The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [126]
Mario left behind two novels, Omerta and his partially completed tale of the Borgias, The Family, so it was a while before I approached his estate about the prospect of reviving The Godfather. After conversations with Mario’s eldest son, Anthony Puzo, and his literary agent, Neil Olson, we agreed on a strategy.
We would discreetly search for a writer at roughly the same stage of his or her career as Mario was when he wrote The Godfather—mid-forties, with two acclaimed literary novels to his credit, and a yearning to write a larger, more ambitious novel for a broader readership than his previous books had reached. We didn’t want a by-the-numbers hired gun. We wanted an original voice, someone who would bring artistry and vision to the Corleone saga, just as director Francis Ford Coppola had done so brilliantly in his film adaptations.
I outlined what we were looking for in a one-page query, which I sent confidentially via e-mail to about a dozen respected literary agents. Within twenty-four hours of sending my confidential e-mail, I received a phone call from New Yorker staff writer Nick Paumgarten. He’d heard all about our search and wanted to write about it. At first I was reluctant to cooperate, due to my concern that every would-be goomba in the country would send me a manuscript. Upon further consideration, I realized that there probably weren’t a lot of goombas reading The New Yorker, and that a story might be a good way to get out the word and attract a broader range of authors.
The day the story was published, The Godfather Returns became headline news. I was deluged with calls from almost every major media organization in the United States, as well as many abroad, from CNN to the BBC in New Zealand. The New York Times Magazine published a cautionary essay about the dangers of sequels. I appeared on a Detroit radio morning “zoo” show with a Vito Corleone impersonator who warned me that my career might come to an untimely end if I didn’t hire him to write the book.
We had set a deadline for the delivery of outlines from potential writers. We stuck to our guidelines—only published authors of acclaimed fiction would be considered. By the day of the deadline, we had been swamped with submissions from well-regarded authors (plus countless more from unpublished ones). As I sorted through the outlines, I was taped by a TV cameraman and interviewed by NBC News correspondent Jamie Gangel, who was covering our search, and who ultimately revealed the winner live on the Today show.
I quickly narrowed down the field to about a dozen serious contenders. Some were dismissed on account of inadvisable plot lines. (Michael Corleone falls in love with a Native American activist. Or, the Corleone women take over the family business. Or, Sonny Corleone didn’t really die.) Others were rejected because the writers didn’t seem to have the right feel for the material. One literary critic described Mario Puzo’s style as “somewhere between pulp and Proust.” That’s part of the reason for his success—he was an original writer who loved to entertain his readers. He could turn a phrase, and there was a sly ironic undertone to almost everything he wrote, but Mario’s greatest talent was for telling a story that stayed with you because the details were so captivating. Our ideal writer would have similar gifts.
From the dozen contenders, we arrived at four finalists. We would have been happy to publish any of them. After consultation with Tony Puzo and Neil Olson, we unanimously agreed that the best candidate was Mark Winegardner. Like Mario, he was an author of two acclaimed literary novels, The Veracruz Blues and Crooked River Burning, and to our delight, both books had organized-crime plot threads. I read Crooked River Burning and loved it,