by Puzo, Mario
The old woman nodded her head approvingly. Kay had once forgotten that it was forbidden to take food from midnight on before receiving Holy Communion. That had been a long time ago, but Mama Corleone never trusted her after that and always checked. “You feel all right?” the old woman asked.
“Yes,” Kay said.
The church was small and desolate in the early morning sunlight. Its stained-glass windows shielded the interior from heat, it would be cool there, a place to rest. Kay helped her mother-in-law up the white stone steps and then let her go before her. The old woman preferred a pew up front, close to the altar. Kay waited on the steps for an extra minute. She was always reluctant at this last moment, always a little fearful.
Finally she entered the cool darkness. She took the holy water on her fingertips and made the sign of the cross, fleetingly touched her wet fingertips to her parched lips. Candles flickered redly before the saints, the Christ on his cross. Kay genuflected before entering her row and then knelt on the hard wooden rail of the pew to wait for her call to Communion. She bowed her head as if she were praying, but she was not quite ready for that.
IT WAS ONLY here in these dim, vaulted churches that she allowed herself to think about her husband’s other life. About that terrible night a year ago when he had deliberately used all their trust and love in each other to make her believe his lie that he had not killed his sister’s husband.
She had left him because of that lie, not because of the deed. The next morning she had taken the children away with her to her parents’ house in New Hampshire. Without a word to anyone, without really knowing what action she meant to take. Michael had immediately understood. He had called her the first day and then left her alone. It was a week before the limousine from New York pulled up in front of her house with Tom Hagen.
She had spent a long terrible afternoon with Tom Hagen, the most terrible afternoon of her life. They had gone for a walk in the woods outside her little town and Hagen had not been gentle.
Kay had made the mistake of trying to be cruelly flippant, a role to which she was not suited. “Did Mike send you up here to threaten me?” she asked. “I expected to see some of the ‘boys’ get out of the car with their machine guns to make me go back.”
For the first time since she had known him, she saw Hagen angry. He said harshly, “That’s the worst kind of juvenile crap I’ve ever heard. I never expected that from a woman like you. Come on, Kay.”
“All right,” she said.
They walked along the green country road. Hagen asked quietly, “Why did you run away?”
Kay said, “Because Michael lied to me. Because he made a fool of me when he stood Godfather to Connie’s boy. He betrayed me. I can’t love a man like that. I can’t live with it. I can’t let him be father to my children.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hagen said.
She turned on him with now-justified rage. “I mean that he killed his sister’s husband. Do you understand that?” She paused for a moment. “And he lied to me.”
They walked on for a long time in silence. Finally Hagen said, “You have no way of really knowing that’s all true. But just for the sake of argument let’s assume that it’s true. I’m not saying it is, remember. But what if I gave you what might be some justification for what he did. Or rather some possible justifications?”
Kay looked at him scornfully. “That’s the first time I’ve seen the lawyer side of you, Tom. It’s not your best side.”
Hagen grinned. “OK. Just hear me out. What if Carlo had put Sonny on the spot, fingered him. What if Carlo beating up Connie that time was a deliberate plot to get Sonny out in the open, that they knew he would take the route over the Jones Beach Causeway? What if Carlo had been paid to help get Sonny killed? Then what?”
Kay didn’t answer. Hagen went on. “And what if the Don, a great man, couldn’t bring himself to do what he had to do, avenge his son’s death by killing his daughter’s husband? What if that, finally, was too much for him, and he made Michael his successor, knowing that Michael would take that load off his shoulders, would take that guilt?”
“It was all over with,” Kay said, tears springing into her eyes. “Everybody was happy. Why couldn’t Carlo be forgiven? Why couldn’t everything go on and everybody forget?”
She had led across a meadow to a tree-shaded brook. Hagen sank down on the grass and sighed. He looked around, sighed again and said, “In this world you could do it.”
Kay said, “He’s not the man I married.”
Hagen laughed shortly. “If he were, he’d be dead now. You’d be a widow now. You’d have no problem.”
Kay blazed out at him. “What the hell does that mean? Come on, Tom, speak out straight once in your life. I know Michael can’t, but you’re not Sicilian, you can tell a woman the truth, you can treat her like an equal, a fellow human being.”
There was another long silence. Hagen shook his head. “You’ve got Mike wrong. You’re mad because he lied to you. Well, he warned you never to ask him about business. You’re mad because he was Godfather to Carlo’s boy. But you made him do that. Actually it was the right move for him to make if he was going to take action against Carlo. The classical tactical move to win the victim’s trust.” Hagen gave her a grim smile. “Is that straight enough talk for you?” But Kay bowed her head.
Hagen went on. “I’ll give you some more straight talk. After the Don died, Mike was set up to be killed. Do you know who set him up? Tessio. So Tessio had to be killed. Carlo had to be killed. Because treachery can’t be forgiven. Michael could have forgiven it, but people never forgive themselves and so they would always be dangerous. Michael really liked Tessio. He loves his sister. But he would be shirking his duty to you and his children, to his whole family, to me and my family, if he let Tessio and Carlo go free. They would have been a danger to us all, all our lives.”
Kay had been listening to this with tears running down her face. “Is that what Michael sent you up here to tell me?”
Hagen looked at her in genuine surprise. “No,” he said. “He told me to tell you you could have everything you want and do everything you want as long as you take good care of the kids.” Hagen smiled. “He said to tell you that you’re his Don. That’s just a joke.”
Kay put her hand on Hagen’s arm. “He didn’t order you to tell me all the other things?”
Hagen hesitated a moment as if debating whether to tell her a final truth. “You still don’t understand,” he said. “If you told Michael what I’ve told you today, I’m a dead man.” He paused again. “You and the children are the only people on this earth he couldn’t harm.”
It was a long five minutes after that Kay rose from the grass and they started walking back to the house. When they were almost there, Kay said to Hagen, “After supper, can you drive me and the kids to New York in your car?”
“That’s what I came for,” Hagen said.
A week after she returned to Michael she went to a priest for instruction to become a Catholic.
FROM THE INNERMOST recess of the church the bell tolled for repentance. As she had been taught to do, Kay struck her breast lightly with her clenched hand, the stroke of repentance. The bell tolled again and there was the shuffling of feet as the communicants left their seats to go to the altar rail. Kay rose to join them. She knelt at the altar and from the depths of the church the bell tolled again. With her closed hand she struck her heart once more. The priest was before her. She tilted back her head and opened her mouth to receive the papery thin wafer. This was the most terrible moment of all. Until it melted away and she could swallow and she could do what she came to do.
Washed clean of sin, a favored supplicant, she bowed her head and folded her hands over the altar rail. She shifted her body to make her weight less punishing to her knees.
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.
Afterword
by Peter Bart
I FIRST MET Mario Puzo at a difficult time in his life. He had just completed the first one hundred pages of The Godfather and had spent the meager $5,000 advance from his publisher. At forty-five, Puzo already owed $20,000 to relatives and bookmakers, so he understandably felt a certain panic. At the time I was a young production vice president with Paramount Pictures, so we had cause to circle each other warily. I was interested in his novel as possible film material; he was interested in whatever option money I might offer. Yet, eager as he was for a movie sale, Puzo was direct and plainspoken about his novel in the works. “I’m writing this book to make money,” he told me straight on. “This isn’t War and Peace.” Under prodding, however, he began to discuss its themes and principal characters with some passion, only to catch himself and reassert: “Look, I don’t want to mislead you—I’m doing this for the money.” His first two novels, The Dark Arena (1955) and The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965), represented some really good writing, he told me. “I even immodestly think of them as art.” The books had elicited good reviews but zero income, Puzo said, so it was time for him to get down to the business of supporting his family.
Puzo finally scratched together the money to finish his book, thanks to a paperback sale and an option payment from Paramount. The novel went on to make him millions. It hovered on the New York Times bestseller list for sixty-seven weeks and became the number one book all over the world, transforming Puzo from a penniless writer to an international celebrity. Suddenly he was hanging with movie stars, attracting lucrative screenwriting assignments, and holding forth in a palatial summer home in Malibu. Through it all he remained the same taciturn, down-to-earth literary craftsman who was delighted that readers around the world had embraced his characters even though he still felt he’d not written that good a novel.
Did he really believe this? Like many writers, Puzo liked to give off mixed signals. On the one hand, as a professional writer, he knew The Godfather represented a milestone in commercial fiction. Yet I don’t think Puzo could ever put behind him the terrible sense of desperation that drove him to produce it. A portly, convivial man who loved to gamble as much as he loved to schmooze, Puzo had to write to survive, and The Godfather represented not so much his dream as his lifeline. He knew he needed another year to research his book—time to seek out the prototypes for the characters he portrayed and understand their milieu. Due to time pressures, however, his research was limited to the library. He admitted this to me during the first days of principal photography when the film’s producer, Albert Ruddy, and I actually assembled three or four real-life Mafia dons and brought them to the set. Our purpose was to introduce them to Marlon Brando, who had never met real capos and wanted to emulate their mannerisms. Puzo was wide-eyed at our assemblage; he had always dreamed of encountering this “rogue’s gallery” but never had the time nor the access. The Mafia of The Godfather was the product of his superb imagination. Marlon Brando’s Godfather was the product of brilliant mimicry by a gifted, if diffident, star.
If Puzo had no firsthand knowledge of the machinations of the Godfather, he nonetheless had an attitude about his societal role. In one form or another, Puzo felt, crime was embedded in almost every facet of American life, whether it represented the petty graft of a government bureaucrat or the more elaborate scam of a Mafia operator. It was all part of the system and, as such, contributed to the economy in the same manner as other forms of endeavor. “Crime is good for America,” Puzo once wrote. “The productive criminal may be just as responsible for the millions of split level homes sprouting out of our marshlands or even for the colleges opening their doors to bright-eyed youngsters.” A born cynic, Puzo liked to quote a character in The Great McGinty who said, “If you didn’t have graft, you’d get a very low grade of person in politics.” Most top corporate executives, he argued, habitually broke or bent the law in their pursuit of profits.
What the organization known as the Mafia accomplished first in Italy and then in the U.S. was simply to institutionalize these practices to benefit a parallel society, Puzo felt. That doesn’t imply that he in any way approved of their practices. Indeed, he was outraged over the attacks of some critics, who suggested that he had “glorified” the Mafia. As far as Puzo was concerned, they had simply missed the point. “It always irritated me that most critics missed the irony in my books,” he wrote in his 1972 memoir, The Godfather Papers. “I sometimes felt it was my fault as a writer, but I hated to lean on an idea. I hated to use intellectual concepts in fiction simply as a coat of paint to hide thinness of character and lack of narrative drive.”
Still, the distorted view that The Godfather glamorized criminals continued to haunt the movie as well as the novel. While Puzo’s work was still in manuscript form I had elicited the interest of a then-young filmmaker named Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola was initially reluctant to take it on, fearing that it would emerge as another conventional Hollywood gangster film. As he burrowed into the book and talked with Puzo, however, he began to develop a broader vision. The Godfather was not just another Mafia tome, he realized, but rather a rich family saga that was also an apt metaphor for the growth of corporate America. It was about capitalism as much as it was about crime.
Even as Coppola worked with Puzo on a screenplay that embodied these themes, the extraordinary hoopla created by the publication of the book served to stall their efforts. No one had expected the book to receive such sudden acclaim. Top executives at Paramount Pictures and its corporate parent, Gulf & Western, now became fixated on their unexpected “hot property.” Why settle for Francis Ford Coppola, still a relatively obscure young filmmaker, when the world’s top directors and superstars would now be attracted to this international bestseller?
Copies of the novel were dispatched with million-dollar offers to these top talents, only to generate a surprising response. The superstars were fascinated by the book, but also scared of it for the very reason Puzo had anticipated. How can this movie be made, they asked, without glorifying a criminal organization? And wouldn’t the movie be widely condemned by self-appointed censors if not by ordinary filmgoers? One after another, the top film directors in the U.S. turned down the project, including Franklin Schaffner, who directed Patton, and Arthur Penn, who did Bonnie and Clyde. Top actors also shied away from the roles, with the exception of Brando, but some of the Paramount brass were opposed to casting Brando in this plum role because his most recent films had performed badly at the box office.
In the end, the corporate “mavens” backed off, and my original proposed director—Coppola—reemerged as the obvious choice. The problems encountered by Coppola during the production have by now been well documented—a tight budget, insufficient time for preproduction planning, arguments over casting, etc.—but oddly, all this strife seemed to work in his favor. Coppola somehow managed to galvanize the tensions on the set into a sort of creative frenzy. Al Pacino’s performance had an edge because the young actor thought he might be fired at any moment. Coppola was determined to throw everything into his scenes day by day because he, too, felt that every shooting day might be his last. At one point early in the schedule the studio actually started interviewing other directors, fearing that the production was out of control. Coppola’s problems were exacerbated by a couple of rebellious members of his crew, who mistakenly concluded that his seemingly disorganized approach to filmmaking signaled a lack of discipline. In fact, Coppola was feeling his way, but doing so with utter brilliance.
The studio eventually rallied to his support, much to Puzo’s gratification. Puzo had liked Coppola from the outset and, indeed, had been delighted by the way Coppola and others had treated him in Hollywood. Once Coppola started rewriting his script, however, and the production moved forward, Puzo, like most writers, began to feel a sense of ostracism. “
The truth is that, if a novelist goes out to Hollywood to work on his book, he has to accept the fact that it is not his movie,” he said. “That’s simply the way it is. And the truth is that, if I had been the boss in the making of this movie, I would have wrecked it.”
Overall, Puzo was not only satisfied but delighted with the final product, and at the same time he got himself a quick education in the ways of Hollywood. He was mortified when his icon, Frank Sinatra, screamed abuse at him in a crowded restaurant. Angered by the depiction of Johnny Fontane in Puzo’s book, Sinatra called Puzo a pimp and threatened to impair his health and that of his family. Suddenly, Puzo realized, his fictional cast of characters was coming to life around him.
Puzo was hurt, too, when, upon accepting accolades for the film, Coppola told reporters that the success of The Godfather would now permit him to make films he “really wanted to make.” Having said for years that he wrote his novel only to make money, Puzo had to confront a director who basically was singing the same tune.
I visited with Puzo shortly after all this happened, and his attitude was typically crusty. “This thirty-two-year-old kid suddenly realizes what I knew at age forty-five,” Puzo told me. “Namely, that both of us had to get The Godfather under our belt in order to win the freedom to do whatever we wanted.” At the same time, even Puzo had to acknowledge that what he had created—indeed what they had created—had taken on a life of its own. Not only had the novel become a legend, but many would consider the film to be among the five greatest movies of all time. The two men had achieved, however inadvertently, a sort of immortality through the very work that both still felt compelled to put down, as though refusing to accept the weight of their own achievement.