The Making of the Godfather

by Mario Puzo

  Two hours later I was surprised to meet her still on the lot, walking toward the gate. We stopped to chat. She volunteered that she had stopped by the casting office to put her name down. “By the way,” she said, “I said I was your niece. Is that OK?”

  I smiled and said sure.

  Well, what the hell, she was only sixteen. And she didn’t know she was on the wrong track. That she should have said she was Ruddy’s or Coppola’s or Brando’s or Evans’ or Bart’s niece. She didn’t know I was batting eighth.

  Another funny story–to me anyway. While making the movie, Bob Evans gave a newspaper interview in which he took the position that the auteur theory was not one of his stronger beliefs. In fact, that maybe pictures were more successful when directors did not have much say.

  The next day Francis Coppola was mad as hell. As soon as he saw Evans, he said, “Bob, I read where you don’t need directors anymore.” Evans just let it pass by.

  It was funny to me because by this time I didn’t believe in the auteur theory either unless it was Truffaut, Hitchcock, De Sica and guys like that. I didn’t believe in the “studio chief cut” either, never mind producers. By this time I thought the writer should have final cut. But of course I was a little prejudiced.

  One strange thing. Pauline Kael writes the best movie criticism in American letters (though she does not share my enthusiasm for the work of some young beautiful actresses). I never once heard her name mentioned in the two years I was in and out of Hollywood. I find that extraordinary. Not that I would expect them to love her. She is a very tough critic. But she is so smart and she writes so beautifully that I’ll still love her even if she murders the movie which she probably will.

  It is true that personal relationships in Hollywood are geared to the making of movies, that most friendships are functional. But within this frame of reference I found many I worked with likable and in some areas warmhearted and generous. A great deal of the personal selfishness I understood because you have to be selfish to get books written.

  I signed to do two original screenplays which at this writing have been completed. And I have instructed my agent that I won’t do any others unless I have complete control of the movie and get half the studio. So I guess I really don’t want to have all that fun. Or it’s because I realize I really didn’t behave as professionally as I should have on the movie.

  I have resumed work on my novel. The thought of spending the next three years as a hermit is sort of scary, but in a funny way I’m happier. I feel like Merlin.

  In the King Arthur story Merlin knows that the sorceress Morgan Le Fay is going to lock him in a cave for a thousand years. And as a kid I wondered why Merlin let her do it. Sure I knew she was an enchantress, but wasn’t Merlin a great magician? Well, being a magician doesn’t always help and enchantments are traditionally cruel.

  It sounds crazy to go back to writing a novel. Even degenerate. But much as I bitch about publishers and publishing, they know it’s the writer’s book, not theirs. And New York publishers may not have the charm of Hollywood movie people, but they don’t demote you down to partners. The writer is the star, the director, the studio chief. It’s never MY movie but it’s always MY novel. It’s all mine, and I guess that’s the only thing that really counts in an enchantment.

  Please read on for a preview of

  The Family Corleone

  A new novel by Ed Falco, based on a screenplay by Mario Puzo.

  Available now

  1

  Fall 1933

  Giuseppe Mariposa waited at the window with his hands on his hips and his eyes on the Empire State Building. To see the top of the building, the needlelike antenna piercing a pale blue sky, he leaned into the window frame and pressed his face against the glass. He had watched the building go up from the ground, and he liked to tell the boys how he’d been one of the last men to have dinner at the old Waldorf-Astoria, that magnificent hotel that once stood where the world’s tallest building now loomed. He stepped back from the window and brushed dust from his suit jacket.

  Below him, on the street, a big man in work clothes sat atop a junk cart traveling lazily toward the corner. He carried a black derby riding on his knee as he jangled a set of worn leather reins over the flank of a swayback horse. Giuseppe watched the wagon roll by. When it turned the corner, he took his hat from the window ledge, held it to his heart, and looked at his reflection in a pane of glass. His hair was white now, but still thick and full, and he brushed it back with the palm of his hand. He adjusted the knot and straightened his tie where it had bunched up slightly as it disappeared into his vest. In a shadowy corner of the empty apartment behind him, Jake LaConti tried to speak, but all Giuseppe heard was a guttural mumbling. When he turned around, Tomasino came through the apartment door and lumbered into the room carrying a brown paper bag. His hair was unkempt as always, though Giuseppe had told him a hundred times to keep it combed—and he needed a shave, as always. Everything about Tomasino was messy. Giuseppe fixed him with a look of contempt that Tomasino, as usual, didn’t notice. His tie was loose, his shirt collar unbuttoned, and he had blood on his wrinkled jacket. Tufts of curly black hair stuck out from his open collar.

  “He say anything?” Tomasino pulled a bottle of scotch out of the paper bag, unscrewed the cap, and took a swig.

  Giuseppe looked at his wristwatch. It was eight thirty in the morning. “Does he look like he can say anything, Tommy?” Jake’s face was battered. His jaw dangled toward his chest.

  Tomasino said, “I didn’t mean to break his jaw.”

  “Give him a drink,” Giuseppe said. “See if that helps.”

  Jake was sprawled out with his torso propped up against the wall and his legs twisted under him. Tommy had pulled him out of his hotel room at six in the morning, and he still had on the black-and-white-striped silk pajamas he had worn to bed the night before, only now the top two buttons had been ripped away to reveal the muscular chest of a man in his thirties, about half Giuseppe’s age. As Tommy knelt to Jake and lifted him slightly, positioning his head so that he could pour scotch down his throat, Giuseppe watched with interest and waited to see if the liquor would help. He had sent Tommy down to the car for the scotch after Jake had passed out. The kid coughed, sending a spattering of blood down his chest. He squinted through swollen eyes and said something that would have been impossible to make out had he not been saying the same three words over and over throughout the beating. “He’s my father,” he said, though it came out as ’E mah fad’.

  “Yeah, we know.” Tommy looked to Giuseppe. “You got to give it to him,” he said. “The kid’s loyal.”

  Giuseppe knelt beside Tomasino. “Jake,” he said. “Giacomo. I’ll find him anyway.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to keep his hands from getting bloody as he turned the kid’s face to look at him. “Your old man,” he said, “Rosario’s day has come. There’s nothing you can do. Rosario, his day is over. You understand me, Jake?”

  “Si,” Giacomo said, the single syllable coming out clearly.

  “Good,” Giuseppe said. “Where is he? Where’s the son of a bitch hiding?”

  Giacomo tried to move his right arm, which was broken, and groaned at the pain.

  Tommy yelled, “Tell us where he is, Jake! What the hell’s wrong with you!”

  Giacomo tried to open his eyes, as if straining to see who was yelling at him. “ ’E mah fad’,” he said.

  “Che cazzo!” Giuseppe threw up his hands. He watched Jake and listened to his strained breathing. The shouts of children playing came up loud from the street and then faded. He looked to Tomasino before he exited the apartment. In the hall, he waited at the door until he heard the muffled report of a silencer, a sound like a hammer striking wood. When Tommy joined him, Giuseppe said, “Are you sure you finished him?” He put on his hat and fixed it the way he liked, with the brim down.

  “What do you think, Joe?” Tommy asked. “I don’t know what I’m doing?” When Giusepp
e didn’t answer, he rolled his eyes. “The top of his head’s gone. His brains are all over the floor.”

  At the stairwell, atop the single flight of steps down to the street, Giuseppe stopped and said, “He wouldn’t betray his father. You gotta respect him for that.”

  “He was tough,” Tommy said. “I still think you should’ve let me work on his teeth. I’m telling you, ain’t nobody won’t talk after a little of that.”

  Giuseppe shrugged, admitting Tommy might have been right. “There’s still the other son,” he said. “We making any progress on that?”

  “Not yet,” Tommy said. “Could be he’s hiding out with Rosario.”

  Giuseppe considered Rosario’s other son for a heartbeat before his thoughts shifted back to Jake LaConti and how the kid couldn’t be beaten into betraying his father. “You know what?” he said to Tomasino. “Call the mother and tell her where to find him.” He paused, thinking, and added, “They’ll get a good undertaker, they’ll fix him up nice, they can have a big funeral.”

  Tommy said, “I don’t know about fixing him up, Joe.”

  “What’s the name of the undertaker did such a good job on O’Banion?” Giuseppe asked.

  “Yeah, I know the guy you mean.”

  “Get him,” Giuseppe said, and he tapped Tommy on the chest. “I’ll take care of it myself, out of my own pocket. The family don’t have to know. Tell him to offer them his services for free, he’s a friend of Jake’s, and so on. We can do that, right?”

  “Sure,” Tommy said. “That’s good of you, Joe.” He patted Giuseppe’s arm.

  “All right,” Giuseppe said. “So that’s that,” and he started down the stairs, taking the steps two at a time, like a kid.

  2

  Sonny settled into the front seat of a truck and tilted the brim of his fedora down. It wasn’t his truck, but there was no one around to ask questions. At two in the morning this stretch of Eleventh Avenue was quiet except for an occasional drunk stumbling along the wide sidewalk. There’d be a beat cop along at some point, but Sonny figured he’d slink down in the seat, and even if the cop noticed him, which was unlikely, he’d peg him for some mug sleeping off a drunk on a Saturday night—which wouldn’t be all that far from the truth since he’d been drinking hard. But he wasn’t drunk. He was a big guy, already six foot tall at seventeen, brawny and big shouldered, and he didn’t get drunk easily. He rolled down the side window and let a crisp fall breeze off the Hudson help keep him awake. He was tired, and as soon as he relaxed behind the wide circle of the truck’s steering wheel, sleep started to creep up on him.

  An hour earlier he’d been at Juke’s Joint in Harlem with Cork and Nico. An hour before that he’d been at a speakeasy someplace in midtown, where Cork had taken him after they’d lost almost a hundred bucks between them playing poker with a bunch of Poles over in Greenpoint. They’d all laughed when Cork said he and Sonny should leave while they still had the shirts on their backs. Sonny’d laughed too, though a second earlier he was on the verge of calling the biggest Polack at the table a miserable son-of-a-bitch cheater. Cork had a way of reading Sonny, and he’d gotten him out of there before he did something stupid. By the time he wound up at Juke’s, if he wasn’t soused he was getting close to it. After a little dancing and some more drinking, he’d had enough for one night and was on his way home when a friend of Cork’s stopped him at the door and told him about Tom. He’d almost punched the kid before he caught himself and slipped him a few bucks instead. Kid gave him the address, and now he was slumped down in some worn-out truck looked like it dated back to the Great War, watching shadows play over Kelly O’Rourke’s curtains.

  Inside the apartment, Tom went about getting dressed while Kelly paced the room holding a sheet pinned to her breasts. The sheet looped under one breast and dragged along the floor beside her. She was a graceless girl with a dramatically beautiful face—flawless skin, red lips, and blue-green eyes framed by swirls of bright red hair—and there was something dramatic, too, in the way she moved about the room as if she were acting in a scene from a movie and imagining Tom as Cary Grant or Randolph Scott.

  “But why do you have to go?” she asked yet again. With her free hand she held her forehead, as if she were taking her own temperature. “It’s the middle of the night, Tom. Why do you want to be running out on a girl?”

  Tom slipped into his undershirt. The bed he had just gotten out of was more a cot than a bed, and the floor around it was cluttered with magazines, mostly copies of the Saturday Evening Post, and Grand, and American Girl. At his feet, Gloria Swanson looked up at him alluringly from the cover of an old issue of The New Movie. “Doll,” he said.

  “Don’t call me doll,” Kelly shot back. “Everybody calls me doll.” She leaned against the wall beside the window and let the sheet drop. She posed for him, cocking her hip slightly. “Why don’t you want to stay with me, Tom? You’re a man, aren’t you?”

  Tom put on his shirt and began buttoning it while he stared at Kelly. There was something electric and anxious in her eyes that bordered on skittishness, as if she was expecting something startling to happen at any moment. “You might be the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  “You’ve never been with a better looker than me?”

  “Never been with a girl more beautiful than you,” Tom said. “Not at all.”

  The anxiousness disappeared from Kelly’s eyes. “Spend the night with me, Tom,” she said. “Don’t go.”

  Tom sat on the edge of Kelly’s bed, thought about it, and then put on his shoes.

  Sonny watched the light from a cast-iron lamppost shine off the parallel lines of railroad tracks dividing the street. He let his hand rest on the eight ball screwed atop the truck’s stick shift and remembered sitting on the sidewalk as a kid and watching freight trains rumble down Eleventh, a New York City cop on horseback leading the way to keep drunks and little kids from getting run down. Once he’d seen a man in a fancy suit standing atop one of the freights. He’d waved and the man scowled and spit, as if the sight of Sonny disgusted him. When he asked his mother why the man had acted that way, she raised her hand and said, “Sta’zitt’! Some cafon’ spits on the sidewalk and you ask me? Madon’!” She walked away angrily, which was her typical response to most questions Sonny asked as a kid. It seemed to him then that her every sentence started with Sta’zitt’! or V’a Napoli! or Madon’! Inside the apartment, he was a pest, a nudge, or a scucc’, and so he spent all the time he could outside, running the streets with neighborhood kids.

  Being in Hell’s Kitchen, looking across the avenue to a line of shops at street level and two or three floors of apartments above them, brought Sonny back to his childhood, to all the years his father got up each morning and drove downtown to Hester Street and his office at the warehouse, where he still worked—though, now, of course, now that Sonny was grown, it was all different, how he thought of his father and what his father did for a living. But back then his father was a businessman, the owner with Genco Abbandando of the Genco Pura Olive Oil business. Those days, when Sonny saw his father on the street, he charged at him, running up and taking his hand and jabbering about whatever was on his little kid’s mind. Sonny saw the way other men looked at his father and he was proud because he was a big shot who owned his own business and everyone—everyone—treated him with respect, so that Sonny when he was still a boy came to think of himself as a kind of prince. The big shot’s son. He was eleven years old before all that changed, or maybe shifted is a better word than changed, because he still thought of himself as a prince—though, now, of course, as a prince of a different sort.

  Across the avenue, in Kelly O’Rourke’s apartment over a barbershop, behind the familiar black latticework of fire escapes, a figure brushed against the curtain, parting it slightly so that Sonny could see a strip of bright light and a white-pink flash of skin and a shock of red hair, and then it was as if he were in two places at once: Seventeen-year-old Sonny looked up to the curt
ained second-floor window of Kelly O’Rourke’s apartment, while simultaneously eleven-year-old Sonny was on a fire escape looking down through a window and into the back room of Murphy’s Bar. His memory of that night at Murphy’s was vivid in places. It hadn’t been late, maybe nine thirty, ten o’clock at the latest. He’d just gotten into bed when he heard his father and mother exchange words. Not loud—Mama never raised her voice to Pop—and Sonny couldn’t make out the words, but a tone unmistakable to a kid, a tone that said his mother was upset or worried, and then the door opening and closing and the sound of Pop’s footsteps on the stairs. Back then there was no one posted at the front door, no one waiting in the big Packard or the black eight-cylinder Essex to take Pop wherever he wanted to go. That night Sonny watched from his window as his father went out the front door and down the front steps and headed toward Eleventh. Sonny was dressed and flying down the fire escape to the street by the time his father turned the corner and disappeared.

  He was several blocks from his home before he bothered to ask himself what he was doing. If his father caught him he’d give him a good beating, and why not? He was out on the street when he was supposed to be in bed. The worry slowed him down and he almost turned around and headed back—but his curiosity got the better of him and he pulled the brim of his wool cap down almost to his nose and continued to follow his father, leaping in and out of shadows and keeping a full block between them. When they crossed over into the neighborhoods where the Irish kids lived, Sonny’s level of concern ticked up several notches. He wasn’t allowed to play in these neighborhoods, and he wouldn’t have even if he were allowed, because he knew Italian kids got beat up here, and he’d heard stories of kids who’d wandered into the Irish neighborhoods and disappeared for weeks before they turned up floating in the Hudson. A block ahead of him, his father walked quickly, his hands in his pockets and the collar of his jacket turned up against a cold wind blowing in off the river. Sonny followed until they were almost to the piers, and there he saw his father stop under a striped awning, in front of a freestanding sign for Murphy’s Bar and Grill. Sonny ducked into a storefront and waited. When his father went into the bar, the sound of laughter and men singing rushed out onto the street and then hushed when the door closed, though Sonny could still hear it, only muted. He crossed the street, moving from shadow to shadow, storefront to storefront, until he was directly across from Murphy’s, where he could see through a narrow window the dark figures of men hunched over a bar.