Mario Puzo¶

At a glance¶

Born: October 15, 1920, Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan
Died: July 2, 1999, West Bay Shore, NY — heart failure, aged 78
Parents: Neapolitan immigrants from Avellino
Service: US Army Air Forces, WWII
Education: City College of New York
Academy Awards: 2 — Best Adapted Screenplay, The Godfather and Part II
Also wrote: Superman (1978), Superman II, Earthquake, The Cotton Club

I wrote it to make money. I was 45 years old and tired of being an artist. Mario Puzo

Before¶

One of seven children of Neapolitan immigrants. His father, a New York Central Railroad trackman, was committed to a psychiatric hospital when Mario was twelve, leaving his mother to raise the family — and giving Puzo the model for the fierce, unsentimental immigrant matriarch who is the best character in his best-reviewed book.

He served in the Army Air Forces in the Second World War, married a German woman he met in Europe, went to City College on the GI Bill, and started writing.

The Dark Arena (1955), about postwar Germany, was respectfully reviewed and sold almost nothing. The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965), about an Italian immigrant family in Hell's Kitchen, was the book he was proud of for the rest of his life. It also sold almost nothing.

By his mid-forties he was writing adventure features for men's magazines under the name Mario Cleri, supporting a family, and about $20,000 down on gambling — a lifelong habit he wrote about frankly, including in a short book about Las Vegas.

The Godfather¶

He decided, deliberately and without embarrassment, to write something commercial.

He had never met a gangster. He said it constantly and it is the most surprising fact about the book. The Mafia in The Godfather is assembled from newspaper files, the Kefauver and Valachi hearing transcripts, and his own Italian-American childhood. What's real in the novel is the family — the food, the fatalism, the way respect works. The criminal machinery is largely invented, and was invented so persuasively that real organized crime adopted the vocabulary. See Real-World Mafia.

Putnam gave him a $5,000 advance. Paramount bought film rights off roughly sixty unfinished pages — $12,500 against $80,000. His agent begged him to hold out. He took it.

Published March 10, 1969. Sixty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list; over nine million copies in two years.

Screenwriting¶

He was hired to adapt it on April 14, 1970 for $100,000 and a percentage, and delivered a first draft that August. He and Coppola then worked separately — Puzo in Los Angeles, Coppola in San Francisco — mailing pages back and forth. Puzo's own summary of the division of labor was that he was better at structure and Coppola was better at everything to do with the camera.

He won the Academy Award for it, and again for Part II, and was nominated a third time for Part III.

He also, notably, wrote the screenplay for Richard Donner's Superman (1978) — a 500-page draft covering two films, which Robert Benton, David Newman, and Tom Mankiewicz then rewrote extensively. The mythic opening on Krypton is essentially his. He worked on Earthquake (1974) and The Cotton Club (1984) as well.

His famous line about learning the craft: he had never read a screenplay before writing one, so he went to the library and got a book on how to do it.

After¶

Fools Die (1978) — Las Vegas and publishing; a huge advance and mixed reception. The Sicilian (1984) — the Giuliano novel, with Michael Corleone bolted on. The Fourth K (1991) — political thriller. The Last Don (1996) — Mafia and Hollywood; a bestseller and a successful miniseries. Omertà and The Family — completed before his death and published posthumously; The Family, about the Borgias, was finished by his longtime partner Carol Gino.

He died of heart failure on July 2, 1999, at 78. He had been discussing a fourth Godfather film with Coppola; his material for it eventually became Ed Falco's The Family Corleone, and the estate's right to license such books touched off litigation with Paramount.

How to think about him¶

Puzo spent thirty years insisting he was a hack who got lucky, and the literary world was happy to take him at his word.

It's worth resisting. The Godfather is a genuinely serious book about immigration, assimilation, and the price of American success, wearing a crime novel as a disguise — and the disguise was so effective that it fooled its own author. The other thing he said, less often quoted: that if he had known so many people were going to read it, he'd have written it better.