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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,