Random House made Mark Winegardner an offer he couldn’t refuse —
continuing Mario Puzo’s legendary Mafia epic

Newsday
By Tom Beer
Freelance writer.
November 15, 2004

Author Mark Winegardner remembers his gut reaction when he first heard that Random House was looking for someone to write a sequel to the late Mario Puzo's blockbuster novel "The Godfather." "There's already been a book and three movies about the Corleone family," he said to himself. "There can't be that much left to say about these people. Can there?"

Many "Godfather" fans may ask themselves the same question, and they'll learn the answer when Winegardner's book, "The Godfather Returns" (Random House, $26.95), goes on sale in bookstores nationwide tomorrow. Weighing in at 430 pages, it's the product of two years' exhaustive research and writing, supported by a high-powered media campaign that kicks off with an author appearance on the "Today" show. "The Godfather Returns," apparently, has plenty more to say about America's First Mobster Family (apologies to "The Sopranos").

"The Godfather Returns" begins in 1955, where Puzo's book ended, with protagonist Michael Corleone consolidating control of the family crime operations after the death of his father, Don Vito Corleone. All the old familiar characters are here: Michael, the college-educated son who has been reluctantly drawn into a life of organized crime; Kay Adams, Michael's WASP-y wife, who doesn't want to know too much about her husband's business; Fredo, the ineffectual Corleone brother who leads a dissipated life in Las Vegas; and Tom Hagen, the German-Irish lawyer the Corleones adopted as a boy, who learns that he will never truly be family. And Winegardner introduces a few characters of his own: Nick Geraci, a resentful capo who emerges as a deadly rival to Michael; and Francesca Corleone, Michael's niece, who finds herself an ethnic oddity at her bland, Eisenhower-era college.

For Winegardner and his publisher, the book is a calculated gamble. Sure, it will have a built-in audience of fans who grew up on Puzo's 1969 best- seller and Francis Ford Coppola's critically acclaimed "Godfather" films of the 1970s. And today, interest in mobster stories is probably at a high-water mark, with the incredible popularity of HBO's "The Sopranos."

The risk of sequels

But it's always risky to tamper with a beloved franchise: Will readers who think of these characters as family accept them in the hands of a new author, and will they embrace new story lines as part of the enduring Corleone mythology? Or will "The Godfather Returns" end up, like sequels to "Gone With the Wind," "Rebecca" and "Pride and Prejudice," as an ill-conceived flash in the pan?

Winegardner, for his part, is coolly confident. The prepublication reviews have been enthusiastic ("A wholly absorbing novel that's written beautifully, with great skill and passion," proclaimed Publishers Weekly; "Puzo himself must be raising a celestial glass and shouting a hearty, 'Salut!'"). And with two previous novels ("The Veracruz Blues" and "Crooked River Burning") under his belt, Winegardner knows that at this point his work is essentially done anyway - the book is written and ready to go out into the world.

"I believe the readers who've been following me, book to book, will read 'The Godfather Returns' and find it a very recognizable Mark Winegardner novel," he says by phone from his home in Tallahassee, Fla., a week before the book hits stores. "And I feel like people who are fans of 'The Godfather' will find that the story is extended in worthy ways."

When Puzo wrote "The Godfather" in the mid-1960s, it, too, was a calculated gamble. Puzo was a little-known, 40-something writer with two novels to his name ("The Dark Arena" and "The Fortunate Pilgrim"), books that had garnered good reviews but negligible sales. He had collected only $6,500 on his literary efforts to date and was deep in debt. Puzo made the conscious decision to write a commercial novel, and although he received a paltry advance of $5,000 from his publisher, "The Godfather" shot to No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list and stayed on the list for 67 weeks. It was a hit in England, France, Germany and elsewhere around the world, selling more than 21 million copies. Puzo wouldn't have to worry about money again. Three "Godfather" films directed by Coppola, with screenplays co-written by Puzo, brought even greater prestige and Academy Awards. (Puzo, tellingly, never felt that "The Godfather" was his best work. "I wished like hell I'd written it better," he once said. "I wrote below my gifts in that book.")

Timing was everything

"The Godfather" was more than just a commercial success, though. For Robert J. Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University and author of an introduction to the 2002 trade paperback edition, it was a timely measure of the late '60s zeitgeist - the right book at the right time.

"You're talking about a period of real social and cultural dislocation and confusion," Thompson says. "The guys you always thought were the good guys are now the bad guys. We ourselves, according to many, were the bad guys in Vietnam. There's the idea that you question authority. Cops were called pigs. In this context, there was something deliciously appealing about 'The Godfather,' who cut through all the red tape and simply got stuff done."

Puzo's characters and dark vision still speak to us. "The Corleones are part of American folk culture," Thompson says. "I would make the argument that the Corleones are now almost public domain. They've penetrated our consciousness."

That may be why one day in the summer of 2002, Random House editor in chief Jonathan Karp was on a walk in Central Park and found himself thinking, "I wonder what the Corleones are up to?" Karp had been Puzo's editor for 10 years before the author's death in 1999 and worked with him on later novels such as "The Fourth K," "The Last Don" and "Omerta."

Puzo didn't want to write it

"Mario and I had talked many times about revisiting the Corleone family," says Karp. "He didn't want to do it. He felt that he couldn't top himself. He knew that book was going to be his greatest legacy, and he didn't want to compete with himself that way."

But before dying, Puzo did give Karp permission to find a qualified young writer to tackle the project. "He loved the idea of providing for his family," Karp says. So in collaboration with Puzo's son, Tony, and literary executor, Neil Olson, Karp e-mailed a handful of literary agents, requesting proposals for a "Godfather" sequel. Within 24 hours, a reporter at The New Yorker got wind of the request, and after an article was published in the magazine, the search for a Puzo successor was suddenly very high profile. "We were deluged with phone calls and e-mails and proposals," Karp recalls. "Hundreds of them. Somebody called it 'Italian Idol.'"

Winegardner's was one of the many proposals to land on Karp's desk. The 42-year-old author and director of the creative writing program at Florida State University had moved 180 degrees away from his initial feeling that there was nothing left to add to Puzo's story. He had reread "The Godfather," and recognized all kinds of "loose ends" that were not explained by the book or the movies and were ripe material for another novel. "I was just desperate to be given this job. I wanted it bad," Winegardner says. "I knew that one of two things were going to happen. They were either going to give it to me to write, or they were going to make a dire mistake they would never recover from."

Winegardner's zeal for the project impressed Karp, who was a big fan of "Crooked River Burning." "He's an ambitious, audacious writer," Karp says. "Some people thought it was an unusual choice that we were picking a creative writing professor from Florida who wasn't Italian. But if you read Mark's fiction, you can tell that he has the voice and the imagination and the narrative energy to do this."

One thing Winegardner wasn't was a rabid member of the "Godfather" cult, one of those die-hard fans who can recite the screenplay of the first film from memory. "Art does not come from a position of reverence," he says. "Though I admired the story, I had zero reverence for it. I felt I had a lot to add.

"I first read the book when I was a kid, either 11 or 12 years old, because I heard there were dirty parts. When I told that to my friend [author] Lorrie Moore, without missing a beat, she said, 'Page 27!' Sure enough, Page 27 - the scene with Sonny Corleone and Lucy Mancini doing it standing up. It made an impression on her."

Revisiting "The Godfather" as an adult (and a writing professor), Winegardner was less struck by the "dirty parts" - "remarkably unlike recognizable human beings having sex," he says now - than by the author's style. "Puzo had this great, magisterial, omniscient tone. It's old-fashioned, 19th century, and it evokes his hero, Dostoyevsky. And the high-octane storytelling in 'The Godfather' is something any literary novelist could learn a thing or two from."

Updating the family

Winegardner worked to preserve that operatic tone in "The Godfather Returns" but also took advantage of contemporary revelations about the inner workings of organized crime that his predecessor didn't have. "Puzo famously remarked that there wasn't anything in 'The Godfather' that he didn't learn in the New York Public Library," Winegardner says, observing that in the '60s any information about New York's Sicilian crime families had to be gleaned from back issues of the city tabloids.

"I had the opportunity to deepen the story and make it more plausible, given what we now know about the Mafia and how it works." Thus the reader is treated to detailed scenes such as one where Michael initiates a new member into the Family, cutting the man's palm with a knife and handing him a burning pasteboard picture of St. Leolucas.

John Dickie, a professor of Italian studies at University College London and author of this year's "Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia" (Palgrave Macmillan), explains that most of our knowledge about the inner workings of the mob derives from the sensational courtroom trials of the 1980s and '90s.

"The mistake Puzo made is to confuse the Mafia Family - an organizational term - with family in the blood sense," he says. "If you read my book, you'll learn how meticulously Cosa Nostra, right from its origins in Sicily, exploited kinship ties for its own organizational ends and exploited this myth that it's all an extension of blood ties in some way."

But historical accuracy, while crucial to the believability of any fictional work, may not be the real point of organized crime books, movies and TV shows - something of a cottage industry by now. "I think ultimately, like all great literary genres, the Mafia story speaks to everyday fears and desires and anxieties," Dickie says.

"It's about that whole problem of juggling your work life and your family life, but it gets represented in this highly stylized, dramatized form, with an edge-of-the-seat suspense factor. It's also, of course, where Americans go to think about the dark side of their society, which is not always easy to represent in a mainstream way."

Whatever grand interpretations scholars might read into the genre, Winegardner's aspirations with "The Godfather Returns" were more simple: He just wanted to write the best book he possibly could. "This book came out of as pure a place in me as my first novel did," he says. "I didn't do it for any other reason than a real passion for where I could take the story."

Meet the family

Michael Corleone (played in the films by Al Pacino): The central character of "The Godfather," Michael is the youngest Corleone boy, a college-educated WWII vet who remains aloof from the family business until his father, Vito, is shot. His fall from grace - and into a life of crime - is the great narrative arc of Puzo's novel, but at the end of the book, he still holds out the hope that the family can go legitimate.

Kay Adams Corleone (played by Diane Keaton): Michael's wife, a New Hampshire WASP who loves her husband but is ambivalent (and usually in the dark) about his business dealings. At the end of "The Godfather," she has returned to Michael and made some peace - at least for the moment - with the cold-blooded Don he has become.

Fredo Corleone (played by John Cazale): The unremarkable middle Corleone brother (the eldest, Sonny, is killed in the course of "The Godfather") who watches helplessly as his father is shot. Later, Sonny is shipped off to Las Vegas, where the family hopes to base its operations. In Vegas, however, Fredo becomes a liability to the Corleones, drinking to excess and impregnating showgirls all across town.

Connie Corleone (played by Talia Shire): The spoiled Corleone daughter, Don Vito's favorite, whose wedding to no-account Carlo Rizzo is the celebrated opening of "The Godfather." In the course of the book, she is infuriated with brother Michael when she suspects (correctly) that he has had her husband bumped off, but by the end she has reconciled with him and also remarried. (In fact, Rizzo was the family traitor responsible for the killing of her brother Sonny.)

Tom Hagen (played by Robert Duvall): Hagen is a German-Irish orphan whom the eldest Corleone brother, Sonny, brought home as a boy. In many respects treated like family, he becomes Don Vito Corleone's consigliere but is demoted when Michael takes over. By the end of "The Godfather," he realizes that as a non-Sicilian, he never truly will be a Corleone, but his loyalty is intact.

Johnny Fontane (played by Al Martino): A hapless nightclub singer turned movie star, modeled on Frank Sinatra. (Sinatra was reportedly incensed at the portrayal.) At the end of "The Godfather," Fontane's voice has been restored after an operation on his vocal cords, and he is beginning to draw closer to his ex-wife after a disastrous marriage to a promiscuous Hollywood starlet. Fontane was Don Vito's godson but not much respected by Michael.

The complete 'Godfather'

"The Godfather," by Mario Puzo (New American Library, $14 paper). First published in 1969, this 2002 trade paperback reissue features an introduction by pop culture scholar Robert J. Thompson and an afterword by Variety editor Peter Bart. The Corleone saga begins here.

"The Godfather DVD Collection" (Paramount Home Entertainment, $69.98). This indispensable five-disc box set includes the three "Godfather" films by Francis Ford Coppola, with bonus materials, including a making-of documentary, additional scenes and audio commentary by Coppola.

"The Godfather Legacy," by Harlan Lebo (Simon & Schuster, $15 paper). A fan's scrapbook of the "Godfather" films, with plenty of behind-the- scenes gossip about Marlon Brando's volatile presence on the set, Coppola's directorial style and the vocal objections of unions, organized crime and Italian-American groups to the film.

"The Godfather" Soundtrack, by Nino Rota (MCA, $13.98). A good deal of the power of Coppola's film comes from this elegiac, Oscar-winning score by Italian composer Nino Rota.

"The Sicilian," by Mario Puzo (Ballantine, $7.99 paper). In 1984, Puzo revived the character of Michael Corleone with this not-quite-a sequel that takes place during Michael's three-year exile in Sicily, where he matches wits with a local bandit named Salvatore Giuliano.

"The Godfather Returns," by Mark Winegardner (Random House, $26.95). The official sequel to Puzo's pop classic, by the author of "The Veracruz Blues" and "Crooked River Burning."

Tom Beer is a freelance writer.

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