James Gandolfini would have been the first person to wonder why anyone would read a book about him, judging from a new biography, Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend. This was a performer whose sense of self-worth, depending on the day, ranged from unfeigned humility to desperate insecurity to full-on self-loathing. But even he would have recognized why we care: The Sopranos, the game-changing HBO series the actor anchored for a decade as Tony Soprano, the Jersey Mob boss who stands alongside Captain Ahab, Jay Gatsby, and Michael Corleone in the pantheon of all-American antiheroes.
It’s no knock on either Gandolfini or author Jason Bailey (a critic and journalist who previously wrote a Richard Pryor biography) that the pre- and post-Sopranos sections of this book can’t compete with its hefty, chewy middle. Professionally, the life was not unlike a sandwich with excellent ingredients nestled between slices of adequate bread. The book could have used trimming, but that is a minor downside to Bailey’s thoroughness as a researcher: he seems to have talked to everyone who would talk to him, and tracked down multiple revealing interviews with those who wouldn’t, including the late, press-averse Gandolfini.
The actor was a working-class son of North Jersey, a high-school jock—Bailey includes an unexpected yearbook picture of lanky, even gangly “Fini,” as he was then known, nearly leaping out of his tight basketball shorts to block a shot—who discovered a knack for acting after trying out for a junior-year production of Can-Can. At Rutgers, he mostly partied, and in later life he told an interviewer he couldn’t remember his major. (Communications.) The death of a girlfriend in an auto accident spurred him to sort out his life’s priorities, which meant moving to New York City in the hopes of becoming the next Mickey Rourke—it was the mid-1980s—while holding down jobs in various nightclubs.
Happily, by page 70, Gandolfini is cast as Tony. Prior to that, his industry standing was not unlike the early career profiles of Chris Cooper, J. K. Simmons, and Luis Guzmàn: the character actor you look forward to seeing—that guy—even if you’re not quite sure who he is. In Gandolfini’s case, he drew notice across the 1990s in films such as True Romance, Get Shorty, and A Civil Action. Cast in a small part in the sweaty submarine thriller Crimson Tide, he was tough enough not to back down when he got into a shoving match with the star, Denzel Washington, over some physical stage business the two had to enact. (They subsequently became friends.)
The Sopranos premiered in 1999. There aren’t as many books on the series as there are on, say, the Beatles or The Godfather, but the shelf is filling up, and Bailey’s narrative overlaps at times with others’. His main plotline is the cost for Gandolfini of channeling Tony’s darkest impulses, and the toll that the actor’s serial no-shows and outright disappearances took on his colleagues. A compassionate and judicious biographer, Bailey neither skirts nor dwells on Gandolfini’s drug and alcohol abuse, or on the turmoil in his romantic life, focusing instead on the guilt he suffered for his lapses, and his generosity to co-stars and crew members, in good times and bad. You could call him a mensch, but a troubled and sometimes selfish mensch.
A man of contradictions! Just like Tony Soprano! Gandolfini wasn’t a mobster himself, and he wasn’t despicable, but the overlap between character and actor was a key reason—aside from hard work and innate talent (oh, that)—why he was so memorable in the role: the sweetness giving way to volcanic anger, the steeliness disguising a wounded soul, the self-awareness coexisting with a lack of self-control. That was both men.
One example of how this could play out on set:
“A man of prodigious appetites,” Bailey writes, “Jim frequently found the food props hard to resist.... Edie Falco recalls a Tony-Carmela dialogue scene where Tony eats ice cream. ‘We did it, and we had to do it again,’ she says. ‘And we had to do it again. And every time, even when they said cut, he continued to eat the ice cream. And they put more in, and they put more in, and eventually he would kind of look at me to say his line … and he wasn’t home. He was in a full-blown sugar coma. He looked like a giant toddler.... I realized, holy crap, he doesn’t remember his lines. So we had to wrap the scene and reshoot it another day because he had too much ice cream!’”
“A giant toddler.” Add the adjective malevolent and you’ve got Tony Soprano in four words. Sadly, Gandolfini never found a role to match it—but how many actors have? The back third of Bailey’s book slogs a bit through muddled films such as The Mexican, Romance & Cigarettes, Violet & Daisy, and Killing Them Softly—movies that no one saw (including me) but in which Gandolfini apparently gave excellent, nuanced performances. True highlights (i.e., ones I saw) included his voice work in Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, a Tony-nominated run on Broadway in God of Carnage, and (my personal favorite) his first starring role in a rom-com, Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said, opposite Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
He mellowed in these years, but not so much that he wouldn’t stand up to one of Hollywood’s most powerful and relentless producers when he thought the man was trying to take advantage of him. According to Steve Schirripa, his Sopranos co-star, Gandolfini told him, “I will beat the fuck out of Harvey Weinstein, he fucking calls me again. I will beat the fuck out of him.” Relating the anecdote to Bailey, Schirripa added, “Swear to God. And this is all before the Harvey Weinstein shit, when he was still king shit.” David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, couldn’t have scripted that better, or more colorfully.
Gandolfini might have done more rom-coms—should have—if he hadn’t died of a heart attack in 2013, at the age of 51. Bailey makes us feel the loss of both artist and man, which is what you want from an account of a life cut short. In a self-effacing move worthy of his subject, he gives the last word to Robert Iler, the young actor who played Anthony Jr. on The Sopranos. Iler says of Gandolfini, “I hate to tell you: He’d probably hate your book. Just because of how nice everyone is gonna be in it, and how much we’re gonna talk about how much we love him and how incredible he is. He’s so pissed right now.”
Too fucking bad.
Bruce Handy is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies
