Stranger Than Pulp Fiction

Hey y'all, it's your girl Cheekies and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite podcast

Cheekies and Chill. I'll be sharing even more personal stories with you guys and as always

you'll get my exclusive take on topics like love, personal growth, health, family ties, and more.

And don't forget I'll also be dishing out my best advice to you on episodes of Dear Cheekies.

It's going to be an exciting year and I hope that you can join me. Listen to Cheekies and Chill season four on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dressing. Dressing.
French dressing. Exactly.
I'm AJ Jacobs and my current obsession is puzzles. And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler.
Something about Mary Poppins? Exactly. This is fun.
You can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears. Listen to The Puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I'm excited to introduce a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
I'm having conversations with some folks across a wide range of industries to hear how they reach the top of their fields and the lessons they learned along the way that everyone can use. I'll be joined by innovative leaders like chairman and CEO of Elf Beauty, Tarang Amin.
Legendary singer-songwriter and philanthropist, Jewel. Being a rock star is very fun, but helping people is way more fun.
And Damian Maldonado, CEO of American Financing. I figured out the formula.
I just have to work hard, then that's magic. Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever-important creative spark, the magic.
Listen to Math & Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 45 years ago, a Virginia soul band called The Edge of Daybreak recorded their debut album, Behind Bars.
Record collectors consider it a masterpiece. The band's surviving members are long out of prison, but they say they have some unfinished business.

The end of daybreak, hours of love were supposed to have been fouled up by another app.

Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

How would you feel if you went back to prison?

I'll have to protect myself again, Senator. I'll have to kill or be killed again.
September 19, 1963, a dead broke writer is lying on his couch in suburban New York. He's glued to his television set, but he's not watching a mob movie.
He's watching a Senate hearing. This is a special report from CBS News in Washington.
The Congress and Cosa Nostra. The testimony is from Cosa Nostra insider, Joseph Valachi, who would become better known as the first man to rat on the mob on national television.
The sworn testimony you just heard came from the lips of Joseph Valachi, lips that supposedly were sealed 33 years ago when he joined America's underworld crime syndicate, Cosa Nostra. The world he describes has a name, a name that's new to most Americans, mafia.
Would it be fair to say that you went back to prison, that you'd be a dead man?

If they got at me, I wouldn't be in there five minutes, Senator.

Meanwhile, the man watching his television set would say he had never met a real gangster,

but he knows enough to see the story for what it is.

As the Senator put it before, what did I get out of it?

What'd you get out?

Nothing but misery. As you all understand, once you're in, you're in, what did I get out of it? What did you get out of it? Nothing but misery.

As you all understand, once you're in, you're in, you can't get out.

The man on the couch sees a true American story,

a web of family and brutality, loyalty and betrayal,

fathers and sons, immigration and the American dream.

The man doesn't know it yet,

but this inspiration will stay with him for years to come.

The man doesn't know it yet, but this inspiration will stay with him for years to come. The man's name? Mario Puzo.
I'm Mark Seal. And I'm Nathan Kang.
And this is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.

In today's episode, we're taking a closer look at the real-life mafia stories that influence Mario Puzo's book. And diving into the life and career of the unlikely author who ascended from the depths of Hell's Kitchen to the glitz and glam of Hollywood.

We'll also learn how Puzo's novel landed in the hands of Paramount executive Robert Evans when he needed it most. So let's get started.
Did you do anything for the family at all in this time or did they just do things for you? Just go out and kill for them. You'd go out what? Kill.
Mark, the Vellacci hearings are infamous. Joseph Vellacci was a made man, a member of the Genovese crime family, and longtime henchman for mob boss Vito Genovese.
Yes, and it was absolutely shocking at the time, especially since Joe Valacci knew exactly how the mob treated snitches. Well, he had some firsthand experience.
He was intimately familiar with the story of Alberto Aguicci. And it's a particularly gruesome story.
When I was researching for the book, it stood out as an incredible example of the brutality of the mafia. Aguichi was a baker from Toronto, but baker is sort of in quotes, isn't it? Baker is definitely in quotes.
He was really a heroin smuggler and an associate of the Magadino crime family in Buffalo. And in May of 1961, he was indicted along with 19 others in a $150 million heroin smuggling ring.
We're talking about the notorious French Connection heroin smuggling ring that started in the 30s and stretched from Indochina all the way to France, then to Canada and the U.S. And one of those 19 others was our mob man turned informant, Joseph Valachi.
And while in jail together, Valachi listened as Aguicci absolutely railed against Magadino, who he had expected to raise money for his bail, but instead was letting him rot in jail. It's generally not a good idea to talk badly about a crime boss as you're in prison.
Not at all. Igwechi ended up having to sell his house to make bail and was apparently threatening to flip on Magadino.
But it didn't last long because in October of 1961, Alberto left his wife and daughters in Toronto to meet Magadino. He never made it, though.
He ended up badly beaten, burned, really gruesomely disfigured

in a cornfield. I wrote in the book that it was like encountering an animal or something.

The police couldn't even tell that it was human. It was in the middle of a circle that had been

burned into the grass like a demented sign from hell. And no one really knows who did it, but

people suspect that Magadino had caught wind of the fact that Igwechi was railing against him and

Thank you. sign from hell.
And no one really knows who did it, but people suspect that Magadino had caught wind of the fact that Igweici was railing against him and speaking poorly and taking his

name in vain and had something done about it. Now, the rest of the story is incredibly complicated,

and we don't have time to tell it here, but it's a tale of brotherhood and betrayal and

threats on people's lives. And ultimately, Joseph Valacci ends up fearing for his life.
It was at this point, apparently, when Valacci decided to sing for protection. An FBI agent was assigned to him full time, and the Justice Department began filling in the blanks on its chart of Cosa Nostra.
This is Valacci's great value, says the department. He is the first member of Cosa Nostra publicly to confirm its existence.
And this is how we get hours of televised Senate testimony about the inner workings of the mafia. And it's the first time the word mafia was ever heard by most Americans.
But Americans had some understanding of organized crime. Yes, in the 1950s, there was something called the Kefauver Hearings, which were televised in 14 cities across America.
And it was something else. It was a hit.
It was like a primetime reality show that people were glued to their television sets to watch. It was a parade of what one publication called 600 gangsters, pimps, bookies, and shady lawyers who testified about the activities of organized crime.
Up until that point, this is something that had existed in the shadows, and suddenly it's in living rooms across America. You have these gangsters on screen talking about, or in some cases, not talking about their crimes.
This was pretty electrifying stuff in its day. Yes, it sure was.
30 million Americans tuned in. And remember, this is still in the early days of TV.
Was this the hearing where Frank Costello testified without showing his face? Yes, Frank Costello, the all-powerful leader of the Luciano crime family, was shot only from the neck down, so you couldn't see his face, and he wouldn't really say anything. But still, just to watch him in the hearings was a huge hit.
The New York Times headlined its article, Costello, TV's first headless star, only his hands entertain audiences. You must have in your mind some things you've done that you can speak off to your credit as an American citizen.
If so, what are they? Paid by tax. This was like The Sopranos in real life.
But nothing compared to the Bellacci hearings 10 years later. Yes, 10 years later, Joseph Bellacci did what Costello would not.
He told and showed everything. May I ask you this time, when did you become a member of this organization? 1930.
What is the name of it? Corsonost in Italian. Our thing and our family in English.
And he said a lot in those 31 hours of testimony. Yeah, he gives almost everything.
He tells about what the initiation rites were. He tells the codes.
He tells the hierarchy. Well, this is a secret organization.
How do you get to know that somebody is a member of the same family? He'll introduce them to you, for instance, as a friend of ours. That means a member.
Now, if he happens to be with someone that isn't a friend of ours, he would just simply say, meet a friend of mine, which means nothing. That's the code between us.
The mob put out a hit on him, offering $100,000 to anyone who could take him out. But it was too late.
He had already spilled everything on national television, and he even used the word godfather. And on the other side of the television screen, Mario Puzo is soaking all of this in like a sponge.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, the testimony was authentic.
It was real. But Mario

Puzo was a writer and author who are a great researcher. So he's sitting at home in the suburbs of New York, lying on his couch, watching these hearings like everybody else.
But he did what nobody else did. He was able to take these hearings and fictionalize them and create a family that was even more romantic, more dangerous,

more influential than anything he's seen on television. He created the Corleone family.
You've described Puzo as a white whale in your reporting of the story because you never actually got to speak to him. But how did you get to the heart of his story and his background? To my eternal regret, Mario Puzo had passed away by the time I started working on the magazine article and, of course, later the book.
But he would tell his incredible story himself in numerous newspapers and magazine articles and later in interviews. and I was able to speak to his eldest daughter, Dorothy Puzo, who told me in an email that she

thought most likely her father had tossed all of the research, all of the writing that he had done on the movie and the book The Godfather. She said, you know, he was a poor aspiring writer.
Who would know to keep that stuff?

But to my astonishment and amazement and good fortune, those things weren't tossed.

They were saved and they're now on display at Dartmouth University in a library there. You can see his writing on the back of folders, which he liked to use with a red sharpie.
You can see his typewriter. You can read early drafts of both the novel and the screenplay of The Godfather.
And then later in my research for the book, I was able to speak with his son, Anthony Puzo, who was invaluable in telling me about his illustrious father, the frog who became a prince of Hollywood, and the true hero of The Godfather. September, 1979.
Virginia's top prison band, Edge of Daybreak, is about to record their debut album behind bars. In just five hours.
Okay, we're rolling. One, two, three, four.
I'm Jamie Petras, music and culture writer. For the past five years, I've been talking to the band's three surviving members.
They're out of prison now and in their 70s. Their past behind them.
But they also have some unfinished business. The end of daybreak, Eyes of Love was supposed to have been followed up by another album.
It's a story about the liberating power of music, the American justice system, and ultimately, second chances. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Camila Ramon, Peloton's first Spanish-speaking cycling and tread instructor. I'm an athlete, entrepreneur, and almost most importantly, a perreo enthusiast.
And I'm Melissa Ortiz, former pro soccer player and Olympian, and like Kami, a perreo enthusiast. Come on, who is it? Our podcast, Hasta Abajo, is where sports, music, and fitness collide.
And we cover it all. De arriba, hasta abajo.
Sit-downs with real game-changers in the sports world, like Miami Dolphins CMO Priscilla Shumate, who is redefining what it means to be a Latina leader. It all changed when I had this guy come to me.
He said to me, you know, you're not Latina enough. First of all, what does that mean? mouth is wide open.
Yeah. History makers like the Sucar family who became the first Peruvians to win a Grammy.
It was a very special moment for us. It's been 15 years for me in this career.
Finally, things are starting to shift into a different level. Listen to Hasta Abajo on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network. Hey y'all, it's your girl Cheekies and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite podcast, Cheekies and Chill.
I'll be sharing even more personal stories with you guys. And I know a lot of people are going to attack me.
Why are you going to go visit your dad? Your mom wouldn't be okay with it. I'm going to tell you guys right now, I know my mother and I know my mom had a very forgiving heart.
That is my story on plastic surgery. This is my truth.
I think the last time I cried like that was when I lost my mom. Like that, like yelling.
I was like, no. I was like, oh, and I thought, what did I do wrong? And as always, you'll get my exclusive take on topics like love, personal growth, health, family ties, and more.
And don't forget, I'll also be dishing out my best advice to you on episodes of Dear Cheekies. So my fiance and I have been together for 10 years.
In the first two years of being together, I find out he is cheating on me, not only with women, but also with men. What should I do? Okay, where do I start? That's not love.
He doesn't love you enough because if he loved you, he'd be faithful. It's going to be an exciting year and I hope that you can join me.
Listen to Cheekies and Chill season four as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pod of Rebellion, our new Star Wars Rebels Rewatch podcast.
I'm Vanessa Marshall. Hi, I'm Tia Surkar.
I'm Taylor Gray. And I'm John Lee Brody.
But you may also know us as Harrison Dula's Spectre 2. Sabine Wren's Spectre 5.
And Ezra Bridger, Spectre 6 from Star Wars Rebels. Wait, uh, I wasn't on Star Wars Rebels.
Am I in the right place? Absolutely. Each week, we're going to re-watch and discuss an episode from the series.
And share some fun behind-the-scenes stories. Sometimes we'll be visited by special guests like Steve Bloom, voice of Zabarelio Spectre 4, or Dante Bosco, voice of Jai Kel Kel and many others.
Sometimes we'll even have a lively debate and we'll have plenty of other fun surprises

and trivia too. Oh, and me? Well, I'm the lucky ghost crew Stowaway who gets to help moderate

and guide the discussion each week. Kind of like how Kanan guided Ezra in the ways of the force.

You see what I did there? Nicely done, John. Thanks, Tia.
So, hang on, because it's going to be a fun ride. Cue the music! Listen to Potter Rebellion on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Where did Puzo come from? Because in a lot of ways, he's the most unlikely character of all in this story. Yes, his life was like an unlikely fairy tale.
As he wrote in various accounts, including his 1972 memoir, The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions, Mario was born into one of the worst sections of New York, whose very name evokes his depravity, Hell's Kitchen. And he was born into a family of immigrants, many of them illiterate, including his mother, who he said could not even read or sign her name, but who employed language like a weapon.
Many of the terms that Mario used in The Godfather, he said, were straight out of his mama's mouth. He grew up in a large family in a tenement flat, and Puzo claimed he never met an honest-to-God gangster, even though they were all around him.
Was his mother worried that he would fall prey to the bad element in the neighborhood? Absolutely. His mother was very protective of Mario, but she wasn't worried about guns so much as girls.
Mario claimed he never had that many dates, though. And he was one of 13 kids.
Yes, and from the beginning, he was different from the rest. He loved gambling.
He loved to pitch pennies and play cards, and he liked to read. And early on, he would read Dostoevsky and go to the library.
And for a long time, he was sort of a hopeless character.

Fame and fortune eluded him, right, Mark?

Yeah, for a long, long time.

He grew up, he was very impoverished.

They were so poor that Mario said

that once his teacher asked all the students

to bring a can of food for the poor,

and Mario would say they didn't know we were the poor.

And he went out anyway with the other kids in his neighborhood, and they went out and stole cans of food to be able to bring it to school. What did his mom think about his profession as a writer? Well, her greatest aspiration for Mario was that he would become a railroad clerk and get a steady salary.
He liked to say every family has a chooch, the Italian word for donkey. And he goes, in my family, the chooch was me.
College, he would later write, wasn't an option. There were two high schools in his neighborhood, and his mom and sister thought he should go to the one that didn't prepare you for college.
He asked, why didn't you urge me to attend college? And his sister says, because you were stupid. And he didn't become a writer right away, did he? No, poor Mario.
He suffered so much before finding his future as a writer. Things were so grim for Mario Puzo that when World War II broke out, he was excited to get away from home.
So he joined the military. You know, it was a dream to him.
He was assigned to the 4th Armored Division, Private Puzo. He's deployed to Europe.
He drove a Jeep. He had affairs.
He found a wife, a German woman who he fell in love with and brought back to America. And best of all, he found material for his first novel.
It sounds like World War II was the best thing to ever happen to him. Well, not immediately.

Typical to Mario is the suffering.

He had dreams of being a writer, but he didn't know where to start.

So he went to the City College of New York on the GI Bill,

and he studied literature and creative writing.

And then he did what would become his trademark.

He struggled.

His weight went up.

His bank account went down. He was broke all the time.
He was gambling. He was adrift.
He got a job as a clerk at the Manhattan Armory, but he never had enough money to quit his day job to become a writer. He wanted to write high art.
He wanted to be an artistic writer. He wanted to be like Dostoevsky or other writers he admired.
But it was all just a struggle for him. Some of his diaries still exist, and it's just full of torment and loss and the theme that money is just ruining everything.
And does he sit down and write his war novel? Yes. All along, he's writing his first novel, The Dark Arena, which gets published by Random House in 1954, and he thinks, wow, this is it.

You know, I'm a published author. But the reviews were mixed.
It didn't do for him what he expected, and Mario got an advance of $3,500, which was quickly gone. His weight was way up.
His hopes were way down. And then on Christmas Eve, something incredible happened.
He was at home, and he suffered a severe gallbladder attack. He called a taxi, which drove him to New York City in excruciating pain.
He arrived at the VA hospital, and just then the attack worsened.

He opened the door of the taxi, and he fell out, and he landed in a gutter.

And he wrote about it later in Time magazine.

Here I am, a published author, and I'm lying in a gutter, dying like a dog.

At that moment, I decided I'm going to become rich and famous.

Wow, so he had really hit rock bottom. How long did it take for him to pull himself up by his bootstraps? Well, a long time, because just because you say you want something to happen doesn't mean it will.
By 1960, Mario's family had grown to five kids, and his job was in danger, because the FBI was investigating his unit for helping young soldiers obey the draft. Mario was never charged, but he ended up quitting his job and pursuing the most unusual path for a writer who aspired to high art.
He decided to become a pulp fiction writer. Exactly.
It was a company called Magazine Management, and if there was any man who was destined to write Pulp Fiction, it was Mario Puzo. I was able to speak with one of his colleagues, John Bowers, and he said Mario was just able to use his research to invent whole worlds.
But Mario had infinite energy at writing. He just could write like nobody's business.
So he walked into the Pulp Fiction offices of magazine management. It's a smoke-filled office.
It's full of men and women sitting over clattering typewriters, pumping out copy for like this never-ending flood of trash magazines with names like Mail and Stag and For Men Only. They were call magazines, but they were really sort of rags.
And soon Mario Puzo was pumping out salacious stories of brave GIs, of damsels in distress. He even wrote a story that took place in Hawaii where mobsters busted in a gambling parlor, right? Exactly.
Yeah, that was just one of the many stories. But I think that was the first of all the ones that I saw that really tackled some instance of the mafia.
And of course, most of it was just dreamed up. Not most of it.
All of it was dreamed up. I mean, he said once that he would take a real-life battle where 7,000 people got killed and turn it into a bloody battle where 100,000 died.

I wish you could read some of those amazing, magical stories.

It was larger than life.

It didn't have to depend upon fact-checking at all.

He'd amp up the action no matter what, and that became his trademark. He became one of the top pulp fiction writers of all time.
Before, you know, he was aspiring to high art. He was spending his time on these novels that didn't make him any money.
He had enormous expenses, not only the bookies that he owed money to, but also, you know, he had a family of five kids. He had to make a living.
He had to bring money home. And he owed money to the IRS.
He owed money to his family. He owed money to the bookkeepers.
And he kept gambling. He kept eating.
He kept living this life that was just way beyond his means. And as much as he aspired to high art, it seems like he was almost destined to write Pulp Fiction.
I mean, after eight years doing it, he was pretty much the most successful of any of them. Well, yeah, but he was not making a huge amount of money.
Yeah, I believe we got something like $150, something like that, for the week. So he went back to his publisher and said, you know, I'm ready for my third book, my third novel.
And his publisher said, forget about it, Mario. They weren't ready to assign him a third book.
And one of the editors said, well, you know, if the fortunate pilgrim had a little bit more of that mafia stuff in it, maybe it would sell. And those words rang in Mario Puzo's head.
A little bit more of that mafia stuff. And that's when it all clicked for him.

He remembered how he had been engrossed by the Vellacci hearings.

It's like a scene out of a movie.

I mean, here's this overweight, overwrought, in-debt writer,

and he pays $10 for the 10-volume transcripts of the Kefauver hearings,

and he gets access to his friend Peter Mass's book on the Valachi hearings, and he gets a lot of other research, and he sits down in his basement, and he cranks out a 10-page outline, and he takes it to his agent, the legendary Candido Donatio, and she sends it out to various publishers, and much to Mario's surprise, one of them gives him $5,000. And what does he do? Of course, he spends the money and he doesn't work on the book.
God, seriously? Yes, he gambles. He spends some money on his family, obviously, and soon the money is all gone.
But the important thing is that he has a fire lit under him, and he has to deliver the book. Not so fast, Nathan.
There's one place a struggling writer can turn to for some fast cash. This must be when he goes to Hollywood.
Allegedly. Evan says Puzo shows up at the gates of Paramount, 35 pages under his arm, looking broke, and sells the option to Paramount for $12,500.
And Mario claims he sold the option through his agent and the story editor at Paramount, and then he never even went to California. Well, regardless of what happened, he sold the option to Paramount.
For big money for Mario, too, $12,500. So now he writes the book.
Yes, he goes home, he walks down the stairs to his basement, and there between the pool table and the constant racket of his five kids, a mafia family rises up from his typewriter. And what a family it is.
He gets the name from a town in Sicily, one of the most mafia-infested towns in the country, Corleone. There's Don Vito Corleone, the godfather.
There's the eldest son and heir apparent, Santino, known as Sonny. There's the middle son, the poorest suffering subservient, Fredo.
And there's the youngest, the future, the college boy who chose to enlist in the military instead of the mafia, Michael. Mario, of course, claimed he had never met an honest-to-goodness gangster, but he looked for inspiration wherever he could.
One story I just loved from when he was writing the book was that one night in 1966, the author Gay Talese and his wife Nan invited Mario to dinner at the home of Talese's aunt, Susan Pelleggi. And Susan Pelleggi, of course, is the mother of the also famous writer, Nick Pelleggi, who had gone to write the novel Wise Guy.
Which was the foundation for Goodfellas. Exactly.
And Gay Talese had written the organized crime classic, Honor Thy Father. And so here's a newcomer to the realm, Mario Puzo, the author of The Forthcoming Godfather at the same table.
So he takes one look at Nan Talese, who'd grown up on the Upper East Side, who was from a different world, very genteel, educated, and he immediately found a model for the wife of Michael Corleone, Kay. So he was really pulling from all around him for inspiration.
That was the brilliance of Mario Puzo, that he would find inspiration in unlikely places. So another thing I was able to discover is that Mario, being Mario and loving Las Vegas more than any other place on earth probably, would go to Las Vegas regularly and gamble at, among other places, the Sands Hotel.
And I was able to interview Ed Walters, who worked as a pit boss at the Sands. Tell me when you first saw Mario Puzo.
Mario Puzo came to Vegas. He used to come to Vegas a lot.
He was a roulette fiend. He played roulette.
And he said that Mario would come in and gamble and at the same time ask questions for his forthcoming book about the mob. He was a little pudgy guy.
And I met him, too. He was talking to this dealer on the roulette wheels,

and I was on the wheels at that time.

And I was standing, I'd listen to him.

I'd answer questions myself.

He'd ask questions about Sinatra and the mob and money.

And because of me, then I opened up about,

because he had things wrong.

I said, well, no, you've got it mixed up.

The mob and the mafia are not the same thing. The mafia are all Italians.
And of course, Ed Walters, who knew a bit about the mob because he had come from New York City, where he had known a lot of people that were, let's say, somehow connected, told Mario a bit, you know, to keep him gambling there. And Mario would ask questions about who was who and what was what.
And as long as he kept gambling, Ed Walters kept talking. Was he taking notes and everything while you were telling him this? No, he didn't at first, but then he started to.
And pretty soon, Mario had an insight into the Vegas aspect of the mob, which figured into the Godfather quite a bit. He'd say, so Eddie, tell me, how deep is Sinatra in the mob? And I said, hold it, hold it, hold it.
I said, Sinatra ain't in the mob. Stop it.
He said, guys told me he's in the mob. I said, full of shit.
I said, Sinatra's not in the mob. He works for us.
He's a fucking entertainer. And he thought, wow, that's interesting.
So Mario would be playing while he's talking to him? Yeah. Yeah, all the time.
Oh, he couldn't have it just sit there and take notes, no. Why? Oh, yeah, we don't want no fucking guy sitting in our casino taking notes.
So you let him do it because he was playing yes because he's playing oh so that was good for you yeah yeah of course i told some people he's writing a book or some shit i don't know but as long as he plays as long as he played fine but there's no way if a guy was daughter Dorothy saying that he couldn't have known this book would be a success. No, of course, he didn't think it was going to be a great success while he was writing.
He was writing, as he always did, he liked to say, for a paycheck. But at the same time, he had decided to give up on high art and those aspirations to be a Dostoyevsky or something like that, you know, to be a fine art writer.
He was writing a sensational story about a sensational family and a sensational world, and he had no aspirations of writing high art. He wanted to turn this book into bucks.
He wanted to make money on The Godfather. Funnily enough, with his back against the wall, he ends up turning out the most Dostoevsky-esque of all of his novels.
Yeah, I know it became something of a masterpiece. I mean, I wouldn't say it was, you know, incredible literature, but at the same time, it was a page turner, a potboiler.
It had all the attributes of like Valley of the Dolls or something like that, but set in the world of organized crime. I don't think he expected it to do what it did, though, still.
I think he thought he was going to, you know, write a book for money, get his $5,000 advance and maybe some royalties, pay off some debts, and then get on to the next project. Instead, it took the world by storm.
Well, and when he was down in that basement and the kids were screaming, he would shout, quiet, don't you know I'm writing a bestseller here? Yeah, but I think that was a joke. You know, the kids would laugh, he would laugh.
I think he had no idea that he was writing a bestseller. And I don't think he'd ever dreamed The Godfather would become an international bestseller and a model for possibly the greatest movie of all time.
When he does eventually finish the book, what happens? So, he leaves the pages with his agent, Candido Donatio, and in true Mario Puzo fashion, he takes his money, he takes his family, and he flies off to Europe for a big vacation with lots of food and gambling. But isn't he still broke? He's broker than he ever has been.
He doesn't have the money to go to Europe. He finances the trip by getting cash advances on his credit card.
He and his family have a great time, but when he returns home, he's eight grand in debt. Can you imagine? Eight grand back then is a fortune.
He goes straight to his agent's office in hopes that she can, as he would later write, pull a slick magazine assignment out of her sleeve and bail him out. Instead, she informs him that Putnam, his publisher, has offered money for the paperback rights to the Godfather.
And Mario goes, how much? And she goes, $375,000. Wow.
Even now, that's a really good offer. So does he take it? Well, he doesn't believe it.
He says, this must be some kind of Madison Avenue. Come on.
He thinks they're joking. After all, the biggest advance up to that point for paperback rights had been $400,000.

So Candida Donatio, his agent, picks up the phone, calls his editor at Putnam, Bill Targ, and the editor says the amount is not correct. The offer had already gone up to $400,000.
Wow. And when the dust had settled and the deal was done, Mario Puzo had sold the paperback rights to the Godfather for $410,000, setting a new record.

Does he get that all at once? Of course not. They give him $100,000, and he takes it to the bank where he said the teller had always, you know, looked at him in a scant when he needed money or, you know, cashed his little checks.
And he showed him the $100,000 check just to watch him grovel, he said. He quit his job at magazine management and he went home and promptly spent the $100,000.
And he was back at his publisher a few months later saying, could you give me another hundred. And000? And they said, Mario, we just gave you $100,000.
And he said, $100,000 doesn't last forever. Well, broke or not, The Godfather was published on March 10, 1969, and it shot to the top of the bestseller list.
Absolutely. It was an instant success.
But Puzo is sort of the most critical about the lack of artistic merit in The Godfather. It's not as good as the preceding two novels.
He said, I wrote it to make money. Yeah, Puzo said if he knew it was going to be such a hit, he would have written it a lot better.
But The Godfather was a sensation. The reviews were ecstatic.
Even the New York Times gave it a rave. Puzo, all of a sudden, this nobody writer begins living very large.
He's a superstar on his way to becoming one of the best-selling writers in the world. He's on the Today Show.
He's being courted in restaurants. All of a sudden, champagne would appear at his table from a certain interested party across the room, which were made men who felt sure that he would have some kind of insight, information, or maybe he was a made man himself.
He became a superstar. The book spent 67 weeks on the bestseller list.
Miraculously, his vow in the gutter to become rich and famous had suddenly become true. And in Hollywood, too, all of a sudden, Bob Evans remembered the dead broke writer who appeared in his office with those 35 pages under his arm.
And the book came out and it became the biggest book in the decade. The only problem? The distribution department at Paramount didn't want to make the movie.
Nobody wanted to make it. As a matter of fact, Paramount refused to make it for a while.
They said, Mafia films don't sell. We did the Brotherhood two years ago.
It failed. They're not going to make this.
Apparently, the studio told Evans that the only way it could be made was if he could do it for under $2 million. So Evans turned to a producer at Paramount who is known for getting stuff made

on the cheap, the soon-to-be legendary Al Ruddy. I get a call with him.
Do I want to produce the

guy father? I got it with a joke. Yeah, of course, my favorite book.
I never read it. He'd ready

Anthony of New York to be Charlie Bluedorn. So I go to New York, I read the book on the plane.

I fell alone. in New York could be Charlie Bluedorn.
So I go to New York, I read the book on the plane. That's not a lot.
Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is a production of Airmail and iHeartMedia. The podcast is based on the book of the same name, written by our very own Mark Seal.
Our producer is Tina Mullen. Research assistance by Jack Sullivan.
Jonathan Dressler was our development producer. Our music supervisor is Randall Poster.
Our executive producers are me, Nathan King, Mark Seal, Dylan Fagan, and Graydon Carter. Special thanks to Bridget Arsenault and everyone

at CDM Studios. A comprehensive list of sources and acknowledgments can be found in Mark Seal's

book, Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.