NOEL COWARDS is said to have sent the following telegram to Marlene Dietrich on her 70th birthday: "It just occurred to me that I've loved you all my life." I don't know if my 35 year friendship with Mario Puzo qualifies as a love affair, but it's been more rewarding than several of the actual ones I've endured. It began in the early sixties when I lured him as an assistant editor at the Magazine Management Company, which put out four monthly adventure magazines: Male, Men, Man's World and - my favourite - True Action. (As opposed to what? False Action?) I offered him $150 a week with an opportunity to enhance his income by writing as many freelance pieces as he could handle. This was what Puzo described as his first straight job, and he misguidedly took my hiring him as an act of generosity.
Actually, I'd read his first novel The Dark Arena, and saw in him someone capable of single handedly writing half our editorial content. In the five years that followed he produced several million words for the magazines, while also working on a new novel called The Godfather.
Many of the stories were dramatised versions of great second World War battles - Anzio, Corregidor, the Bulge. When he ran out of battles, Puzo was only too happy to concoct new ones. Puzzled at first, readers who were veterans wrote to us, hungry for details of these great conflicts that they had somehow missed. Among the many other stories he tossed off were a substantial number of mini Godfathers, still there in the archives waiting to be mined by some entrepreneurial film producer.
My memories of Puzo at this time all have to do with size - the size of his appetite for one thing, especially when he would arrange to meet you for Chinese dinner and, if you were five minutes late, slip around the corner and wolf down an entire pizza as an appetiser. After which he'd calmly "take in", as he put it, a seven course Cantonese meal. Then there was the size of his cigars and the enormity of his laugh, always filled with amazement at some quirk of human behaviour. Above all, there was the size of his generosity. Even as a struggling assistant editor, he would fight you tooth and nail for the bill at a restaurant.
I don't know if Puzo is the most intelligent man I know, but I always think of him as the wisest. On one occasion, three words from him may have saved my life. Years ago after Crazy Joey Gallo had been released from prison, the mobster and his buddies had taken to staging Friday night soirees at the Chelsea home of Jerry Orbach, the actor, along with my wife and three children showed up at several of these fascinating, lavishly catered get togethers, which featured an impressive list of writers, actors, socialites and barons of industry. With great delight, I told Puzo about it. He listened carefully, thought for a moment and said: "It's not intelligent."
I never showed up again, and later, when I was invited to join Gallo and friends at Umberto's Clam House for a late night meal, I declined. Had it not been for Puzo's three word advisory, I might very well have been in the line of fire that fateful night when Crazy Joey was gunned down.
These thoughts travel through my mind as drive to Puzo's house on Long Island, New York to congratulate him on the publication this month of his new novel, The Last Don. It deals with the all controlling Clericuzio clan, the most powerful Mafia family in America, as the Don prepares to relinquish power and ease his family into mainstream and legitimate America - the movie business, in particular. The Clericuzios are very much a modern day version of The Godfather's Corleone family, but Puzo's knowledge of that world has only deepened with the passage of time.
Beginning with The Godfather Puzo's triumph has been to combine a literary sensibility and a steam rolling narrative in almost mathematically equal measures - the dream of every writer. But never before has he brought off this feat with more power (a favourite Puzo word) than in The Last Don.
The Godfather dealt with Hollywood and Vegas only in passing, but in The Last Don that's where the real action is. Even as the old Don is wrapping up the family's illicit businesses back east, a new generation of Clericuzios is making its way out west. One cousin has become a prominent screenwriter, while another runs one of the great Vegas casinos. At first they try to keep the family business at arm's length, but naturally that doesn't last.
Of course, there is always a slight downside to reading a Puzo novel. His seigneurial style is infectious. The night before I went to see him, I found myself admonishing my wife, suggesting that she "betrayed" me by not picking up the mail. My 12 year old daughter has "dishonoured" me and failed to show proper "respect" by not putting her dishes in the sink. Then, too, there is the sharpening effect on your appetite, stimulated by the mouth watering descriptions of banquets and the parade of lovingly described dishes. At midnight, before my visit, I became ravenously hungry for pasta and had to prowl the streets of Southampton in search of an Italian restaurant that hadn't closed.
When I arrive at his house, I recall that it was once considerably more modest in size. Wings have been added, as have a tennis court and well tended garden paths, so that it's become an estate worthy of Don Clericuzio himself.
PUZO comes out to greet me, looking better and more relaxed than he has in years. Still moving gracefully, he wears a green country club style jacket and rich off white slacks. For some time, he has been taken with the idea that he resembles Marlon Brando. I'd always been dismissive of this, but amazingly, now that he's in his seventies, he has started to resemble Brando. In truth, he looks better than the legendary actor.
He leads me into his huge, airy studio, which might easily exist in Malibu. It is lined with various translations of his books and cassettes of his movies. When I suggest that The Last Don may he his best yet, he is not entirely convinced.
"What about the ending?"
I have to laugh. The book was bought by CBS Television for $2.1 million (after a bidding war with Francis Ford Coppola); it's been sold to a long list of foreign countries; it's already received several enthusiastic reviews - and he's worried about the ending. It works, Mario," I say.
I knew Puzo had put in years of research on the Borgias, and am curious why he'd set that aside to work on The Last Don.
"I had all my notes assembled. I had digested the research, and I was probably the world's top expert on the Borgias. Then wrote a few pages on my old typewriter and realised that if I proceeded with the novel I would have to say `M'lord' a thousand times."
"So you switched to Vegas, Hollywood and the Mob?"
"Which is not to say that I won't return to the Borgias. Many of the ideas in my novel were suggested by the Borgias. But it would never sell to the movies; the Pope is a villain, although I do treat him sympathetically."
The Last Don is a return to the three things he knows best: the film business, gambling and, of course, the Mafia. I've never spoken about Puzo to anyone who didn't suspect that he was in some way "connected", and it's no secret that Mafia figures have actually modelled their behaviour - and speech - on characters in The Godfather. Did that amuse him?
"It works both ways. I've actually caught myself using some of the facial expressions and bodily gestures of Brando in The Godfather. And there was one chilling moment in Gary Crosby's house in Vegas. Two hard looking men surrounded me and poked me in the ribs, saying "Admit it, Puzo, you're one of the guys." I denied it, of course, then Crosby told me that one of my new friends was John Roselli, whose name I recognised from the literature, and whose body was later found in a dumpster. The other guy was present at Bugsy Siegel's ambush and execution. He was unharmed, so you can figure out what his role was."
I recall that Joey Gallo had once asked Mario - through his publisher - to write the mobster's life story. "I declined and told the publisher not to tell Gallo that we'd even had the conversation. My feeling was that, with all the contracts out on his life, he would be dead in six months. And, of course, that's what happened, and then my publisher thought I was connected."
In fact, Puzo's knowledge of the Mob derives from tales he heard as, a boy, extensive reading and a rich imagination. He is a first generation American who resists strenuously being called Italian American. His parents were born in Naples, and he grew up poor in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen. Later, he moved to Long Island and, except for extended visits to Hollywood and the great casinos of the world, has never left.
Puzo once told Nick Pileggi, the writer of Goodfellas and Casino, that there was an elderly man in his old neighbourhood who became one of the models for Don Corleone in The Godfather. That's as close a connection as he's ever admitted. The ultimate irony would be if he really is connected and has been fooling his old friend all these years. (Puzo is generally affable, but his eyes tend to narrow when asked the wrong question, and there's an ominous silence before he answers. I confess, this has always concerned me.)
We stop to eat. Once a month, I have lunch in Southampton with Puzo, Joe Heller, Speed Vogel and the screenwriter David Z. Goodman, so I'm used to Puzo's tastes. But this time he has promised me "a good one".
"I don't eat much at this hour," he tells me, but obviously somebody does. The table is groaning with Italian delicacies tender artichokes, paper thin prosciutto, savoury chunks of pepperoni and, I'm happy to note, the mozzarella of my dreams. In the novel, Don Clericuzio refuses to eat mozzarella if it's more than 20 minutes old. His creator follows suit.
At our "literary" lunches in Southampton, the discussions tend to be about women and money, but this time our conversation drifts to Hollywood and screenwriting. I recall that Mario had spent many enjoyable summers next door to Burgess Meredith in Malibu, and I wonder if he misses Hollywood.
"Not really. I had some wonderful times, but I'm content now to be at home and work on my novels."
Does he write his novels with a film sale in mind?
"Who knows what sells in the movies. I'm no expert. I was totally convinced that The Fourth K would produce an automatic film sale - and I was wrong." The Sicilian became a film, of course, but Fool's Die, which may be his personal favourite, was never produced. As a screenwriter, he's had nine screenplays produced and won two Academy Awards, yet he remains curiously ambivalent about the form.
"I respect screenwriters, but I wish they'd come up with another name for what they do. It just isn't `writing', as I understand it. There's access to the eyes, the emotions, but they don't have the novelist's direct access to the brain. And though screenwriters are well compensated, the worst part of it is that they have absolutely no power. I was paid a million dollars to write The Cotton Club, and not a word of mine appeared on the screen. It's as if the screenwriter is the guy you put in the right field as a kid because you were sure no balls would come his way. There isn't a producer I know who doesn't think he could write a screenplay if he just had the time."
Puzo is obsessed and amused by the unwillingness of studios to give even the best writers gross points. Around the time of his first experience with the movie business, he called me about a deal he was being offered that contained something called a "rolling gross". I said, "Mario, I don't know much about gross, but I can assure you that if it is a rolling gross, it will be rolling away from you. What you want is a stationary gross.
For all of his success as a writer for the screen, I recall a certain self consciousness on his part about his skills at the craft. "It's true."
I never actually studied the form. One day I decided to take dead aim and read a guide to successful screenwriting.
"In the first chapter, the writer declares, that one of the finest screenplays ever written was the one for The Godfather, which I had written. So that was the end of my studying."
We agree that an emblematic Hollywood moment came about when during a Cotton Club script conference with Puzo, the producer Robert Evans insisted that a city sidewalk blow up. There had been no build up to the scene. No explanation for it. "Why does the sidewalk blow up?" Puzo asked, genuinely confused. "Because it just does," said Evans. "And who knows?" Puzo says. "Considering it was a movie, maybe he was right. A novelist who did that would have been destroyed by the critics."
The Last Don contains his most, scathing portrait of Hollywood to date, but when I ask if he would still rather be a novelist, even if he were 26 years old and just starting out, he surprises me.
"Absolutely not. I'd take the first plane to California and become a screenwriter. It's a cheerful life, it's fun, you're well paid - and the weather's great. Writing serious novels is simply too hard. It takes years to get recognition. You have to lead a monk's life. In eight weeks of work on The Cotton Club, I made more money than I did putting in four years on a novel. They criticised Nathanael West for abandoning the novel in favour of Hollywood. His four novels together earned $6,000."
IN speaking to writers, I always want to know which moment in their careers they found most satisfying. The sale of a first story? The great review? In Puzo's case, I assume his magic moment would have to do with The Godfather - which went on to become the bestselling novel in publishing history.
"It wasn't The Godfather," Puzo says. "My feeling was one of relief obviously because of the economics. I was thinking in terms of $50,000 or $100,000. I had no idea it would produce millions. But there was no teal joy; there had been too many defeats, too many terrible times.
"My second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, was called a minor classic by the New York Times, and nobody bought it. Success came, but it was too late. It was like a girl you've been trying to date for four years. Finally, she says yes, and your feeling is, `Who cares?'". And there was a certain sadness about the experience. On re reading it, think it's a strong novel better than thought when I wrote it but it was the first time I'd ever considered the reader, catered to the reader. Before that, I wrote exactly what I wanted and never gave the reader a second thought."
The hours slip by without notice. We talk of women, those who'd delighted us, puzzled us and, on occasion, betrayed us. A surprising feature of The Last Don is that the women for the most part are cheerfully predatory in their sexuality, seducing men, discarding them, moving on to the next conquest - a style that would have made a younger Puzo go weak at the knees.
"That was Carol's doing," he says, shifting the blame - if that's what it is - to his longtime companion. "She enlightened me. Overall, I think feminism is a terrific deal for men, sparing them the tremendous expenditure of energy involved in caring for and protecting women. It strikes me, however, that women give up an important asset in not keeping up at least the pretence of fidelity. `That lets men completely off the hook, and lose their power.
Does Puzo have any regrets? "I wish I had worked harder," he answers ruefully. "All I can remember is goofing off. And I wish I'd been able to get out a book a year, like Clancy and Crichton."
I bring up Chekhov, who in his brief writing life produced 5,000 pages of short stories. "I'm not impressed by those guys," says Puzo. "They had no distractions. No television, no movies, no Super Bowl. What else did they have to do but write?"
Finally, we speak of advancing age. "There are many advantages," says Puzo. "Chief among them is I can now look at a beautiful young woman and know she has no power over me.
We part several hours later, and I realise that the fuel that runs our friendship apart from affection is the exchange of stories. My last thought as I say goodbye is of one story Puzo told me that dealt with his mother's reaction when he announced that he wanted to become a writer. "Why, Mario?" she cried out in horror. "Why must you do such a foolish thing?"
"I can't help myself, Mom," he explained. It's like a hunchback. Can a hunchback lose his hump?"