James Gandolfini, 51, was finally in a good place.
He had banked enough money to support himself and his family for years to come. He had built up enough Hollywood cred to do almost anything he wanted — a documentary for HBO, the rom-com “Enough Said.”
Then, on June 19, 2013, he had a massive, fatal heart attack.
But unlike the ending of that last episode of “The Sopranos,” critic and historian Jason Bailey isn’t willing to just cut to black. His new biography “Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend” (Abrams Press, 352 pp., $30) goes back to look at the actor’s too-brief career, and how growing up in Park Ridge helped make him the man he was.
Q: So first off — because I know what goes into these books — what was it about James Gandolfini that made you want to spend several years on this?
A: Sometimes, you know, I think it’s like baseball players — the way you get someone’s rookie card and you just latch onto them, and follow their careers, and invest in their success? It can be like that with actors. You spot someone early, see something that really impresses you, and you turn to a friend and say, “This guy’s going to be huge.” And that’s it. I saw “True Romance” opening weekend when I was 17, and I came out talking about this actor who, even in this incredible cast, stole the movie with just two scenes. And from then on I was all in. “Crimson Tide,” “A Civil Action” … anything James Gandolfini was in, I would go see. And then, of course, “The Sopranos” hit.
Q: Which was a whole different thing.
A: It was, although it’s funny, when HBO started running the ads for it, everybody was like, “Oh cool, a gangster show.” And I was like, “Yeah, all right! A Gandolfini show!” And then, after the series blew up, you would — very rarely, but occasionally — hear him in interviews and you realized he had this whole other dimension. He wasn’t just some Jersey roughneck — which made him even more interesting to me. So I loved him on “The Sopranos,” of course, but I kept track of him afterwards, and when he passed I was very affected by it. I think a lot of us were.
Q: Did his family cooperate with you on the book? Were they actively opposed?
A: It was tricky. I reached out to (his son) Michael very early on, and after what seemed like some genuine deliberation he decided to pass, although he didn’t stand in my way. Gandolfini’s second wife, I reached out to later. She did not get back to me, and although she didn’t tell people not to talk to me, she asked them to not go into personal stuff. Which I understand. I was grateful for what I did get. And frankly, you could see why the family had a healthy distrust of journalists. During those peak “Sopranos” years, it was like Beatlemania, and the coverage in the tabloids was not kind.
Q: I interviewed him a few times and he was a little guarded, but self-effacing and funny. But then I would see him in real life — walking around the theater district, or at a movie premiere with his kid — and he would just glower. There was this real keep-away vibe.
A: I think it’s because being a celebrity, being approached all the time on the street … that’s not what he thought he had signed up for. Sometimes people get annoyed when they hear celebrities complain about fame. You know, “What did you think you were getting into when you decided to become a star?” But he never imagined he’d be a star. He never anticipated that level of fame, or loss of privacy. He thought maybe, if he were lucky, he’d be able to support himself as a working actor. He really didn’t expect he’d become a celebrity. No one did. Once, when he was first starting out, he did tell his parents he was thinking of changing his name to protect them, so if he ever did become famous they wouldn’t get hassled. And they listened to him very seriously, and when he left to use the bathroom, they burst into laughter. The mere notion he’d ever become famous was ridiculous.
Q: That was not the kind of world they lived in.
A: He came from a truly blue-collar background, and that informed his entire life and career. His dad worked as a custodian, his mother was a school lunch lady … in his eyes, these were the kind of people who did real work. And sometimes to him, what he did, by comparison, felt quite frivolous. Which I think is what inspired his personal and financial generosity. When he got that big bonus from HBO he ended up chopping it up and distributing it among the supporting cast; everybody got a check. He was embarrassed about coming from where he did and having that kind of money.
Q: You also write a lot about the toll that playing Tony took on him, emotionally.
A: Because it wasn’t like doing a part in a movie, where you’re only working for a couple of weeks. He lived with this character for 10 years, and the darkness of that character, that world, really weighed on him. And people who worked with him said it drew out some of his darker aspects, encouraged some of his vices and indulgences. When you play a character that iconic for that long, the lines can get blurry. Towards the end of the show he told one interviewer, “I’m really ready to say goodbye to this guy.”
Q: I know it also shook him that people found that character attractive.
A: I personally knew a lot of women who found Tony Soprano sexy. He radiated self-confidence; he didn’t have any of the sort of shame or self-consciousness about his physical appearance that I think Jim himself did, and that made him attractive. And David Chase was aware of that, and of the risk of glamorizing these people; in fact, he was constantly moving the goalposts to make the show darker, to make it more horrifying, to keep reminding us of how terrible these characters were. Yet we, as a country, have this appetite for nihilism. And this idea of masculinity: that if someone can just nod their head and have someone killed, they must be a powerful person.
Q: You use an interesting device in the book, where many of the chapter titles come from Gandolfini’s various nicknames — Jamie, Fini, Bucky. Where did that come from?
A: It comes from the initial question I wanted to ask and hopefully answer, which every biographer has to ask and try to answer: Who was this guy? And that was the conundrum. At different points in his life, people called him different things, depending on how they knew him. During “The Sopranos,” people would see him on the street and yell out “Tony!”; on the set, everyone called him Jim. Not even James but Jim … you know, like he was your affable uncle. So I knew, early on, the gulf between Tony and Jim was where the real guy lived. He had all these personas: the person he was in public, the parts he played. His life was a journey of figuring out who he was, and how he was, in relation to the world around him, and what kind of career he wanted to have as an actor. And I feel he had really kind of figured that out by the end of his life. Which is why that he passed when he did was a tragedy — for his family and for us.
_________________________________________
CONTRIBUTE TO NJARTS.NET
Since launching in September 2014, NJArts.net, a 501(c)(3) organization, has become one of the most important media outlets for the Garden State arts scene. And it has always offered its content without a subscription fee, or a paywall. Its continued existence depends on support from members of that scene, and the state’s arts lovers. Please consider making a contribution of any amount to NJArts.net via PayPal, or by sending a check made out to NJArts.net to 11 Skytop Terrace, Montclair, NJ 07043.