“Mario Puzo Talks” teased the headline in New York magazine, spoofing the notion that the “Godfather” mastermind had turned into a canary, a stool pigeon. But this was no joke. After two decades, Puzo had broken his personal code of omerta. He’d caved in to the strong-arm tactics of his publisher (Random House) and agreed to sing long and loud to reporters about his latest novel, “The Last Don,” which he calls a return to the family values that made his original Mafia epic such a commercial powerhouse for readers and moviegoers.
This time around, Puzo wasn’t just spilling Mafioso beans; he was taking shots at Hollywood, where he’d made a small fortune, and Las Vegas, where he’d dropped it, according to one credible source. He still has bad feelings about Vegas –partly because of the gambling losses but also because he had a nearly fatal heart seizure there five years ago. He was planning to avoid the city on his upcoming West Coast trip for “The Last Don,” not wanting to add to the stress of having to face the Hollywood press corps.
“To meet a strange person is always a shock to my nervous system,” the novelist once wrote. Yet here’s Puzo, calmly, amiably welcoming yet another inquisitive stranger to his brick-and-shingle home in this modest Long Island exurb. His son, Tony, has led the way through the house–past the pool table, past the fireplace mantel with the two “Godfather” Oscars, past the behemoth TV sets that seem to dominate every room–and up two flights of stairs to where the novelist waits at the entrance to his inner sanctum.
Puzo apologizes for not answering the door himself. At 75, he’s hobbled by the complications of diabetes and a quadruple bypass, and he uses the stairs only when they can’t be avoided. “If I had a kitchen up here, I’d never go downstairs,” he says, ushering his guest through the bedroom and into the suite of offices beyond, a roomy annex built and furnished with the grandiose paychecks from his 1969 novel “The Godfather” and the three movies extracted from it.
Settling onto one of the white sofas, Puzo might be re-enacting the opening scene from the book and first movie, in which assorted minions arrive for an audience with Don Corleone, seeking his ritual favors and blessings as if he were the unholy father, Satan’s pontiff. Unlike the deep and photogenic gloom of the movie Godfather’s den, however, Puzo’s quarters are airy and cheerful, with soft rose carpeting, posters by Picasso and Hollywood, and a balcony that overlooks a tennis court.
Because of his age and infirmities, the master of the house no longer uses the tennis court. Nor does he venture onto the balcony. “I do miss the tennis,” says Puzo, “but I’m not even tempted to go out on the balcony. I’m allergic to fresh air.” He prefers the great indoors, watching sports and movies on television, reading and writing fiction on one of two ancient Olympia portable typewriters.
“My girlfriend got me a computer tutor,” says the author, a widower for 18 years, “but there was no way I could write and use a computer, too.”
Nothing like his characters
The opulence of his quarters is no surprise, but Puzo is. He is the soul of congeniality and physically unimposing–short and borderline trim, except for the pot belly–bearing only a shadowy resemblance to the hulking, almost menacing badfella that glared out of the ’70s photos. Engulfed by plump cushions as he reclines on the sofa, he seems as elfin and wicked as Truman Capote in the memorable book jacket photo. His eyes are friendly, magnified by round horn-rimmed glasses. His hair is long but mostly gray and skimpy on top. He’s wearing monogrammed sweat pants, a synthetic knit shirt and black Gucci-style loafers.
Puzo says the enduring confusion between himself and the scheming, homicidal torpedoes who populate his fiction can be disconcerting. “It’s so crazy that people who should know better think I’m in the Mafia,” he says. “I’m a literary man. I write essays. I write book reviews. I write short stories. I write novels. I write movies. How can anybody think I’m in the Mafia? If there’s a mouse in the room, I can’t kill him.”
Swearing to Puzo’s sweet and gentle nature is Joseph Heller, a close friend since the mid-’50s, long before “Catch-22” and “The Godfather.” “He’s a wonderful, generous man,” says Heller, a charter member of a lunch and poker roundtable that also includes novelist George Mandel and professional maniac Mel Brooks. “I’ve never heard him say an unkind word about anybody or known him to do an unkind thing. He’s nothing like the people he writes about.”
He doesn’t even know the people he writes about, insists Heller, who claims that Puzo’s knowledge of gangsters comes entirely from second- and third-hand sources, such as Peter Maas’ “The Valachi Papers” and Norman Lewis’ “Honoured Society,” about the Mafia’s roots in Sicily. “As far as I know, he’s never even met a member of the Mafia.”
While happily confirming Heller’s testimonials to his innocence and docility, Puzo says his knowledge of the Mafia was drawn not from Valachi’s squealings and other gangland exposes but mainly from Senate records. “You can write and get transcripts of all their investigative committees,” he says. “For 10 bucks, I got 100 volumes.”
Puzo may not have the inside track on the Mafia, the way Maas, Nicholas Pileggi, Martin Scorsese and Gay Talese do, but there’s little question about the authenticity of his mobsters or their tribal misbehavior. “In terms of sociology, the ethnic criminal family from Sicily, he’s got it down as well as anybody who ever wrote non-fiction,” asserts Talese, author of “Honor Thy Father,” who adds: ” `The Godfather’ should rank with some of the fiction of grandeur associated with Russian writers. . . . Puzo’s a muralist who goes from one side of the room to the other, giving a great panorama of the generations.”
The journey from Hell’s Kitchen
A boyhood spent on New York’s West Side, in the area known as Hell’s Kitchen, did little to prepare him to write about gangsters and secret societies, Puzo says, much less drive him to criminal behavior. “It was supposed to be this tough place, but it wasn’t. There were strict family values, Irish and Italian. What used to happen was that some of the boys would get mixed up with stickups, hijackings, go away to prison for five years, then come back, marry, have children, go to work on the docks, and live perfectly respectable lives.”
In Puzo’s case, he became not a stickup man or a hijacker but a writer, a dream he’d secretly nourished since he was 14. After serving in World War II, he wrote two impeccably literary novels–“The Dark Arena” (1955) and “The Fortunate Pilgrim” (1964)–that brought him extravagant praise but only $6,500 in royalties. “I grew up in this romantic atmosphere where you had to suffer to be a great writer,” he says. “You had to be poor, the whole `La Boheme’ kind of crap. But you get older, you get wiser.”
It wasn’t until Puzo was in his mid-40s, with five children to raise, that he got wise. He wrote “The Godfather,” in his famous phrase, “below my gifts” and made $6 million, at last count. Even if “The Godfather” was a patently commercial novel, written to liberate him from the grind of men’s magazines, Puzo calls it “a much more serious book than I intended. Half the time a writer doesn’t know what he’s doing. It just happens.”
Though Puzo hasn’t lived in the city for many decades, his voice has a distinct New Yawk edge, often reduced to a mumble by a footlong El Rey del Mundo cigar, which rarely leaves his mouth. “I just chew them,” he says. “Once in a big while, I’ll light one up. There are a lot of things I can’t do, like eat pizza, but I do them anyway.”
Revisiting some familiar types
Almost 30 years after the publication of “The Godfather,” Puzo says he’s still astonished that it provoked such indignation and hostility among his fellow Italian-Americans, and that the book and the movies were considered acts of treason by “very literate, very responsible people.” Those people will not be comforted by “The Last Don,” which recycles many murderous stereotypes and legends. Like his counterparts in “The Godfather,” the mortally ill Don Clericuzio hopes to divert his children and grandchildren from the business of crime into more legitimate endeavors, but it’s an impossible dream that leads to garrotings, shootings, stabbings and other reversionary family practices.
With “The Last Don,” Puzo says he intended to demythologize the Mafia, to rub away much of the “romantic veneer” of “The Godfather.” “I wanted to show the Clericuzio family in a crueler way than I showed the Corleones. They’re tougher and less moral.”
However naturally gifted in torture and assassination, the Clericuzios are nearly defenseless against the Hollywood studio chiefs and producers with whom they’re forced to match wits and muscle in “The Last Don.” In addition to the Clericuzio stronghold in New York and their Xanadu casino in Las Vegas, the novel’s principal location is Hollywood, where the Don’s great nephew, Croccifixio (a k a “Cross”), attempts to break into movie production, with notably less success than he’s found in crime. “Dante,” he tells a cousin, “neither one of us can run a movie studio. We’re not ruthless enough.”
Before the Clericuzio family asserted itself into his narrative, Puzo had intended to focus entirely on Hollywood, embellishing on his experiences and observations as a hired gun on a dozen films, most obviously the three “Godfathers,” which he wrote with director Francis Ford Coppola. “I thought I could write a funny book,” says Puzo, whose devilish humor is more evident in “The Godfather Papers,” a 1972 roundup of his “confessional” essays and reviews, than it was in any of his novels. “But I had linked Hollywood with Las Vegas and from Vegas it’s a natural progression because at one time the Mafia ran Vegas.”
Tossing grenades?
Unlike his mythic take on the Mafia, Puzo’s view of Hollywood is anything but romantic, filled with scorn and disrespect, much of it satirical. A nurse tries to sell a studio tycoon a screenplay on his hospital death bed. And a corrupted Pulitzer Prize novelist can get his full cash value from Hollywood only by killing himself. “I’ve seen movies that moved me to tears,” the writer says, “and the fact is, the people who made them are moronic, insensitive, uneducated and with not an iota of morality.”
Elsewhere, the playful Puzo has the novelist quote his mother’s favorite maxim: “Life is like a box of hand grenades, you never know what will blow you to kingdom come.”
At the suggestion that “The Last Don” is a box of grenades tossed at Hollywood (with one in particular aimed at its most profitable–if simple-minded–movies), Puzo removes the cigar to deliver a stirring affirmation of film producers that sounds as if it might have been scripted by Louis B. Mayer or Darryl F. Zanuck. “There are a lot of charming, intelligent, sensitive people involved in the making of movies,” he says.
“Francis (Coppola) did me an enormous favor by making a great movie out of `The Godfather,’ ” adds Puzo. “I didn’t know it at the time, but now that I look back, it was Francis’ genius that was responsible.” He says he’s somewhat less grateful to Coppola for the operatic finale to “The Godfather III.” The director discarded Puzo’s ending without his advice or consent. Which was just as well, he adds, “because I hate confrontations.”
Coppola’s antithesis, Puzo says, is Michael Cimino, the director of “The Deer Hunter” and “Heaven’s Gate,” who turned his novel “The Sicilian” into “just a horrible movie. Everything in it was wrong, just everything. I’ve never been able to watch it all the way through.”
Though Puzo publicly swore he’d never work on another movie after “The Godfather,” he now calls that “writer b.s.,” pointing out that he’s since written nine more. “They paid me fortunes for two of them (`The Cotton Club’ and `Christopher Columbus: The Discovery’) and never used a word.
“When I was growing up, it was very important to be a true-blue artist, never writing for money, never selling out to the movies. But once I got a taste of how easy the life was, I would’ve sold out in 10 seconds. It’s such a nice racket. Half your work is b.s.ing with other people. Writing a novel is hard work. You earn the money. If I had written a screenplay first, I would never have written a novel.”
As “The Last Don” proves, Hollywood hasn’t entirely spoiled Puzo for writing fiction (nor has the novel alienated the movie industry, considering that CBS paid $2.1 million for the rights to make a six-hour mini-series). And he doesn’t intend for it to be his last book, says Puzo, who has two more high-magnum opuses in the works: “The first one’s about the Borgias, and then I’d like to write a novel about the Mafia, starting in 1300 and taking it to the year 2000.”
When it comes to banditry, Puzo adds, the Mafia may have been outsmarted not by Hollywood producers but by the owners of Italian restaurants, who have lately made pasta such a hot and profitable commodity. “Lots of nights when I’m home alone I’ll cook up a dish of spaghetti,” he says. “As far as I can figure out, it costs me 20 cents. But if I go to a restaurant, it costs me 12 bucks. And the good restaurants won’t even give you meat balls. It’s too low class.”
