Saturday, July 3, 1999
Laredo Morning Times
ENTERTAINMENT
Reluctant ‘Godfather’ father dies
BY MEL GUSSOW
c.1999 N.Y. Times News
Service
Mario Puzo, the best-selling
novelist and screenwriter who
created “The Godfather” and
made the Corleones the most
famous — and infamous — of
Mafia families and an enduring
myth on the American cultural
landscape, died Friday at his
home in Bay Shore, N.Y. The
cause was heart failure, said his
agent, Neil Olson. He was 78.
When Puzo wrote “The
Godfather” in the late 1960s, he
did it reluctantly. His first two
novels had received favorable
reviews, but earned him a total of
$6,500. At 45 and in debt, he
believed that as a writer he was
going downhill fast. But he had
some favorite stories to tell about
the Mafia, and, for the money, he
decided to write a book about
Italian Americans in organized
crime. From the author’s
account, he had scant encouragement from publishers, and
received an advance of only
$5,000. But after the book was
published in 1969, it became
one of the most phenomenal
successes in literary and cinematic history.
The novel was the No. 1 best
seller in the United States, and
was on the New York Times
Book Review list for 67 weeks. It
was also the most popular novel
in England, France, Germany
and other countries, and sold
more than 21 million copies.
Then it tripled — or quadrupled
— that success when Francis
Ford Coppola filmed it. With a
screenplay by Puzo and
Coppola, the film made reputations (for the director, the writer
and many of its stars), earned
millions of dollars, won Academy
Awards for the screenwriters,
among others, and became the
most quoted movie of its time,
with phrases like “my father
made him an offer he couldn’t
refuse” entering the American
lexicon.
The film outdid the book in pop-
MARIO PUZO
Father of ‘Godfather’
ularity and in critical respect.
When the movie opened in
1972, Vincent Canby, in his
review in The New York Times,
called it “one of the most brutal
and moving chronicles of
American life every designed
within the limits of popular entertainment.”
Led by Marlon Brando as the
patriarchal Don Vito Corleone
and Al Pacino as the collegeeducated son Michael who
eventually takes control of the
family business, the Corleones
edged their way into respectability. The film was far more than a
gangster melodrama; it was a
sweeping portrait of a family that
was as devoted to its own sense
of values as to violence. It was
also a commentary on greed in a
capitalist society.
Perhaps the most astonishing
aspect of the movie’s success
was that it was repeated again
and again, as “The Godfather”
spawned “The Godfather Part II”
(1974) and “The Godfather Part
III” (1990), with all three screenplays written by Puzo and
Coppola.
Playing
various
Corleones, Brando, Pacino,
Robert De Niro and James Caan
gave some of their most memorable screen performances, as
did Robert Duvall and Diane
Keaton in other roles. Recently
there was talk about a possible
“Godfather Part IV,” tailored to
another Italian-American movie
star, Leonardo de Caprio.
As the Corleones entered popular mythology, they were surrounded by contradictions. Were
they villains or heroes, or some
hybrid of the two? Don Vito
Corleone and his sons were
feared and admired — and later
they were often parodied. With
the help of Coppola, Puzo had
humanized people who in other
fictional and cinematic forms had
often been condemned and
reviled. The Corleones were,
first of all, a family, and there was
a bond that extended through
the sequel (which incorporated a
prequel), as more and more people throughout the world were
touched by their story.
Because of his insights into
crime and crime families, it was
assumed that Puzo wrote from
first-hand experience. One of the
oddities of the Puzo career is
that, when it came to the Mafia,
he was very much an outsider.
As he wrote in 1972 in “The
Godfather Papers and Other
Writings,” “I’m ashamed to admit
that I wrote ‘The Godfather’
entirely from research. I never
met a real honest-to-god gangster. I knew the gambling world
pretty good, but that’s all.”
After the book was published,
he was introduced to several
gangsters who, he said, “refused
to believe that I had never been
in the rackets.” He added, “But
all of them loved the book.” And
later they loved the movie,
although the author was sometimes subjected to the charge
that “The Godfather” was unflattering to Italian-Americans.
Sometimes it seemed as if the
person with the strongest doubts
was Puzo himself. “I wished like
hell I’d written it better,” he said.
“I wrote below my gifts in that
book.” He preferred his second
novel, “The Fortunate Pilgrim.”
But there was no denying that
“The Godfather” and the
Corleones totally transformed
the author’s life and made him
one of the most popular and one
of the wealthiest of novelists.
Mario Puzo was born in Hell’s
Kitchen on the west side of
Manhattan. His parents were
poor Italian-American immigrants from Naples (not, like the
Corleones, from Sicily). His
father, who was a railroad trackman for the New York Central
Railroad, deserted the family
when Mario was 12, leaving his
wife Maria to raise their seven
children.
Although there were, of course,
gangs on the New York streets,
Puzo stayed clear of them and
conformed, he said, to the “formidable” structure of his family.
As he later recalled, his mother
often told to stay home because
“only bad things happen to you
outside.” Puzo once referred to
his boyhood environment as “the
stone city.”
In a preface to a new edition of
his second novel, “The Fortunate
Pilgrim,” Puzo said that his mother was the model for Don
Corleone, the Godfather (who
was played as an old man by
Brando and as a young man by
De Niro). “Whenever the
Godfather opened his mouth,”
he wrote, “in my own mind I
heard the voice of my mother.”
He said that novel began as a
book about himself but was
taken over by the character of
Lucia Santa, based on his mother: “My mother was a wonderful,
handsome woman, but a fairly
ruthless person.”
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