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

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