I wrote it to make money…. How come you people never ask writers about money?

The background to The Godfather is well known and blatantly self-proclaimed. Puzo wrote two 'literary' novels which were well received (The New York Times's 'small classic' is a phrase which stuck in the proud author's mind), but which netted only $6,500 between them. 'I was forty-five years old and tired of being an artist…. It was time to grow up and sell out.' Publishers had shown some interest in 'that Mafia stuff' in his second novel, which dealt principally with the struggle of an Italian immigrant family. So Puzo drew up the outline of a full-blown gangster saga set in the 1940s New York, and loosely based on folk demons like 'Uncle Frank' Costello. Those ten pages earned him $5,000 advance from Putnam. This was 1965; Puzo, who seems by his own account to be a hand-to-mouth sort of writer, finally delivered the manuscript in 1968, spurred by the need for some money to take his family on holiday. While he was away, paperback rights were auctioned to Bantam for a then record $410,000. Once published The Godfather assumed the #1 spot on the New York Times list, and held a place in the top ten titles for sixty-seven weeks. It was also number one in England, France and Germany; countries where, perhaps, interest in 'gangster' America was heightened by the Vietnam war. 'They tell me', Puzo wrote in 1972, 'it's the fastest and bestselling fiction paperback of all times.' By 1978 it was one of the select half-dozen novels to have broken the 10 m. sales barrier in the US, and is credited by Hackett as being the bestselling novel ever. By the end of the decade The Godfather's publishers were claiming worldwide sales of over 15 m.

Puzo's only mistake in an otherwise triumphant 'selling out' was to release the film rights for $12,500 while he was between agents, and at a time when a few thousand still 'looked like Fort Knox.' Altogether the novelist's connection with the movie industry was unhappy. He was hired by Paramount at $500 a week to co-author the Godfather script with another 2.5 per cent 'points' in the profits. But the self-effacing nature of the work offended his aggressively freelancing instincts. It particularly upset him that he was not consulted on the final cut—that last and most influential stage of editorial revision. 'It was not MY movie,' he concluded, and vowed never to work in Hollywood again 'unless I have complete control'—a stipulation which he was realistic enough to acknowledge might disbar him from further serious film work.

None the less the film, starring Marlon Brando, James Caan and Al Pacino, was Judged by most critics to have been better of its kind than the novel. As New York critic Pauline Kael saw it, Puzo's Godfather was a clumsy performance, 'all itch and hype and juicy roman à clef,' but 'Puzo provided what Coppola needed: a story teller's outpouring of incidents and details to choose from, the folklore behind the headlines, heat and immediacy, the richly familiar.' Swollen with this kind of praise, Coppola became overnight a cult director reputedly able to make silk purses even out of rehashed Little Caesar. But to hear Puzo tell it, Coppola's motives were not much different from his own; both were working calculatedly 'below their gifts' so as to bankroll better things:

One interview I have to admit depressed me. Francis Coppola explained he was directing The Godfather so that he could get the capital to make pictures he really wanted to make. What depressed me was that he was smart enough to do this at the age of thirty-two when it took me forty-five years to figure out I had to write The Godfather so that I could do the other books I really wanted to do.

It is a reflection on author/auteur vanity that neither the enriched Puzo nor Coppola have, in the event, done anything surpassingly good after the dizzy success of their Godfathers. Puzo's Fools Die earned, in its turn, a record advance paperback sale of $2.2 m. and was proclaimed 'The publishing event of the decade,' yet only someone addicted to gambling could have read this rambling, painfully autobiographical Las Vegas melodrama without embarrassment, and one learned with gratitude that Puzo's next commission was as consultant to Godfather III. For his part Coppola weighed in with the $30 m. epic Apocalypse Now.

The germ of The Godfather is an exuberantly paradoxical essay which Puzo wrote for Cavalier (a girly mag) in 1966; 'How crime keeps America healthy, wealthy, cleaner and more beautiful.' Puzo has elsewhere written 'A modest proposal,' and evidently feels an affinity with Swift. In his panegyric to American crime he puts forward a 'logical' argument for abolishing conventional civic virtue:

How are we to adjust to a society that drafts human beings to fight a war, yet permits its businessmen to make a profit from the shedding of blood?… as society becomes more and more criminal, the well-adjusted citizen, by definition, must become more criminal. So let us now dare to take the final step.

In the spirit of this final step the best adjusted citizen of all is taken to be the most powerful criminal in America, Don Corleone, the Godfather. And as the essay applauds the social achievements of crime, so the novel insinuates a warm commendation of Mafia 'family life,' of the military virtues of the family's 'soldiers' and the efficiency and high business ethics of the 'organization.' These are the true Americans; 'are we not better men,' the modestly murderous Don asks, 'than those pezzonovanti who have killed countless millions of men in our lifetimes?.'

Puzo complains that readers fail to register 'the casual irony in my books.' But he confesses that this quality in The Godfather was not just casual but oblique: 'so oblique in fact, that most of the critics missed the irony in the novel and attacked me for glorifying the Mafia.' A disservice was done to Puzo in this respect by Brando's superbly leonine interpretation of the Don, and the self-justifying speeches which Coppola added to make a decent-sized 'part' for his star—especially the role the script assigns to Corleone in the treaty meeting with Sollozzo. This scene also stresses that the Corleone family will have nothing to do with the 'dirty' crimes of narcotics, a special plea which sets up a facile opposition of good-guy gangsters and bad-guy gangsters. Watching the film it is only too easy to believe the canard that Puzo and Paramount were paid a million dollars to do an advertising job on the Mafia. But the novel, while not exactly a modern Jonathan Wild the Great, insists on being read ironically if one reads it at all carefully. Take the following description of the Don's funeral. He has died, it will be remembered, of natural causes, cultivating his garden. By a stroke of acting genius, Brando improvised the famous business in which grandad cuts out orange-peel fangs with which playfully to terrify the children, just before having a massive heart attack. As with the whole creation of the part it is magnificent, but fatally humanizes Puzo's consummate businessman:

It was time for the cemetery. It was time to bury the great Don. Michael linked his arm with Kay's and went out into the garden to join the host of mourners. Behind him came the caporegimes followed by their soldiers and then all the humble people the Godfather had blessed during his lifetime. The baker Nazorine, the widow Colombo and her sons and all the countless others of his world he had ruled so firmly but justly. There were even some who had been his enemies, come to do him honour. Michael observed all this with a tight, polite smile…. He would follow his father. He would care for his children, his family, his world. But his children would grow in a different world. They would be doctors, artists, scientists. Governors. Presidents. Anything at all.

The epigraph which Puzo chose for The Godfather is Balzac's 'Behind every great fortune there lies a crime.' It may be that he is au courant with nineteenth-century French fiction. But it seems more likely that he borrowed Balzac's apt sarcasm from C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite, which makes the same epigraphic use of it. In the mordant description of the new Don's funeral musings, Puzo gives his own social theory of the formation of America's pezzonovanti/power elite, and the barely hidden criminal power on which governors and presidents build their 'legitimate' authority.

Irony, especially anti-American irony, never sold 15 m. novels, and Puzo was wise to keep it so oblique as to be invisible to most critics and virtually all lay readers, for whom it would fatally have interrupted the pleasures of the quick read. Ignoring any literary sophistication, popular reception of The Godfather ran along two well-grooved channels. There was the shocked response, which found in the novel a naturalistic exposure of American vice almost too horrible to contemplate: 'This is the hard, chilling, incredible, brutal reality of the vice that this nation tolerates' (from a Chicago newspaper, appropriately enough). And there was the thrilled reading which found the novel, in Kael's phrase, 'a juicy roman à clef.' The ubiquitously reported scene of Sinatra balling Puzo out in a Hollywood restaurant fuelled the sales-promoting conviction that here was a novel/film which spilled some interesting beans.

Whether it was read for the inside story of American crime, or the inside story of show business scandal, The Godfather was universally taken as a novel whose author knew what he was writing about. Since Mario Puzo was himself of Sicilian extraction it was only too easy to see the work as a rare violation of ten centuries of omerta (silence)—the work of a once-in-a-lifetime canary like Joe Valachi. (Puzo, incidentally, strenuously affirms that his novel is based solely on 'research'—but he would, wouldn't he?) And yet the novel's cleverest trick is to go through an elaborate ritual of apparently disclosing while actually giving no hard information for the reader's $1.95. Like Valachi, Puzo shapes as if to tell. But since, unlike Valachi, he has no privilege against libel law and no FBI protection against assassination, his 'revelations' are folded back into fiction. Of course, the reader quite understands the necessity for this. Did not Sinatra successfully sue a British newspaper which injudiciously slandered him by falsely suggesting that he might have mob-associations along the lines of Johnny Fontane? Did not the Italian-American Anti Defamation League lean on Paramount so that the names 'Mafia' and 'Cosa Nostra' could not be mentioned in a film, which if it is not about the Mafia and Cosa Nostra is about nothing?

By drawing the audience/reader into a conspiratorial acquiescence with its prudent vagueness—the omissions of reference, misnamings and distortions—The Godfather contrives to suggest indiscretion while in fact giving nothing away. And in this pleasantly tantalizing game with the reader, Puzo is helped by the paradoxical nature of the mythological (and historical?) Mafia. In the popular mind, it is an institution which is invisible—yet all-powerful. It is omnipresent, but no one in authority acknowledges its existence (for most of his career, for example, J. Edgar Hoover apparently denied the existence of any significant organized crime in America). It is a force about which one knows nothing—except that it affects and possibly controls every department of one's life.

Since a totally 'secret' organization can only be constituted and tested against the reader's fantasy of it, Puzo can pull off yet another spectacular trick in The Godfather. This is to suggest that Cosa Nostra is so powerfully influential as to have rendered the rest of American life a mere accessory to itself. Where other institutions appear in the novel they are either shams or secretly controlled by the family. Anything can be fixed. Union co-operation, for example, can be turned off and on like a tap by Don Corleone; this it is, together with limitless finance and violence against prominent persons that makes him a power in Hollywood. Among his minor fixes is to speed up Michael's demobilization—had his son so wished he could, of course, have arranged promotion or release from military service altogether. The omnipotence and omnipresence of the Mafia explain why in a novel of gangster life there is no opposing law enforcement by society at large. The two policemen we encounter in the novel are Mafia place men in uniform—McCluskey and Neri. Neri, the fearless executioner, is particularly interesting since the narrative contrives to suggest that he serves Don Michael Corleone as the real NYPD police chief:

And now, finally, Albert Neri, alone in his Bronx apartment, was going to put on his police uniform again. He brushed it carefully. Polishing the holster would be next. And his policeman's cap too, the visor had to be cleaned, the stout black shoes shined. Neri worked with a will. He had found his place in the world, Michael Corleone had placed his absolute trust in him, and today he would not fail that trust.

He is not, as one might think, preparing for a mayor's parade. Properly turned out, Neri puts three bullets in rival Don Barzini's chest with his service .38 for the honour of his own Don.

Similarly, there is no justice in the novel save what the Mafia buys or what the Godfather administers. The first scene in which the distraught undertaker, Amerigo Bonasera, sees the defilers of his daughter set free by a tainted judge establishes the hollowness of 'legitimate' institutions. 'For justice we must go to Don Corleone,' he resolves. The few 'outsiders' in the novel, like Jules Segal, Tom Hagen and Kay Adams, have the status of refugees who, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, have managed to struggle into the 'real' world. All three are 'adopted.' Segal, the struck-off doctor, becomes the family physician. Hagen, the former Irish waif, becomes the family lawyer. Kay, the blonde girl whose ancestors came across with the founding fathers, becomes family tout court. She is converted to Catholicism and as Mrs. Corleone becomes plus Sicilienne que les Siciliennes. The novel ends with this patrician young WASP preparing to take communion, herself transubstantiated more than any wafer could be:

She emptied her mind of all thought of herself, of her children, of all anger, of all rebellion, of all questions. Then with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe, to be heard, as she had done every day since the murder of Carlo Rizzi, she said the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone.

The Mafia and the Godfather possess everything and every-body. The fabric of American life—its institutions, political, legislative and judicial, its law enforcement, its entertainment industries, its commerce are reduced to filmy insubstantiality. The Mafia has hollowed out America, and filled what remains with itself.

Puzo's vision of secret yet irresistibly extensive Mafia omnipotence has clear elements of solipsism and maniac self-aggrandizement in it. And to indulge a vein of speculation, one may note that immediately after the Second World War was a significant period in which to have set The Godfather. Historically the two years 1946–8, in which the novel's main action occurs, cover the only moment in history when one man—the President of the United States—enjoyed global omnipotence. The US's sole possession of nuclear weapons, and the presidential structure which put one man's finger on the button, gave a new dimension to the idea of absolute power. For a moment, Nero's fantasy about the world having but one neck to cut came true. Yet this climax of American potency was also a period of national shame for Italian Americans. Italy as wartime enemy had made a notoriously poor showing in the recent war; revealed herself as militarily incompetent and cowardly. The Duce was universally regarded as a poltroon. It is possible, I suspect, that these contrary facts are somehow condensed into the 'dreamwork' of The Godfather—a novel which fantasizes about the private possession of irresistible power, and whose chronicle reasserts Italian military prowess as displayed in the savage, but highly disciplined, wars of the families. Puzo, incidentally, was in his mid-twenties at the time of The Godfather's main action, and served in the Army Air Corps in Europe.

As a bestseller The Godfather is more like Love Story than Jaws. That is to say it renovates old material rather than introducing new. Any moderately practised cultural consumer of the 1960s would come to Puzo's novel more of an expert on the Mafia than sharks. American TV, films and paper-back fiction have been obsessed with gangsters, mobsters, urban banditti for most of the twentieth century. And their images of the arch-criminal—the capo di tutti capi—have traditionally been both morally ambiguous and emotionally extravagant. Orwell, for example, noted with astonishment the perverse hero-worship that a Neapolitan crook like Capone inspired: 'Books have been written about Al Capone that are hardly different in tone from the books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe and all the rest of the log cabin to White House brigade.'

Against this one can put a hysterical, hostile depiction of the Godfather genus from Spillane's Kiss Me, Deadly:

The Mafia. The stinking, slimy Mafia. An oversize mob of ignorant, lunkheaded jerks…. Someplace at the top of the heap was a person. From him the fear radiated like from the centre of a spiderweb. He sat on his throne and made a motion of his hand and somebody died. He made another motion and somebody was twisted until they screamed. A nod of his head did something that sent a guy leaping from a roof because he couldn't take it any more.

Just one person did that.

The achievement of Puzo's Godfather is to have made a stale cliche fresh again, and to have brought the pervasive American ambivalence about stylish crime under a new artistic control. He managed this by an injection of 'researched' historicity and ethnic inwardness; by a cool, deadpan naturalism which works against the melodramatic and sensationally charged subject matter; and by an irony which permits us to read (and Puzo to own) the work as 'critique.' At the same time the irony is so oblique as to be virtually private; 'unsophisticated' readings of the novel are also permitted. Frank, vicarious thrill-seeking approaches are not turned away. As a result 15 m. copies are sold and The Godfather takes its place as the bestseller of bestsellers.