m in and out. I have no responsibilities.”

  That was Gandolfini’s first mention in The Times.

  For the next two and a half years Gandolfini and Aston would develop a showcase titled Tarantulas Dancing, first as a one-act, then with a second act added. They performed at all sorts of stages around the city, from the Samuel Beckett Theatre on Theatre Row to the basement stage at the West Bank Café on Forty-second Street, which was managed in those days by Yale theater grad Lewis Black (who later became famous for his splenetic rants on The Daily Show). Directed by Aston and written by a friend specifically for the two of them, Tarantulas Dancing takes place as Aston’s character, called “M’Darlin’,” has decided to break it off with Gandolfini, who’s named “Bucky.” The MacGuffin is an electric steam iron Bucky claims as his and wants back.

  It’s a play about opposites attracting one another, and a kind of duel between their different accents—Gandolfini looming over the doll-like Aston, who hits back with a little steel-magnolia bite. “I’ve made Jell-O that’s been harder than your dick,” M’Darlin’ says. “Aww, c’mon, I was ill! I told you I was sick!” Her spunk elicits a kind of vulnerability out of Bucky. (The kidding about their accents went on into the next century; Aston played a recent phone message for me after James’s death in which he mocks her drawl—“Jaaa-iimes, Jaaa-imes, Jaaa-imes, O mah Lawd, today!” was all he said.)

  Aston has kept a videotape, from 1988, of one of their Tarantula performances. Gandolfini, Aston says, weighed 185 pounds. Thin and slightly round-shouldered, looking a bit more like John Cleese than Tony Soprano, he nonetheless brings an implied forcefulness to his presence that jumps off the screen.

  Gandolfini had just graduated from Kathryn Gately’s class when he met Aston, and he urged her to take a six-week study with his teacher, which she did. Then they started to work together to develop elaborate backstories for their showcase characters. As they worked out scenes they collected stage notes that shaped their performances.

  In a way, it was a sketch of the ideal character James thought he could portray. He wrote out an outline in longhand, in blue marker on white lined paper, describing who Bucky’s father and mother were, what they did for a living, what Bucky hoped to become. It described the conflicts that shaped his personality. Aston still has it, and the one she made for M’Darlin’. They were alternate identities—he was using his self-christened college nickname, for pete’s sake—recreated for the stage. There was some shamanlike authenticity in that.

  Gandolfini did other acting gigs wherever he could, often for no pay. His first film appearance in a speaking role was shot in 1989 as a student project at New York University. David Matalon, who was studying filmmaking, scraped together $10,000 to make Eddy, about a working guy who falls in love with a prostitute, Madge. Her pimp, Mike, played by Gandolfini, decides to put a stop to Eddy’s plans to take Madge out of the business and shoots him, inadvertently killing Madge, too.

  After Gandolfini’s death, Matalon told CNN he interviewed fifteen actors for the part before Gandolfini. “None of them were very convincing and threatening,” Matalon recalled, “and then he just had it.… You could see there’s a slight dangerousness in him. It kept it exciting.”

  That he could bring that kind of intensity to the stage made him stand out. But it was with Aston that Gandolfini kept honing the character he wanted to project, the working-class Everyman whose feelings were both tender and explosive. They did other plays, like The Danger of Strangers, in which Aston portrayed a woman who lures Gandolfini’s character back to her apartment and kills him. The plotlines tended to hover around the big guy with feet of clay, who knows he can scare people but wants to be loved at the same time.

  Gandolfini and Aston’s acting dynamic fit one play in the American canon perfectly: Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Streetcar features its own linguistic duet between Polish tough guy Stanley Kowalski and the lilting Southern pretensions of Blanche DuBois. And it was to Streetcar that the path begun by Tarantulas led. While they were still working on the showcase, Gandolfini got his first real paying job in the theater, playing Mitch, Blanche’s aborted suitor, in a production of Streetcar set to tour Scandinavia. Sweet, stable Mitch was the Karl Malden part from the movie version of Streetcar (Gandolfini would alternate between Mitch and Stanley types in his character roles for years to come).

  Gately remembers Jim coming back to her conservatory to tell her he’d just landed his first acting gig. He’d done all sorts of jobs after managing Private Eyes—construction, a little home carpentry, bartending, and bouncing. He once said he sold books on the street. He worked for a long time for a Jewish
businessman whose company, Gimme Seltzer, delivered big bottles of the stuff to restaurants and shops around the city. Jim was supposed to start a job cutting down trees when Streetcar was offered. Touring Sweden was a lot better than sawing wood.

  “I remember lots of old people falling asleep in dinner theaters,” is how Gandolfini recalled his tour later, but the trip was definitely an eye-opener. He visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Louvre in Paris; when the tour was over, he rolled around Ireland for a week with a girl he’d met through a friend in New Jersey.

  When he got back to New York City he did a small part in One Day Wonder at The Actors Studio, and in 1991 he took a big part in Summer Winds, by Frank Pugliese, performed with the Naked Angels. Marisa Tomei was the star of this “romantic drama in which love songs become love stories” (a premonition of 2005’s Romance & Cigarettes)—it was his first paying job that used his choir-trained singing voice. Summer Winds had two-week runs at a number of different venues, some of them college theaters.

  Then, in 1992, he was called back for On the Waterfront with The Actors Studio. Gandolfini was cast as Charley, the Rod Steiger part, a major role. But he was abruptly fired after just a week. Some friends remember him scaring people on the set—something about putting his hand through a glass window in frustration, like breaking that security barrier at Rutgers (“He took out his anger on inanimate objects all the time”). Years later Jim remembered it as a “lovely discussion” with one of the producers. A few minutes later, “I got a call telling me I was fired for being too mouthy.”

  Later that year he got his first real break, playing Steve, one of Stanley’s poker pals, in a Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire featuring the movie stars Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange. Aida Turturro played Steve’s wife, Eunice. Jim would be understudying Mitch. Aston got one of the other poker wife parts. Gandolfini knew the casting director, who lived across the street from his apartment—but there was little question he knew the play. And being part of a Broadway production of Streetcar was where his study for the past five years had been leading, almost inevitably, all along.

  Streetcar is the arc of inarticulate male longing that sails through American theater in the last half of the twentieth century. With On the Waterfront, it’s also the fountain from which Marlon Brando’s career, and by proxy all postwar working-class method actor careers, springs. And the play carries a deep insight for men who want to act.

  Much later, after The Sopranos became a hit, Gandolfini put it this way, in an interview with Rolling Stone:

  “I think Marlon Brando said, ‘The character that suffers is always the best character in the play’.… So people watch Tony, and they watch his mother giving him shit and his wife giving him shit. Even his girlfriend throws shit at him, you know. So here’s this powerful figure getting abused all the time, and I think people get a good laugh out of that.”

  And I guess anguish is more fun to play than some chirpy.…

  “I don’t know if it’s more fun to play, but it’s certainly more fun to watch.”

  You think maybe it’s not more fun to play?

  “I think it’s a hard character to play, especially over a period of time. Everyone’s yelling at you all day long.”

  Like Streetcar, The Sopranos would be a production about the male beast caged, regulated and, at least partly, tamed by women in his family. And about the pathos of so much power so completely overmatched by emotions he can barely express. But all that was still to come. First he had to start going a little Hollywood.

  “And after that,” Aston says, “he went off to Hollywood with the boys, and I didn’t work with him for four or five years.”

  5.

  Character Actor Years: Working-Class Hero vs. Gentle Hitman

  Gandolfini actually started his film career in New York, appearing in small parts in several films before he moved away from the theater and “went off to Hollywood with the boys.” If you’re in a generous mood, you could say his film career began in 1987 with walk-ons, like his role in the low-budget Shock! Shock! Shock!, in which he appeared as a hospital orderly. After playing the pimp in the 1989 student film Eddy, he took a part so small that it went uncredited in the 1991 Bruce Willis thriller The Last Boy Scout, and you had to look quick to catch him as a hood who tries to extort protection money from Hasidic jewelers in Sidney Lumet’s 1992 A Stranger Among Us, starring Melanie Griffith.

  And then, in 1993, he landed the role of Virgil in True Romance.

  Actually, he was in three movies that year. In Money for Nothing, which was shot in Philadelphia, he played the older brother of John Cusack, an out-of-work longshoreman who picks up $1.2 million that fell off an armored car in the middle of the street and then tries to take the money and run. In Italian Movie Gandolfini played a young version of Tony Soprano, a small-time neighborhood gambler and sexual predator. He was the chief villain of the film, and he lip-handles a cigar in a way Tony would later do every week in the opening credits for The Sopranos, but it was a flawed picture (even with Rita Moreno’s cameo). When Gandolfini became famous as Tony Soprano, the production company tried to repackage the film with a big photo of James, but his was really a supporting role.

  True Romance was the standout, and not just because of the cast (Gary Oldman, Christian Slater, Brad Pitt, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Tom Sizemore, Chris Penn, and, of course, Patricia Arquette). For fans, True Romance is the first picture in which Gandolfini’s range as an actor was finally there to see. It even has a nifty subplot (not involving Gandolfini’s character, unfortunately), about trying to make it as a character actor in L.A.

  For the people who knew Buck in life, however, it was almost a disappearing act.

  “I swear to God, I saw him in that movie and I didn’t recognize him,” says Mark Di Ionno, the columnist for The Star-Ledger who drove Gandolfini to summer stock tryouts after freshman year at Rutgers. “I hadn’t seen him for ten years at that point, and man, he’d changed.”

  We’ve already described the balletic beating Gandolfini gives Patricia Arquette in True Romance, and the ordeal of filming that twelve-minute scene over five days. It says something about Gandolfini’s courtliness, and maybe about his sense of gender stereotypes, that he begged Aston not to go see it (she still hasn’t). Gandolfini is brutal and terribly convincing in that scene. What gave the beating its dramatic punch, however, was the writing by Quentin Tarantino.

  William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, once described that entire movie as a series of reversals of audience expectations. Almost from the beginning, the film sends up the conventions of previous horse operas about the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang: The heroes are betrayed by their trusty sidekicks, the posse doesn’t give up when the going gets rough, Butch actually welcomes the bicycle as a potential replacement for his horse—scene after scene upending stereotypes and updating the western in the process.

  Quentin Tarantino writes that way, too, only more so. The big reversal in Gandolfini’s scene is, of course, that Arquette shoots him with his pistol-grip shotgun at the end. But each little segment along the way twists expectations, too—Arquette doesn’t wail and beg for mercy, Gandolfini doesn’t just kill her when he finds the suitcase, the tiny corkscrew he mocks becomes an effective weapon, and so on. And until he feels that corkscrew bore into his foot, Gandolfini wears a tight but playful smile that became almost the actor’s trademark. He does wince-worthy things throughout the scene, like putting a pretty girl through a glass shower door, for example. And the biggest reversal of all is how we feel about him for it.

  Virgil is not a leading character, and he isn’t on screen for very long, but he’s unforgettable because of that genial air of menace. It’s almost a meta performance in that way, a picture of an actor enjoying his twists on other actors playing heavies. When Virgil’s anger is loosed, it’s thrilling because we’ve been waiting for it, almost hoping for it, to clear the air of ambiguity. And the premo
nition of Tony Soprano is unmistakable.

  “The boys” in that film are all, more or less, graduates of what we might call the Streetcar school of male sexuality (Gary Oldman is an exception, perhaps, but is Joe Orton really so different from Tennessee Williams?). Slater is the only real romantic lead. The rest are character actors who, here and there, had breakthrough roles that made them leads—usually roles that allowed them to show an unexpected tenderness or courage or vulnerability.

  The Hollywood tradition of turning tough guys into leads is venerable, beginning, you could say, with Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney, and continuing through Lee Marvin, Warren Oates, Charles Bronson, and on and on. Maybe we should think of it as an inevitable kind of type reversal that comes after committing X number of murders on the screen. True Romance put Bucky’s foot firmly on that ladder (even though, without getting all Anthony Weiner about it, he didn’t actually murder anyone in True Romance). There was no guaranteed career, exactly, but you could not mistake the ladder presented. Combined with that physical fearlessness he displayed again and again as a young man, and the affability that won him friends wherever he went, Gandolfini might have seemed a good bet to become a star even when he had so few credits to his name.

  Anyway, after True Romance, acting really seemed like a grown-up career choice for a thirty-two-year-old single guy. Gandolfini wasn’t ready to quit any part-time day job quite yet, but he at least felt sure enough to actually rent a place to live on the West Coast, too. He had started signing leases for his own apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1989. In 1994, he rented a place in Malibu (he would rent apartments in Sherman Oaks the next year, and a house from 1996 to 1998 in Mount Olympus, in the Hollywood Hills, but he never changed his official residency from New York City throughout his career). For five years he bounced from one coast to the other and from Tennessee to Boston to Florida to the south of France, depending on the production.