James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano by Dan Bischoff Read Free Book Online Page A

famous actor was a little like being Geppetto. You work at it and work at it, and one day people may think you’ve made a real boy. Nothing to fuss over, really.
    And there was such a thing as being a good son, too. Nobody fussed over his father’s labor or his mother’s; whatever Jamie did was all due to them. Success he wanted, of course, most people do, but this sort of monster success, where everyone knows your name and thinks they know you —that was embarrassing.
    Some of those who knew him the longest say he was always just as shy as he was outgoing, if that makes any sense at all. As a kid, Gandolfini struck some of his friends as particularly gentle and paradoxically solitary. “In sixth grade, when I first met him, what he wanted to be when he grew up was a forest ranger, which seems so kind of low-key and kind of almost quiet and alone,” classmate Julie Luce told the Bergen County Record . “And I think a little part of that was sort of with him always. He was somebody who did not like the attention. It’s, like, contradictory because everyone in the entire planet knew who he was, or most of them did, but he was really very private.…
    “He was like a really regular person. He tried to live a regular life and I don’t know how he did that, but he was able to a little bit, in between the craziness of being a celebrity.”
    It did seem odd that an actor who was so convincing in the most intimate of performances would just stiff-arm almost all requests for interviews. And it made it very easy for his fans to simply assume he was Tony Soprano. People who didn’t know him before he got famous slipped and called him “Tony” all the time. After all, he was Italian-American, from Jersey, and he tawked like the Tone. Who else could he be?
    And, whatever his reasons were, putting Park Ridge under a kind of media bell jar helped preserve a certain civic pride in appearances. Like a lot of Bergen County, Park Ridge projects an air of being left out of the modern issues roiling America. There are few class conflicts, few ethnic frictions, in Park Ridge. There are also very few African-Americans (one exception was a Park Ridge High School music director, the one who demanded Fini learn his lines or he’d cancel the play). Diversity largely amounts to people with Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish backgrounds. “But we don’t think of ourselves that way,” Dolly Lewis, a former teacher at Park Ridge High, told me by the town pool one day. “We just think of ourselves as Americans.” It’s really just a nice place, with strong civic values.
    Though, as former mayor Don Ruschman likes to point out, there was that guy who lived in the Gandolfinis’ neighborhood, whom everybody knew was a lieutenant in the mob. Not that anybody made a big deal about it. As Ruschman says, chuckling, “He kept his lawn beautifully.”

 
    3.
    Romantic Lead
    After graduation from Park Ridge High in 1979, Gandolfini’s mother, Santa, insisted that he go to college. He’d be the first Gandolfini boy to go (both his sisters had attended Rutgers); they thought he should study something useful, like marketing. He didn’t want to.
    “But then I got there and I thought, jeez, fifty thousand eighteen-year-olds in one place—what the hell was I complaining about?” he said much later. “This is great. I was around a lot of fun people and I had a ball. I had more fun than somebody probably should have and I learned a lot—although I don’t think I remember anything from communications.”
    Gandolfini thrived at Rutgers’ flagship campus in New Brunswick, a small former industrial city on the Raritan River. He started to move beyond the quiet, skinny kid he’d been in Park Ridge.
    “He told everyone he wanted to be an actor,” says Mark Di Ionno, now a columnist and Pulitzer finalist at The Star-Ledger . In the fall of 1979, Di Ionno was a four-year naval veteran who had just doffed his uniform to enroll as a freshman.