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

houses built in the sixties and seventies around a tiny nineteenth-century core. The downtown is festooned with gingerbread, and the meandering eighteenth- and nineteenth–century roads give it a bucolic charm very different from tract housing suburbs. In the 1970s, it was mostly a blue-collar town.
    Don Ruschman, a former mayor of Park Ridge, first noticed Jamie Gandolfini sometime in the seventies, when he started crossing over into Ruschman’s backyard from his own in order to play with his daughter. The Gandolfini home on Park Avenue has been razed and replaced with a much larger house built in the past fifteen years or so, but there’s a small Cape Cod next door that neighbors remember as all but identical to Jim’s first house. The lot, with a big sweep of front yard, is on the town’s main street, just a couple of blocks from the town center and Park Ridge High.
    “He was a tall, good-looking kid. My daughter knew him better than me, of course, but he was always respectful, kind of quiet,” Ruschman says. “I met him later, when he’d return for the local OctoberWoman Foundation for Breast Cancer Research fund-raiser in town every year. When The Sopranos was at its height, and people were crazy for it, he was still just a direct, down-to-earth person, totally indifferent to celebrity and all that. Even though he was the biggest draw at every dinner.
    “I credit his parents with who he became,” Ruschman says. “They were hardworking people who raised their kids and that’s who they lived for.”
    Most of the citizens of Park Ridge in the 1970s were Irish, German, or Italian, and many were Catholic. The town has its own power company and water company, and its own school district, too. High schools all around Park Ridge have graduating classes in the three- to four-hundred-person range, but Park Ridge High School graduates less than a third of those numbers. Thirty years ago the middle school was in the same building as the high school, so kids barely recognized their generational differences—everybody was similar, facing similar prospects, fellow students told me again and again. They were almost like one family.
    “We didn’t have extremes of poverty or wealth,” Ruschman recalls. “Most people were working people, blue-collar people, in those days. Everybody got along. They still do. This sounds like boilerplate, but it’s just a great place to raise kids.”
    Park Ridge is a town built by the American middle class during the era of its greatest security, based on well-paid union jobs and the great economic expansion of the postwar era. Homes sold for $15,000 to $35,000 back in the day; now, when people buy them, at an average price of around $435,000, they sometimes tear down the original and build a McMansion in its place. There’s even a new section of town, called the Bear’s Nest, with townhouses at $1 million to $1.3 million apiece.
    But those are symptoms of a different, more unequal America—the Park Ridge James Gandolfini remembered all his life was a smaller town, almost a village.
    “I think I feel a lot,” Gandolfini once said, trying to explain how his working-class hometown inflected his whole career. “I never wanted to do business or anything. People interest me, and the way things affect them. And I also have a big healthy affinity for the middle class and the blue collar, and I don’t like the way they’re treated, and I don’t like the way the government is treating them now. I have a good healthy dose of anger about all of that. And I think that if I kept it in, it wouldn’t have been very good. I would have been fired a lot. So I found this silly way of living that allows me to occasionally stand up for them a little bit. And mostly make some good money and act like a silly fool.”
    James and Santa Gandolfini spoke Italian in the home to each other, but not to Jamie and his sisters. Jamie said he could always tell when “they were mad at me in Italian,” but even