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Fifty years ago this month, the idea for The Godfather was born. Tired of being broke and in debt, my father vowed to write a bestseller. When his two previous novels received terrific reviews but didn’t make a penny, he realized it was time to grow up and sell out. Or, as his family, friends, and creditors admonished him, time to put up or shut up.
His publisher wanted a book about the Mafia, but there was just one problem. My father often said that he was embarrassed that he had never met an honest-to-God gangster. (Yet, a famous hoodlum said, “Puzo knew our life cold. He had the whole atmosphere, the way we talked. Either he was getting help or he was some kind of genius.”) But he had many stories as a boy growing up in Hell’s Kitchen. And he had read many volumes of books on the subject. Fortified by the transcripts he requested from the Library of Congress (the Valachi hearings had concluded), he felt confident he could write a novel depicting the Mafia in a new light.
Locked in a small office in his basement, he began the process. He often yelled at his children to be quiet; he was writing a bestseller. We laughed and continued to make even more noise.
My father’s unique and ultimately brilliant idea to base The Godfather on family values was the key to its success. He believed that nobody had more family values than Italians. That’s why, he claimed, they are so good at being in the Mafia. What is The Godfather , he often said, but a heartwarming story about a family with great, solid family values? (In Italian neighborhoods you would call a close friend of your parents’ “compare” or “godfather.” Nobody ever used “godfather” in reference to criminals. Not even the Mafia. The term didn’t exist until my father’s book.) The fact that they kill people once in a while (well, just bad people) he found amusing. Also, wouldn’t everybody love to have somebody to go to for justice, without going through the courts?
Through his characters my father heard the voices of his brothers and sisters. The Don, strangely enough, was based on my grandmother. Whenever the Don opened his mouth, my father said that in his own mind he heard the voice of his mother. He heard her wisdom, ruthlessness, and unconquerable love for her family. The Don’s courage and loyalty came from her. Like the Don, she could be extremely warm or extremely ruthless. (My grandmother was always warm to me, never ruthless.)
The success of The Godfather was phenomenal, beyond my father’s wildest dreams. Number one on the New York Times bestseller list for many months. He had written the bestseller that he had vowed to write. My father was criticized for glamorizing the Mafia, but he felt that if you were a true novelist, your first duty was to tell a story. If you wanted to moralize, write nonfiction.
He called himself a romantic writer with sympathy for the devil. He felt businessmen were far more criminal than the Mafia, especially the Hollywood moguls. Having worked in Hollywood writing screenplays for many movies, he had learned how poorly the writer was treated. The moguls would cheat you blind if you let them.
A few years later, The Godfather won best picture and best screenplay Oscars at the Academy Awards. This despite the fact that my father had never actually studied the form. But he had a sense of how his characters should speak. Francis Ford Coppola remembers writing a description of Clemenza in the kitchen browning garlic in olive oil. My father crossed it out with the note: Gangsters don’t brown. Gangsters fry!
For The Godfather, Part II he decided to read a guide to successful screenwriting. In the first chapter the writer declared that one of the finest screenplays ever written was the one for The Godfather . So that was the end of his studying.
Hollywood treated writers very poorly. They had no power. Low man on the totem pole. So much so, that even as a screenwriter with two Oscars, he could have his words changed by the producer’s girlfriend!
My father always wished he had worked harder. He always thought of himself as goofing off. He loved writing above all. (Maybe not as much as his family; he was Italian, after all.) But he ultimately realized that creating The Godfather and many other fine novels was not such a bad legacy.
Very ill in the last week of his life, he was determined to finish Omerta , his last book. And he did. He always said, “I like the idea of sitting at my desk and as I finish the last word I fall over dead.” Which is very close to what happened!
Anthony Puzo
May 31, 2016