Johnny Fontane¶

At a glance¶

Played by: Al Martino
Relationship: Vito's godson
Profession: Singer, then film star
Appears in: The Godfather, Part III (briefly), extensively in the novel

You can act like a man! Vito to Johnny Fontane

The godson, the horse's head, and the most persistent rumor in Godfather history.

In the film¶

Fontane has two scenes. He arrives at Connie's wedding, sings, and reduces the guests to swooning. Then, in Vito's study, he weeps about his collapsing career and a film role he wants, and Vito slaps him across the face and tells him to act like a man.

He wants the lead in a war picture at Jack Woltz's studio. Woltz refuses because Fontane took a girl Woltz was grooming. Tom Hagen is dispatched, is abused, is polite, and leaves. Woltz wakes in a bed full of blood with the severed head of his $600,000 stud stallion under the sheets.

Fontane gets the part.

The horse's head is one of the most famous images in cinema and it exists to make a structural point: this is what the family's favors actually cost, and the beneficiary never sees the bill. Fontane doesn't know. He never has to know. That's the whole service.

In the novel¶

Puzo's novel gives Fontane a great deal more — arguably too much. There is an extended Hollywood section covering his ruined voice, his failed marriages, his self-loathing, the surgery that saves his singing, and his second career as a producer.

Coppola cut nearly all of it, and he was right: it is a different novel about a different industry, and it stops the Corleone story dead. But it is not bad writing. Puzo was 45 and convinced his own career was finished when he wrote it, and Fontane's terror of being a middle-aged man nobody wants is the most personal material in the book.

Fontane returns briefly in Part III, where Al Martino appears again as an older Johnny at the papal-honor reception.

The Sinatra question¶

The rumor is that Johnny Fontane is Frank Sinatra: an Italian-American singer with a mob-connected godfather, a career revival via a war picture (From Here to Eternity, 1953, for which Sinatra won Best Supporting Actor), and long-documented associations with organized crime figures including Sam Giancana.

What's documented:

Sinatra was furious about the book. He confronted Puzo in a restaurant — Chasen's, by most accounts — and abused him publicly.
Sinatra's mob associations were real, extensively investigated, and are a matter of FBI record.
The From Here to Eternity casting parallel is genuinely striking.

What isn't documented:

That Sinatra got the role through mob intervention. This has never been substantiated. The most credible accounts credit Sinatra's own campaigning, a low salary, and Harry Cohn's calculation.
That Puzo based Fontane on Sinatra. Puzo denied it, consistently but not always convincingly.

The rumor also folds in a second, better-attested story: that Sinatra pressured people around the production, and that Al Martino — a singer with genuine mob connections of his own, whose godfather was the Pennsylvania boss Russell Bufalino — lost and then regained the role amid pressure from several directions. Vic Damone was cast in between and withdrew, reportedly fearing repercussions.

The honest summary is that Fontane is a composite of a recognizable type of mid-century Italian-American entertainer, that Sinatra is the most famous instance of that type, that Sinatra believed it was about him, and that this is not the same as it being about him.

Sinatra later agreed to play Don Altobello in Part III and couldn't clear the schedule; Eli Wallach took the role.

See Real-World Mafia.

Al Martino¶

Martino (1927–2009) was a genuine star — his 1952 single "Here in My Heart" was the first UK number one — with a career that included a documented period of leaving the United States after his contract was bought by mob interests.

He was cast as Fontane before Coppola came aboard, then dropped when Coppola took over, then reinstated. Which pressures produced which outcome has never been established, and everyone involved has told it differently. It is the most Godfather piece of Godfather casting history.