The Making of the Godfather Read online

  When I got through with all the phone calls, my wife was in bed asleep. So were the kids. I went to bed and slept like a rock. When I woke up the next morning, my wife and kids circled the bed. My wife said, “What was that you said last night?” She had just grasped the whole thing.

  Well, it’s a nice happy ending. But nobody seemed to believe me. So I called Bill Targ and drew an advance check for $100,000. I paid my debts, paid my agents’ commissions, paid my brother his well-deserved 10 percent and three months later I called my publishers and agent for more money. They were stunned. What about the huge check I had just gotten three months before? I couldn’t resist. Why should I treat them any differently than I had treated my family all those lean years? “A hundred grand doesn’t last forever,” I said.

  At least I could be a publisher’s “chooch.”

  The Godfather to date had earned over $1,000,000, but I still wasn’t rich. Some of the money was diverted to trust funds for the kids. There were agents’ commissions and lawyers’ fees. There were federal and state income taxes. All of which cut the original million to less than half. But before I grasped all this I had a great time. I spent the money as fast as it came in. The only thing was that I felt very unnatural being out of debt. I didn’t owe anybody one penny.

  I loved the money, but I didn’t really like being “famous.” I found it quite simply distressing. I never much liked parties, never liked talking to more than two or three people at one time. I dislike interviews and having my picture taken (with reason).

  I got conned into doing the TV Today Show by an editor at Putnam’s saying, “How do you know you don’t like it when you’ve never done it?” That sounded reasonable. I did it. I hated it. So I was never tempted when offers came from the other talk shows. I don’t think it was a reverse snobbism. Or a phony kind of humility. It’s just damn uncomfortable. And nearly every writer I’ve seen on TV has seemed foolish; it’s not a writer’s medium.

  Interviews come out sounding like someone I didn’t even know; and I couldn’t even blame the interviewers. I did make those dumb statements, but I didn’t say them like that. So I quit on TV and all publicity, including interviews. And, thank God, I never went on those cross-country trips that are supposed to help a book to best-sellerdom. Not because of other people but because of me. To meet a strange person is always a shock to my nervous system, but I think that’s true of most people.

  In the meantime I had made what turned out to be a very big mistake. Just before The Godfather was finished, I sold the paperback rights of The Fortunate Pilgrim for a $1,500 cash advance against the usual royalties. I sold them to Lancer Books, and one of the partners, Irwin Stein, was so agreeable he sent me the $1,500 in one whole payment rather than reserving half for publication date.

  A bigger mistake was made long before publication when I had the first one hundred pages of The Godfather done. The William Morris Agency approved a contract with Paramount for the book for a $12,500 option payment, against $50,000 with “escalators” if they exercised the option. I had already switched to Candida Donadio as agent, but William Morris had signed the initial book contract and so represented me in the movie deal. They advised me against taking it. They advised me to wait. That was like advising a guy underwater to take a deep breath. I needed the cash and the $12,500 looked like Fort Knox. Let me say now that the fault was mine. But I never held it against Paramount that they got The Godfather so cheap.

  Now all through this chapter I’ll mention how people did things that seem like sharp practice, and the reader may get the impression that I resent it or was surprised or offended. Never. In the world and society we live in almost all these actions were perfectly reasonable. The fact that I feel that the William Morris Agency might have sold me down the river to Paramount Pictures does not mean that I disapprove, condemn, or even am resentful. I consider it perfectly reasonable business behavior on their part.

  Anyway, to wind up. The Godfather became No. 1 best seller in the USA; sixty-seven weeks on the New York Times list; also No. 1 in England, France, Germany and other countries. It’s been translated into seventeen or twenty languages, I stopped keeping track. They tell me it’s the fastest and best-selling fiction paperback of all times or will be when the new “film edition” comes with the movie–but one can’t believe everything publishers tell their authors. Though Ralph Daigh at Fawcett proved a straight guy and promoted the book like hell. Even paid me everything he said I sold. It’s a success all right and I remember one day when I was working on it. My wife sent me to the supermarket; my daughter asked me to drive her to her girlfriend’s; my son wanted a ride to football practice. I exploded. I said, “Jesus Christ, do you guys know I’m working on a book that could make me a hundred thousand dollars?” They looked at me and we all laughed together.

  The book got much better reviews than I expected. I wished like hell I’d written it better. I like the book. It has energy and I lucked out by creating a central character that was popularly accepted as genuinely mythic. But I wrote below my gifts in that book.

  The Movie:

  I had read the literature about Hollywood, how they did in Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, and novelists in general.

  I had already had one enlightening experience with Hollywood movie producers. Earlier that year my agent had called to ask that I come to New York to meet John Foreman, who produces most of the Paul Newman movies. I live fifty miles out in the suburbs and hate New York. But my agent said that John Foreman had read The Fortunate Pilgrim, was in love with the book, and wanted to make it a movie. He was a big wheel. I really should make the trip.

  I did and it was worth it. John Foreman was dynamic. For three hours he talked about my book, how he loved it, how he was determined to do it as a movie. He quoted all the best parts. He liked all the right things. I was thrilled and impressed. The movie was definitely on. As he left, he said he would call my agent the next day and arrange the financial details of the contract.

  Nobody ever heard from him again.

  So I was not interested at all in what Hollywood did to the book as a movie just so long as I didn’t help them do it. But one day I picked up the paper and it said that Danny Thòmas wanted to play the role of The Godfather. That threw me into a panic. I had always thought that Marlon Brando would be great. So through a mutual friend, Jeff Brown, I contacted Brando, wrote him a letter, and he was nice enough to call me. We had a talk on the phone. He had not read the book but he told me that the studio would never hire him unless a strong director insisted on it. He was nice over the phone but didn’t sound too interested. And that was that.

  What I didn’t know at this time was that Paramount had decided not to make the movie. The reason for this being that they had made a movie called The Brotherhood–also about the Mafia–and the movie was a critical and financial disaster. When I saw The Brotherhood, I felt that they had given the first one hundred pages of my book to a real cookie-cutter screenwriter and told him to write a switch. Then they got Kirk Douglas to play the lead, and to show that he was a lovable gangster they always had him kissing little children. Then they had his own brother kill him on orders of the higher-ups.

  When I saw the picture, I wasn’t angry because I thought Paramount hustled me. That was OK. Working for my magazines, I’d written some cookie-cutting switches in my time. But I hated the sheer stupidity of that movie, the writing, the whole concept, the whole misunderstanding of the Mafia world. What I didn’t know at the time was that the financial disaster of the film made the studio brass feel there was no money in Mafia movies. It was only when The Godfather became a super best seller (the sixty-seven weeks on the Times best-seller list gave it this classification for the money boys) that they had to make the film.

  Finally Al Ruddy, the producer, was assigned to the film, and he came to New York, saw my agent and said Paramount wanted me to do the script. It would be a low budget, he said, so they couldn’t offer to pay me much. I turned the offer down. They fo
und more money and a percentage and I agreed to see Al Ruddy. We met at the Plaza for lunch. He is a tall, lanky guy with a lot of easy New York charm.

  He was so nice I thought it might be fun to go to California. He had to take some calls in the Plaza Edwardian Room and he apologized gracefully. “Christ,” he said, “this is like the bullshit in the movies but I really gotta take these calls.”

  I chatted with his wife and was charmed when she produced from her handbag a miniature live poodle who let out a yip and had the handbag zipped over his head again before the enraged maître-d’ spotted where the sound came from. It seemed Al and his wife took the poodle everywhere, with nobody the wiser. The poodle never let out a sound while in the handbag. At the end of the lunch I was enchanted by them and the poodle and I agreed to write the script.

  Fellow novelists wondered why I wanted to make movies. I didn’t like show biz. I was a novelist; I had my novels to write.

  So how come? When I was poor and working at home on my books, I made my wife a solemn promise that if I ever hit it big I’d get a studio, get out from under her feet. She hated having me home during the day. I was in the way. I rumpled up the bed. I messed up the living room. I roamed around the house cursing. I came charging and yelling out of my workroom when the kids had a fight. In short, I was nerve-wracking. To make matters worse she could never catch me working. She claims she never saw me type. She claims that for three years all I did was fall asleep on the sofa and then just magically produced the manuscript for The Godfather. Anyway, a man is bound by solemn oaths. Now that I was a big success, I had to get out of my own house during working hours.

  I tried. I rented quiet elegant studios. I went to London. I tried the French Riviera, Puerto Rico and Las Vegas. I hired secretaries and bought dictating machines. Nothing happened. I needed the kids screaming and fighting. I needed my wife interrupting my work to show me her newest curtains. I needed those trips to the supermarket. I got some of my best ideas while helping my wife load up the shopping cart. But I had made a solemn promise to get out of the house. So OK. I’d go to Hollywood.

  It’s true–success really throws a writer. For a year I had wandered around having “a good time.” It wasn’t that great. It was OK but it wasn’t great. And then remember that for twenty years I had lived the life of a hermit. I had seen a few close personal friends on occasion for dinner. I had spent evenings with my wife’s friends. I had gone to movies. I had taught my children how to gamble with percentages. But mostly I had been living in my own head, with all my dreams, all my fantasies. The world had passed me by. I didn’t know how much men had changed, women had changed, girls had changed, young men had changed, how society and the very government had changed.

  Also I had always been very content to be an observer at the few parties I went to over the years. I rarely initiated a conversation or a friendship. Suddenly I didn’t have to. People seemed genuinely delighted to talk to me, to listen to me; they were charming to me and I loved it. I became perhaps the most easily charmed guy in the Western Hemisphere. And it helped that the people were for the most part genuinely charming people. It was easy to stop being a hermit, in fact it was a pleasure. So I had the courage to leave for Hollywood.

  The deal for the script was agreeable: $500 a week expense money, nice money, up front (sure money), plus 2½ percent of net profit. A fair deal in the marketplace of that time, especially since Al Ruddy had gotten his job by saying he could produce the picture for only a million.

  But the deal was not as good as it sounded. For one thing, a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel was $500 a week, so that wiped out the expense money right there. Plus the fact that my 2½ percent was worth zero unless the picture became a big block-buster like Love Story. The way it works is that the studio usually legally snatches all profits from anybody working on a percentage of net profit. They do this with bookkeeping. If the picture costs $4,000,000, they add another million for studio overhead. They charge advertising department costs to pictures that make money. They have accountants who make profits disappear like Houdini.

  Again, let it be clear that this is not to mean that Hollywood is less honest than publishing. The paperback publisher called Lancer Books makes Hollywood studios look like Diogenes. Lancer Books advertised that it sold nearly 2,000,000 copies of The Fortunate Pilgrim. It only paid me for approximately 30 percent of that amount.

  Still OK. In America nobody blames any businessman who hustles. But then Lancer put out an original paperback called The Godmother. I figured that no matter what they told me about Hollywood, it could never sink that low. (Sure enough, it wasn’t Hollywood. In Italy they made a film starring my idol, Vittorio De Sica, called The Godson.)

  So I went to Hollywood absolutely sure it held no surprises for me. I was armored. The Godfather was their picture, not mine. I would be cool. I would never let my feelings get hurt. I would never get proprietory or paranoid. I was an employee.

  California had a lot of sunshine and a lot of fresh air and a lot of tennis courts. (I’d just discovered tennis and was crazy about it.) I’d get healthy and skinny.

  The Beverly Hills Hotel is for me the best hotel in the world. It is a rambling three-story affair surrounded by gardens, its own bungalows, swimming pool and the famous Polo Lounge. Also a tennis court whose pro, Alex Olmeda, called me Champ. Of course, he called everybody Champ. Still….

  The service is superb and friendly without being familiar. It is the only hotel I’ve ever been in that made me feel altogether comfortable. But it did wipe out my $500-a-week expense money and more besides.

  My office was fun. I loved the Paramount lot with its fake Western town, its little alleyways, its barracklike buildings, its general atmosphere that made me feel I was in the twilight zone. I had my place on the third floor, out of traffic, just as I liked it. Al Ruddy had his much more elaborate HQ down on the first floor and we both could just run up and down the stairs to see each other.

  My office wasn’t really that great but I didn’t mind. I had a refrigerator and an unlimited supply of soda pop free. And I had an adjoining office for my secretary and a telephone with a buzzer and four lines. This was living.

  So I spent the next two weeks playing tennis and seeing friends of mine from New York who had settled in California. Also I had conferences with Robert Evans, the head of production for Paramount Pictures, and Peter Bart, his right-hand man.

  I had read once a Life magazine article on Evans, a savage putdown. So I was surprised to find that he was easy and natural. I liked Evans right off for one reason. There were five of us having a conference in his office. He had to take a private phone call. So he stepped into a little closet to take it. Now Louis B. Mayer would have told the four of us to squeeze into the closet and shut the door so that we wouldn’t hear him take the call at his desk.

  Evans was unpretentious and usually said or seemed to say exactly what he thought. He said it the way children tell truths, with a curious innocence that made the harshest criticism or disagreement inoffensive. He was unfailingly courteous, to me at any rate. If this seems too flattering a portrait of a film studio chief, let me add that he was so cheap about handing out his Cuban cigars that I had to sneak into his office when he wasn’t around to steal some.

  Evans was open to argument and he could often be swayed. He was of course charming but everybody in the movie business is charming, in fact everybody in California is charming, except: Peter Bart, who has a cold intelligence and is the only uncharming guy in the movie business whom I met. He didn’t say much either. The reason for this (though I didn’t know it at the time) is because he liked to think things out before voicing an opinion, and he hadn’t yet picked up the California trick of being charming while he was thinking.

  The first conference went over very well. There were Evans, Al Ruddy, Peter Bart, Jack Ballard and myself. Ballard is a Yul Brynner-headed guy who keeps track of production costs on a movie. Self-effacing, but producers and directors shook in thei
r boots when he totaled tabs on their costs. Evans directed the meeting. It was a general conversation with a built-in pep talk intended for me. This was going to be the big movie for Paramount. I had to come through. This picture would “SAVE” Paramount. I love that kind of stuff, it makes me feel important and I work twice as hard. (I really wanted to “SAVE” Paramount but I was too late. Love Story did it before me.) Then we talked casting. I suggested Marlon Brando for the role of the Godfather. They were kind to me but I got the impression my stock had dropped 50 points.

  Al Ruddy suggested Robert Redford for the role of Michael, and I didn’t care how nice a guy he was, his stock dropped 50 points. I spoke out and was pleasantly surprised when Evans and Bart agreed with me. It was going to be a fair fight, I thought.

  They had no director. I had to write the script before they got a director. Directors like to read scripts before they sign. Well, that was what I was in California for. I assured them I was one of the best technicians of the Western world (Not bragging, technique can be measured. You can’t brag about art).

  All this had happened at the Paramount studio’s plush head-quarters on Canon Drive. When Al Ruddy and I got back to his comparatively humble office on the Paramount studio lot, we were just like soldiers returning to the front lines and finally rid of the brass.

  “You just do what you want to do,” Ruddy said. “You’re the writer. But do me a favor. Start off with a love scene between Michael and Kay.” He still wanted Redford.

  “Al,” I said as I drank his whiskey and smoked his cigars, “you can’t start The Godfather off with a love scene. It ain’t fitting.”

  He recognized the tag line and he laughed. He was a New York City street guy and I felt comfortable with him.

  “Listen,” he said, “just try it. We can always cut it out later.”

  “OK,” I said. I went back upstairs and read the contract and, sure enough, it said the producer can tell the writer how to write the script. I had to start off the movie with a youthful love scene. So I wrote it and it was lousy. I showed it to Al and he loved it.