James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (14 page)

Some TV shows take a little time to find an audience. But not
The Sopranos
. Overnight, James Gandolfini became one of the most recognizable American actors in the world. He certainly couldn’t hide: he was six feet tall and, at the beginning of the show, some 265 pounds. Is anyone ever prepared for the way celebrity can upend their sense of self? Some people, like those whose parents work in the entertainment business, have at least seen it in their regular lives. People like Robert Downey, Jr., say, or Jeremy Piven.

Gandolfini wasn’t like them. He’d already lived more than half—more like three-fourths—of his life before celebrity happened to him. One of the strangest things to Jim was the way his character could do the most horrible things (like garrote a Mafia snitch he sees while taking Meadow on that tour of colleges, an act so gruesome HBO executives pleaded with Chase to cut it), and yet the public seemed to love him for it. He was playing a villain, in his words a “New Jersey lunatic.” It made no rational sense, like American celebrity itself.

But his incredible popularity was unmistakable. Gandolfini’s manager Mark Armstrong tells the story of how, by the middle of the first season, HBO was asking Gandolfini to help out their other big production, Friday night boxing, by coming to the HBO skybox and making an appearance before the fight. Armstrong and his partner, Nancy Sanders, flew out from Los Angeles in March 1999 on business, and Gandolfini asked them to come with him to a Holyfield-Lewis match.

Armstrong says they met in the skybox with a bunch of people from HBO. And then four security guards showed up and asked Jim to come with them.

“I thought, that’s a little unusual,” Armstrong says. “People would stop Jim when he was visiting L.A. with me, but it was usually like one or two people, and they’d say things like, ‘Mr. Gandolfini, I really respect your work, sir.’ But here in New York, somebody had assigned him four security guards—this is going to be different.

“So these guards walk us out into Madison Square Garden. And the whole place erupts, ‘
To-nee! To-nee! To-nee!!’
And he put his arms around both our shoulders, drew us close, and said, ‘See what you’ve done to my life?’”

It was incredible, it was like a joke. (Other people reported that when he took them out into those cheers at the Garden, he’d lean over and say, “Be nice to me, or I’ll have them kill you.”) It seemed so far outside his notion of who he was.

The day after that Madison Square Garden crowd scene, Gandolfini did a reading with Meryl Streep for a movie they were considering (it didn’t work out). After the reading Mark and Nancy walked Streep and Jim back to her hotel in midtown, and every block, people would recognize him, shout out “Hey, Tony!” or stop them to tell him
The Sopranos
had shot some scene in front of a best friend’s house in Jersey or something. Meryl Streep, of course, has been nominated seventeen times and won three Oscars. She is almost universally admired as one of the leading American actors of her generation, a famed technician of character whose ability to inhabit any role has been her hallmark ever since she starred at the Yale Drama Department. And she looked at Jim and said, “How do you do it?”

“What are you talking about?” Jim asked in reply. “You’re Meryl Streep. Like, everybody knows you.”

Streep looked up at Gandolfini and said, “Have you noticed, they’re not yelling at me?”

7.

Troubles on the Set (2000–2003)

Five years after
The Sopranos
ended, scriptwriter Terence Winter, who went on to create the cable series
Boardwalk Empire
about the Jazz Age gangsters who built the Jersey Shore, told
Vanity Fair
that there was a sort of barbershop-mirrors effect to writing about the Mafia.

“One F.B.I. agent told us early on that on Monday morning they would get to the F.B.I. office and all the agents would talk about
The Sopranos,
” Winter recalled. “Then they would listen to the wiretaps from that weekend, and it was all mob guys talking about
The Sopranos,
having the same conversation about the show, but always from the flip side. We would hear back that real wiseguys used to think that we had somebody on the inside. They couldn’t believe how accurate the show was.”

Forget about what the F.B.I. thought of
The Sopranos.
The real point here is that
the mob
thought it was so true that Chase or someone at HBO had to have an inside source—they thought there was a stool pigeon singing in David Chase’s ear.

One of the great things about
The Sopranos
was the way it played with fact and fiction.
The Sopranos
had embedded in it an ongoing critique, or maybe parody, of the way reality is depicted by TV. David Chase took delight in mocking the established conventions of dramatic closure and edifying moral lesson that TV had always peddled. His show pretended to realism while depicting a perennial fictional American archetype, the Italian mobster; it became a hit dramatic series, based on wonderfully written scripts, in an era when “reality TV” and (at least putatively) unscripted stories were the hottest innovations in the medium. Untying the knots Chase’s series wove between his world and our own became one of the delights fans found so fascinating about Tony Soprano’s story.

Chase himself had described the show as
The Simpsons
with guns or
Twin Peaks
in the Meadowlands. He was thinking of the vulgarity of
The Simpsons,
its anarchic parody of the ups and downs of family life as it is usually shown on TV.
The Sopranos
would be a parody of Italian gangster movies, of the sentimental mythic sheen
The Godfather
movies peddled, and of day-to-day suburban life. We’d see Tony Soprano drive to the mall, buy an ax at a gardening center, play golf with his next door neighbor.

Gandolfini said that he’d heard Chase say the show was a story about “people lying to themselves” about who they are.

Gandolfini’s performance carried the greatest truth. He seemed to braid reality and art effortlessly. He was, of course, a Jersey guy—even though he needed an accent coach to get that clipped, central Jersey, staccato-Italianese sound. He was gregarious, but he could be moody; he was gently clumsy, sweet, and intuitive about the feelings of others, but he could be forceful when pushed or cornered, like you might expect of a former nightclub bouncer. On the show, when Tony is spotted at the gardening center carrying the ax, his neighbor visibly quakes with fear at the sight. Gandolfini’s eyes record first bland suburban bonhomie, then consternation, then realization, followed quickly by a faint hint of anger at his inability to blend into his identity as just another suburban dad. Jim could encapsulate the entire narrative arc of the season in three or four muscle twinges around his oddly transparent, hooded eyes.

The rest of the cast—at least, the rest of the male actors—wanted to get across the same pugnacious authenticity. It came easy to Tony Sirico, who played Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri, the Soprano family captain and enforcer: Sirico had been arrested twenty-eight times in his youth, spending seven years altogether behind bars, and claimed to have been offered the chance to be made in the Mafia. He said he’d turned them down because he had “troubles with authority.” By the time
The Sopranos
had started he’d been in maybe forty movies and fifty TV shows, almost always playing a mobster or some other kind of heavy.

But everybody started getting into character on the set, and it got hard sometimes to go back to being themselves. Producer Brad Grey said contract negotiations became “testosterone-fueled” as the guys started channeling their characters when they talked with management.

The strangest twists started happening in real life. Michael “Big Mike” Squicciarini played hitman “Big Frank” Cippolina for two episodes of the 2000 season. Then “Big Frank” got whacked, and Big Mike left the show; and then Big Mike himself died in 2001, of natural causes.

Yet even after his two deaths—the fictional one followed by the real one—Squicciarini’s name turned up in 2002 in papers filed by Manhattan D.A. Michael Hillebrecht against the Brooklyn branch of the DeCavalcante Mafia clan. The government asserted that Squicciarini, who was six-five and weighed upward of three hundred pounds, had been present when drug dealer Ralph Hernandez was executed by Joseph “Joe Pitts” Conigliaro from his wheelchair back in 1992.

Big Mike wasn’t around to defend his good name (given his previous five-year stint in prison for an aggravated assault committed in Monmouth County, New Jersey, his defense might have been flawed in any case). But Squicciarini’s posthumous rap sheet justified “former
Sopranos
actor linked to cold-blooded murder” as a media factoid.

Squicciarini’s bit part on
The Sopranos
came eight years after a prosecutor alleged he was in the background for a mob rubout, but the story acquired legs when Robert Iler, who played Tony’s son, A. J. Soprano, was arrested for robbery and marijuana possession in July 2001. Iler was hanging out with three other teenagers in his Upper East Side neighborhood in Manhattan when they ran into two sixteen-year-old tourists from Brazil. Iler and his buddies demanded their wallets, making off with $40.

The tourists flagged down a passing police car and caught up with the four teens in nearby John Jay Park, sitting on a bench. Iler was sixteen himself at the time. “Life imitates television” was the lede in story after story.

When the posthumous Squicciarini story came out, the media saw a pattern. From then on, no
Sopranos
actor could have a brush with the law without a media ripple. As with Squicciarini, there was no statute of limitations, either. In April 2005, for example—nearly four years after “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero was liquidated on HBO—the actor who played him, Vincent Pastore, was charged with attempted assault on his then-girlfriend, Lisa Regina, in Little Italy, of all places. He ultimately agreed to do seventy hours of community service after pleading guilty to attempted assault, and later settled a civil suit with Regina out of court. Most headlines about Pastore’s problem had the word
Sopranos
in them.

Nine months later, the worst imitation of art occurred. Lillo Brancato, Jr., who played aspiring mobster Matthew Bevilaqua, was arrested and charged with manslaughter for an attempted burglary in the Bronx. A police officer, Daniel Enchautegui, was shot and killed when he confronted Brancato and his accomplice. The partner went to jail for life without parole; Brancato was acquitted of murder charges, but got ten years for first-degree attempted burglary. When Gandolfini died, reporters went to the New York state prison where Brancato was serving time to get his reaction.

No offense was too petty. Near Christmas in 2006, Louis Gross, who played Tony’s muscle-bound bodyguard Perry Annunziata, was arrested. Gross was pinched for criminal mischief after a woman said he had tried to break into her house in New York City. (He subsequently received probation.)

Even ending the show didn’t stop the stories. In October 2011, more than three years after the last episode of
The Sopranos
aired, John Marinacci was charged with taking part in a “low-level gambling operation in the Gambino Bookmaking Enterprise” along with thirty-six others. Marinacci, who taught poker in real life and had played a dealer in two 2004 episodes of
The Sopranos,
went on to bit parts in
Boardwalk Empire,
too. (His legal responsibility in the gambling case remains unresolved as we go to press.) In December that same year, Anthony Borgese, who had played captain “Larry Boy” Barese on
The Sopranos,
pleaded guilty to arranging the beating of a man who owed money to an upstate car dealership. A Gambino family heavy did the beating, breaking the victim’s ribs and jaw. Borgese, who also goes by the stage name Tony Darrow, got a reduced sentence by agreeing to speak to youth groups about the dangers of mob involvement and film a public service ad.

By the end of the show’s run,
The Sopranos
was so synonymous with American organized crime that TV news shows would use the logo—“Sopranos” with an automatic pistol as the “p”—as a symbol for crime news. When New Jersey police broke up a ring of Jewish rabbis who were selling human organs on the black market with mob help in 2009, a New York station actually ran their account over a clip of Tony getting out of his SUV taken from the show’s familiar opening credits. Jon Stewart, another Jersey native, devoted a couple of minutes on
The Daily Show
to the ethnic alphabet soup of organized crime his home state had become in the media.

It’s hard to interpret this leitmotif in the tabs and Hollywood press without thinking about Italian cultural stereotypes. Just about every immigrant group of any size in America has generated its own criminal subculture: There are Irish mobsters and Jewish mobsters and Lebanese mobsters. Not to mention Hungarian, Chinese, French, and Russian gangsters. Examples show up all the time in the movies; even Gandolfini played a KGB-turned-Russian-mob killer in
Terminal Velocity.

But Italians are somehow the
real
mobsters, even today. If you go to a strip club in the Russian section of Brooklyn called “Little Odessa,” home to local franchises of the Russian Mafia, you’ll see nude revues of pretty blond Russian girls dressed (only) in Armani suit jackets and Borsalinos, dancing to a discofied version of
The Godfather
theme. The movies had a lot to do with that—Edward G. Robinson (who was as Jewish as those organ-thieving rabbis) playing
Little Caesar,
deadly but dapper, is a case in point. But as we already noted, the movies enshrined Irish mobsters, too, like James Cagney. Tony Sirico told me that the way Paulie Walnuts holds the pinky ring on his right hand with his left, both arms held out flat in front of his stomach, is his personal homage to Cagney.

Italian-Americans attribute the focus on Italian gangsters to sheer prejudice. “My grandfather never considered himself white.…” Italian-American cultural organizations protested
The Sopranos
throughout its run. Some towns along “Guinea Gulch,” like Bloomfield itself, refused to allow the show to film in their precincts. All of Essex County public property, including the parks and nature preserves, was declared off-limits for filming
The Sopranos
in 2000 because the county commissioners felt the production showed Italian-Americans in a “less than favorable light.” In 2002, after the episode titled “Christopher” tackled questions of Italian-American identity through Newark’s annual Columbus Day parade, its organizers officially banned
Sopranos
cast members from taking part. “Come on, you can’t poke fun at yourselves,” Gandolfini said about this Italo-delicacy. “What is that? You got to be able to poke fun at yourselves. In terms of the violence and things like that, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. ‘Oh, they are making these monsters cuddly and nice,’ and then we will do an episode with the stripper where we show what these guys are capable of and the violence is too much. Are you crazy? It’s a depiction of these people.”