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

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.”

 
    4.
    Learning How to Act
    Once in Gately’s class, Gandolfini reacted as he often would—with self-doubt. He wondered almost immediately if he was in over his head.
    “When he came to me he wanted to play your average suburban nice guy, the leading-man type,” Gately