Jack Valenti, 85, Confidant of a President and Stars
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Jack Valenti, who became a confidant of President Lyndon B. Johnson and then a Hollywood institution, leading the Motion Picture Association of America and devising a voluntary film-rating system that gave new meaning to letters like G, R and X, died yesterday at his home in Washington. He was 85.
The cause was complications of a recent stroke, his family said. He had been hospitalized in Baltimore in March.
For 38 years, Mr. Valenti was the public face of the movie and television production industry and one of its fiercest advocates. He lobbied Congress to protect filmmakers’ intellectual property from piracy and to ease trade barriers overseas. And he fended off lawmakers’ recurring campaigns to curb violence and sex on the screen, arguing for free expression. He devised the film-rating system precisely to avoid censorship by local review boards.
He also remained a starry-eyed fan, cherishing his friendships with Kirk Douglas, Sidney Poitier and Frank Sinatra, falling speechless before Sophia Loren and savoring his seconds in the spotlight as a regular presenter at the Academy Awards.
As a Houston political consultant, he was in the motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963, and he watched as Johnson was sworn in beside Jacqueline Kennedy aboard Air Force One.
Mr. Valenti soon became known, and for a time mocked, for his unfailing loyalty to Johnson, if not outright idolatry of him. “I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my president,” he once said in Boston, inviting guffaws nationwide.
Even after leaving a senior post at the White House in 1966, Mr. Valenti remained at Johnson’s service, secretly arranging the president’s surprise detour to the Vatican to meet with Pope Paul VI on the way back from Vietnam in December 1967.
His fidelity was lifelong. Mr. Valenti, a bantam 5-foot-7 who forever looked up to the towering Johnson, picked fights with critical Johnson biographers like Robert Caro and Robert Dallek.
Mr. Valenti’s forthcoming memoir, “This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood” (Crown), does as much to polish Johnson’s legacy as his own. He was to have begun a six-city tour on June 5 to promote the book.
In 1966 Mr. Valenti took his talents for personal politicking — and lionizing his bosses — to Hollywood, heeding the request of Lew Wasserman and Arthur Krim, then chairmen of MCA/Universal and United Artists respectively, that he take over the Motion Picture Association. “If Hollywood is Mount Olympus,” Mr. Valenti once said of his new liege, “Lew Wasserman is Zeus.” He became the organization’s third president.
At the time, Hollywood was still officially operating under the Hays Production Code, the industry’s draconian and increasingly outmoded self-censoring rules that flatly barred nudity, profanity, miscegenation and even childbirth scenes from being depicted on film.
Mr. Valenti was soon confronted with two films in 1966 that convinced him that the code had become obsolete. He dealt with one, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” by negotiating a compromise in which three out of four particular vulgarisms were cut.
Later that year, M.G.M. released Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blowup” even though that film, showing brief scenes of nudity, lacked Production Code approval. Sensing that other films would also begin flouting the code and in turn create a vacuum into which local politicians and censorship boards might rush, Mr. Valenti decided to act.
“I knew I had to move swiftly, and I did,” he later recalled. “I was determined to free the screen from anything like the Hays Code. But I also emphasized that freedom demanded responsibility.”
So by late 1968 he persuaded the national theater-owners association to buy into a system of voluntary ratings, based on an ascending scale of adult content, that would be enforced at the box office: G, M (later PG), R and X.
The system was not without flaws and detractors, and it required some tinkering. In 1984, after receiving complaints about frightening parts of PG-rated movies (“parental guidance suggested”) like “Gremlins,” the association added the PG-13 category (“parents strongly cautioned”). Though the other ratings were trademarked, the X was not, and pornographers quickly co-opted it. In 1990 the association replaced the X with NC-17 (no one 17 and under admitted), hoping it would be embraced, but distributors have mostly spurned it for commercial reasons, leaving many filmmakers to make wrenching cuts to adult-themed films in pursuit of an R rating.
Mr. Valenti always rebutted critics by citing an annual survey, paid for by the association, showing that parents of young children strongly believed that the ratings were useful.
In 1983, at the height of the Reagan administration’s deregulation efforts, Mr. Valenti led a fight to preserve federal rules intended to protect television producers and studios from the market power of the three major networks. The Federal Communications Commission was considering repealing the rules and allowing the networks to produce programs, thus giving them vertical control over production, distribution and exhibition.
In his memoir, he said he asked Mr. Wasserman, who had once been Ronald Reagan’s agent, and Charlton Heston to urge the president to oppose the repeal. The White House did just that, and the federal rules remained in place until 1995, by which time mergers between studios and networks had rendered them unnecessary.
In Mr. Valenti’s last decade at the association, it became consumed with fighting digital piracy. But one of his bolder strokes, in 2003, blew up in his face. He had learned that half the films being sent to industry people on DVD, known as screeners, for awards campaigns were turning up for sale illegally around the world. So he banned screeners altogether. A storm of protest ensued — loudest of all from the major studios’ own specialty divisions, which rely heavily on awards attention to publicize their films — and the policy was overturned by a federal judge, who said it ran afoul of antitrust laws.
Jack Joseph Valenti was born in Houston on Sept. 5, 1921, to the son and daughter of Italian immigrants from Sicily. He traced his passion for politics to the day his father, a clerk for the city government, took him to a political rally, where the 10-year-old Jack was invited to give his first speech, from a flatbed truck, for the Harris County sheriff. “I never recovered from it,” Mr. Valenti wrote.
As a youth he worked for a chain of second-run movie theaters in downtown Houston, roaming the city putting up posters in storefront windows in exchange for free passes. Hired as an office boy at the Humble Oil Company (an antecedent to ExxonMobil), he attended the University of Houston at night but still managed to be elected class president his sophomore year.
A voracious reader, he devoured everything by Macaulay, Churchill and Gibbon, and his speaking and writing style would mix his native twang with the rhetorical flourishes of his heroes in a brew of cliché, cornpone, compelling phrases and clunkers that one critic called “a kind of Texas baroque.”
In 1982 Mr. Valenti published a guide to oratory, “Speak Up With Confidence,” which was revised and reissued in 2002. He also wrote “The Bitter Taste of Glory,” a book of essays (World, 1971); “A Very Human President” (W. W. Norton, 1975), about Johnson; and a political novel, “Protect and Defend” (Doubleday, 1992), edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
As an Army B-25 pilot in World War II — the Naval air corps had rejected him because of a heart murmur — he flew 51 missions over Italy, but never piloted a plane again after returning his flak-battered bomber to the United States. He went to Harvard Business School on the G.I. bill, then returned to Humble Oil’s advertising department, where he helped its Texas gas stations jump from fifth to first in sales through a “cleanest restrooms” campaign. He co-founded an advertising agency in 1952, with a rival oil company, Conoco, as its first client. He later added Representative Albert Thomas, a Johnson ally, as a client.
It was in 1956 that he met Senator Johnson at a gathering of young Houston Democrats. As a sideline, Mr. Valenti had begun writing a weekly column in The Houston Post, and he rhapsodized there about the senator’s “strength, unbending as a mountain crag, tough as a jungle fighter.” Their friendship grew, and when Johnson became Kennedy’s running mate, he had Mr. Valenti run the ticket’s campaign in Texas. Mr. Valenti helped stage Kennedy’s televised meeting on Sept. 12, 1960, with a group of Protestant Houston ministers, an event that was instrumental in helping him overcome anti-Catholic bias.
Mr. Valenti cemented his ties to Johnson in 1962 when he married Mary Margaret Wiley, a Johnson secretary. The couple accompanied Johnson to Rome for the funeral of Pope John XXIII, and Mr. Valenti was put in charge of the Houston leg of Kennedy’s 1963 swing through Texas. After a dinner there on Nov. 21, Johnson asked Mr. Valenti to fly on Air Force Two the next day. Moments after learning Kennedy was dead, Mr. Valenti was summoned to Air Force One, where he was hired on the spot as a special assistant.
In his memoir he recalled helping rustle up votes for Johnson’s monumental Great Society legislation; witnessing Johnson’s private browbeating of Gov. George Wallace of Alabama after the attacks on civil-rights marchers in Selma; and being accused (unfairly, he maintained) by Robert F. Kennedy of leaking to the news media stories about Kennedy’s chances of being made Johnson’s 1964 running mate.
But Mr. Valenti may have rendered his most vital White House service by being a source of companionship, public praise and private candor, Mr. Dallek said; before leaving the White House, he warned Johnson how much the war was hurting his credibility with voters. Mr. Valenti spent more time socially with the president than any other aide, often bringing along his wife and their toddler daughter, Courtenay Lynda, a Johnson favorite.
In addition to his wife of 45 years and his daughter, now an executive vice president for production at Warner Brothers Pictures, Mr. Valenti is survived by a son, John Lyndon, of Los Angeles, the chief executive of icreate.com, an informational service for the film industry; another daughter, Alexandra Alice, a photographer and video director in Austin, Tex.; and two grandchildren.
Mr. Valenti, who was four days shy of 83 when he stepped down from the motion picture association, continued to come to work, nattily dressed, long afterward. “Retirement to me is a synonym for decay,” he wrote in his memoir. “The idea of just knocking about, playing golf or whatever, is so unattractive to me that I would rather be nibbled to death by ducks. So long as I am doing what I choose to do and love to do, work is not work but total fun.”

Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s First Post-Soviet Leader, Is Dead
By MARILYN BERGER
Boris N. Yeltsin, the burly provincial politician who became the first freely elected leader of Russia and a towering figure of his time when he presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Communist Party, has died at the age of 76, the Russian government said today.
A Kremlin spokesman confirmed Mr. Yeltsin’s death but gave no details about the circumstances or cause. The Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified medical source as saying the former president had died of heart failure.
In office less than nine years and plagued by severe health problems, Mr. Yeltsin added a final chapter to his historical record when, in a stunning coup at the close of the 20th century, he announced his resignation, and became the first Russian leader to relinquish power on his own in accordance with constitutional processes. He then turned over the reins of office to his handpicked successor, Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Yeltsin left a giant, if flawed, legacy. He started to establish a democratic state and then pulled back, lurching from one prime minister to another in an effort to control the levers of power. But where his predecessor, Mikhail S. Gorbachev sought to perpetuate the Communist Party even as he tried to reform the Soviet Union, Mr. Yeltsin helped break the party and the state’s hold over the Russian people.
Although his commitment to reform wavered, he eliminated government censorship of the press, tolerated public criticism, and steered Russia toward a free-market economy. Not least, Mr. Yeltsin was instrumental in dismembering the Soviet Union and allowing its former republics to make their way as independent states.
The rapid privatization of Russian industry led to a form of buccaneer capitalism, and a new class of oligarchs usurped political power as they plundered the country’s resources. But Mr. Yeltsin’s actions assured that there would be no turning back to the centralized Soviet command economy that had strangled growth and reduced a country populated by talented and cultured people and rich in natural resources to a beggar among nations.
His leadership was erratic and often crude, and the democrat often ruled in the manner of a czar. He showed no reluctance to use the power of the presidency to face down his opponents, as he did in a showdown in 1993 when he ordered tanks to fire on the parliament, dominated by openly seditious Communists, and in 1994 when he embarked upon a harsh military operation to subdue the breakaway republic of Chechnya. That costly and ruinous war almost became his undoing, and it flared ferociously back to life in 1999, continuing to rage long after his resignation.
The Yeltsin era effectively began in August, 1991, when Mr. Yeltsin clambered atop a tank to rally Muscovites to put down a right-wing coup against Mr. Gorbachev, a heroic moment etched in the minds of the Russian people and television viewers all over the world. It ended with his electrifying resignation speech on New Years Eve, 1999.
Those were Mr. Yeltsin’s finest hours, in an era marked by extraordinary political change, as well as painful economic dislocation for many of his countrymen and stupendous wealth for a privileged few.
Expressing condolences today to Mr. Yeltsin’s family, Mr. Gorbachev described him as a man “on whose shoulders rest major events for the good of the country, and serious mistakes,” and said he suffered “a tragic fate.”
President Bush said today that he and his wife were “deeply saddened” by Mr. Yeltsin’s death, calling him “an historic figure who served his country during a time of momentous change” who “helped lay the foundations of freedom in Russia.” “I appreciate the efforts that President Yeltsin made to build a strong relationship between Russia and the United States,” Mr. Bush said.
To turn around the battleship that was the Soviet Union, with its bloated military-industrial establishment, its ravaged economy, its devastated environment and its antiquated and inefficient health and social services system, would have been a Herculean task for any leader in the prime of life and the best of health. But in Russia, the job of building a new state from the ashes of the old was taken on by Mr. Yeltsin, a man in precarious health whose frequent, mysterious disappearances from public life were attributed to heart and respiratory problems, excessive drinking and bouts of depression. These personal weaknesses left a sense of lost opportunity.
A former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack F. Matlock, cited the difficulty of managing a transition where there was no prototype and no road map.
“The change is so profound that probably no one leader could have sorted it out,” he said in an interview. “I suspect it will take more than one generation of politicians to do it.”
But he said that Mr. Yeltsin, along with his predecessor, Mr. Gorbachev, deserve full credit for what he called a “tremendous achievement.” Together, he said, “they destroyed the most monstrous political system in the history of the world, a regime with extensive resources to keep itself in power.”
Mr. Yeltsin was the most populist of politicians, and rejected the notion of forming a political party of his own, insisting instead that he was elected by “all” of the people. This rendered him weak at the task of building coalitions to support efforts to initiate necessary reforms.
He sometimes played with the truth, surrounded himself with cronies, and appointed and dismissed one Prime Minister after another. Then, in failing health and under suspicion of enriching himself and his inner circle at the expense of the state, he surprised the world with his resignation, asking forgiveness for his mistakes.
He turned the government over to Mr. Putin, a loyal aide and former officer of the K.G.B. In return, Mr. Yeltsin, and it was rumored, his family, received a grant of immunity from criminal prosecution and credit for leaving the Kremlin voluntarily.
Mr. Yeltsin left with his fondest wish for the Russian people only partly fulfilled. “I want their lives to improve before my own eyes,” he once said, remembering the hardship of growing up in a single room in a cold communal hut, “that is the most important thing.”
In fact, in the dislocation and chaos that accompanied the transition from the centralized economy he had inherited from the old Soviet Union, most people saw their circumstances deteriorate. Inflation became rampant, the poor became poorer, profiteers grew rich, the military and many state employees went unpaid and flagrant criminality flourished. Much of Russia’s inheritance from the Soviet Union stubbornly endures.
Mr. Gorbachev had sought to preserve the Soviet Union and, with his programs of glasnost and perestroika, to give Communism a more human dimension. Mr. Yeltsin, on the other hand, believed that democracy, the rule of law and the market were the answers to Russia’s problems.
A big man with a ruddy face and white hair, he was full of peasant bluster — what the Russians call a real muzhik — and came to Moscow with a genuine warmth and concern for his countrymen.
During a visit to the United States in 1989 he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its centralized, state-run economic system, where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’ ”
He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.” An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss.
Mr. Yeltsin became etched in the minds of the Russian people and, indeed, became a world figure, with one act of extraordinary bravery on the day in August 1991 when he clambered atop a Red Army tank and faced down the right-wing forces who were threatening to overthrow Mr. Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader.
Long a thorn in Mr. Gorbachev’s side and soon to become his most powerful rival, Mr. Yeltsin on that day was Mr. Gorbachev’s most powerful and effective ally.
“Citizens of Russia,” he declared. “We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d’etat We appeal to citizens of Russia to give an appropriate rebuff to the putschists.”
Thousands of Muscovites came out in the street to support him, he defeated the coup and saved Mr. Gorbachev. But not long after, he became the instrument of Mr. Gorbachev’s political downfall and with it the dissolution of the Soviet state.
Mr. Yeltsin’s accomplishments are all the more remarkable given the odds against him. Bill Keller, who covered the Soviet Union for The New York Times from 1986 to 1991 and is now the newspaper’s executive editor, observed that when “Yeltsin emerged in the mid-1980s as the Communist Party boss of Moscow, a rambunctious, crowd- pleasing reformer, Western officials viewed him as an uninvited guest at the Gorbachev honeymoon.
Mr. Keller wrote, “To scholars on the left, he was an irksome distraction from the attempt to humanize socialism; to scholars on the right, his origins as a Communist functionary in the hinterlands made him deeply suspect — ‘a typical provincial apparatchik’ was the dismissive judgment of Dmitri K. Simes,” a leading Russian scholar.
Mr. Yeltsin survived expulsion from the Communist Party Politburo in 1987; the Communist coup attempt in 1993; the failed effort to subdue Chechnya in 1994; a new challenge from the Communists in 1996; Russia’s economic collapse in 1998; and a Communist-led drive to impeach him in 1999.
He also survived frequent bouts of influenza, bronchitis and pneumonia, quintuple bypass surgery in 1996 with continuing heart problems, a bleeding ulcer, a bizarre near-drowning before he ever achieved high office, uncounted missed appointments and even the spectacle of toppling over at official ceremonies, due, it was widely believed, to overindulgence in vodka and bourbon.
As Celestine Bohlen reported from Moscow for The New York Times, Mr. Yeltsin was a master of drama and of the political moment, who “dominated the Russian political stage like an erratic, lumbering bear, emerging from periodic bouts of poor health with surprise moves calculated to confound his opponents and dazzle his political allies.”
Mr. Yeltsin often seemed overwhelmed by the long road Russia had yet to travel, and he may well be remembered less as a builder of institutions than as a destroyer of them.
He broke up the Soviet Union. He laid the Communist Party low, removing the bottom brick from the one-party Soviet system. He upended the centralized Soviet economy that had impoverished his country, and he crushed the putsch that threatened to return the country to the old system.
But Mr. Yeltsin could only begin the transition to a democratic, capitalist Russia based on the rule of law. The system he put in place survived legislative and military challenges but remained personal, incoherent and fragile, prone to corruption and easily bent away from its ideals.
Even so, he brought about fundamental economic change in Russia, instituting a market economy, however distorted, fostering an emerging younger class of business executives, and in the last years of his presidency, achieving a gradual reduction in crime.
Politically, too, his reforms had impact. The legislature began to shape politics, the news media largely kept their newly acquired freedoms, and political rivals competed openly in elections. Though Mr. Putin has since reinforced the Kremlin’s sway over some of these areas, from hemming in the news media to toppling some of the new “oligarchs” of business who were not his political allies, the worst that many in Russia and the West had feared — a Communist revival or a new fascism built on chaos — has not materialized.
Mr. Yeltsin failed, though, in the undramatic work of hammering together a political and economic framework that could consolidate and stabilize the new Russian state, not least by refusing to establish his own political party, leaving him with no structure to see through many of his reforms.
“Yeltsin’s understanding is a tabula rasa,” said Vitaly T. Tretyakov, editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, one of Moscow’s most respected newspapers. “In economics, his knowledge is nil — nil. In how to construct a state, zero. It’s really the same in all fields. It’s not his fault, of course. To come to power, he had to contest everything. But leading is a different matter.”
Mr. Yeltsin embodied both the best traits attributed to the Russian people — warmth, loyalty and shrewdness — and some of the greatest faults — an inability to plan, an affection for chaos and an excessive love of alcohol.
And though he possessed a populist’s skill with symbolism and drama, he sometimes retreated to govern in isolation.
Though Mr. Yeltsin had more natural aptitude as a politician than Mr. Gorbachev, he never received the respect and affection in the West that Mr. Gorbachev did, perhaps because of his boisterous style, so unlike the cultivated Western manner of Mr. Gorbachev.
Old habits from his years in the Communist Party apparatus led Mr. Yeltsin to surround himself with loyal acolytes who rarely told him what he did not want to hear, and led him into adventures like Chechnya. He was ultimately stymied by the fierce opposition that developed to his reforms, and to the war in Chechnya, which he was unable to win but unwilling to end.
The campaign to subdue secessionists in Chechnya left as many as 80,000 people dead and undermined Mr. Yeltsin’s moral authority. It exposed the breakdown of Russia’s once-vaunted military machine, and raised concern about the stability of a country still in possession of a huge nuclear arsenal. The killing of civilians and widespread human rights abuses tainted the image of a democratic Russia in the West.
As President, Mr. Yeltsin showed that he could shift his domestic political alliances with great skill, moving to the right of center after the surprisingly strong showing of the ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky in parliamentary elections in December 1993, and then turning in 1995 to assemble a centrist block with leaders like Viktor Chernomyrdin and Ivan Rybkin after the Chechnya war cost him the support of many liberal democrats. Such changes in political direction could unnerve his supporters in the West, but they succeeded in extending Mr. Yeltsin’s hold on power.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin first came to widespread public attention in 1985, when Mr. Gorbachev called him to Moscow from the provincial city of Sverdlovsk (now once again known by its pre-Communist name, Yekaterinburg), where Mr. Yeltsin was chief of the local party organization.
Mr. Yeltsin was soon jumping on to trolley buses in the capital and demanding to know why they were not running on time, and charging into stores to harangue managers over their empty shelves while the back rooms were filled with meat and vegetables and soap. He was a breath of fresh air from the steppes, and people loved it.
When Mr. Gorbachev appointed him to be head of the Moscow City Party Committee, Mr. Yeltsin wrote that he felt he had a mandate to clear away old debris, including party hacks who opposed Mr. Gorbachev.
Mr. Yeltsin declared war on the bribery and corruption that was endemic in the capital, fought against the privileges claimed as entitlements by the party elite and worked to get food — particularly fresh vegetables — into the city’s state-run stores and private markets.
He sought to make the city more attractive and livable, with street cafes and fruit stalls. He met with citizen’s groups to answer questions. He encouraged a freer press and welcomed new television programs.
It was when he brought his brusque manner and open criticism to the inner workings of the Communist Party that he fell afoul of his mentor, Mr. Gorbachev, creating a rupture that was never healed.
Mr. Yeltsin took the unusual step at a closed party plenum in 1987 of mounting a scathing personal attack on a conservative rival, Yegor K. Ligachev, and denouncing the lethargic pace of reform. His speech was not published, but his words percolated out through the Moscow rumor mill, destroying the image of party unanimity.
Mr. Yelstin’s break with the party had begun, and it was that moment that Mr. Gorbachev chose to humiliate him. He called Mr. Yeltsin away from his sickbed, where he was recovering from heart trouble and a “nervous collapse,” to face criticism from the Moscow Party organization, which then dismissed Mr. Yeltsin as the city’s party leader and forced him to resign from the Politburo. Mr. Gorbachev then appointed him to a relatively unimportant job in the construction bureaucracy.
A year later, Mr. Yeltsin had his nerves back under control when he reappeared at the 19th Party Congress and made a televised appeal for political rehabilitation “in my lifetime.”
Mr. Yeltsin never was formally rehabilitated by the party. But Mr. Gorbachev and the party unwittingly provided the vehicle for his resurrection by establishing an elected parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies. Mr. Yeltsin saw his chance and ran for a seat as a political underdog and victim.
Skillfully campaigning on television, he denounced the special privileges of the party elite, and in 1989 won a Moscow citywide seat in the congress with a stunning 90 percent of the vote.
Once in the parliament, Mr. Yeltsin showed his political savvy, winning the admiration of pro-democracy intellectuals, building alliances with nationalist leaders and establishing himself as the vital voice of Russia’s future, while casting Mr. Gorbachev as the ghost of the Soviet past.
Then in the spring of 1990, in another landslide, Mr. Yeltsin was elected to the legislature of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, by far the largest of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics. The legislature named him president of the republic.
But that was not enough for Boris Yeltsin: he wanted a popular mandate, and called for elections. He stunned his fellow delegates when he resigned from the Communist Party and still won the popular vote for the presidency on June 12, 1991, getting more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round.
That made him the first legitimately elected leader in a thousand years of Russian government, and provided him with an extraordinary forum for attacking Mr. Gorbachev’s policies.
It was two months later, in August 1991, that Mr. Yeltsin strode from his office in the Russian republic’s headquarters, an office building known as the White House, to thwart the right-wing coup, an act of heroism that saved Mr. Gorbachev from overthrow but also sealed the Soviet Union’s doom.
Standing on the tank, Mr. Yeltsin declared: “The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power. We proclaim all decisions and decrees of this committee to be illegal.”
With his bold stand, Mr. Yeltsin came to embody the last hope of his people. His ability to rally Muscovites that night suggested that a democratic spirit was taking hold in a land that had known little but czars and commissars. His ability to attract support from segments of the Soviet armed forces demonstrated the breakdown of centralized control. Five days later, Mr. Gorbachev effectively closed the Bolshevik era when he resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party and dissolved its Central Committee.
In an interview with Reuters in September 1991, Mr. Yeltsin described his feelings at the moment of the coup attempt: “At that time I had only one thought on my mind, and that was to save Russia, to save this country, to save democracy and the whole world, because otherwise it would have led to chaos, to another cold war — or a hot war, for that matter. And that would have been disastrous for the whole world.
“And this is again something that we should always remember: The roots are still there, the roots of the old totalitarian system are still there.
We need to pull them out, and we should continue along the road of a rule-of-law state, so that the people live better.”
He saw himself as a man with a mission. “The system gave birth to me, and the system changed me,” he once said. “Now it is time for me to change the system.”
Toward that end, days after he thwarted the coup, Mr. Yeltsin signed a decree suspending the activities of the Communist Party. And he created a constitutional court as a guarantee against the arbitrariness of the Soviet system, though the court later proved a pliable reed and revived the party.
But even as Mr. Yeltsin had taken for Russia the mantle of Soviet power, he entered uncharted territory, and his country was already in shambles.
“This is a bear, a giant bear,” he said. “And this wheel needs to be put in motion. And this is what I want to do, to set it in motion.”
He had to build a state in a country where all the people with experience had been loyal to the system he had just destroyed. “I can’t say that we had to start from scratch,” he wrote, “but almost.”
Mr. Yeltsin set about almost immediately to negotiate the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the independence of its constituent republics. Mr. Yeltsin started by ending Mr. Gorbachev’s increasingly violent efforts to keep the three Baltic republics, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, tied to the Soviet empire.
By the end of the year, working with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine, he had scrapped the Soviet Union in favor of a much looser confederation, which became the Commonwealth of Independent States. Even that grouping, dominated by Russia and plagued by ineffectiveness and lingering suspicions, was eventually all but abandoned.
Faced with an embittered and potentially explosive Russian nationalism at home, Mr. Yeltsin reasserted Russian economic prerogatives and tried to defend the rights of ethnic Russians left stranded and unhappy in the new republics. Under his command, Russia organized an independent (if demoralized) army, and took control of most of the Soviet nuclear inheritance, as well as the Soviet Union’s seat on the United Nations Security Council. Russia also assumed responsibility for the Soviet Union’s debt.
Mr. Yelstin continued Mr. Gorbachev’s policy of cooperation with the West, not least because economic aid could come only from that direction. He reaffirmed Russia’s adherence to arms control treaties and to extensive arms reductions. In his second term, despite persistent protests from nationalists, he acquiesced in an expansion of NATO toward Russia’s western border, trying at the same time to maintain an independent foreign policy.
But Mr. Yeltsin’s critics complained that he deferred too often to the West, and that he had been outmaneuvered by Ukraine over control of the former Soviet Black Sea fleet and the Soviet nuclear weapons based in Ukraine. If Mr. Yeltsin and Mr. Gorbachev had not hated one another, the critics charged, the union itself need never have collapsed.
David Remnick, in his book “Lenin’s Tomb,” (Random House, 1993) wrote that “Gorbachev began accusing Yeltsin of running a government not dissimilar to ‘an insane asylum,’ and Yeltsin’s aides began chipping away at Gorbachev’s (generous) retirement deal, first taking away his limousine and replacing it with a more modest sedan, then threatening worse. ‘Soon,’ one newspaper cracked, ‘Mikhail Sergeyevich will be going to work on a bicycle.’ “
In time, the Boris Yeltsin who was admired for his ability to grow with each new responsibility seemed to become less flexible as president: more impulsive, less democratic, ever more reliant on cronies. It was said, for example, that he frequently took the advice of his longtime bodyguard, Aleksandr A. Korzhakov, a former K.G.B. officer with a sinister reputation who monitored everything that went in and out of Mr. Yeltsin’s office.
In 1995 Natalya Ivanova, editor of Znamya, a highly regarded journal of literature and comment, said in an interview: “Some people learn all their lives, and some people stop learning. Sadly, Yeltsin stopped learning in 1991.”
Mr. Yeltsin said in his autobiography that he initially felt uncomfortable in the lush surroundings of the Kremlin office suite that came with his leadership, and that while security concerns dictated that he work there, the luxurious trappings contradicted his populist election platform.
Furthermore, the abandon with which his subordinates parceled out the traditional perquisites of power — the cars, the country houses, the resort vacations — suggested that for all the talk of change, things were looking very much the same.
The bureaucratic elite that ran the Soviet Union had gotten over its shock and had begun to reestablish new ties to Mr. Yeltsin and the government.
With that, the intellectuals whose support Mr. Yeltsin had won became alienated. Ordinary Russians chafed under the steep price increases he ordered in the initial phase of his bold economic gamble, and many questioned the competence of the people he chose to carry out his reforms.
In December 1991, Mr. Yeltsin backed a young economist, Yegor T. Gaidar, and eliminated price controls entirely in early January 1992. This was brutal economic shock therapy, Mr. Yeltsin acknowledged in his autobiography. “They expected paradise on earth,” he wrote, “but instead they got inflation, unemployment, economic shock and political crisis.” To say nothing of crime and corruption.
But the hard medicine was applied for only a few months, leaving Russia to fall into a period of stop-and-go economic reform that was meant to ease the pain of transition but only prolonged it. When Mr. Yeltsin decided that Russia could take no more social strain, and in the face of severe criticism from the holdover Soviet parliament, he removed Mr. Gaidar as Prime Minister in December 1992, replacing him with Mr. Chernomyrdin, a more reassuring, older-style figure who was head of the state natural-gas monopoly.
Mr. Yeltsin again put himself and his policies to the people in a referendum in April 1993, and again won a big vote of confidence. But by the autumn, he was forced to defend himself and his reforms in a bloody confrontation with more conservative nationalist legislators, whose own views of reform Mr. Yeltsin generally ignored. The struggle became a serious fight for power and ended with the indelible image of tanks firing at the parliament building itself.
Mr. Yeltsin dissolved the Russian legislature in September 1993, declaring that the “irreconcilable opposition” of its large number of Communist holdovers had paralyzed his reforms and his ability to govern.
He acted after a member of the opposition, in a gesture with clear meaning to Russians, indicated with a flick of the index finger that Mr. Yeltsin was drunk. But there was also strong evidence that the parliament’s leaders intended to remove him under the old Soviet constitution and empower Aleksandr V. Rutskoi, whom Mr. Yeltsin had chosen as vice president but had later summarily dismissed.
Mr. Yeltsin announced elections to a new parliament. The Supreme Soviet, the parliament’s day-to-day policy making arm, responded by voting overwhelmingly to depose him. Mr. Yeltsin then ordered the police to surround the parliament and cut off the electricity to the building, setting the stage for a violent confrontation.
It came two weeks later, in October, after parliamentary supporters, urged on by Mr. Rutskoi, broke through police lines and rampaged through Moscow, taking over the main television tower in what became a street battle. With Mr. Yeltsin at his dacha and his government inattentive, the demonstrators could probably have taken the Kremlin if they had tried.
Mr. Yeltsin moved to win over the reluctant backing of his top generals to oppose the coup, but only after an all-night session at the Defense Ministry. Elite troops were summoned to the White House building, the same location where Mr. Yeltsin had stood on a tank to oppose the coup against Mr. Gorbachev in 1991. This time, a 10-hour barrage of fire by tanks and armored personnel carriers routed the rebellious opposition, leaving dozens of people dead and the vast White House building windowless and burning.
It was the worst civil strife in Moscow since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
A different Yeltsin emerged from the affair. He imposed an overnight curfew on the capital, banned extremist opposition parties and closed down Pravda and a number of other newspapers that had supported the rebels. But censorship was soon ignored and the papers and parties reopened, sometimes under different names. Mr. Rutskoi and other leaders were jailed, but were soon pardoned by the new parliament.
The Yeltsin optimism was gone. “Do not say that someone has won and someone has lost,” the shaken leader warned his people. “These are inappropriate, blasphemous words. We have all been scorched by the deadly breath of fratricide.”
By 1996, the threat of a Communist resurgence behind his chief rival for the presidency, Gennadi A. Zyuganov, energized Mr. Yeltsin again. He threw himself into the campaign like a much younger man, flying all over the country, shaking thousands of hands and performing everything from peasant dances to a widely televised version of the twist.
To ensure his victory, Mr. Yeltsin made a pact with Aleksandr I. Lebed, a gruff former general whom he had fired for insubordination. Mr. Yeltsin identified Mr. Lebed as a likely successor and made him chairman of the powerful National Security Council. But to insure that Mr. Lebed would not become a rival, he then saddled him with trying to find an honorable end to the Chechnya fiasco.
Just before the final round of voting, Mr. Yeltsin had a relapse — what his doctors later acknowledged to be a heart attack — and he nearly disappeared from sight, unable to receive any visitors other than close relatives.
But the latest setback to his health was hidden from voters by compliant Russian news media, which feared what a Communist victory might mean.
Mr. Yeltsin later admitted that he had reached a point where he was prepared to scuttle democracy completely and outlaw the Communist Party. In his “Midnight Diaries,” (Public Affairs, 2000), published in the year after he stepped down from the presidency, Mr. Yeltsin wrote that he had gone so far as to have the necessary decrees drawn up. He said he knew he would “pay a heavy price in credibility” but that it would resolve the main problem of his entire presidency, by assuring that the Communist Party would be “finished forever in Russia.”
But he said his daughter and the former prime minister, Anatoly B. Chubais, persuaded him that the step would backfire. In his frail state, he revived sufficiently to beat back the Communist challenge of Mr. Zyuganov and win the election by a substantial majority.
Afterward, an aide described him as “colossally weary,” and Mr. Yeltsin’s poor health rendered him unable to start off his second term with the quick and energetic recommitment to reform sought by Russia’s Western supporters, especially President Clinton. Then Mr. Yeltsin underwent quintuple bypass surgery, and as his health worsened, politicians maneuvered to succeed him.
He responded with his own maneuvers, appointing and firing four prime ministers in two years as he sought to deal with one of the worst financial crises since the demise of the Soviet Union. In August, 1998, the value of the ruble collapsed in international currency markets, taking the Russian stock market down with it. The government postponed paying some foreign debt and started printing money, contributing further to inflation.
Chechen bandits invaded the neighboring province of Dagestan in 1999, and a series of bombings of Moscow apartment houses were attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Chechen terrorists, reigniting the war in the Caucasus.
When Mr. Clinton criticized Russia’s large-scale bombardment of civilian areas in Chechnya, Mr. Yeltsin, in his last month in office, intemperately brandished his nuclear arsenal. It seemed, he said, that Mr. Clinton “had for a minute forgotten that Russia has a full arsenal of nuclear weapons.”
Mr. Yeltsin’s health continued to decline. On a visit to Tashkent in Central Asia, he appeared nearly to fall over as he stood listening to a band performance. At an official dinner, he gave a confused version of a speech, reading from the beginning, then the end, and apparently realizing he had finished too quickly, reverted to the middle section.
In 1999, the remaining Communists in Russia’s Parliament led a drive to impeach and remove Mr. Yeltsin on a host of charges including treason (dismantling the Soviet Union, assailing the Communists in 1993, waging illegal war in Chechnya) and genocide (allowing Russian living standards to plummet, causing millions of early deaths). The impeachment effort failed when 100 members of the legislature boycotted the vote and some ballots were thrown out because they were defaced or contained no names.
During his last month in office, Mr. Yeltsin, with the help of the popularity of his chosen successor, Mr. Putin, was able to win enough votes in the parliament to pursue his agenda of economic reform and break the Communists’ hold on legislation. But Mr. Putin was soon making alliances with the same Communists who had gone down to defeat.
Mr. Yeltsin was a moody man, subject to occasional glooms and lassitudes, and wrote in his autobiography of being plagued with worry, of bending under the burdens he carried: “The debilitating bouts of depression, the grave second thoughts, the insomnia and headaches in the middle of the night, the tears and despair, the sadness at the appearance of Moscow and other Russian cities, the flood of criticism from the newspapers and television every day, the harassment campaign at the Congress sessions, the entire burden of the decisions made, the hurt from people close to me who did not support me at the last minute, who didn’t hold up, who deceived me - I have had to bear all of this.”
Mr. Yeltsin knew first-hand the misery of the Russian people under Communism. He was born on Feb. 1, 1931, to a peasant family in Butko, a village in the Sverdlovsk district of the Urals, the oldest of six children.
When his father moved to the town of Berezniki to work as a laborer, during what Mr. Yeltsin remembered as “Stalin’s so-called period of industrialization,” the family was allocated a single room in a communal hut. He recalled in the first volume of his autobiography, “Against the Grain” (Summit Books, 1990), that they lived in that hut for 10 years.
“Winter was worst of all,” he wrote. “There was nowhere to hide from the cold. Since we had no warm clothes, we would huddle up to the nanny goat to keep warm. We children survived on her milk. She was also our salvation throughout the war.”
Even as a boy, Mr. Yeltsin challenged authority, and tales of his early brashness were woven into the carefully burnished lore surrounding him. Acknowledging that he was something of a “hooligan,” he recalled standing up at his graduation from elementary school to denounce a teacher who, he declared, “had no right to teach children because she crippled them mentally and psychologically.” He then fought the bureaucrats to get the diploma that was withheld from him as punishment.
He was still only a boy during World War II when he lost the thumb and forefinger of his left hand when he tried to dismantle a grenade that he and some friends had stolen.
At the Urals Polytechnic Institute he studied civil engineering and played volleyball. Competing in one long tournament despite a headcold, he said, he first strained his heart. He refused to go to a hospital and went home instead, and forever after remembered his heart pounding violently in his chest.
Still, he took hikes in the mountains and forests, and spent one summer traveling around Russia by catching rides on the top of railway cars. One day, he wrote, he met up with a group of former prisoners who got him into a poker game and took him for everything but his underpants.
Upon graduation, Mr. Yeltsin returned to Sverdlovsk, where he was offered the job of foreman at an industrial building site. He refused, insisting instead that he work in each trade first, so that when he was in a position to give orders, he would know what he was talking about.
He did not join the Communist Party until 1961, when he was 30 years old, an age at which Mr. Gorbachev was already well on his way up the party hierarchy. For Mr. Yeltsin, membership was a move to further his career in the Sverdlovsk construction agency, not an expression of his fervent belief in Communism.
He vented his disdain for the party in his autobiography when he described the oral examination he had to pass for membership. A member of the local committee, he wrote, “asked me on what page of which volume of ‘Das Kapital’ Marx refers to commodity-money relationships. Assuming that he had never read Marx closely and had, of course, no idea of either the volume or page number in question, and that he didn’t even know what commodity-money relationships were, I immediately answered, half jokingly, ‘Volume Two, page 387.’ What’s more, I said it quickly, without pausing for thought. To which he replied, with a sage expression, ‘Well done, you know your Marx well.’ After it all, I was accepted as a Party member.”
Fifteen years later, after serving as a secretary of the Sverdlovsk provincial committee, Mr. Yeltsin became party chief for the region, and stood out in the stagnation of the Brezhnev era as an activist, less interested in the perquisites of office than in rooting out bureaucratic corruption and improving the lot of the people.
When Mr. Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, he sought out regional leaders like Mr. Yeltsin who were not mired in Moscow’s ways. But he may have gotten more than he bargained for in Mr. Yeltsin, who wrote in his autobiography that he turned down the offer of a government dacha that Mr. Gorbachev had formerly used.
“We were shattered by the senselessness of it all,” he wrote of the enormous fireplaces, marble paneling, parquet floors, sumptuous carpets, chandeliers, crystal and luxurious furniture in the house. “I lost count of the number of bathrooms and lavatories.”
He asked: “What was the point of the whole thing? No one, not even the most outstanding public figures of the contemporary world, could possibly find a use for so many rooms, lavatories and television sets all at the same time.”
He concluded that the K.G.B. had paid for it all, and added, “It would be interesting to know how all this expenditure is accounted for and under what heading of the K.G.B.’s budget. Combating spies?”
Mr. Yeltsin had found a subject he could ride, and he later used it — often — as a blunt club. Tartly enumerating all of Mr. Gorbachev’s houses and dachas, he suggested that “perestroika would not have ground to a halt ... if only Gorbachev had been able to get rid of his reluctance to deal with the question of the leadership’s privileges, if he himself had renounced all those completely useless, though pleasant, customary perquisites.”
Mr. Yeltsin could not resist a final shot. “Why has Gorbachev been unable to change this? I believe the fault lies in his basic cast of character. He likes to live well, in comfort and luxury. In this he is helped by his wife.”
To this he contrasted the simple tastes of his own wife, Naina, and his daughters, Lena and Tanya, who, along with several grandchildren, survive him.
Mr. Yeltsin once said, “As long as no one can build his own dacha, as long as we continue to live in such relative poverty, I refuse to eat caviar followed by sturgeon.”
But as Russia’s new rich started dotting the countryside with fine brick houses, Mr. Yeltsin too was soon enveloping himself in comfort and relative luxury, enjoying life at a state dacha, playing tennis, wearing trendy Western fashion, using more limousines than Mr. Gorbachev ever had, and allowing those officials around him to live equally well, if not better.
At a time when state employees, army officials and pensioners often went unpaid, a reported $823 million was spent to restore Kremlin palaces, churches, administrative offices and Mr. Yeltsin’s Kremlin residence to their czarist splendor. By 1999, Mr. Yeltsin, and his family whose frugality and moderation he had so praised, were being accused of accepting kickbacks, with evidence emerging that he and his daughters had used credit cards supplied by a Swiss construction firm that had received Kremlin contracts.
It was Mr. Yeltsin’s personal excesses that made him particularly vulnerable. In his 1989 visit to the United States he acted like a vigorous American politician in the middle of a campaign. But reporters also noted the mercurial leader’s great thirst for bourbon. In his autobiography, Mr. Yeltsin attributed his slurred speech during that visit to the effects of a sleeping pill and exhaustion from jet-lag, and he insisted that a videotape was doctored to make him look drunk.
In a still puzzling incident before he became President, he turned up soaking wet at a police station near Moscow. According to one version, a jealous husband pushed him off a bridge. Mr. Yeltsin intimated that the K.G.B. was trying to kill him.
In an interview with Barbara Walters during a visit to the United States in January 1992, Mr. Yeltsin regularly denied reports that he drank too much, although he acknowledged that he turned to alcohol to relieve stress. “I am not an ascetic,” he told Barbara Walters in a televised interview in 1992, “but I am categorically denying all those rumors.”
“Athletic activity and alcohol are two things that are incompatible with each other,” he continued, speaking through an interpreter. “I’m very actively engaged in sports, an hour and a half every Tuesday and Saturday, athletic exercise morning and night, a cold shower, and very intensive work for 19 to 20 hours a day.”
In the same interview he implicitly aimed an arrow at Mr. Gorbachev when he said he did not consult his wife about political decisions. “In my family, I’m the boss,” he said pointedly.
Some attributed his occasionally aberrant actions and his puffy face to the pain medication he took for a severe back problem stemming from a 1990 airplane accident, and the way such medication might interact with alcohol.
There was no such explanation for his erratic behavior some years later, when a visibly embarrassed Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of Germany, had to help Mr. Yeltsin down a flight of steps after he played the buffoon, boisterously picking up a baton to conduct the Berlin police orchestra during a visit in 1994.
Jet lag, sleeping pills and a cold were the excuse a month later when Mr. Yeltsin failed to make it off his plane at a stopover in Ireland, where the Irish prime minister himself stood waiting on the tarmac to greet him.
Then in January 1995, at a summit meeting in Kazakhstan when he mumbled and stumbled and had to lean on aides to stand up straight, the excuse was again the inevitable effect of a long plane trip on a 64-year-old man.
But Mr. Yeltsin was stung by criticism of his drinking, and tried to clean up his act for a while. He put in long work days and managed to make his voice boom when he delivered speeches. But he soon stumbling again, slurring his words and disappearing from the scene again and again for long holidays.
There were also increasing signs of worsening heart disease, including a sudden hospitalization in July 1995, when Mr. Yeltsin complained of chest pain. For the first time, the Kremlin admitted there was a diagnosis for his ailment — myocardial ischemia, a shortage of oxygen to the heart muscle because of narrowed arteries — and Mr. Yeltsin was out of the Kremlin for four weeks. He then took a month-long vacation.
He had another attack of ischemia in October 1995, after a five-day visit to France and the United States, and was hospitalized again. Aides issued implausible assurances that the president was fine, and in time, Mr. Yeltsin returned to his desk.
“A man must live like a great bright flame and burn as brightly as he can,” Mr. Yeltsin said in March 1990. “In the end he burns out. But this is better than a mean little flame.”
He came to recognize how far short of his goals he fell. In his resignation speech, he told the Russian people: “I want to ask for your forgiveness. For the fact that many of the dreams we shared did not come true. And for the fact that what seemed simple to us turned out to be tormentingly difficult. I ask forgiveness for not justifying some hopes of those people who believed that at one stroke, in one spurt, we could leap from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into the light, rich, civilized future. I myself believed in this, that we could overcome everything in one spurt. I turned out to be too naïve.”
After leaving office, Mr. Yeltsin worked on his memoir, based on a diary he kept during bouts of insomnia in his years as president.
At the end, he was a man worn down: “I feel like a runner who has just completed a supermarathon of 40,000 kilometers,” he wrote. “I gave it my all. I put my whole heart and soul into running my presidential marathon. I honestly went the distance. If I have to justify anything, here is what I will say: If you think you can do it better, just try. Run those 40,000 kilometers. Try to do it faster, better, more elegantly, or more easily. Because I did it.”

Unspeakable tragedy in Virginia.
Bush Comments on Virginia Tech Shootings
Apr 16 04:29 PM US/EasternBy The Associated Press
Text of President Bush's remarks on the Virginia Tech shootings, as transcribed by CQ Transcriptions.
Our nation is shocked and saddened by the news of the shootings at Virginia Tech today. The exact toll has not yet been confirmed, but it appears that more than 30 people were killed and many more were wounded.
I have spoken with Governor Tim Kaine and Virginia Tech President Charles Steger. I told them that Laura and I and many across our nation are praying for the victims and their families and all the members of the university community who have been devastated by this terrible tragedy.
I told them that my administration would do everything possible to assist with the investigation and that I pledged that we would stand ready to help local law enforcement and the local community in any way we can during this time of sorrow.
Schools should be places of safety and sanctuary and learning. When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community.
Today our nation grieves with those who have lost loved ones at Virginia Tech. We hold the victims in our hearts, we lift them up in our prayers, and we ask a loving God to comfort those who are suffering today.
Thank you.

Experts see firing of Imus as broadcast tipping point
Extraordinary push by sponsors, activists, network employees
Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, April 13, 2007
CBS' cancellation Thursday of Don Imus' syndicated radio program for derogatory remarks he made about female college basketball players could signal a tipping point in the type of language that major broadcast outlets will tolerate from even the most profitable and popular performers.
The move by CBS came a day after cable outlet MSNBC pulled the plug on its simulcast of Imus' show, bowing to a stream of departures by advertisers and protests from employees and civil rights activists.
Eight days after Imus called members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" -- comments that at first were largely ignored by major media outlets -- the 66-year-old member of the Broadcasting Hall of Fame found himself unemployed.
"This will be on the scale of Janet Jackson baring her breast at the Super Bowl in terms of the effect it will have on broadcasters," said Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Because Imus was someone at "the top of his profession, this will, at least temporarily, cause performers and producers to think about what they say and choose to broadcast," Jurkowitz said.
Threats by advertisers to pull sponsorship and boycotts by activists outside corporate headquarters are familiar to major broadcasting outlets. But analysts say the last eight days have seen an extraordinary convergence of advertiser, interest group and employee pressure on the networks. Each constituency has put financial and ethical pressure on NBC and CBS not to shrug off Imus' bigoted remarks, even after he made public apologies. On Thursday, CEO Les Moonves of CBS said that Westwood One radio network, which CBS manages, will no longer distribute the show to 61 stations nationwide. The show was reported to be bringing between $15 million and $20 million in advertising to CBS Radio annually, making "Imus in the Morning" its top-grossing program.
"There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society," Moonves said Thursday. "That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision."
In an e-mail to CBS employees Thursday before the announcement, Moonves wrote, "This is about a lot more than Imus.
"He has flourished in a culture that permits a certain level of objectionable expression that hurts and demeans a wide range of people. In taking him off the air, I believe we take an important and necessary step not just in solving a unique problem, but in changing that culture, which extends far beyond the walls of our company."
"I think they made a wise choice," said Michal Ann Strahilevitz, a professor of marketing at Golden Gate University. "Now I think everybody is going to be more careful. When advertisers pull out, it not only hurts that program but other programs on the network. And it makes a statement to their employees that they won't tolerate racism.
"I think this is definitely a tipping point," Strahilevitz added.
In recent years, Imus had expanded beyond his origins as a "shock jock." His shows interspersed low-rent humor with interviews with national journalists like "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert and politicians like Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who announced his campaign for president on the program.
Last week's comments weren't Imus' first bigoted comments. In the past, he has referred to prominent black journalist PBS host Gwen Ifill as a "cleaning lady" and New York Times columnist William Rhoden as a "quota hire."
But those comments were largely shrugged off in the mainstream press, analysts said. The difference this time was that Imus picked on college-age women "who did nothing to seek the spotlight other than be outstanding basketball players and outstanding students," said Kim Otis, National Council of Women's Organizations, which represents 210 organizations and 11 million women.
"And the visuals made it so strong," Otis said, referring to the near nonstop replays of Imus' remarks that have dominated the cable airwaves for the past four days. In an analysis of media coverage of the Imus story for the Pew Research Center, Jurkowitz wrote that "through mid-day on (Wednesday), there were about 5,200 stories on Google News alone that contained the name 'Imus.' The search does not provide a definitive portrait of the coverage. But it does suggest that the tone of the reporting and commentary is quite tough."
But Jeff Schechtman, general manager and program director of KVON (1440 AM), which aired the show in Marin and Napa counties, said, "Imus has become the victim here. Everyone who knows him knows that he's truly not a racist.
"This has become a story about the media, about what's acceptable and what isn't," he said. "Imus' comments have gotten lost in the shuffle."
Schechtman wondered if CBS Radio executives would shy away from hiring a provocative broadcaster. "The question is: Are they going to program for the PC (political correctness) or program for listeners?"
So why did the journalistic pack circle Imus, wonder activists at Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group that monitors dozens of cable and nationally syndicated programs. Its archives are full of similarly objectionable commentary from other broadcasters and cable talk hosts.
"This is a tipping point," said Media Matters communications strategist Eric Burns, "in that mainstream media picked up on the fact that the public couldn't take the racist, bigoted comments from another member of the mainstream media."
This article appeared on page A - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Magical Mystery Tour Ends for Apple Corps Executive
By ALLAN KOZINN
There has been a good deal of irrational exuberance in the virtual world of Beatles chat sites since Tuesday. That morning Apple — the Beatles’ company, not the computer maker — announced that Neil Aspinall, its chief operating officer nearly from the start, “has decided to move on,” and that his chair would be filled by Jeff Jones, a vice president at Sony/BMG whose focus over the past dozen years has been catalog reissues.
To read some of the comments posted on the Internet, you would think that Mr. Aspinall has single-handedly delayed everything from upgrades of the standard Beatles catalog to the release of video projects like the restored and expanded versions of “Let It Be” and the 1965 Shea Stadium concert, which have languished on Apple Corps shelves since the 1990s.
But that’s not how it is. Mr. Aspinall is answerable to Apple’s board, which is to say the Beatles or their representatives (who in turn are answerable to the Beatles who appointed them), and he could not move forward on any of these projects without their approval.
He was the Beatles’ alter ego, often the bad cop to their good cop. The Beatles themselves could publicly say anything: that everything anyone could want to hear would eventually be released or that they enjoyed collecting bootlegs themselves. But the Beatles have the last word on what will be released, and when and whether to pursue bootleggers or even authors who write about bootlegs. Mr. Aspinall and Apple’s lawyers simply do their bidding.
That’s why the wording of the announcement was so odd. Saying that Mr. Aspinall “has decided to move on,” with none of the usual platitudes about spending time with his family or pursuing other interests, makes it sound like something’s up. Did he suddenly quit? Was he fired? Was there something to the illogical rumors that the Beatles were dissatisfied with the February agreement between their Apple and the computer company?
People close to Apple say that Mr. Aspinall is simply retiring. He turns 65 in October and had heart problems in the 1990s. Perhaps, having spent 46 years at the Beatles’ beck and call, he wanted to reduce his stress.
For Mr. Aspinall, his work with the Beatles has been a handful — literally at first. He became the group’s road manager in 1961, which means that he has been part of the Beatles entourage longer than 50 percent of the surviving Beatles: Ringo Starr didn’t join the group until August 1962. (Mr. Aspinall came to the Beatles through Mr. Starr’s predecessor, Pete Best, and remained with them after Mr. Best was booted out.) When the Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1988, George Harrison said that if anyone deserved to be known as the fifth Beatle, it was Mr. Aspinall.
Having driven their van and hauled their equipment during the touring years, he became a sort of general factotum when the Beatles stopped touring in 1966. When the Beatles, holed up in the recording studio till the wee hours, needed anything from tea and sandwiches to arcane noisemakers, it was Mr. Aspinall’s job to round it up. The Beatles’ decision to start Apple Corps led to all sorts of turmoil, which was exacerbated by their growing internal divisions: not least among them, who should run the company.
When the smoke cleared, Mr. Aspinall had been thrust behind a desk as chief executive officer and put in charge of a number of thankless tasks. First there was a stack of lawsuits among the Beatles themselves, and between the Beatles and EMI, that needed to be settled. That took 20 years.
In the meantime Mr. Aspinall began assembling film clips for a history of the Beatles, originally to be called “The Long and Winding Road.” There was no possibility of doing much with this project until the lawsuits were settled, but when they were, in 1989, Mr. Aspinall revived the project and persuaded the surviving Beatles (and Yoko Ono, representing John Lennon) to sign on.
The result was “The Beatles Anthology,” which turned out to be a huge trove of previously unreleased audio and video material as well as a book. The six discs of the CD “Anthology” (1995-96), taken together with the double CD “Beatles Live at the BBC” (1994), just about doubled the size of the Beatles official catalog.
Mr. Aspinall’s accomplishments notwithstanding, Mr. Jones’s appointment may be a good sign. If there’s one thing the Beatles need, it’s someone savvy about reissues and how to properly remaster, package and market them.
But another thing Apple needs is someone who comes to the job without the baggage of 46 years of subservience to the Beatles. We can probably assume that someone like Mr. Jones, who has been in the record business since the 1970s, did not just hear of Apple and the Beatles last Wednesday and knew all about how demanding the Beatles and their representatives can be. If we can assume that he has negotiated a measure of independence and freedom to navigate, his tenure may be refreshing.
How many Beatles collectors, after all, have looked at the Sony Legacy reissues of recordings by the Byrds, Janis Joplin and Miles Davis and thought, “If only the Beatles archive were treated this way”?

MSNBC Drops Imus's ShowAs Advertisers Pull Out Amid Backlash,

CBS Director Hopes Host Will Be Fired
By Paul Farhi

Washington Post

MSNBC said late yesterday it is dropping host Don Imus's morning program after a succession of advertisers suspended sponsorship of his cable TV show and outrage increased over his racially and sexually insensitive remarks.
Imus's four-decade career as a radio host also appeared to be in jeopardy after a board member at CBS Radio said he hoped the shock jock would be fired. CBS, which syndicates Imus's show to 70 radio stations across the country, continued to stand by Imus, saying it would "continue to speak with all concerned parties and monitor the situation closely."
Imus, whose show is simulcast on radio and MSNBC, first sparked outrage last week when he referred to Rutgers University's women basketball players as "nappy-headed hos." Team members have agreed to meet with Imus on Tuesday -- a day after the host is to begin serving his two-week suspension from CBS.
In a statement late yesterday, NBC, which owns the cable news channel, said the decision to drop Imus came after "an ongoing review process" that included "many conversations with our own employees." The broadcast company added: "Once again, we apologize to the women of the Rutgers basketball team and to our viewers."
MSNBC said that starting today, it would offer "expanded live news programming" from 5:30 to 9 a.m., the slot formerly occupied by "Imus in the Morning."
Imus's comments about the Rutgers team have prompted widespread condemnation and have turned Imus into a touchstone for a national debate on such topics as racial prejudice and the coarseness of popular culture. Some, including radio shock jocks Opie and Anthony, have supported Imus's freedom of speech and suggested that his slur was no worse than the lyrics of popular rap songs.
The pressure on NBC clearly was building after seven major advertisers -- including top sponsors Sprint Nextel Corp. and General Motors Corp. -- said over the past two days that they would no longer place ads on MSNBC's broadcasts of "Imus in the Morning," at least while the controversy over his comments is raging.
Amid widespread media attention and expressions of dismay from prominent officials, including White House press secretary Dana Perino, the advertiser defections were clearly a tipping point for NBC.
Imus's show has been a relatively low-rated but profitable weekday offering for MSNBC. The network has simulcast the video feed of Imus's radio program since 1996.
Sprint Nextel, the Reston-based telecommunications company, was among the advertisers that said yesterday it had directed MSNBC not to place its ads on Imus's program. "We don't want our advertising associated with content that we, our customers and the public find offensive," said Leigh Horner, a company spokeswoman. Sprint, like the other advertisers, didn't say how long it intended not to advertise on the program.
Sprint Nextel was the largest single sponsor of "Imus in the Morning" last year, with estimated expenditures of $1.57 million, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus.
In announcing its pullout, General Motors Corp. said it "obviously does not condone the comments Don Imus made." The carmaker said it "welcomed" Imus's apology and intent to change his program, but that it had not committed to return as a sponsor. GM, however, said it would continue its support of Imus's charitable activities.
Imus has also lost ad support from American Express, Procter & Gamble, Bigelow Tea, Staples Inc. and drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline.
Imus -- who earns $8 million annually under his recently renewed five-year contract with CBS -- also got a strong rebuke yesterday from Bruce Gordon, a director of CBS Corp. and a former head of the NAACP. "He's crossed the line, he's violated our community," Gordon told the Associated Press. "He needs to face the consequence of that violation." CBS declined to comment on Gordon's statement.
Imus is scheduled to begin a two-day fundraising event today for several charities, including his organization that runs a New Mexico cattle ranch for children who have cancer. Although MSNBC and CBS had delayed his suspension until next week so the telethon could proceed, the fund drive will now be heard only on his radio network, which includes WTNT-AM (570) in Washington.
In a separate announcement, CBS Radio said former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle would replace Imus during his suspension. Barnicle, who left the Globe in 1998 after questions were raised about the existence of his sources, has his own troubled broadcast history. In 2004, while hosting a radio program in Boston, he described the interracial marriage of Janet Langhart and former defense secretary William Cohen as "Mandingo," a reference to a 1975 movie in which a black male slave and a white woman have sex. After the NAACP protested, Barnicle apologized on the air.
On Opie and Anthony's show, which is also syndicated by CBS, hosts Greg Hughes and Anthony Cumia fired back yesterday at Imus's critics, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has helped lead the campaign against Imus.
"Opie and Anthony" sidekick Jim Norton read the lyrics of hit rap songs containing multiple crude references to women. With the hosts' assent, Norton repeatedly called the anger over Imus's comments "phony outrage."
Staff writer Frank Ahrens contributed to this report.

Gandolfini, Iler have a father-son chat about life-changing series

NEW YORK - Robert Iler doesn't recall much about that summer in 1997, when at age 12 the former Pizza Hut pitchman won the role of a mobster's bratty son in the pilot episode of an edgy new cable drama.
By Gary Levin
USA Today
NEW YORK - Robert Iler doesn't recall much about that summer in 1997, when at age 12 the former Pizza Hut pitchman won the role of a mobster's bratty son in the pilot episode of an edgy new cable drama."I just remember not wanting to be there. I wanted to be hanging out with my friends," Iler says.Excitement built, even as veteran co-stars cautioned him that the odds were against the show ever becoming a series. "This is probably the last time you'll see any of us," he was told by Tony Sirico, who plays hot-tempered lieutenant Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri.
Ten years later, the cast of The Sopranos finally is preparing to say goodbye. Production is set to end on HBO's biggest hit - and one of TV's seminal series - just as nine final episodes begin airing April 8.But not before the ties between Iler's Anthony Jr. ("A.J.") and Mob boss dad Tony take center stage, James Gandolfini, 45, and Iler, 22, reveal in their only joint interview, at a sprawling sports and studio complex on Manhattan's West Side.
"The relationship between A.J. and the parents is a very big part of the season," Gandolfini says. In burying the series after eight years and 86 episodes, creator David Chase explores the generational divide and the strange pull of the Mob "family" on the Soprano family, the heart of the series.Last season, wayward teen A.J. dropped out of a local college, got fired from Blockbuster for stealing and was eager to stab his great-uncle Junior in retaliation for an attack that left Tony hospitalized in critical condition. In doing so, A.J. would have thrust himself into the mobster's life of crime.For all the bravado, "Tony as a 19-year-old would have eaten A.J. as a 19-year-old alive, would've taken his lunch money," says Gandolfini, quoting a description by Sopranos writer/producer Terence Winter.
But as a parent, Tony has changed his tune."In the scene where he was going to go stab Uncle Junior, maybe in a different world Tony's father would have encouraged behavior like that, whereas Tony's like: 'You make me want to cry. You can't do this. I don't want you to do this for a living,' " Gandolfini says. "And (Tony) says to him, 'You're a good guy. You're a nice guy. You're not cut out for this kind of (stuff).' "
Do the actors bring any of their own upbringing to their TV personas? "I'm sure we do. My father used to swat me on the back of the head occasionally, which I did to him on the show," Gandolfini says, gesturing to Iler. "My father used to call me gogoots, which I didn't even tell David, and he wrote it into the show. I think it means eggplant." (Actually it's a squash, but colloquially it's an affectionate term for a stupid person.)"His family is very old-world Italian, like mine," he says.An unusually reflective Gandolfini speaks of a generational divide, calling Tony and his wife, Carmela, a different breed from his notoriously cold and psychologically abusive mother, Livia, as played by the late Nancy Marchand.
"We're better parents, but I don't think that's necessarily good in a way," Gandolfini says."Because we've become dependent?" Iler asks.
"Yeah, maybe," Gandolfini responds. "One way to look at it is they're going to toughen up when they have to. Another way to look at it is if you give them (grief) right away, they're used to it."Which could just as easily apply off-screen.The show's aura of authenticity also provides eerie parallels for the actors, who prefer not to discuss them. Iler pleaded guilty to robbery and drug possession in an incident in 2001; Gandolfini was in the midst of a messy divorce just as Tony and Carmela separated on-screen late in 2002.
"The show has a lot of real-life situations, not TV situations, so it's bound to happen in real life, too. And that can get a little weird," Gandolfini allows.And it was just as strange for the adolescent Iler. "I was going from being at home arguing with my mom to going to work and arguing with my (TV) mom," Edie Falco. "It was weird; it was a great experience. I'm thinking about it now, how much I'm going to miss it. I don't know if it's fully hit me. This is going to be the first time since I'm 12 years old that I'm going to be unemployed."
Alone among his castmates, Gandolfini is itching to get out, saying that though he'll miss the cast and crew, the intensity of playing Tony for so long has taken its toll. "It's like you take a sponge and you wring out the sponge and then, you know, it's empty. After a while you've been to too many of the same places, and it's time to explore something new."HBO chairman Chris Albrecht understands the three-time Emmy winner's emotions as the series winds down. "No one has had to take a character on this length of a journey, on this depth of a journey, through as long a period," he says.And like a proud papa, Gandolfini is impressed with Iler's blossoming in upcoming episodes. (He's forbidden from describing them because of Chase's notorious penchant for secrecy.) Iler, he says, has "done incredible work this year; some of the scenes shocked me. I really was taken aback about how powerful some of the stuff was. Wow."
And Iler, who grew up in an Irish family, says that "after working with these people for 10 years, a part of me has become almost like Italian. I see myself pick up Italian mannerisms, little sayings. When you grow up with an Irish family, you say 'Cheers' I guess, but now, whenever I'm with my friends, it's like, 'Cent'ann'." It started like a joke between me and my friends, but now it's what I say."Gandolfini grins, noting that "95% of the people on the show are Italian, really Italian." So for him, "it wasn't that big a stretch. I have an Uncle Al who reminds me of Uncle Junior. The only difference is the Mob stuff."
As for The End -the long-awaited and much-speculated-about conclusion to the often-violent drama - the series' final scene was shot last week at an ice-cream parlor in Bloomfield, N.J. The filming attracted throngs of nostalgic onlookers, although other scenes remain to be filmed before the series wraps its production in mid-April.Betting sites are laying odds on which regular characters get whacked before it's all over and which loose ends are tied up. On that front, don't count on too many, thanks to the unconventional interests of creator David Chase.But after all that has come before, the series finale "makes sense," says Michael Imperioli, who plays Soprano deputy (and cousin) Christopher, though, like life, "it's never really cut-and-dried and clean."
Adds Falco, Tony's wife, Carmela: "It's as unpredictable as everything else in this show."Fans continue to be frustrated specifically by Chase's refusal to revisit the whereabouts of Valery, the Russian mobster last seen in "Pine Barrens," a beloved third-season episode in which Christopher and Paulie get lost in the Jersey woods.
"David has a vision of what he wants to do; he's not going to do something to have a nice clean ending, to have the audience satisfied that the Russian guy" reappears, Gandolfini says.As the cast finished the final "table read," a run-through in which actors read through the script, "we all kind of sat there," he says. "I think for five minutes nobody said anything. It just kind of felt satisfying. Nobody was like, 'Whaaaa?' "The actor had higher expectations than anybody: "I didn't want it to go out like something I didn't like. And I should have known he wouldn't do that."
When it ends, Iler has nothing lined up yet, but he says, "I want to start working right away." Gandolfini, who starred in a few films during the Sopranos run, plans to take some time off; he also is producing an HBO documentary about American soldiers wounded in Iraq.But he's no longer sentimental about Tony Soprano, the character with whom he'll be forever indelibly linked: "No more beatings for a while and no more yelling for a while will be good. But I don't know what else I'm going to (expletive) play."

James Gandolfini: Gentle giant
In Tony Soprano, they created a character devoid of moral standards yet also tortured and sympathetic
By David Usborne
Published: 07 April 2007
James Gandolfini, the lead actor in The Sopranos, has long been used to the unsettling experience of meeting strangers on the street who momentarily rock back on their heels with expressions of fear. He remembers opening the door of his home to a man one evening and watching as the blood drained from his face. These are the people who confuse reality with fiction and wonder if they are about to be whacked.
If pressed, Gandolfini, who at 45 has achieved enough in his acting career - and earned enough money - to take early retirement, will admit that he does share some of the character flaws with Tony Soprano, the conflicted New Jersey mob boss he has played with such intensity for almost a decade since it first premiered on the HBO cable network in the United States in 1999. But there are differences, of course. Murder is not on his CV, nor bone-breaking or loan sharking. Nor has he ever been shot.
My own meeting with Gandolfini occurred several years ago when I happened to be on the Silvercup Studio lot in Queens - not, happily, in a dark alley - where he and his cast were in the midst of shooting the second season. The door of his trailer swung open, and out he stepped - all 260lb of him - attired in Tony's favourite white dressing gown and giant slippers. He squeezed my hand, delivered a disarming smile and vanished upon discovering that a reporter had penetrated the set. Anyway, he had orange juice to share with his screen wife, Carmela, played by Edie Falco, and murderous deeds to mull.
Gandolfini has never much liked giving media interviews. Everything about him - his sheer size and the phenomenal applause earned from his years playing Tony - would suggest a man who could afford to swagger a little in the public spotlight, especially today with the last and final season of The Sopranos poised to begin this Sunday night on American televisions. Yet the truth about this one-time club manager and son of blue-collar parents in New Jersey is that he is entirely modest and often self-deprecating.
It is a trait that surfaces when he speaks of other actors whom he usually seems to admire more than himself. In a recent interview, for instance, he fell over himself describing the ability of his co-star in the film Romance & Cigarettes, Kate Winslet, to talk dirty during their sex scenes. "I was very impressed with how much stuff she could make up about sex. I remember being underneath Kate and she was chatting away; she kept going and going and going. I was thinking, 'God, I hope we stop at some point!' Every time she'd make up new stuff, the director would say, 'Keep going!' And she went for it."
Certainly, he was astonished when he was originally approached by David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, to star in the original pilot so many years ago. His career until then had been steady but not stellar. "I thought, I've never been the lead before. They're going to hire somebody else," he told Vanity Fair. "But I knew I could do it. I have small amounts of Mr Soprano in me. I was 35, a lunatic, a madman." Even when they began work on the pilot, Gandolfini did not allow himself to imagine the show would work. "I looked around this group of fat, ugly guys and said: 'Let's do the pilot and go home!'"
The rest, as they say, is television history. The Sopranos established itself as a must-see Sunday night viewing experience for millions in America and in countries around the world where HBO sold it, including, of course, Britain. It transformed the fortunes of HBO, identifying it as a nursery for dynamic and serious television drama. At the core of its success were Gandolfini and the programme's team of writers. In Tony Soprano, who famously spends as much time in the office of his psychiatrist, played by Lorraine Bracco, as in the company of his crooked crew, they created a character who was at once indisputably devoid of all normal moral standards and yet also tortured and thus irresistibly sympathetic.
A "lovable, huggable murderer" is the best description Robert Thompson, head of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television, can find for Tony. "This was a show that demonstrated how novelistic and how sophisticated television could be. It is not only about bad guys; it's about people who are at the heart, horribly, morally corrupted individuals. But at the same time, they were presented in a way where we really could identify with them."
Gandolfini himself has explained that it is precisely the challenge of exploring the deeper recesses of people that has fuelled his interest in acting throughout his career. Most appealing to him is representing the small guy from the same background he came from, working class, and, as it happens, from New Jersey. He is captivated also by people who have had troubled periods in their lives, as, indeed, he has.
"People really interest me, especially the way things affect them," he told one interviewer. "It's basically why I became an actor. I have this big passion for the lower middle class and the blue-collar guy. It's how I was brought up, and I don't like the way our country treats them. By becoming an actor, well, I found this job that lets me, on occasion, stand up for the blue-collar guy, in a small way."
Born near the Jersey shore, Gandolfini was the son of two Italian-Americans, Michael, a bricklayer and school maintenance man, and Joann, who worked in a school kitchen. He had his blue-collar pedigree ground into him by his family. "My father always said a million times, 'We're peasants,'" he once said, which partly explains why he is press-shy. "It's just a little odd for me, to get that slightly different treatment sometimes. And I'm uncomfortable with it. I want nothing to do with privilege."
After studying communications at nearby Rutgers University, he moved to New York where he worked as a waiter, a club bouncer and eventually went into club management. Serendipitously, he had a friend taking evening acting classes and one day he decided to go along. It wasn't long before he knew acting was what he wanted to do with his life. By then he was already in his mid-20s.
Watch Gandolfini play Tony and you know that he has an ability to channel anger and emotion into his performances. Some of it, he admits, has been drawn from the well of his own life, particularly a tragedy suffered at just 19 years old when his girlfriend of two years was killed in a car accident. "I might not have done what I've done" without her death, he told GQ, acknowledging that acting gave him the opportunity for release. He once said that acting allowed him to "vomit my emotions out of me".
Indeed, there have been other points of turbulence in his life. A marriage to a former public relations executive, Marcella Wudarski, in 1999, with whom he had one son, Michael, ended in acrimonious divorce in 2002, just at the time that his celebrity as Tony Soprano made him perfect fodder for the New York tabloids. Ms Wudarski fuelled the fire with allegations in court of alcohol and drug abuse by her estranged husband. Gandolfini has freely acknowledged having to battle substance problems and pulling himself together in rehab but declines to elaborate in interviews. In 2004, he announced his engagement to Lora Somoza, a writer, but the couple split two years ago.
Professionally, his first big break came with a supporting role in a Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire alongside Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin. Soon after, he landed his first film role in Sidney Lumet's A Stranger Among Us (1992), which was quickly followed by the part of the mob enforcer Virgil in Tony Scott's 1993 film True Romance. In what may have been precursor to the performances he has given on The Sopranos, there is one memorable scene where he physically assaults a female character played by Patricia Arquette while simultaneously cooing, "You've gotta lot of heart, kid."
"You don't have to be a brain surgeon to spot someone who's got that much talent," the film's director, Tony Scott, once remarked. Other films followed, including Crimson Tide, also directed by Scott, as well as Get Shorty (1995), The Juror (1996), Lumet's Night Falls on Manhattan (1997), She's So Lovely (1997) Fallen (1998) and A Civil Action (1998). All these were supporting roles, however.
It was his performance in True Romance - and possibly that one scene with Arquette - that had recommended him to Chase, however, as he embarked on The Sopranos.
That the show and the figure of Tony Soprano himself should so quickly have reached the heart of American popular culture astonished everyone, not least Gandolfini. "Basically, we were all surprised at the show's success," he says.
"The work that he and David Chase have done in creating the character of Tony Soprano is one of the most interesting things in the history of television," says Chuck Rose, who runs the annual Filmmakers' Symposium in New Jersey. As for any similarities between Tony Soprano and James Gandolfini - Jimmy to friends - Rose says, "He's the opposite of that character. In real life, he's a sweetheart, a teddy bear, and I can tell you that's extremely rare, from the actors I've dealt with."
The pleasure of watching we can all share watching Gandolfini playing Tony is almost at an end. Among his future projects is portraying a man of similar physical presence, Ernest Hemingway. We could wish he would reprise Tony a few times more, but every good performer knows when a character has run its course. "I'm old, Carm," he tells his wife in the first episode of the closing season, pausing to reflect on the gunshot wound that nearly killed him. "My body has suffered a trauma that it will probably never fully recover from. So why don't we just face the facts."
A Life in Brief
BORN 18 September 1961, in New Jersey.
FAMILY Was married to Marcella Wudarski, one son, Michael. Now divorced.
EDUCATION Park Ridge High School, New Jersey, Rutgers University.
CAREER Began acting in the New York theatre. Broadway debut in 1992 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire followed by Tony Scott's True Romance (1993). Other film roles include Crimson Tide,Get Shorty (1995), The Juror (1996), Night Falls on Manhattan (1997), She's So Lovely (1997), Fallen (1998) , A Civil Action (1998), All the King's Men (2006). His performances as Tony in The Sopranos have won him a Golden Globe award, three Emmys and three Screen Actors' Guild awards.
HE SAYS "I'm playing an Italian lunatic from New Jersey, and that's basically what I am."
THEY SAY "Some of the turmoil that's inside of Jim, that pain and sadness, is what he uses to bring that guy (Tony Soprano) to the screen." - David Chase, creator of The Sopranos