In the late 1960s, Mario Puzo retreated to the basement nook that served as his office to work on a new book. The broom-closet-like space beneath his Long Island house had enough room for a desk, a typewriter and little more.
The basement also held a pool table, and while Puzo typed away, his five children would come down and play loud games, forcing Puzo to admonish the brood.
“He’d say, ‘Keep it down, I’m writing a best-seller,'” Puzo’s eldest child, Tony, tells The Post.
The kids rolled their eyes and snickered. Their father’s claim was so laughable because, at that point, Puzo was a long way from the best-seller list. His previous two novels were well-reviewed but had sold about enough copies to fill a modest station wagon.
So Puzo had decided to sell out. He put his highbrow literary aspirations aside and set out to pen a big, honking, commercial book that would bring him fame and fortune. Or at least enough money to pay off his mounting debts.
The result was “The Godfather,” published 50 years ago next week, and a book that, as he promised his children, did indeed become a best-seller — and then some.
The Mafia tale had its roots in rough Hell’s Kitchen, where Puzo was raised by Italian immigrants. His father worked for the railroad and abandoned the family when Mario was 12. (He was later diagnosed with a mental illness.)
Puzo’s stern mother kept him clear of the gangs that dominated the neighborhood back then, and the young man spent his free time reading books checked out from the public library.
While a student at Commerce High School, Puzo’s writing drew notice. He was told by teachers it was good enough to be published.
As an adult, he wrote adventure stories for a pulpy men’s magazine published by the owner of Marvel Comics. (Stan Lee was right down the hall.)
Puzo’s first novel, 1955’s “The Dark Arena,” earned him $3,500. His second, 1965’s “The Fortunate Pilgrim,” just $3,000.
“I was going downhill fast,” Puzo wrote in his 1972 memoir “The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions.”
Puzo increasingly struggled to make ends meet.
“He liked to do things first-class even though we only had fifth-class money,” says Tony Puzo, 72, a retired editor. “He ran up a lot of debt.”
When his editor mentioned that “The Fortunate Pilgrim” might have done better if it had more Mafia in it, Puzo reluctantly accepted the seeds for his next book.
He wrote a 10-page outline for a novel about the Corleone crime family, whose son Michael takes the reins after his father is murdered. But Puzo’s then-publisher passed.
Eventually, a friend arranged a meeting at G.P. Putnam’s Sons, the venerable New York publisher behind Edgar Allan Poe, among others.
“The editors just sat around for an hour listening to my Mafia tales and said go ahead,” Puzo wrote in 1972.
The author walked away with a $5,000 advance. He didn’t really want to write the book, however, and spent three years working on it.
He finally finished in July 1968, because he needed the final installment of the advance to take his family to visit Europe.
“He was so broke,” Carol Gino, an author and Puzo’s longtime girlfriend, tells The Post (Puzo’s wife died in 1978; he followed in 1999). “His wife never knew that when they came home from Europe, they were going to have to sell the house.”
It never came to that.
Upon his return, Puzo had lunch at the Algonquin Hotel with his editor, Bill Targ, and was stunned when Targ informed him the publisher had sold the paperback rights to “The Godfather” for $410,000 (nearly $3 million in today’s dollars). Before the book had been released in hardback, Fawcett had snapped up the paperback privileges, breaking the then-record by $10,000.
Puzo was in disbelief, asking Targ if this was “some kind of Madison Avenue put-on.”
“That kind of sale for paperback rights at the time was unheard of,” says Jim Milliot, the Publishers Weekly editorial director.
Puzo was flush for the first time in his life.
“Every Italian family has a ‘chooch,’ a donkey, a family idiot that everybody agrees will never be able to make any money,” Puzo wrote in his memoir. The writer now called his family to let them know he was no longer the chooch.
Puzo promptly asked the publisher for a $100,000 check, and he used the money to pay off debts. Three months later, he called the publisher and asked for another $100,000.
The stunned publisher asked what happened to the fortune they’d just given him. “A hundred grand doesn’t last forever,” Puzo replied.
‘The Godfather” hardback was released March 10, 1969, and had the good fortune to appear at a time when American’s interest in organized crime was at a fever pitch.
“The Mafia became much more present in pop culture after the [1950-51] Kefauver hearings [on organized crime],” says Kenneth Davis, author of “Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America.” “Then there was the breakup of the [1957] Apalachin Mafia meeting in upstate New York and the publication [in 1968] of ‘The Valachi Papers’ [about Brooklyn mobster Joe Valachi]. A few things all came together at once.”
Reviews for the book were solid. Kirkus concluded it was “bound for popularity,” and The New York Times agreed, writing “The Godfather” was “such a compelling story” that it was headed for “the heights of best-sellerdom.”
Reviewers especially applauded the authentic job Puzo had done of capturing the criminal underworld. He did it so well, some suspected the author had connections.
“He was a little offended if anyone asked him if he was part of the Mafia,” says Gino, whose book “Me & Mario” chronicles her time with Puzo. “He worked so hard and suffered so much humiliation to get out of Hell’s Kitchen [and the gangs].”
Whatever the reason, “The Godfather” connected with readers like few books had.
“According to Fawcett’s sales figures, ‘The Godfather’ was the fastest-selling book in history, with 5 million copies sold in 1970,” Milliot says. “By January of 1971, there were 7 million copies in print.”
It was also at the time the single most profitable book published by Putnam’s and, in paperback (also released in 1969), by Fawcett. (A 50th-anniversary edition of the masterpiece hits shelves Tuesday.)
Puzo was so used to being broke, it took him a while to adapt to his windfall.
“One time, he went to the library and the book he wanted was taken out,” Tony Puzo says. “Then he remembered he had money now and went to the bookstore and bought a bunch of books.”
One source that surprisingly didn’t add much to Puzo’s coffers was the 1972 movie adaptation.
After Puzo had completed 100 pages of “The Godfather,” Paramount offered him $12,500 as an “option” to make the film, with another $50,000 if the movie got made. Puzo’s agent advised passing on the deal, but to the writer, that kind of money looked like “Fort Knox.” He took it.
The studio set out to make a low-budget adaptation that would cost about one-fifth what their other films did.
“The [option] cost Paramount nothing and they wanted to get a movie made, but every big director turned it down,” “The Godfather” producer Al Ruddy tells The Post. “In everyone’s mind, it was a nice gangster thriller but nothing important.”
Ruddy was hired because he’d made one previous movie and it came in under budget. He read “The Godfather” on the plane to New York to meet Charles Bluhdorn, the head of Gulf and Western, owner of Paramount.
“I was stunned,” Ruddy says. “The narrative was so strong. I said, ‘This is a masterpiece.’ ”
Ruddy told Bluhdorn he’d like to make an “ice-blue terrifying movie about people you love.” Bluhdorn replied, ‘That’s brilliant,” then left the meeting.
Ruddy was ambivalent about hiring Puzo to adapt the screenplay because novelists can be too precious about their book. The two met for lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria. “Mario said, ‘If you hire me, I promise you I will never look at this book again,’ ” Ruddy says. “And he threw his copy of the book on the floor at the restaurant. I gave him the job.”
Puzo flew out to LA and moved into The Beverly Hills Hotel — a luxury that wiped out the $500 a week he was being paid in expenses.
At the time, though, the proposed Mafia flick angered some — especially Italian-Americans who thought “The Godfather” promoted stereotypes. (Puzo, too, received numerous angry letters from Italian-Americans.)
Mafia boss Joe Colombo was especially irked and made filming in New York City difficult by strong-arming local businesses and unions not to cooperate. To make peace, Ruddy invited Colombo to his office to read “The Godfather” script.
The mob boss showed up with two henchmen, and Ruddy handed him the massive, 155-page script.
Colombo pulled out reading glasses and stared at the first page for a couple minutes. Finally, he turned to Ruddy and asked, “What does ‘fade in’ mean?”
“I knew he’d never get to page two,” Ruddy says.
‘Through ‘The Godfather,’ I came to my true gift: a storyteller.’’
Colombo tossed the script aside and hurriedly made a deal with Ruddy to excise the word “Mafia” from the script. (There was just a single instance.)
After that, work on the film proceeded more smoothly.
One Italian-American who would not be so easily placated was Frank Sinatra. Ol’ Blue Eyes’ lawyers had demanded to see a manuscript of the novel before it was published because Sinatra thought the mobbed-up crooner Johnny Fontane bore a resemblance to him.
Later, when Puzo was working on the movie script, he found himself at a party with Sinatra. The host insisted on introducing them, despite Puzo’s refusals.
Sinatra exploded, calling Puzo a “pimp” and threatened to beat him up, according to Puzo’s memoir. As the writer walked away, the singer screamed, “Choke. Go ahead and choke.”
Even with the controversy, the film, of course, went on to become among the greatest made, and the script (co-written with director Francis Ford Coppola) won Puzo an Oscar and suddenly turned him into an in-demand screenwriter.
“After ‘The Godfather,’ my dad bought a book on how to write screenplays,” Tony Puzo says. “On the first page, it said, ‘The best screenplay ever written was ‘The Godfather.’ After he read that, he threw the book away.”
Tony Puzo says his dad had an “80 percent” positive relationship with his most famous book. Mario did lament the fact that readers often didn’t know he wrote other novels.
Still, Puzo recognized what writing that big commercial book had brought him.
“He said once, ‘I felt at the time that I had sold out, because I was a literary man,'” Gino says. “‘But through “The Godfather,” I came to my true gift: a storyteller.'”