Gandolfini by Dan Bischoff

Author:Dan Bischoff
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: BIO005000, BIO000000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2014-04-22T14:00:00+00:00

“We had no idea, we were just so busy doing our work,” Tony Sirico says. “Then we went over to Italy for the beginning of the second season, to Naples. That’s where my people are from. I’m what they call a Napoli don. The Isle of Capri is just a few miles up the coast from there, you know, [he starts to sing,] ‘T’was on the Isle of Capri that I found her. . . .’ And who do I get to go to Capri with? Big Pussy. Vincent Pastore.

“Anyway, so we get to the island, and we get off the boat and get on the what do you call it, the train up the mountain,” he continues. “And so Vincent and I are there in the car, we’re just sitting there, and there’s like fifteen tourists from Ireland in the car, and we hear them start saying, ‘Hey, it’s Paulie, that’s Pussy!’ Like, they know us. Tourists from fucking Ireland know the show! That’s when it hit me. This thing was a really big deal.”

Some TV shows take a little time to find an audience. But not The Sopranos. Overnight, James Gandolfini became one of the most recognizable American actors in the world. He certainly couldn’t hide: he was six feet tall and, at the beginning of the show, some 265 pounds. Is anyone ever prepared for the way celebrity can upend their sense of self? Some people, like those whose parents work in the entertainment business, have at least seen it in their regular lives. People like Robert Downey, Jr., say, or Jeremy Piven.

Gandolfini wasn’t like them. He’d already lived more than half—more like three-fourths—of his life before celebrity happened to him. One of the strangest things to Jim was the way his character could do the most horrible things (like garrote a Mafia snitch he sees while taking Meadow on that tour of colleges, an act so gruesome HBO executives pleaded with Chase to cut it), and yet the public seemed to love him for it. He was playing a villain, in his words a “New Jersey lunatic.” It made no rational sense, like American celebrity itself.

But his incredible popularity was unmistakable. Gandolfini’s manager Mark Armstrong tells the story of how, by the middle of the first season, HBO was asking Gandolfini to help out their other big production, Friday night boxing, by coming to the HBO skybox and making an appearance before the fight. Armstrong and his partner, Nancy Sanders, flew out from Los Angeles in March 1999 on business, and Gandolfini asked them to come with him to a Holyfield-Lewis match.

Armstrong says they met in the skybox with a bunch of people from HBO. And then four security guards showed up and asked Jim to come with them.

“I thought, that’s a little unusual,” Armstrong says. “People would stop Jim when he was visiting L.A. with me, but it was usually like one or two people, and they’d say things like, ‘Mr. Gandolfini, I really respect your work, sir.

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