Best-selling author Mario Puzo, creator of the fictional Corleone mob family and winner of two Oscars for the screen adaptations of his book The Godfather, died on July 2nd. He was 78.
He expired, apparently of heart-failure - he suffered a heart attack in 1991 - at his home in Bay Shore, New York. The announcement was made by his literary agent, Neil Olson, who said that Puzo had just finished work on his latest novel, Omerta. The book is due out in July, 2000.
Puzo, who wrote seven other novels in addition to The God- father, was born in Hell's Kitchen, on Manhattan's West Side, the son of illiterate Italian immigrants. There were seven children in the family and the father, who worked on the railways, deserted them when Mario was twelve.
His mother, a powerful personality by all accounts, brought Mario and his six siblings up in what was a very tough neighbourhood. His admiration for his fellow Italian-Americans and their illicit activities would later find its way into his books.
Forced to leave school and take up a job similar to his father's on the railways, Puzo was saved by the second World War. He served in the US army and, when the war ended, worked as a public relations officer for the US Air Force in Bremen. There he met a German girl called Erika Broske, whom he married. They had three sons and two daughters, but she died in the late 1970s after a long illness. The woman who nursed her, Carol Gino, was to become Puzo's companion for the of his life.
In 1949, Puzo returned to America, where he took a job as an administrator with the civil service. At night he studied creative writing in Columbia University and in 1955 published his first book, The Dark Arena, a bleak story set in post-war Germany. This was followed in the early 1960s by a semi-autobiographical novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, which told the story of an immigrant Italian family living in a poor district of New York in the 1920s. Both of these books garnered critical acclaim, but failed to sell. In debt, and with a wife and five children to support, Puzo deliberately set out to write a blockbuster. The result was The Godfather, a book that was soon to make him a multi-millionaire.
This account of the gang wars between Don Vito Corleone's family and its rivals was loosely based on fact, but Puzo always maintained that he had no personal ties with the Mafia. All he knew about the "wise guys" and their operations, he had learned from books and from a mass of Senate investigations about them.
He received a $5,000 advance for The Godfather, a gripping if sentimental read. The book appeared in 1969, was widely syndicated and sold enormously world-wide. By the time Puzo died it was estimated that over 20 million copies had passed over the counters of book shops.
In 1970, Puzo collaborated with Francis Ford Coppola on the screenplay for the first film, and it duly appeared in 1972 to rapturous acclaim and a raft of Oscars. There was opposition to this glamorised account of Mafia doings by civic rights groups and by the Italian-American community, but the public flocked to the film, making it a commercial as well as a critical success.
Phrases from the book and the film, such as "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse" and "he's swimming with the fishes", entered the vernacular and, it is said, even the vocabulary of the Mafia itself. There is no doubt that the "wise guys" adored the book and adopted the dialogue and body language of actors such as Marlon Brando, James Caan and Al Pacino.
Drawn to Hollywood by the big money, the glamorous people and the heavy-stakes gambling, Puzo wrote screenplays for other big-budget movies, including two of the Superman films and Coppola's ill-fated The Cotton Club. But he also continued to write novels. Fools Die in 1978 was a thriller about gambling - something close to its author's heart - and in 1992 he wrote The Fourth K a futuristic story about another of the Kennedy clan becoming president of the US.
He also returned to the subject of the Mafia in The Sicilian, based on the life of the bandit Salvatore Giuliano, and The Last Don, which has just been made into a successful television series.
A heavy-set man who suffered from diabetes, Puzo enjoyed the company of other writers and liked to socialise with them in the ethnic restaurants of his beloved New York. He often remarked about his seminal novel that "I wished like hell I'd written it better", but it did make him a very wealthy man and was read by millions. Whether it painted a true picture of the Mob, with its reverence for family values and its insistence on a code of honour, is another matter. What is certain, however, is that, on July 2nd last, the Great Godfather in the sky made Mario Puzo an offer he couldn't refuse.
Mario Puzo: born 1921; died July, 1999