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

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