James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano Read Online Free PDF Page A

in tracksuits discussing the film’s finer points as if they were Roger Ebert.
    Director Francis Ford Coppola hit upon the idea of turning the gangster into an analogue of the American capitalist, forced to adapt to survive, constantly changing with the times and the culture, and thereby slowly “losing the family.” It was a love letter to the stubborn ethnic cultures of the Northeast, which were being worn away by suburban mobility, rock ’n’ roll, and the general prosperity of the 1970s.
    Of course, the Corleones were a New York crime family, and their idea of the suburbs, at least in Coppola’s imagination, was a fieldstone estate in Lake Tahoe. As the series progressed we got to see them not only kill their fellow Italian-American competitors but threaten movie producers and United States senators, successfully suborn the grand jury process and defy Congress. They were captains of industry, building the new world, convening corporate board meetings (only, instead of energy or railroads, they oversaw illegal booze, gambling, prostitution, and the labor rackets).
    It was a little over the top.
    The reality for Italian-Americans was less operatic than that. When Italians began immigrating to the United States in large numbers (between 1880 and 1920 some four million Italians recorded entry to the United States, more than any other ethnic group over a period lasting almost half a century), many of them settled in cheap housing in port cities. Factory work, dock labor, and construction jobs were mainstays.
    Today, Little Italy in Manhattan is a tourist-trap vestige, a few blocks under constant threat of being swallowed by a burgeoning Chinatown. But back then the tenements were crowded with recent immigrants. They helped found similar concentrations in cities all around the region. Many of the new arrivals were uneducated peasants from the south of Italy, traditionally the poorest section of the boot, and they dreamed of moving out of the cities.
    “The majority of Italians came after Garibaldi united Italy, and one of the outcomes of unification was compulsory education,” says Maria Laurino, who published a book in 2000, Were You Always an Italian?, about the woes of New Jersey Italian-American assimilation. David Chase read Laurino’s book, blurbed the paperback, and then distributed it among The Sopranos ’ scriptwriters. Laurino was raised in the upscale suburb of Short Hills, New Jersey, but her father came from neighboring Millburn, which had a large concentration of southern Italians. Laurino, whose brother Robert is now an Essex County prosecutor, is descended from emigrants from Basilicata and Avellino; David Chase’s mother’s people come from Avellino, too.
    “Most of them had been peasants for many, many generations,” Laurino says, “people who worked the soil. The dream was a little land in the country. But the idea of a son who’d be better educated than his father, who would not respect his father because he knew more—that was anathema to them. So that was one of the reasons why they moved to the United States in huge numbers. Compulsory education had been in place for years [in the United States], but they were already here when they found out.”
    Many of these immigrants complained of American prejudice, of being asked to repeat themselves because of their accent or being followed around in department stores. More than one Italian-American has told me something like, “My grandfather never thought he was white.”
    In New Jersey, the earliest concentrations of Italians were in Newark, first in the city near the factories and warehouses, and then in Vailsburg, on the city’s western border, and in mill towns like Paterson. In The Sopranos, Tony’s mother and father are buried in a graveyard in Vailsburg. The inner-belt suburbs offered factory work and tedious finishing jobs that could be done in the home (independent Italian garment workers, usually women, sewed