The Editors of LIFE - LIFE the Godfather

The Godfather

Michael in Sicily.

The Godfather

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e-ISBN: 978-1-54784-725-9

Copyright 2019 Meredith Corporation

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Vol. 19, No. 7 March 1, 2019

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CONTENTS

THE FILMS OPENING SCENES , at Connie and Carlos wedding, set the key for the trilogy: Family comes first.

CHAPTER ONE

The Father of the Godfather

He agreed to write about the Mafia because he needed money. And after years of research, Mario Puzo delivered the book that changed popular culture, and his life

Mario Puzo at his desk in Hollywood in 1970, a year after his book debuted.

His book The Godfather would sell 30 million copies (and counting), and its first screen adaptation remains among the most acclaimed and imitated films of all time, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture and best adapted screenplay. The movie that followed it The Godfather: Part II eclipsed its predecessor, the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (and again for best adapted screenplay), and like the original is on the American Film Institutes list of 100 greatest movies.

In another AFI list, one line from the novel that made it into the Godfather screenplayIm gonna make him an offer he cant refuse, uttered by Marlon Brandoranks as the second-greatest movie quote of all time, one spot behind Frankly, my dear, I dont give a damn from Gone with the Wind, and one spot ahead of I coulda been a contender, also spoken by Brando, in On the Waterfront.

And yet Mario Puzo, author of the books, coiner of famous phrases and co-writer of those towering Godfather films, came from the first generation of Puzos who could read, never mind write. As he once observed, My direct ancestors for a thousand years have most probably been illiterate.

Antonio and Maria Puzo emigrated from near Naples, Italy, to New York City at the dawn of the 20th century, like so many others before them. Their son Mario Gianluigi Puzo, was born on October 15, 1920, into the Italian-immigrant slums of Hells Kitchen. The Puzos lived in a gaslit apartment in a tenement on 10th Avenue near 30th Street, overlooking the railyards of the New York Central Railroad, where Antonio worked as a trackman before abandoning his family when Mario was 12. At 16, the boy announced his intention of becoming a great writer. Maria was raising seven children on her own, providing as best she could in their hardscrabble neighborhood. His mother was a wonderful, handsome woman, Mario would later write, but a fairly ruthless person.

It was not Antonio or any other man in the neighborhood, but rather Mariawonderful and ruthless, loyal and brutalwho inspired Puzos conception of Vito Corleone, the Godfather in The Godfather. Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth, in my own mind I heard the voice of my mother, wrote Puzo. His mother couldnt read. The timeless story that would make him rich and famous, that is now a fountainhead of popular culture, was animated, as Puzo said, by an illiterate peasant.

In writing The Godfather, Puzo had a simple intention: I wrote it to make money, he confessed. In the first 15 years of his writing career, after serving as an Army corporal during World War II and attending the New School and Columbia University, he wrote freelance magazine articles, borrowed money from one of his brothers, and unsuccessfully sought his fortune in casinos and with bookmakers. Puzos first two novels, published 10 years apart, brought him literary praise, deepening obscurity and the grand sum of $6,500. The second of those novels, The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965), was an immigrants tale with a minor character who was a Mob boss.

The editors didnt like the idea behind my next novel, he wrote in a 1972 memoir called The Godfather Papers. It sounded like another loser. One editor wistfully remarked that if Fortunate Pilgrim had only had a little more of that Mafia stuff in it maybe the book would have made money. I was 45 years old and I... owed $20,000 to relatives, finance companies, banks, and assorted bookmakers and shylocks. It was really time to grow up and sell out as Lenny Bruce once advised. So I told my editors okay, Ill write a book about the Mafia. His 10-page outline was rejected. Puzo, raising five children while writing stories for an adventure magazine, finally sold the proposal to G.P. Putnams Sons. His future commercial blockbuster attracted an advance of $5,000.