9.
“Who am I?” is always a great question, but for actors it’s a tease, a commercial challenge, and a personal problem all at once. Especially if you are a famous actor, like the forty-seven-year-old James Gandolfini was in 2008, the first year in almost a decade when he would not be playing Tony Soprano.
In 2001, Rolling Stone asked Gandolfini whether his reluctance to talk about himself in public reflected his desire to live an unexamined life, if he preferred to just “get on with things” rather than talk about them—you know, like Tony. But he said he thought of himself as more like another iconic figure.
“Yes, I would do that,” he replied initially. “But only because I’m a neurotic mess. I’m really basically just like a 260-pound Woody Allen.… There are some days when you say, ‘Oh, fuck it,’ and some days when I think way too much. As does everybody. I’m no different than anybody else. But you know what? Unless you have some deep problem, I don’t know.…” He stops himself. “You know what, I shouldn’t be talking about therapy. I don’t know a thing about it.”
Well, he had to know a little about it—at least, about pretend therapy, because that’s what he and Lorraine Bracco had been doing then for two years on the set. There had to be a few places where they scratched the overlaps between Tony and Jim. Even mooning her during her reaction shots had to have some kind of therapeutic meaning.
His fame gave him much more leeway to pick and choose the roles he would take and ultimately his onstage identity, the sort of power you work long years in the business to develop. He was in control, but only up to a point. He still could not change his “type,” though he could play against it; he could not easily appeal across generational divides, though he could try.
Many people would have taken a vacation after nine years as the most intense antihero in TV history—not a month at the Jersey Shore, but some sort of getaway reward for all the hard work. Jim rented a bigger beach house, but he didn’t exactly go on vacation. Although, after All the King’s Men came out in 2006 and The Sopranos wrapped the next year, Gandolfini didn’t appear in any films for a couple of years, he didn’t really take a break. What he did was start the effort to reinvent himself after Tony Soprano in earnest.
His instinct was to do something real, and something local. And real life in his neighborhood had been changed forever during the third season of The Sopranos when two fully-loaded jetliners smashed into the World Trade Center, not two miles from his and Marcy’s apartment in the West Village.
Susan Aston remembers coming to James’s apartment after the planes hit. Power was out in places downtown, but Jim had electricity, and she, her niece Britney Houlihan, Jim, and Marcy hunkered down in front of the television after the towers fell and the tip of lower Manhattan went black with smoke and dust. Michael was still a toddler. They were joined later that day by Marcy’s masseuse, Bethany Parish, and her husband Anthony; they lived in Battery Park City, right next to the towers, and Battery Park was being forcibly evacuated.
Like a lot of New Yorkers, they weren’t sure that the attacks had ended. They saw out their windows the bedraggled lines of people in scorched clothes and with soot-blackened faces as they walked north from Ground Zero, very quietly for the most part, trying to find a way home. The bridges and tunnels were closed and all the subway and commuter trains shut off; Susan’s then-husband, Mario Mendoza, had been upstate, and he’d parked his car north of Spuyten Duyvil and walked across the Henry Hudson Bridge into the city. Mario hitched rides or walked all the way down the island to join them in the Village that afternoon. They thought about getting the raft James had brought into the city from the Shore that summer. They could cross the river to Jersey, make their way quickly enough to friends’ houses. At least there they could be mobile.
“But if we got the raft,” James said, “we’d have to bring guns, too.” They might need some means of defense if there was another attack—but also, perhaps, to ward off stranded commuters anxious to get off the island themselves. Aston says that’s when she really started to freak out about what was happening.
They decided against making a dash across the river. Aston’s mom called from Texas and told her that the Pentagon had been hit and another airliner had been crashed by its passengers in Pennsylvania. And that was it. But no one who was in New York City that day will ever forget the way it felt.
After the cleanup got underway, James, Tony Sirico, Vincent Pastore, and Vincent Curatola went to Ground Zero to meet with firemen, police, construction workers, and other volunteers to boost morale. The actors were mobbed.
“We were supposed to meet the mayor [Rudy Giuliani], but he couldn’t make it, he got delayed, you know what it was like back then,” Tony Sirico remembers. “So we go in, they gave us all these masks to wear, to breathe. There was like hundreds of these guys out there, and it was unbelievable, just unbelievable, what those buildings had become … Just twisted, what all was in it, well, you’ve seen the pictures. Unbelievable. And the guys who were working there were so happy to see us, any break from searching through that mess of wreckage, thinking you’d find a body. Only, they found out, there weren’t many bodies.
“And at one point I took off my mask to light a cigarette, and marone,” Sirico continues. “I almost choked. These guys were breathing that stuff day after day.… It was amazing. And I think [our commitment to do something for people responding to the attacks] all started from that. You just had to do something. We all felt it.”
It’s true, they did. The day after 9/11, Steve Buscemi, who the previous spring had directed Sirico in the acclaimed “The Pine Barrens” episode, in which Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti get lost in the snow, had gone down to his old firehouse and volunteered. He spent a week clearing the rubble alongside his fellow firefighters.
Everything about those days became emotionally freighted for New Yorkers. At The Sopranos, they were careful to remove the brief glimpse of the towers you could catch in Tony’s side rearview mirror as he left the Lincoln Tunnel during the credits sequence. Time was divided between the days when the World Trade Center was there and the days when it wasn’t.
James told Susan that he felt ridiculous going to Ground Zero and just standing there in a mask, without really pitching in and helping, physically. But the overwhelming response of the working guys at Ground Zero, the way they so evidently loved the visit by Tony, Paulie, Big Pussy, and Johnny Sack, revealed another side of this celebrity thing. It didn’t have to be a fire hose aimed at you. It could be a spotlight you used to shine on other people.
Soon Gandolfini was going back to Jersey every fall for the annual OctoberWoman’s Breast Cancer Foundation fund-raising dinner, to help out his old classmate Donna Mancinelli in Park Ridge. The whole cast came out to Bergen County, signing autographs and posing for pictures. Jim spent the night afterward, no matter how long the banquet took, drinking beer and telling jokes with his high school buddies in basements and rec rooms in Park Ridge.
Jim insisted on only HBO cameras, no media. But when the financial crash came in 2008, the cancer fund-raising changed—no one was buying thousand-dollar dinner tickets anymore—and The Sopranos had ended. What hadn’t ended were the two wars sparked by the attack on the World Trade Center.
Those wars were still sending a steady stream of severely maimed and wounded soldiers back home. In 2006, Al Giordano, a former Marine and a veterans affairs activist, had helped found a nonprofit called the Wounded Warriors Project, designed to help returning soldiers adjust to civilian life. Part of the project was an annual summer event at Breezy Point, in Queens, where convalescent soldiers, including amputees, could get out in the sun, learn to use their prostheses, and do water sports—“like, learn to ski on one leg,” Sirico, a vet himself, says. He called to find out if there was anything he could do, and Giordano invited him down.
“I had to do it, I just had to,” Sirico says. “I mean, I play a tough guy, but these guys are the tough guys. After what they had done, I had to.” He told Gandolfini about the event. Soon James was in touch with Giordano. Every July the Wounded Warriors mount a parade from Staten Island across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and down to Breezy Point (the cops shut down the bridge and river traffic for the day). It’s a long march of wounded soldiers, some more ambulatory than others. Gandolfini became a regular.
“Jim shows up in a red Cadillac convertible with a quadruple amputee, Eighty-second Airborne, his wife, daughter, and his mother-in-law in the backseat with him,” Giordano recalls. This was in 2012. “And he drives them the whole parade route, it takes like two hours, and then spends the day at the beach.… I meet a lot of celebrities in my job, and some want to do this just for the cameras. But that was not Jim Gandolfini.”
Gandolfini and Sirico toured military hospitals together, often with other actors from the show. They’d meet at Walter Reed hospital outside Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Army Medical Center, and in rehab clinics around the Northeast, talking to large groups. Sirico remembers one Veterans Administration facility that had a rock-climbing wall, to help amputees regain a sense of mobility—many of them could climb to the top with just three, even two limbs. Gandolfini insisted on hooking up a belay harness and trying to climb in front of dozens of recovering soldiers.
“HBO woulda had a heart attack if they’d seen this,” Sirico recalls. “So Jimmy gets all hooked up, he’s like a really big guy then, and he climbs two, three, four handholds—and boom, flat on his ass! It brought down the house, I’m telling you.”
They journeyed out to the U.S. military’s chief burn center in San Antonio, always the most difficult place for a morale visit—soldiers with “half their face burned off, limbs burned off, in constant pain,” Sirico recalls. “The trick is, never lose eye contact. I’d grab their arm, you know, where they weren’t burned, touch them, let them know we care.” Jim was representing an expensive watch company, and he would pass out $5,000 watches to the wounded—he’d hint that they didn’t have to treat them like sentimental keepsakes if they needed the money.
All the soldiers knew who Tony Soprano was. DVDs of The Sopranos were popular items in Iraq and Afghanistan.
* * *
In 2006, HBO aired Baghdad ER, a documentary about life in a U.S. military trauma ward in Iraq, directed by Jon Alpert. The documentary was intense, heartbreaking, and profoundly honest, and it won a Peabody Award. Alpert wanted to do the obvious sequel, a documentary about soldiers returning and the work being done by Wounded Warriors. But HBO, perhaps understandably, thought however honorable the idea was, it was unlikely to draw an audience—eat-your-spinach TV is a euphemism here. Besides, the Pentagon had not liked Baghdad ER, and they decided to revoke the filmmaker’s access to Walter Reed hospital just as he was about to shoot there.
That was when Gandolfini got involved. Although he didn’t want to be on camera, an odd compromise evolved. The vets would come into New York City, to an empty stage set, and sit on a chair; Jim would sit off the dais, with the camera shooting over his shoulder, and interview them about their “Alive Day,” the day they were wounded but survived.
Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq became the first project Gandolfini put before the public after The Sopranos ended. He interviewed ten wounded soldiers, many of them missing two or three limbs, some with severe head trauma or post-traumatic stress syndrome. You don’t hear much from Jim; occasionally you see him get up and hug the soldier when the interview is done. One of the subjects, former army first lieutenant Dawn Halfaker, a pretty redhead, had lost her right arm and shoulder to a rocket-propelled grenade. During their talk Halfaker wonders aloud whether her child, if she ever has one, could truly love her now. There’s a long pause.
Gandolfini waits, waits a little longer, then quietly asks, “What were you just thinking about?”
“The reality of, will I be able to raise a kid?” she answers. “I won’t be able to pick up my son or daughter with two arms.”
Jim was committing a kind of journalism, though probably not the sort he’d imagined when he was getting that Rutgers degree. And it was also a kind of reversal on the celebrity journalism Gandolfini hated—he, the celebrity, out of the lights, real tough guys onstage and bearing witness to the awfulness of violence. Gandolfini kept in touch with some of the soldiers over time. He asked Giordano to help him find ways to help out. He wanted a Wounded Warrior driver for when he was in Los Angeles, and Giordano found him a marine vet who had once driven for a general.
Wounded Warriors became part of his crew. He filmed a series of public service announcements for the project just before he died, to help with fund-raising. (Wounded Warriors has now grown from Giordano and his two buddies into an organization with 421 direct employees and an annual budget of $200 million.) Giordano says he’s not sure what to do with the PSAs now that Jim has died. But he remembers, when they were shooting the commercials and asked if he could do another take, Gandolfini replied, “Sure, this is way more important than the shit I usually do.”
One of the wounded soldiers in Alive Day committed suicide a few years later. Jim had kept in touch. The vet set up his computer to send out farewell notes after he’d died, and Jim was one of the recipients.
Gandolfini teamed up with Alpert for a second documentary, this time as executive producer and narrator, on the history of wartime post-traumatic stress, Wartorn 1861–2010, in 2011. Tom Richardson of Attaboy Films says they were preparing a documentary on American prisons when Gandolfini died, and talking about a documentary on for-profit prisons. Alpert, like Sirico, became a regular visitor at the Jersey Shore in the summer, and Gandolfini took a seat on the board of his New York City documentary company.
In all his work on the documentaries and for charity, Jim was pretty consistent about trying to fade into the background.
“I grew up not so different than Jim,” Al Giordano says. “I’m from Long Island. My dad was in the marines, I was in the marines, my brother went to West Point. Military service is in my family. I worked with Jim all these years, he was like a regular guy, you could talk with him about anything, he loved his Jets, Rutgers football, his son, his family, all of that, just like anybody. But I didn’t know until I read about it, after he’d died, that his father had gotten a Purple Heart in World War II. He never mentioned it. And that kind of makes it all come together for me. He was quiet about certain things.”
It’s a reminder of what T. J. Foderaro called his “bullshit meter”—the way Jim would be embarrassed by any mention of his own problems, or any note of sympathy you might offer him (even about Lynn Jacobson’s death). Gandolfini, Sirico, and Richardson—who’d met Buck twenty-five years earlier at the Rutgers pub—visited Iraq and Afghanistan together on U.S.O. tours. At first the U.S.O. put them up in a five-star hotel in Kuwait City, but Gandolfini wanted to see the war. They took off, first for a police station in Mosul, in Kurdistan, which had been taken back by American troops just the day before. They saw enough to make guys who play tough guys on TV respect the tough guys who were protecting them in the desert.
But they impressed everybody, even General Ray Odierno, a Jersey guy himself, who would later become commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Giordano and the Wounded Warriors Project have decided to create an annual James Gandolfini Award, dedicated to the celebrity who does the most to support them in any year.
* * *
Gandolfini made two movies, too, in 2008, first David Chase’s semiautobiographical Not Fade Away, about a young Italian-American growing up in Newark in the 1960s in love with the Rolling Stones. Gandolfini plays the slightly mystified father, whose son throws caution to the winds and heads to California with his upscale Jersey girlfriend—who promptly leaves him behind at a Malibu party to run off with Mick Jagger.
And Gandolfini played a world-weary American general in the British satire of the political shenanigans leading up to the Iraq war, In the Loop. The movie did rather well, appearing just as the American presidential elections were gearing up and the consensus that the war had been a huge mistake had hardened into a wide conviction. Gandolfini’s is a supporting role, but one crucial to the plot, a U.S. general who knows the war will be a disaster but cynically comes out in support to help his career when he realizes Washington has already decided to go to war.
While he was filming In the Loop, Gandolfini caught some theater in the West End of London, including The God of Carnage, by French playwright Yasmina Reza. Carnage had debuted in Zurich, and it was being done in English by film star Ralph Fiennes, which was why Gandolfini chose to see it in the first place (well, that, and the fact that the play is only an hour and a half long). Gandolfini came out of the theater laughing and inspired. He met with the producers and broached the subject of bringing the play to Broadway.
He hadn’t been on the New York stage since A Streetcar Named Desire with Alec Baldwin in 1992; he hadn’t actually been on stage since 1997, when he did a short play at a ninety-nine-seat theater in Los Angeles run by Sean Penn’s parents. But The God of Carnage was in many ways perfect: An ensemble piece with four equal parts, it tells the story of two fairly well-off couples who come together after their eleven-year-old sons have a fight at school. Gandolfini wanted to play the least neurotic character in the piece, a small-business owner married to an artsy wife (played by Marcia Gay Harden). Jeff Daniels played the Fiennes part, an arrogant lawyer, whose wife (Hope Davis) “manages” her husband’s wealth. The play is a high-voltage, quick-riposte comedy laced with raucous social satire (Daniels’s character repeatedly talks on his cell phone with more attention than he does in person). Harden won the Tony, but it was Gandolfini who got the audience to show up. And he was very funny.
What happens in The God of Carnage—four adults coming together to discuss a fight between eleven-year-olds, who then wind up acting like middle-schoolers themselves—brought out his appealing childishness. Gandolfini was able to explode with deep frustration (something he did again and again on The Sopranos) to get laughs. And the play bristled with character reversals, the most important being the audience’s sense that the lawyer’s marriage was shaky is transferred to the small businessman’s marriage over the course of the play.
But more to the point, The God of Carnage helped change Gandolfini’s image in the business. “Comic roles started coming to him after Carnage,” Mark Armstrong says. “He was offered the lead on The Office for its third incarnation, the part that ultimately James Spader took. He was very tempted, but it probably wouldn’t have worked out, he had an exclusive contract with HBO. But we were getting more offers for comedy, and we were very happy with that.”
In October 2009, Gandolfini married Deborah Lin in her native Honolulu, with hundreds of guests attending. The groom was forty-seven years old, the bride forty. They had just bought a colonial on almost nine acres for $1.5 million in the rolling hills around Tewksbury, New Jersey, about an hour from New York City. The house was new, built in 2007, and it won the New Jersey Builders Association Custom House of the Year Award, in part for its geothermal heating and cooling and the recycled, antique hardwood floors. Gandolfini commuted from Tewksbury to the city most days during The God of Carnage.
After taking a supporting role the next year as a New York City mayor in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Gandolfini and Sirico had finally met Rudy Giuliani after the mix-up just after 9/11, and Sirico says they became good friends), Gandolfini returned to another childlike role. He played the voice for Carol, the big striped Wild Thing in Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze and adapted from the children’s book by Maurice Sendak.
If The God of Carnage treated adults like children, Where the Wild Things Are treated children’s fantasies like adult neuroses, and the little boy’s relationship with Carol is key. Carol is sort of the child’s id. We meet Carol (the character was played by another actor in a giant suit, and Jim synced his lines) as he’s destroying the Wild Things’ hivelike houses made of sticks; Carol shows Max his artwork, a stick-built version of the island where everyone can be happy. When Max finally leaves the island to go home, a tearful Carol begs him to stay, but knows he must go. All of this is only hinted at in Sendak’s book, and the film adds a suggestive prestory about Max and his single mom, Connie (played by Catherine Keener), who is trying to date again (Mark Ruffalo). Gandolfini’s sorrow over childhood’s disappointments and ultimate loss is oddly powerful in the maw of the giant suit, and the message is more Eugène Ionesco than Lewis Carroll.
Gandolfini’s friends say he was beginning to accept his status in Los Angeles now, too—the reflexive doubts about his ability to perform particular roles, and the letters to directors recommending other actors, had begun to fade from his practice. In 2010 he rented a house in Laurel Canyon, a twisting arroyo that is lined with expensive homes tucked into the sere California landscape. It’s a relaxed enclave for movie business people, a beautiful section of green-friendly but often unpretentious houses that bring nature into their designs.
For the first time, Gandolfini begins to really go native in California. “Moving out here after those years in New York,” says his manager Nancy Sanders, “he had a hard time with California for a while. Even at his Laurel Canyon home he’d see his neighbor just staring at the mountains for hours, and Jim would say, ‘What the fuck is he looking at?’
“But he started to relax, I think,” Sanders continues. “He was settling into the California lifestyle and caught himself enjoying some of it … except the driving. The thing about Jim was his mind never stopped. He’d think about things, sometimes too much. He was very bright, and with that comes a bit of being tortured and hard on yourself and others. I think in those last years he started to settle down and accept things a little better, realizing that he couldn’t control it all.”
“The doubts calmed down,” says Mark Armstrong, Sanders’s partner. “Jim was a pretty driven guy in some ways. He could yell at you when something went wrong, but he’d hug you when it was over, that was his way of communicating, you know? But he seemed much more accepting in those last couple of years.”
And in 2010 Gandolfini released a film that reads like an act of love, Welcome to the Rileys, about a small businessman from Indianapolis and his wife of thirty years (Melissa Leo) whose daughter died in a car accident years before. The couple has drifted apart as the wife’s guilt turns into an intense agoraphobia, and Doug Riley wanders into an affair with a waitress. On a convention trip to New Orleans for his plumbing supply business, Riley meets a sixteen-year-old stripper and runaway (Kristen Stewart of Twilightfame) and decides to sell his business and live with her, platonically, almost like a replacement dad. When his wife overcomes her lassitude and joins him in New Orleans, she, too, accepts the stripper, and they form an uneasy pseudo-family until the girl bolts. But the effort reunites the older couple, and allows them to accept life once more.
Directed by Jake Scott, the son of Ridley and nephew of Tony, Welcome to the Rileys debuted at the 2010 Sundance Festival, where some critics cited it as part of Gandolfini’s continuing effort to “whack Tony Soprano.” It is that, of course, but it’s also an extension of his everyman persona, another small businessman (like his part in The God of Carnage) and a confused soul lost in the middle of his life. Tony without the gang and violence, you have to say.
Gandolfini had contemplated the problem of how to make his break from the gangster genre during The God of Carnage, telling The Los Angeles Times that the audience might not have accepted him “in a wig as Ferdinand II” right after The Sopranos ended (“I’d pay to see that,” costar Jeff Daniels quipped). Generals and big-city mayors were not that far from Tony, in some ways; small businessmen from Brooklyn and then Indianapolis were yet another step away.
There was still a problem of scale, somehow, with Gandolfini’s presence in a film. A lot of TV stars have difficulty transferring to the movies—it’s like the audience doesn’t want to let you disappear into a different character. They think they know you, and they want to see you, not someone else. Gandolfini could overcome this problem to an extent; he could bring an audience to a sophisticated comedy, as The God of Carnage showed. But as part of a coequal quartet, he was like a bass player doing lead guitar. The contemporary movie with a character actor as its lead was a rare thing, and finding just the right part was harder than it looked.
* * *
After studying the problems of runaway kids for Welcome to the Rileys, in 2011, Gandolfini heard a radio report about a home for runaways and abused kids in Toms River, near the Jersey Shore, called Ocean’s Harbor House. It’s a twelve-bed shelter that’s open twenty-four-hours a day every day, with medical services and counseling as well as food and clothing for ten- to nineteen-year-olds.
Michael’s school in L.A. had asked its students to do some form of community service in the summer and report on it in the fall. So Gandolfini called Harbor House to see if he and Michael could help out in any way. The director said they had no computers for the kids—would Gandolfini care to contribute toward that?
Jim took Michael, who was eleven at the time, to a nearby electronics outlet and bought thirteen laptops, which he and Michael loaded with software and drove over to drop off. While Michael showed the computers to the kids and counselors, Jim walked the grounds. The garden and property were scraggly with weeds after the Jersey summer.
The next day Jim hired workmen at a nearby lawn center to pull the weeds and vines, and then he and Michael trucked over with eight yards of mulch. The image of Jamie helping his father at the Catholic high school in Paramus with maintenance and painting chores comes immediately to mind. They spent the afternoon spreading the mulch with the help of facilities director Ken Butterworth.
Gandolfini was, Butterworth remembers, “completely down-to-earth, really likable. Approachable, you know? You could tell he really loved his kid, and wanted him to know that not everybody is lucky with their families.
“And so we were working together, and I asked him, ‘Where’d you go to college?’” Butterworth says. “And he looked away, I think he said Rutgers, but I thought, ‘Ah, so we’re not going to talk about you, huh?’”
Knowing where the boundaries should be was becoming more important every year. Gandolfini had been working with his acting coach, Harold Guskin, on an independent film, called Kiddie Ride, written by Guskin’s wife, Sandra Jennings, that was all about boundaries. Set at the Jersey Shore and debuting at a 2011 film festival, it got limited release as Down the Shore in 2013 (though that was not Guskin’s edit). Jennings wrote the script with Gandolfini in mind. There were autobiographical elements—the Shore of course, the working middle-class milieu and so on. The conflict stems from the hero’s sense of loyalty and friendship, which keep him from claiming what’s rightfully his.
Bailey (Gandolfini) runs the merry-go-round and kiddie train concession in a cheap seaside carnival. His best friend owns it all, including the girl next door, Mary (Famke Janssen), who was Bailey’s first love.
Most of the movie takes place in the little step-back houses built chock-a-block in Keansburg, not so different from those in nearby Lavallette, where Jim’s parents summered when he was a kid. (Half of Keansburg’s 3,300 houses were destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, lending the film an archival sadness.) Bailey and Mary used to crawl across the tiny gap between their houses on a ladder laid across their bedroom windowsills.
The plot turns on family secrets, a murder, financial schemes, and drugs, all familiar Jersey themes from The Sopranos, but here the crime occurred years before our story begins. At the conclusion Bailey, Mary, and her mentally handicapped son are in a truck with a bag full of money and the highway in front of them, about as Elmore Leonard-y an ending as you could want (Gandolfini loved crime novels and thrillers, Leonard’s and Stephen Hunter’s most of all). Unlike The Sopranos, there is hope, but only in escape from New Jersey—Bailey and Mary have a second chance at happiness if they drive all night.
Guskin and Jennings have nothing but praise for Gandolfini’s acting as Bailey, but the most significant aspect for a student of his career is that it’s his first romantic lead. Maybe that’s why Variety called it “James Gandolfini’s most substantial feature role to date.” It works in part because we’re left to imagine the two lovers as teenagers and all the years before the story begins. Whether it’s his “enduring status as a sex symbol” or just a function of his gift, the contrast between Janssen and Gandolfini—the svelte former model, famous at the time for her performance as Jean Grey, heartthrob of the X-Men series, and a now “270-pound Woody Allen” as Jim described himself the year before—never registers as an impediment to their romance. We take it for granted that she loves him.
Like a lot of indie films, there was trouble with the financing in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, so Kiddie Ride/Down the Shore, like Romance & Cigarettes, never got quite the attention it deserved. But the project was important to Gandolfini, and he felt bad enough about the outcome to ask Guskin and Jennings if they were “okay with money” after it went awry. “Can you imagine anyone else saying that?” Jennings says. “We’ll be fine, but that’s not the point. That was Jim. He could have made oodles of money instead of taking his time to do this film, and then he asks us if we’re all right.”
“Acting was his family,” Guskin says, beaming.
Family and acting had to be what Gandolfini was thinking about. His other project in 2011 was Cinema Verite, a TV film for HBO about the making of An American Family, the PBS documentary series about Bill and Pat Loud, a well-to-do couple in Santa Barbara, California, and their five handsome kids. An American Family, which aired in 1973, is usually thought to be the ultimate ancestor of reality TV. Gandolfini plays documentarian Craig Gilbert, who discovered the Louds and convinced them to try the “bold experiment” of putting their lives on TV. What he ends up making, of course, is an exposé of the family’s dissolution, brought on in part by the pressures of having a film crew document their daily lives.
Gandolfini plays Gilbert with a wonderful ambiguity. Gilbert himself never made another film after An American Family: The series was a huge ratings success, but it also led to a heavy round of media condemnation, for the Louds as a family but also for Gilbert, his methods, and the meaning of what he had achieved. Was an entertaining documentary on the breakup of a successful, liberal California family worth the breakup itself? Was the American fame culture corrosive of family values?
The fact that eldest son Lance Loud came out as gay on the show—essentially the first openly gay man on American TV—and ended up as an editor and writer for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine only underlined the profundity of these themes. Lance died of AIDS in 2001, and, as Cinema Verite reveals in its credits, his last wish was for his parents to get back together. And they did.
There were all sorts of fascinating aspects to the story of the making of An American Family, but what everyone in the media has always agreed about was Craig Gilbert’s role: he was the serpent in the garden.
Gandolfini said he saw the man differently. “I’ve gone to lunch with [Gilbert] a few times in New York City,” Jim, ever diligent about his research, told the press at the premiere. “He’s a wonderful man, smart, honest, incredibly intelligent. Old-fashioned way about him, graduated from Harvard. He was an ambulance driver in World War II—he’s old school. I enjoy him immensely. I love the guy.
“This experience really hurt him,” Gandolfini continued. “I think he was so astounded that the Loud family got so destroyed and he got so destroyed by people. They went after the Loud family so viciously. All they were really were regular people and their family was not that much different than anybody else’s. He was just trying to document it and they went after both of them so viciously that he said, ‘The hell with this.’”
As it happened, Cinema Verite hurt, too. As written, the script broadly hinted that Gilbert and Pat Loud had an affair during the filming of An American Family. Before shooting began Gilbert hired a lawyer to watch over his and the Louds’ interests, but there is nonetheless a scene in which Diane Lane, as Pat Loud, follows Gandolfini, as Gilbert, to his hotel room to see evidence of her husband’s infidelity. And in a gesture familiar from scores of movies beginning with D. W. Griffith, Gandolfini reaches out and places his hand on Lane’s. Fade to black.
HBO paid the Louds a settlement with the stipulation that they never discuss the film, but Gilbert refused. It didn’t help that suspicion about his relationship with Pat Loud had been part of the original controversy in 1973. Gilbert was bitter about how it turned out, and complained to The New Yorker about Cinema Verite in April 2011. Now eighty-five and living in the same one-room apartment on Jane Street in Manhattan that he’d had for twenty-one years, Gilbert said he’d told Gandolfini at dinner “no in twenty ways” about the old rumor of an affair. Pat Loud has also consistently denied the rumors.
Truth, art, privacy, telling a good story—they can get tangled up so easily. You can use the word “damn,” but there’s no question that An American Family did something with four letters to the Louds. So it’s a metaphor, allowed under an artist’s license.
In Cinema Verite there’s a scene in which Gandolfini-Gilbert meets with a tableful of suits from PBS about his cost overruns and dull drama—would the show end up ten hours of “pass the salt?” Gandolfini wears a flippy seventies-era toupee, and struggles not to sound unctuous as he asks for patience. You have to build trust with a family before the drama begins, he says. Gandolfini, as a character actor, was stretching himself to portray the man whose work, inadvertently or not, had helped create “reality TV” and all its attendant assaults on norms of privacy. He was, in a way, siding with the “vampires” in the press—and at the same time invading the privacy of a creative filmmaker, albeit one who could never work again.
“[Gilbert] tried to do something that nobody else had ever done,” Gandolfini said. “It ended up this exceptional thing. Then they threw out all the rest of the footage, hours and hours, they threw it all out—and he was incredibly hurt by all of it.
“He’s a bit of a freak—but a great guy. He tells me what an asshole I am every time he sees me. ‘You’re an asshole Jim, you’re an idiot.’ I say, ‘You’re absolutely right,’ and I laugh—he’s a charming man.”
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The reminder of the sharp edge of fame Cinema Verite delivered was ironic, perhaps, but it may have left a bruise. The next year Gandolfini took a small part, as C.I.A. chief Leon Panetta, in the celebrated movie about SEAL Team Six and the killing of Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty. Gandolfini did his research, and achieved a plausible resemblance to the former California congressman. The movie was controversial, however, for the suggestion that torture had led to cracking the bin Laden case (it’s a long and complicated argument that in no way hurt the box office). But Jim took no chances.
When Panetta retired from his subsequent post as President Barack Obama’s secretary of defense, he told ABC News’s Martha Raddatz that Gandolfini actually wrote him a note apologizing for his portrayal. Panetta recalled the note saying, “As an Italian I’m sure, you know, you probably have a lot of concerns about how I played your role.” Panetta had questioned the accuracy of the overall film, but as far as Jim was concerned, he was simply glad that “thank God it was an Italian.”
“The reality is, I like him, I like him as an actor,” Panetta told Raddatz. “I’ve met him before, and he did a great job in the movie.”
Remember, even as The Sopranos fell four or five years into the past, every time a former cast member picked his nose (or, okay, stood by while a New York City police officer was shot, or hired a Gambino family goon to collect a debt) there would be a headline about life imitating art again. Having played Tony Soprano so well for so long was like sowing a minefield through your future. You could not do anything in public that might in even the wildest imagination seem vaguely Tony-like without getting accused of imitating art. Or worse, justifying the way people sometimes looked frightened at your approach.
Guskin says that Gandolfini came to him in 2012 about a part in a movie that Brad Pitt had asked Jim to do, Killing Them Softly, that he’d agreed to as a favor but wasn’t sure he really wanted to go through with. The movie is based on a novel by George Higgins, a bleak chronicler of the Irish mob in Boston best known for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a 1973 movie with Robert Mitchum. Higgins’s vision of a criminal is much more Whitey Bulger than Bobby Baccala.
Killing Them Softly is set in New Orleans, where Pitt lives. He plays a hard-bitten hitman for the mob who prefers to kill his victims “softly,” by shooting them when they won’t see it coming and will feel no pain or panic. But he happens to know his next victim personally, so he hires Mickey Fallon, played by Gandolfini, to do it for him.
Guskin says Gandolfini thought he was “done” with such violent characters forever, but as he thought about the alcoholic, dissolute nature of the part, he began to see how the role might whack the very idea of his playing a mobster ever again. Mickey Fallon (Fini’s Irishness is entirely notional here) takes shape in two long, rambling conversations with Pitt, in a bar and in Mickey’s hotel suite, where they discuss means and methods of the trade. Fallon’s lechery and drunkenness is so grotesque that Pitt’s character tips off the police, who nab Mickey on an old weapons charge before he can attempt a kill.
Like everything based on Higgins’s writing, the movie is sourly depressing—not inappropriate for a picture about murder for hire, surely. And Gandolfini works hard to expunge the least wisp of charm from his presence: pale, puffy-faced, and breathing stertorously, he’s a study in depravity. It was, indeed, the last hitman he would ever play.
On October 10, 2012, James and Deb had a baby daughter in Los Angeles. They christened her Liliana Ruth. Jim told Armstrong and Sanders he liked working on movies that his kids would want to see—that was the original idea he had for Where the Wild Things Are.
He’d been working at the end of that year on a big Hollywood comedy, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, with Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi, and Jim Carrey. It was about the way magic acts were becoming weird endurance feats, a kind of performance art for hip audiences, leaving established Las Vegas magicians looking lame. Gandolfini plays an increasingly frustrated agent for Carell and Buscemi.
“It was a chance to work with two of the biggest comedians in Hollywood,” Armstrong says, “and it was a character.” Wonderstone got disappointing reviews, and had the worst opening box office of any Carell or Carrey movie yet. Gandolfini was filming, but in March 2013 Armstrong went with Michael to the red carpet premiere of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone in Los Angeles. They were already planning their trip to Rome that June.