James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (4 page)

Of course, the Corleones were a
New York
crime family, and their idea of the suburbs, at least in Coppola’s imagination, was a fieldstone estate in Lake Tahoe. As the series progressed we got to see them not only kill their fellow Italian-American competitors but threaten movie producers and United States senators, successfully suborn the grand jury process and defy Congress. They were captains of industry, building the new world, convening corporate board meetings (only, instead of energy or railroads, they oversaw illegal booze, gambling, prostitution, and the labor rackets).

It was a little over the top.

The reality for Italian-Americans was less operatic than that. When Italians began immigrating to the United States in large numbers (between 1880 and 1920 some four million Italians recorded entry to the United States, more than any other ethnic group over a period lasting almost half a century), many of them settled in cheap housing in port cities. Factory work, dock labor, and construction jobs were mainstays.

Today, Little Italy in Manhattan is a tourist-trap vestige, a few blocks under constant threat of being swallowed by a burgeoning Chinatown. But back then the tenements were crowded with recent immigrants. They helped found similar concentrations in cities all around the region. Many of the new arrivals were uneducated peasants from the south of Italy, traditionally the poorest section of the boot, and they dreamed of moving out of the cities.

“The majority of Italians came after Garibaldi united Italy, and one of the outcomes of unification was compulsory education,” says Maria Laurino, who published a book in 2000,
Were You Always an Italian?,
about the woes of New Jersey Italian-American assimilation. David Chase read Laurino’s book, blurbed the paperback, and then distributed it among
The Sopranos
’ scriptwriters. Laurino was raised in the upscale suburb of Short Hills, New Jersey, but her father came from neighboring Millburn, which had a large concentration of southern Italians. Laurino, whose brother Robert is now an Essex County prosecutor, is descended from emigrants from Basilicata and Avellino; David Chase’s mother’s people come from Avellino, too.

“Most of them had been peasants for many, many generations,” Laurino says, “people who worked the soil. The dream was a little land in the country. But the idea of a son who’d be better educated than his father, who would not respect his father because he knew more—that was anathema to them. So that was one of the reasons why they moved to the United States in huge numbers. Compulsory education had been in place for years [in the United States], but they were already here when they found out.”

Many of these immigrants complained of American prejudice, of being asked to repeat themselves because of their accent or being followed around in department stores. More than one Italian-American has told me something like, “My grandfather never thought he was white.”

In New Jersey, the earliest concentrations of Italians were in Newark, first in the city near the factories and warehouses, and then in Vailsburg, on the city’s western border, and in mill towns like Paterson. In
The Sopranos,
Tony’s mother and father are buried in a graveyard in Vailsburg. The inner-belt suburbs offered factory work and tedious finishing jobs that could be done in the home (independent Italian garment workers, usually women, sewed “piecework”—“piece-a-work”—that paid per item of clothing completed long after the postwar boom began to fade).

New Jersey Italians began their long march toward that little piece of land in the countryside along Bloomfield Avenue, which runs roughly northwest out of the city toward the Caldwells (Tony Soprano’s McMansion was in North Caldwell). Bloomfield Avenue became known as “Guinea Gulch,” lined with Italian-American homes and businesses. Vesuvio, Artie Bucco’s restaurant in
The Sopranos,
was on Bloomfield Avenue—at least, until Tony had it firebombed so Uncle Junior couldn’t use it as a place to whack Little Pussy.

The Gulch forms the spine of the TV series, too. The famous opening credits sequence follows Tony in his SUV as he leaves the Lincoln Tunnel, passes through Newark (with its water towers painted like buckets), crosses the rusting steel truss bridges that embroider its edges, and then drives up Bloomfield Avenue to the Caldwells. Along the way we glimpse the shotgun step-back houses, sturdy bungalows, the Pizza Land shack, and finally the sweeping lawns of “the heights” (the hilly reaches of central Jersey) where the Soprano family manse sits on its cul-de-sac.

James Gandolfini’s parents came at the height of the prewar Italian wave, but moved in a different direction, almost straight north from Newark, at a right angle to the main postwar migration route.

James Joseph Gandolfini was born in Borgo Val di Taro in 1921, on a hillside a little more than a hundred miles outside of Milan, but he moved to the United States as a young man. The Gandolfinis still own land near Milan, a rocky plot the actor would later describe as “mostly covered with snakes.” During World War II, the older Gandolfini fought for the American army, winning a Purple Heart. He returned after the war to the area around Paterson and its suburb to the north, Paramus, where he worked as a bricklayer and cement mixer. He worked on the Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson as a youngster, then worked construction in Jersey until he took the job as head custodian of the Paramus Catholic High School.

His wife, Santa, was born in New Jersey in 1924, but moved back to Naples as a child. She went back and forth her whole life. James and Santa had two daughters, Johanna (now Antonacci), who manages the Family Division of the Superior Court in Hackensack, and Leta Gandolfini, who would become the chief executive officer of a small dressmaking firm, Sunrise Brands. Johanna is thirteen years older and Leta is eleven years older than James John Gandolfini, the baby of the family. Jamie, as he was known until high school, was born even farther north, in Westwood, New Jersey, on September 18, 1961.

In a family that seemed full of women all old enough (well, to a toddler, anyway) to be his mother, Jamie was the center of everybody’s attention. And he learned early how to make all that attention worthwhile. Jamie’s cousin, Patricia Gandolfini, remembers one Sunday afternoon when her father, Aldo Gandolfini, had invited his brother James and his family over to Patricia’s house in Waldwick to play poker. “I had just gotten my license and wanted to drive everyone everywhere,” Patricia wrote in an e-mail exchange with the Bergen County
Record
. So she drove Jamie to the duck pond in Ridgewood, where they bought ice cream and walked around the water. “My mother says when I came home I said to her, ‘You know, Jamie was more entertaining than any of the guys I know.’ He was always fun, smart, always putting on a show.”

When Jamie was beginning grade school, the family decamped to Park Ridge, a suburb planted on the farthest northern border of the state, almost in New York. Park Ridge is only twenty miles from Times Square, but it can seem like it’s in a different country—a small, leafy community of around eight thousand, living mostly in Cape Cods, colonials, and ranch houses built in the sixties and seventies around a tiny nineteenth-century core. The downtown is festooned with gingerbread, and the meandering eighteenth- and nineteenth–century roads give it a bucolic charm very different from tract housing suburbs. In the 1970s, it was mostly a blue-collar town.

Don Ruschman, a former mayor of Park Ridge, first noticed Jamie Gandolfini sometime in the seventies, when he started crossing over into Ruschman’s backyard from his own in order to play with his daughter. The Gandolfini home on Park Avenue has been razed and replaced with a much larger house built in the past fifteen years or so, but there’s a small Cape Cod next door that neighbors remember as all but identical to Jim’s first house. The lot, with a big sweep of front yard, is on the town’s main street, just a couple of blocks from the town center and Park Ridge High.

“He was a tall, good-looking kid. My daughter knew him better than me, of course, but he was always respectful, kind of quiet,” Ruschman says. “I met him later, when he’d return for the local OctoberWoman Foundation for Breast Cancer Research fund-raiser in town every year. When
The Sopranos
was at its height, and people were crazy for it, he was still just a direct, down-to-earth person, totally indifferent to celebrity and all that. Even though he was the biggest draw at every dinner.

“I credit his parents with who he became,” Ruschman says. “They were hardworking people who raised their kids and that’s who they lived for.”

Most of the citizens of Park Ridge in the 1970s were Irish, German, or Italian, and many were Catholic. The town has its own power company and water company, and its own school district, too. High schools all around Park Ridge have graduating classes in the three- to four-hundred-person range, but Park Ridge High School graduates less than a third of those numbers. Thirty years ago the middle school was in the same building as the high school, so kids barely recognized their generational differences—everybody was similar, facing similar prospects, fellow students told me again and again. They were almost like one family.

“We didn’t have extremes of poverty or wealth,” Ruschman recalls. “Most people were working people, blue-collar people, in those days. Everybody got along. They still do. This sounds like boilerplate, but it’s just a great place to raise kids.”

Park Ridge is a town built by the American middle class during the era of its greatest security, based on well-paid union jobs and the great economic expansion of the postwar era. Homes sold for $15,000 to $35,000 back in the day; now, when people buy them, at an average price of around $435,000, they sometimes tear down the original and build a McMansion in its place. There’s even a new section of town, called the Bear’s Nest, with townhouses at $1 million to $1.3 million apiece.

But those are symptoms of a different, more unequal America—the Park Ridge James Gandolfini remembered all his life was a smaller town, almost a village.

“I think I feel a lot,” Gandolfini once said, trying to explain how his working-class hometown inflected his whole career. “I never wanted to do business or anything. People interest me, and the way things affect them. And I also have a big healthy affinity for the middle class and the blue collar, and I don’t like the way they’re treated, and I don’t like the way the government is treating them now. I have a good healthy dose of anger about all of that. And I think that if I kept it in, it wouldn’t have been very good. I would have been fired a lot. So I found this silly way of living that allows me to occasionally stand up for them a little bit. And mostly make some good money and act like a silly fool.”

James and Santa Gandolfini spoke Italian in the home to each other, but not to Jamie and his sisters. Jamie said he could always tell when “they were mad at me in Italian,” but even though he traveled back to Italy several times as he grew up, to meet family, he never picked up the language. Assimilation wasn’t a choice, it was simply part of growing up. His dad cutting the lawn with a push-mower to the sound of Italian singers on the stereo was about as far as his cultural memory went toward the immigrant experience.

“There were things I did that drove my father nuts, I know,” he told Stephen Whitty of
The Star-Ledger
in 2012. “Lying on the couch and then getting up, and thirty-five cents would have fallen out of my pocket and just be lying there on the cushions. Drove him crazy. He said it showed I had no respect for money. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I still don’t.”

Jamie’s father’s job at Paramus Catholic pulled long hours but was usually regular and predictable. He’d often have Jamie help out with painting jobs or other maintenance work at the school. Jamie’s mother worked as a high school lunch lady, first at the Immaculate Heart Academy in Washington Township, and then as cafeteria chief at the nearby Academy of the Holy Angels in Demarest, to make ends meet.

They were people who worked hard, who got up every day and did what had to be done. But in those days you could make a living that way. They bought a little two-family cottage in Lavallette, on the Jersey Shore, renting one side to friends or relatives every summer. After he was fourteen or so, Jamie had a boat at the Shore, a wooden boat with a motor, and he’d go fishing and crabbing along the coast. Sometimes with a friend, but often alone.

Jamie wasn’t entirely sure what he’d inherited from his mother. “I don’t know—introspective, depressed, a little judgmental, kind of smart about people,” he once said. But thinking about her made him take measure of just how assimilated he thought he really was. Asked, in the middle of
The Sopranos,
what was most Italian about him, Gandolfini said, “Loyalty to friends and family, I think. I guess you’d have to ask them. Stubbornness. I don’t know. I think I’m very Italian. I communicate a little bit through yelling. A lot of our family does that. I’ve been working on that.”

*   *   *

Park Ridge High is an imposing three-story brick pile with a six-columned Georgian portico, the flagship of a K through 12 school system that celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary in 2008. For years kids have gathered after school in a frame building right next door that was called Pop’s Sweet Shoppe—honestly—for decades (today it’s called Marc’s Pizzeria, but it’s still full of high school kids every afternoon). There’s an Astroturfed football field and handsome baseball diamonds just below the old mill race pond behind the fire department, and the whole town is scored by deep-sided creeks shadowed by oaks and maples and lined with cornflowers.

If growing up in Park Ridge in the 1970s sounds less like
The Godfather: Part II
than
Happy Days,
well, brace yourself. Jamie Gandolfini wasn’t the Fonz, either. He was more like Richie Cunningham, with a black helmet of hair everyone remembers as “David Cassidy perfect.”

“He was a tall, skinny but broad-shouldered guy, he joked around a lot with the girls, teasing them,” Julie Luce (née Francke) told me shortly after Gandolfini died. “He played football and basketball, and was well liked by everybody. He was just a fun, fun-loving guy.”