3.
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. “Frankly, I didn’t recognize his talent at the time. He seemed like just a regular Jersey guy.… He was like a lot of us, like I wanted to be a writer. You know, college freshmen in the middle of New Jersey, how the fuck you gonna get there?”
Di Ionno recognized Gandolfini’s natural leadership, and that he was often up and down—ebullient, but occasionally moody, like any teenager. Selfish, undisciplined.
But he also saw the beginnings of Gandolfini’s first adult crew, the group of guys who would wind up hanging out together all through college and beyond: Jim’s roommate, Stewart Lowell, now an accountant for a New York firm, and Di Ionno’s roommate, Tony Foster, another Bergen County kid, were among the first. Tom Richardson, who would later work at Gandolfini’s production company, Vito Bellino, now an account executive at the Ledger, and Mark Ohlstein, a chiropractor, would soon join the group and remain good friends with Gandolfini until his death.
The friendships developed as you might expect, over beer and games; the guys would sometimes engage in a sort of half-comic “fight club” in the halls, whaling on each other. (This is something of a New Jersey tradition—my ten-year-old son did the same thing with his pals in the garage behind our house in South Orange, much to his non-Jersey-born parents’ consternation. Everybody seemed to enjoy it tremendously.) Among the inner core of friends, Gandolfini was known as “Buck.”
One night, about two or three weeks into freshman year, Di Ionno was awakened by pounding on his door. “Buck got arrested, Buck got arrested!”
Gandolfini had broken one of the wooden traffic barriers that protect the parking lots at Rutgers. “He didn’t even have a car,” Di Ionno recalls. “The worst thing was that it happened on campus, but somehow he’d been arrested by New Brunswick police, not campus cops.
“I put my uniform back on, because I know they’re not going to release him to another student,” he continues. “And I go down to the New Brunswick police station and I say, ‘I’m here to get James Gandolfini.’ So they release him, and I think I wound up going to court with him, too … he ended up paying a fine.”
The year went on like that. A few months later someone bought a bunch of spring-loaded dart guns—novelty toys that shot little plastic sticks with rubber suction cups on one end—and they started having High Noon gun battles throughout the dorm.
After removing the suction cups, of course, so they’d hurt more when you got hit.
“So [Gandolfini] runs into his room, he doesn’t see me,” Di Ionno says. “I come up behind him, just outside his door, gun in my hand, and I kick it—Bam!—and the metal doorknob smashes right into his face. I had no idea he’d turned back. I open the door and he’s knocked out, he’s unconscious, blood all over, and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, what did I do?’ I thought I fucking killed the kid. I ended up taking him to St. Peter’s [hospital].”
Jim got a few stitches, for which Di Ionno paid the $25 fee. But that scar on Gandolfini’s forehead, the one that became so expressive on The Sopranos when he was angry at another mobster or begging for respite from his wife’s impatience? That was a Rutgers dorm gun battle wound.
Di Ionno said Gandolfini always had a kind of mutual loyalty bond with his friends, an understood promise that they’d always be there for each other. Even after freshman year, when many of the guys, including Gandolfini, moved off campus, the group hung together, adding members now and then.
Buck took a job at the campus pub as a bouncer and bartender, at $3.50 an hour. In those days, campus pubs were a much bigger deal than they are today. The Vietnam War had set up the irony that eighteen-year-olds could be drafted and killed or maimed abroad, but could not order a Budweiser at home. So the drinking age was lowered in most states to eighteen in the late 1960s, and four-fifths of the student body qualified. The pubs grew until they seemed to absorb the student centers that had established them. The Rutgers pub would invite musical acts—real acts, not one guy with an acoustic guitar—and major speakers. After the Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaign began in the mid-1980s, states raised the legal drinking age back to twenty-one, and campus pubs shrank back to their larval stage as if they’d eaten magic mushrooms.
But back in 1980 the Rutgers pub was a scene, and Jim Gandolfini seemed to enjoy it enormously. He was, to boot, the kind of strong guy who was amiable enough to defuse any conflict before it got out of hand. He often did front-door ID checking, greeting customers, setting the tone; but he pulled the heavy duty, too, hefting kegs, mopping out, all the drudge work. And, like all good bartenders, he took care of his friends.
That’s where he met Tom Richardson, also a bouncer at the pub, who became one of Jim’s closest friends and project manager at his film and TV production company, Attaboy Films. Richardson was an Irish guy from West Orange, who had his first taste of mozzarella with tomato and basil leaves plucked from Gandolfini’s father’s garden behind their little two-family summer place on the Shore, in Lavallette (“Marone, where you been all your life, never had tomato, cheese, and basil!”). Richardson’s roommate Mark Ohlstein was a regular, too, along with all the dorm crew. It was almost like forging a new, on-site family, which just happened to have the same all-for-one attitudes, and more often than not the same class origins, as the gang of kids in Park Ridge.
“For the last two years at Rutgers, Jimmy drove around campus in this black Ford Falcon he’d gotten, from his father, I think,” says a fellow classmate. “He loved that car. Just loved it. In part because it was like a big ‘Fuck you!’ to the guys at Rutgers who drove around in fancy sports cars.”
The 1962 Falcon had been his father’s car, kept in mint condition, and giving it to Jim was, for Mr. Gandolfini, a test of the boy’s maturity. One that he did not pass with flying colors. One summer Jim drove the whole crew down to the Shore in the Falcon. Just as they picked up one of the guys in front of his parents’ house, the engine caught fire. They had to put it out with a fire extinguisher.
“Jim really loved his parents,” one of the guys remembers. “Ruining the car’s hood like that was just terrible in his dad’s eyes. I can remember Jim standing with his dad, hanging his head, as Mr. Gandolfini, who was a lot shorter and slighter than Jim, lectured him over what he’d done to his car. But he never had it repainted or anything. He just drove it around like it was.”
Stories about Gandolfini’s physical fearlessness often go hand-in-hand with tales about his remarkable strength. Not just carrying kegs at the pub, but standing up to challenges. There’d be fights between students every now and then; and he’d break them up, often genially, but with a sobering display of muscle. A couple of Jim’s friends remember two pickup trucks filled with five or six guys squealing their tires in the pub parking lot one night. Jim was just getting off shift, and he went out to tell them off. They surrounded Gandolfini, but he stood his ground until the pub bouncers heard what was happening and scared them off. “He wasn’t afraid of anything,” a friend recalls.
Sophomore year Gandolfini moved out of the dorms and into the Birchwood Terrace Apartments on Hamilton Street (the building is still there), not far from the Rutgers campus. It became the center of his life for the rest of his years in college. When he graduated in 1983, he’d tell everyone that his degree was in marketing or communications—although his Rutgers transcript actually gives his degree as in “journalism”—but he was quick to say he didn’t remember much about marketing.
Maybe the most curious thing about his time at Rutgers is he never tried to go on stage while he was there. He told all his friends he was going to be an actor, but he didn’t try out for campus plays. The university, like all major state schools, has an active theater department, with a professional staff, and they mount dramas and musicals every year. But Gandolfini wasn’t a theater major, and the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers restricts roles for its students. The university has no record of Gandolfini appearing in any unaffiliated plays or performances on campus over his full four years.
It’s rare for a major talent to simply not seek expression, especially in acting, which has many more ingénues than it does older character actors. Was he unsure of his commitment, or did he doubt he could actually make it as an actor?
Di Ionno remembers one attempt Gandolfini made to land a theater job, after freshman year. When classes ended, Gandolfini asked Di Ionno if he’d join him on a road trip to North Carolina, where students could try out for summer stock. So the two of them, anticipating all the adventures a road trip could offer, loaded up Di Ionno’s car and headed south.
“And he failed. He failed miserably,” Di Ionno recalls. “He was just very disappointed in how bad he seemed to be.… I remember driving home, he was angry with himself. He felt he’d been unprepared, that he’d given the thing no thought about what he might be asked to do, or something. And he was just very upset that he’d done that.”
As far as anyone can tell, he didn’t try out for acting again for another five or six years.
Gandolfini did get serious about a girl in those years, for the first time, really. By the summer after his sophomore year he and Lynn Marie Jacobson, whom he’d met as a bouncer at the campus pub when she was a waitress, were close, even though she was a couple of years older. By 1981, when she graduated, she was always at the Birchwood.
Friends remember Lynn as “classically beautiful”—so pretty, in fact, that she intimidated some of Jimmy’s buddies. She had auburn hair, dressed more formally than most of the other kids, and was nice, friendly, nothing off-putting about her, but serious, older than most of Jimmy’s crew. She was from West Caldwell, and studied advertising. After she graduated, she got a job in New York City at the Media Management Public Relations and Advertising Company during the day, and several nights a week she also worked late hours as a hostess at The Manor, a sort of banquet room–conference center in West Orange.
Lynn worked two jobs to help her family with her tuition costs; she had a twin sister, Leslie Ann, and another sister, Gail, who still lived with her parents. She’d pull long hours a few days a week, doing her day job in the city and then schlepping up to The Manor until closing. The hours were a little unpredictable—these sorts of catered complexes are fairly common in Jersey, and they host events of all sorts, with schedules set by the group or firm that rents the space.
Lynn was driving back to Caldwell on a Sunday morning around 4:45 A.M. when her car crossed Bloomfield Avenue and hit a utility pole. She was almost home—the accident happened right where the road curves to enter Caldwell, just east of 180 Bloomfield Avenue. Lynn’s car, a 1971 Ford Mustang, was cut in half, and the front end smashed into a storefront a few feet farther on. She was killed instantly. She was twenty-two years old.
The police found no mechanical problem or anything else in the car to explain the crash. Everyone assumed she’d fallen asleep at the wheel after a very long week.
When you’re just nineteen and a tragedy of such adult scale happens, friends are often so shocked they don’t know what to do. Especially since it seemed sort of out of character for a guy like Gandolfini to be touched by death. He was still a junior in college, majoring in the same practical subject Lynn had studied. The night after Jim learned about Lynn’s accident, just two friends went to his apartment at the Birchwood and let themselves in. Jim was there, drinking wine and watching television. The three spent the night together, now and again smoking marijuana, but mostly just sitting in front of the TV, talking about this and that. Every now and then, for no reason—for every reason—Jimmy would start to cry.
Everyone came to the funeral, of course, at Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church in Essex Fells. Jimmy was, several friends told me, “the boyfriend” at the funeral, helping the whole family, but trying in particular to console Lynn’s twin sister. The burial was in East Hanover.
In some sense the shock never left him. When he won his third Emmy as lead actor in a drama in 2003, Gandolfini—after blowing a raspberry into the microphone because he’d promised his son, Michael, that he would—said: “I’d like to dedicate this to the memory of a girl I knew a long time ago who basically, inadvert … I can’t say that word. She made me be an actor. Her name was Lynn Jacobson, and I miss her very much.”
It was typical Jim, playing peekaboo with his real life, without really explaining what Jacobson meant to him. People who watched the Emmys that year could be forgiven for assuming she was a favorite drama teacher, or maybe someone who’d convinced him to pursue his true ambitions in life, that sort of typical, celebrity-acceptance-speech sentiment.
“She was a smart, lovely girl who worked two jobs to get her way through college and help her family,” Gandolfini told GQ correspondent Chris Heath in 2004, in the only interview that ever got Jim to open up about Jacobson. Her sudden death “made me very angry … I think I was studying advertising or something before that, and after that I changed a little bit. You know, it must have changed me a little bit.
“If anything, it was ‘Why plan for the future? Fuck it.’ It was like, ‘Fuck this.’”
That’s the most he ever said about Lynn in public. According to friends who knew him at the time, he said little more in private. But in his stiff-lipped, understated way, Gandolfini saw her death as a turning point. It left him with something inside he could not express, something that could not be assuaged by roughhousing or parties or, well, anything less than artistic expression.
“Yeah, I think I might not have done what I’ve done,” he told Heath. “I don’t know what I’d have done. I think it definitely pushed me in this direction. I don’t know why. Just as a way to get out some of those feelings. I don’t know.”
* * *
At the same time that Gandolfini was going through Rutgers, a true revolution in American cooking was moving east from California. As late as the mid-1970s, salad dressing in the United States was, like fried potatoes, usually called “French,” and most sauces were just “gravy” (which to most Italian-Americans meant tomato sauce—Jerseyans like Paulie Walnuts still call it that). But on the West Coast there were already fads building for fresh ingredients, traditional recipes, and “artisanal” (as they’d come to be known) cheeses, sausages, coffees, you name it.
More than many students, Gandolfini wanted to earn extra money, but like most, he really wasn’t qualified to do much more than tend bar. But by 1982, Gandolfini applied for a job at Ryan’s, a new bar/restaurant in New Brunswick that tried to set a higher standard—and promised better tips.
New Brunswick in the early 1980s was still, even near the campus, rather run-down. Customers complained about the street Ryan’s was on, about parking in a dingy nabe that had some of them darting to their cars when they left. But they came anyhow. It was a white-tablecloth kind of place, with the start of a decent cellar and an interest in trends that were only then starting to be called “foodie.” Gandolfini tended bar there for two years, beginning a pretty serious involvement with nightlife that would be a part of his working life for years.
“We met shortly after Lynn died,” says T.J. Foderaro, a wine critic and journalist who back then worked as a waiter at Ryan’s. Gandolfini and Foderaro became good friends; five nights a week they spent late nights closing down the restaurant and then wandering out for a nightcap. They’d talk about books, poetry, philosophy. Foderaro says he was in his “serious young man” stage, reading Dostoyevsky and the like, bringing a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in to read aloud while the waitstaff cleaned the grill. He presented a copy as a gift to his new friend, who seemed to really get a kick out of it. But Jim also had a blue edge, as T.J. soon discovered.
“He was in the throes of [mourning for Jacobson] for years,” T.J. remembers. “Sometimes he’d talk about it—I remember, every now and then, at a party or after everyone had left the restaurant, he’d be sitting there alone, with tears running down his face.
“Occasionally he’d start to talk about her, but the second he felt you might think he was exploiting it, or you tried to console him, that was it.”
Foderaro remembers Jim keeping a yellow Labrador retriever at the Birchwood apartment building. Gandolfini had shared him with Lynn when she was alive, and for Jim, the dog seemed to keep her alive, too, somehow.
It wasn’t as if her death doomed his chances at love, exactly. Women were always attracted to Jim, T.J. says, and not just because he was tall and good-looking back then.
“He was the most complex and demanding relationship I ever had,” Foderaro says. “Because he didn’t want to have any kind of superficial relationship. He wanted to talk to you honestly, and when he locked eyes with you he wanted you to connect to him on a very deep level, and he didn’t tolerate bullshit. He didn’t want you to put up defenses, or pretend to be something you weren’t. He wanted to get you, and he wanted you to get him, and he really meant it.
“And girls loved that.”
Toward the end of their years at Rutgers Foderaro became the manager at a new restaurant, The Frog and Peach (named for a Peter Cook/Dudley Moore sketch, but also a four-star, white-tablecloth kind of place—it’s still open). The chef was another Rutgers guy, an out-of-state student (they pay a much higher tuition) named Mario Batali, whose family had been involved in making and selling Italian cuisine on the West Coast since 1903. The foods his family championed required hand labor—Italian sweet sausages, fresh pastas, hand-dipped cheeses, that sort of thing. The labor made them expensive, but insisting on traditional methods was a mark of quality in a country taken over by food production on an industrial, corporate-run scale.
Foderaro introduced the rotund, red-haired Batali to Gandolfini, and they became good friends, too. The three of them would talk food and wine in the same way T.J. and Jim talked books and philosophy. Later, when Batali became an expert on classical Italian cuisine and a famous chef with restaurants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, Gandolfini became a regular on both coasts. Rutgers decided to include both Gandolfini and Batali in an award ceremony for distinguished graduates a couple of years ago, and the two old friends trooped on stage relatively abashed. Most of their fellow honorees were scientists and historians, a computer whiz, that kind of thing; Gandolfini, always self-deprecating, would tell the press that he and Batali had followed all these brainiacs to the podium with some trepidation, like “Heckle and Jeckle” bringing up the end.
But Jim really did learn his wines in those years, and a lot about food. It was a foundation for earning a living, of course, but it was also a real education, one earned in good company and with plenty of real experience. Italian-American food in New Jersey is not quite the same thing—actually, The Sopranos would devote an episode to the difference, distinguishing between classical cuisine and dishes like “gabagool.” We’ll come back to this topic later, since it cycles through Gandolfini’s life at every stage, but it’s important to understand that it’s a more serious issue than the actor himself ever acknowledged in public.
Foderaro hired another student, Roger Bart, a senior at Mason Gross School of the Arts, to act as bartender at The Frog and Peach. Late each evening Gandolfini would drop by to help close the place, drinking wine for free and schmoozing with the staff, before wandering off into the night with T.J. Maybe because he was tending bar himself at Ryan’s, Jim gravitated to Bart, and they struck up a friendship.
“I grew fond of Jim right away,” Bart recalls. “He was an affable guy, you could see how he might be a bartender. But he had this way of looking down when he talked to you—there was this vein of sadness in him.”
Bart found Gandolfini’s presence striking, but kind of hard to place. “He was also very smart, he and T.J. would have very intellectual conversations, they were both very well read, even though he had this Jersey working-class image going, too,” Bart says. “And he was just very sharp, he had a really sharp sense of humor.… I’m a pretty funny guy, but Jimmy was always right there with it. And I think I could tell there was this volcanic temper just underneath.… Oh, yeah, you could see that, even then.”
Bart asked Gandolfini if he’d ever thought of acting, and he replied, “No,” pretty gruffly, as if that were somehow out of the question. Bart had spent the past three years learning the stage at Mason Gross, and he was consumed with worry about how he would ever find his footing as an actor when he graduated. There seemed to be a huge gulf between doing a school play and building a career.
“You’ve got to remember, I was twenty-one, twenty-two; most of what I talked to Jimmy about was type,” Bart recalls. “You know, stereotype? At that age, you’re wondering what you can play, what sort of part you can get, that might add up to a living. Being cast in a conservatory school like Mason Gross is such an easy thing, you ask a guy you know or sometimes you just read your name on a list. But out in the real world, how do you get on stage?
“I was like, a hundred and thirty pounds, with this voice that gets so high,” Bart says, demonstrating. “So I was kind of mystified about how to make it myself. But I could see Jimmy’s type right off. He was tall, six-one or six-two, obviously just really strong physically. And he was a real Jersey guy, but I kept thinking to myself that New Jersey could use its own Gene Hackman. So I told him so, and I think some of the comparisons I made maybe resonated with movies he’d liked and things he’d admired. It wasn’t like I was telling him, ‘Oooh, you could be in commercials!’”
Bart thought in particular about a teacher he had at Rutgers, Kathryn Gately, and the patient way she’d worked with a big slab of an Irish guy who Bart thought hadn’t half the spark Gandolfini did. She’d been patient and supportive, using the Sanford Meisner method to promote immediacy and bring out a deep-buried forcefulness in his performance. Bart could imagine her working with Jim and finding it much more rewarding.
So he kept mentioning it to Gandolfini, whenever they were together socially. Jim would tell him, “Yeah, I mean to, I should,” but he never did. Bart didn’t give up.
Then a funny thing happened. Six weeks after he graduated from Rutgers and had found himself an apartment in Jersey City, Bart got called back for the part of Tom Sawyer in Broadway’s Big River, a musical adaptation of Mark Twain. He had a career in show business.
Still, the Rutgers crew would get together every now and then, in Jersey and in Manhattan, where a lot of them drifted soon after school. Whenever Bart saw Jimmy, he’d recommend Kathryn Gately. Bart wasn’t sure why Gandolfini didn’t just call her, but he never dropped it. It wasn’t personal, it was just business.
* * *
When Gandolfini graduated in 1983, he took an apartment for about a year with his former roommate, Stewart Lowell, in Hoboken. The whole neighborhood all around was undergoing a big renewal, but their apartment was not—it was a tiny tenement hutch carved out of a bigger space to rent to people who couldn’t afford Manhattan.
It was on the fourth floor. It was very small—two bedrooms, but with only a half wall between them—and hot as an oven in the summer. Anybody who thinks the top floor in a northeastern city tenement has to be the hottest because its roof is exposed to the sun all day just doesn’t understand five-floor walk-up physics. It’s hotter in the middle, where the air circulates like mud. Air-conditioning would have been an extravagance, and anyway they’d have to lug the machine up four flights, as they’d just done with their refrigerator. The boys bought fans and left them on all the time instead. They helped drown out the noises from the building, too.
Lowell’s first job was at McCann-Erickson, the advertising firm, so he commuted to Manhattan every day. Soon Jim had landed a bartending gig at an expensive wine bar on the Upper East Side, where he could walk away each night with $100 to $125 in tips, very sweet in those days. He did odd jobs, too, worked construction, filled in as a bouncer now and then.
“He was a survivor,” a friend who knew him in those days says. “He always had a job. He was never lazy, always pitched in, and somehow, whenever he got a job, he’d always be right up there with the owner, or anyway with the most important people.”
One day, Gandolfini answered a newspaper ad and was offered the chance to manage a pricey New York nightclub.
It was called Private Eyes, on West Twenty-first Street, in the trendy club district in those days, and it was one of the first video clubs in Manhattan. Every wall was lined with rows of TV sets held by steel and aluminum racks, and they’d play music and art videos all night long. Madonna arranged advanced screenings of videos at Private Eyes; Andy Warhol would show every now and then; at one party an eight-year-old Drew Barrymore was underfoot. Sleek and techno, Private Eyes was large, though nothing like the nearby four-level Area club of the same era. It was the time when video killed the radio star, and Private Eyes took the winner’s side.
Private Eyes wasn’t cheap—a beer could go for $20, very stiff in those days—and it catered to a wealthy, Long Island clientele. It was a diverse eighties crowd. Gandolfini himself later described the club as being “gay two nights of the week, straight two nights, and then everybody for the last two nights.” The club did downtown mini social events, like hosting the debut of a play for video by The Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto, that kind of thing.
It was a big job. Gandolfini remembered he might have ordered a whole year’s supply of liquor in his first week, with nowhere to put it all. Still, the owner, Robert Shalom, had faith in the big twenty-two-year-old Gandolfini.
“I’ve been thinking back to those days, and the fact that he got this job when he was that young to run Private Eyes, which was a pretty big nightclub, shows something about him,” Foderaro says. “I mean, I was just hanging out there with him. But he was managing a really hip, big-deal club, a whole team of bouncers, waitstaff, buying the beer, wine, everything—it was a real job.”
Gandolfini had been a bouncer at clubs before, and he was obviously the sort of staffer entertainment venues like to have around. Several friends said he “enjoyed” bouncing, because finding the psychological insight that gave you an edge against anyone, no matter how drunk or how big, was fascinating.
He moved to Manhattan for good, though without taking an apartment of his own. He was making good money at the club, but not that good—and he had better uses for the money he made than paying a mortgage. Managing a club also meant (within reason) being the one person who had to stay sober. It meant assessing a situation quickly, and taking responsibility when things happen that are in no way predictable.
Running a place like Private Eyes showed you a lot of life, exposed you to people from all over and the vices they indulged in. It’s not quite stand-up comedy, and it isn’t community policing, either, or even the emergency medical service—but it definitely means you versus a crowd, every night.
“The thing about Jim was he was just fantastically strong, and fearless,” remembers Foderaro. “I remember one time we went to a convenience store in downtown Manhattan after the club had closed, this was like two A.M., and there were some black guys outside the store who started taunting us. And Jim gave right back.… He sort of focused on this one dude, and they started really dishing it back and forth. And Jim, he loved this, you could tell he was really into it.
“We go into the store and they follow us, so it goes on inside the store, and you could see right away the store owner is not real keen on this,” Foderaro continues. “And all of a sudden Jim goes right up to this one guy who was taunting us, like really nose-to-nose. And he came at this guy, who was bigger than Jim, with such force and determination that he basically just backed out of the store and ran away. Jim projected this monster energy.”
The gig at Private Eyes lasted a year or so. Gandolfini could have gone on, taken another nightclub job maybe, but he told friends he didn’t want to. He went back to construction and odd jobs for a while. He did a little indoor renovation, he even sold books on the street. He seemed unusually proud of his construction labor. Once, in 2002, he offered to drive a writer home after an interview, one of those spontaneous acts of kindness he seemed prone to take, and as the reporter hopped out Gandolfini leaned over to the passenger’s side and looked fondly up at the building. He recognized it—he “did a little carpentry here” in the old days.
Roger Bart remembers some kind of job at Astor Place Liquors, on the edge of the NYU campus. He’d see Jimmy lugging mixed boxes of fine wines on the sidewalk—Bart thinks somehow the owner or the staff were friends of Jim’s—and they’d talk. Bart would remind him about Kathryn Gately, who had left Rutgers and was running a conservatory at the Nat Horne Studios in Manhattan (the forerunner of the Gately Poole Conservatory she runs today in Chicago).
Gandolfini was now twenty-five. He seemed “wide-eyed” at the prospect, but still, Bart had to call Gately and plead for him. She was running an advanced class. Gandolfini hadn’t been on stage since he washed out at summer stock tryouts in 1980. Could she at least see Gandolfini, to take measure of what Roger saw in him? Bart arranged for his friend to call the teacher in her office.
“And then he asked what no other student before or since has ever asked,” remembers Gately. “He said he wanted to do the interview, but he wanted to do it over a good meal. So I trooped uptown to this restaurant that had white tablecloths and met this well-dressed young man, so tall, towering, I thought. And he conducted that interview. And the food was great. It really was.… It was like a presentation, he told me about everything, it was so Italian. He seemed to have so much dignity. And of course, he was accepted.”