Mario Puzo

Mario Puzo was born in “Hell’s Kitchen”, a very poor district of New York in 1920.  His family were poor Italian immigrants.  There were several children and his father abandoned the family when he was 12.   The person, who worked to bring him up and keep the family together in very hard times, was his Italian mother.   Some of her qualities, he gives to the Don Vito Corleone, in “The Godfather”.  In the book he is somewhat dismissive of women’s abilities.

 Don Vito’s wife, Mama Corleone, is shown as shrewd but uneducated, and a good mother.  We never even learn her name. It is her husband who manages the family and who used his strength and native wit to raise them from poverty.   And he too thinks that women will be “saints in heaven” but are not very competent in this world’s affairs.

Mario went to college and served in World War II, but he was not able for combat duty because of poor eyesight.  Instead he worked as a public relations officer for the army and was in Germany in the post war years.  He married a German lady, Erika. 

After his army service he worked in a Government office, and had a family to provide for.  He began to write for magazines, writing action adventure stories.  He wanted to write but he also wanted to make money.  He had 5 children to support.  So he hoped that when he wrote novels they would be best sellers.  However it was not until his novel “The Godfather” came out in 1969 that he achieved runaway success.

He didn’t know much about the MAFIA. In his boyhood, he had only encountered very low level “organised crime” but in his days in pulp journalism he heard stories about those higher up in the organisations.   He researched and used his knowledge of Italy and the Italian experience of America, and his memories of his mother struggling to keep her family together.  He understood the idea that there was no point in relying on the state or other people, that it was up to families to look after and protect each other –. 

The Don loses his father as a boy, just as Puzo did, and he had to go to America and become a man.  Over time, he built up his empire, based on protection rackets, crime, running gambling and later provision of liquor.  

Puzo’s book became a best seller, perhaps because it referred to old fashioned values, even though the family which professed them was a crime family. America was traumatised by the social changes and revolutions of the 1960s and the Vietnam War.  The Corleones are very much a family, at times quarrelsome and at odds with each other, faulty and confused, but still a loving family….

The book has been accused of glamourizing and excusing crime and criminals, which is a fair point.  The Don is seen as a clever man, and a “moral “one who does not like prostitution, and who won’t get involved with selling drugs.

Puzo was not a great writer - but he was a storyteller… He had the quality which often carries a not very good novel forward…he satisfied the desire to “know what happens next…”

 However, when Coppolla turned it into a film, he simplified it and cut out side stories such as the story of Johnny Fontane... a big time singer and actor in Hollywood.(probably based on Frank Sinatra)…or the rather long drawn out story of Sonny’s mistress Lucy.  This improved the story, concentrating on the Corleone family and the rise of Michael as Don… and cutting out the bits that distracted one’s attention.  Together with beautiful photography, a good script, and excellent actors, the changes made for the Godfather film to be one of the greatest in American film history.

Puzo’s novel made him a fortune and he also wrote other “Mafia” novels afterwards….  He died in 1999…..