Paperback Godfather

"The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business."

--John Steinbeck

It was dinnertime at the Manhattan publishing offices of G.P. Putnam's Sons. The last bag of taco chips had long since tumbled from the corridor vending machine, but Subsidiary Rights Director Irene Webb, 30, and her colleagues were not leaving their desks. June 15, 1978, was a day for executive field rations. Since 9:30 a.m. Webb's ear had been grafted to her telephone, accepting bids for what ended as the most expensive paperback auction in publishing history: $2.2 million for the rights to reprint Mario Puzo's new novel, Fools Die, plus $350,000 to reprint his alltime bestselling saga, The Godfather. The previous record price, $1.9 million, was paid for Colleen McCullough's Australian sheep opera, The Thorn Birds, now playing beach blankets and jammed airline lounges throughout the free-time world.

The first hard-cover edition of Fools Die is not scheduled to go on sale until October. This meant that the paperback publishers were bidding that June day on futures, as if the book were listed on the commodity exchange along with soybeans and pork bellies. With good reason. The booming paperback business can become as risky, and profitable, an arena as the stock market and the gambling casino. Fortunes have changed hands at paperback auctions and reprint sales; unknowns have become overnight celebrities because of a paperback success. Authors like John Jakes (The Bastard), institutions like the Agatha Christie estate, romancers like Rosemary Rogers and Victoria Holt owe their millions to the modest little 7-in. by 4-in. volumes that decorate racks at drugstores, airports, supermarkets and book emporiums. No wonder that Mario Puzo's latest effort excited such frantic bidding. With paperback rights, the successful bidder would be able to saturate those ubiquitous wire racks--if Puzo's track record is any guide--with one of next year's biggest blockbusters. Stores would be clamoring for every paperback copy of Fools Die they could lay hands on. This, in turn, would give the publisher leverage to persuade sellers to stock other titles on the firm's list: a million-dollar domino theory.

Before the 15-hour sale ended, some bidders had grown grouchy as they saw the cost of the prize soar. "They sounded as if they had low blood sugar, and I offered to send them sandwiches," recalls Webb. For the winner, Elaine Koster, 37, editor in chief and publisher of New American Library, the problem was breathable air. The cooling system in her office overlooking a gaudy flank of the Americana Hotel had been shut off. At 8 p.m. she retreated to her more comfortable West Side apartment for the final and triumphant round.

It was literally a day for the books. In addition to the Puzo package, Koster was chasing rights to publish works by Franz Kafka. She was outbid by Pocket Books, who paid $210,000. The Prague pension clerk would have been fascinated by the rituals of a modern paperback auction. He had envisioned the adrenal new world in his novel Amerika. But could he have imagined that he would be in six figures?

Weeks before the Puzo sale, competing publishers had laid intricate game plans that many would scrap to stay in the race. Final offers from runners-up Ballantine and Pocket Books were both $2.5 million, only $50,000 short of N.A.L. That seems a relatively small gap, but it is a chasm to the bidder already hundreds of thousands of dollars over his limit. In such cases, terms of the sale tip the balance.

In the Puzo case, the hard-cover publisher, Putnam, will receive only 40% of the advance; Puzo gets the rest. Most authors settle for a 50-50 arrangement. The novelist expects to take his $1.5 million share in chunks spread over five years. With 10% going to his agent and approximately half of the rest for taxes, he should eventually pocket at least $500,000 from the record $2,550,000 auction.

An unwritten publishing rule stipulates that authors stay away from the point sale. That suited Puzo, 57, fine. He spent the big payday in his studio and on his backyard tennis court in Bay Shore, L.I. "To me this was a business matter," he says. "I had nothing to do with it. I told my agent Candida Donadio: 'Get it done and tell me when it's finished.'

Nevertheless, the ever watchful godfather of The Godfather never missed a shuffle of the paperback poker game: "While I was playing tennis it was up to 1.6, something like that. Then after dinner it was 1.8. It was Ballantine, N.A.L., and up to 1.5 Bantam was in it. The last three were Pocket Books, Ballantine, N.A.L. Then at 9 o'clock I got a phone call. Ballantine and N.A.L. were up to 2.4. Then I got a final call saying that Ballantine and N.A.L. were at 2.5 and 2.55, and if it was O.K. with me, we'd take it. They had to get my O.K."

Such fast action was unheard of 40 years ago when the modern paperback business was born. Potboiler westerns, mysteries and a few novels were sold mainly in drugstores and on newsstands. The 1950s saw the emergence of "trade" or "quality" paperbacks. They were the inexpensive, soft-covered reprints of classics, serious novels and texts that heralded the so-called paperback revolution. Readership climbed steadily with the growth of the college-educated population. Last year's industry figures indicate that more than 530 million paperbacks were sold, between 60% and 80% bought by women mainly in the 18-to-34 age range.

In the years before high-powered auctions, hard-cover houses would circulate manuscripts to their friends in the paperback business. Back would come sealed bids, with the rights going to the highest offer in a one-round competition. In 1957, for example, Fawcett paid $100,000 for rights to James Gould Cozzens' novel of emotional middle-age spread, By Love Possessed. Four years later the same house paid $400,000 for William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The hyperthyroid auction era arrived in 1972, when Avon Books spent $1 million for Thomas Harris' I'm Okay, You 're Okay. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's All the President's Men sold for $1 million in 1974; two years later their The Final Days fetched $1,550,000. Other notable $1 million-plus books include Erich Segal's Oliver's Story ($1,410,000), E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime ($1,850,000), Dorothy Uhnak's The Investigation ($1,595,000), William Safire's Full Disclosure ($1,375,000) and McCullough's phenomenal The Thorn Birds, which nearly broke the $2 million barrier.

Unsuccessful bidders for Puzo's new work have grumbled that many of these books are the equal of Puzo's in earning power, and that the re-reprint rights for The Godfather were generously underestimated to ensure the record sale of Fools Die.

A case of sour grappa? Possibly. The figures paid for books are impressive, but to recoup a multimillion-dollar investment today, paperback publishers must tout their products like new cars. Record-sale publicity is one way. And, of course, there are gimmicks and advertising blitzes for the soon-to-be-made-into-a-major-motion-picture that augment the hard-sell paperback commercials on radio and TV.

The show-biz approach was inevitable as the paperback business grew: some of the largest paperback houses belong to conglomerates with movie and television interests. In addition, inflation has pushed the cost of paperbacks higher than the average for most commodities, demanding more aggressive salesmanship. In the past six years the cover price of a rack-size book has jumped 77%, from an average of 930 to $1.65. The consumer price index for the same period rose 44.8%. Where will it end? Inflation is not likely to vanish and neither is the desire of publishers to secure bigger blockbusters. This is almost certain to cause new records in paperback auctions. Says Putnam's Webb: "There's no ceiling. God knows, there's no ceiling."

Last year Bantam Books President Oscar Dystel spread a little gloom among his colleagues when he cautioned that net unit sales--the actual number of. paperback books sold--have remained fairly static since 1973, William R. Grose, editor in chief of Dell, takes a grimmer view. "I used to think there was a ceiling on paperback rights. Now I don't know. The consumer is the one who pays for all this nonsense, and the consumer doesn't seem to have balked. Everyone you talk to will say it's an unhealthy situation, but no one knows what to do."

But even though costs are spiraling, a paperback remains an exceptional entertainment value. As one reviewer once put it, "Shogun is a summer vacation." So are most other bestsellers. The trick is to book readers into the right vacation. N.A.L. hopes to sell more than 10 million copies of Fools Die and their edition of The Godfather. There are already 13 million paperback copies of the Mafia classic in print.

Puzo's new work is not likely to exceed that figure, though its lure may be enhanced by the autobiographical nature of the novel. Its hero, John ("The Kid") Merlyn, like Puzo, is a formerly impoverished novelist who turns commercial, has intriguing connections in the gambling world of Las Vegas, and spends a good deal of time writing film scripts in Hollywood. Merlyn's unpretentious philosophy and even his tone of voice sound familiarly like the author's. Reflects Merlyn: "I wanted to live an honorable life, that was my big hangup. I prided myself on being a realist, so I didn't expect myself to be perfect. But when I did something shitty, I didn't approve of it or kid myself, and usually I did stop doing the same kind of shitty thing again. But I was often disappointed in myself since there was a great variety of shitty things a person can do, and so I was always caught by surprise."

Fools Die contains the sort of mini-dramas and surprises that keep paperback readers flipping pages; a man wins a small fortune at baccarat and blows his brains out; a straightforward love affair turns baroque with kinky sex; an extremely cautious character makes a stupid and fatal error.

Puzo's descriptions of Las Vegas, its Strip, showgirls, characters, and the variety of ways one can lose money swiftly and painlessly, are carried off with brio. The green baize world of casino management has never seemed more professional, entertaining and lethal.

In Hollywood, Merlyn-Puzo's eyes alternately widen with naive excitement and narrow with humorous contempt. His description of a studio head with the Dickensian name of Wartberg: "He used lawyers as a hood used guns, used affection as a prostitute used sex. He used good works as the Greeks used the Trojan Horse, supported the Will Rogers home for retired actors, Israel, the starving millions of India, Arab refugees from Palestine. It was only personal charity to individual human beings that went against his grain."

Merlyn, as his name implies, thinks of himself as a literary necromancer who can magically make his audience laugh and cry at the same time. Actually, he is an attractive and bittersweet conman, as the last chapter of the novel reveals. The ambiguous hero of the book is a writer named Osano, a ruthless genius who pursues his dreams of potency, fame and fortune by living out his darkest instincts.

Osano is constructed of some cast-off parts of Norman Mailer and some full-blown fantasies of Mario Puzo. The character is a grand fool, but also a brutally honest observer. Says he to Merlyn: "You live in your own world, you do exactly what you want to do. You control your life. You never get into trouble, and when you do, you don't panic; you get out of it. Well, I admire you, but I don't envy you. I've never seen you do or say a really mean thing, but I don't think you really give a shit about anybody. You're just steering your life."

Such candid statements appear throughout Fools Die. Novelist Puzo enjoys casting a sly peasant eye on pretension and selfdelusion. When moralist Puzo judges his characters' behavior it is not because that behavior offends convention but because it endangers survival. Merlyn's warning to a promiscuous actress about the dangers of V.D. echoes an Army training film, though the reader may not be sure whether the author is trying to be funny or just didactic. The novel's biggest flaw is a switching back and forth from third-to first-person narrative, thus violating Puzo's own first rule of writing.

Yet Merlyn's knack for livery yarning and his ability for introspection give the book its special quality: a fat, comercial novel with a lean, serious writer signaling wildly to get out. Insiders in Las Vegas and Hollywood may be doing some wild signaling themselves. The novel has an enticing roman `a clef flavor even though Puzo dismisses the issue with a typically tough and ready remark: "How dare they think they are part of my creation?" Nevertheless, Pauline Kael will be flattered when she recognizes herself as the highly praised film critic Clara Ford. Certain agents, and some executives at Universal who shortchanged Puzo for his script of Earthquake, will not be so pleased.

Puzo won his suit against the studio. Yet film writing is a subject that sends him to the mattresses: "It is the most crooked business that I've ever had any experience with," he says. "You can get a better shake in Vegas than you can get in Hollywood." His advice to novelists heading west to write for film: "Make sure you get a gross, not a net percentage of the profits. If you can't get gross, try and get as much money as you can up front. But the best way is to go in with a mask and a gun."

Antagonism between authors and producers is at least as old as Jack Warner's reputed classification of scriptwriters as "schmucks with Underwoods." Puzo has no illusions or false pride about his screen work. "I'm fascinated by the movies simply because it is an enormous machine for making money and no matter how bad they run it, it still makes money. It's the perfect industry to put your nephew in and your idiot cousin, because they'll be geniuses."

The money machine has been exceptionally kind to Puzo. He made about $1 million for his work on Godfather I. For Godfather II he received a $100,000 script fee plus a promise of 10% of the net--which he is yet to see. There is another $1 million, minus legal expenses, for Earthquake, and $350,000 plus 5% of the gross on Superman I and II, the forthcoming spectaculars about The Man of Steel. On top of this, Puzo will earn $250,000 in increments and a gross percentage for his treatment for Godfather III. The paperback millionaire estimates that in the past ten years he has made at least $6 million from his books and movies. Before Godfather, his combined income from two previous novels amounted to $6,500.

Perhaps because success came to him in middle age, he has no romantic notions about what money can or cannot do. The long shot of literary recognition and reward has paid off, "but it can't make me 26 years old and 150 Ibs.," says the 5-ft. 6-in. author whose sumo-wrestler stomach is the major contributor to his 208 Ibs. Still, financial security has been good to his actuarial statistics. Observes Puzo, a diabetic who suffered a heart attack five years ago: "If I hadn't made a lot of money on The Godfather, I would probably be dead now, because I would have ended up working every day and living under a great deal of pressure and guilt over taking care of my family."

For the Puzos, such pressure is over. Mario and German-born Wife Erika, whom he met while serving with the Army in World War II, live with two of their five children in a white colonial tract house on Long Island. The house was a contractor's model, and the author bought it furnished in 1969. He has little concern with the obvious symbols of success. His wife made him trade in his Cadillac for a Lincoln that he does not like to drive. When he comes to Manhattan for the day, he prefers to hire a chauffeur-driven limousine.

The conspicuous possession he values is his tennis court. On its clay surface he is a better than average weekend player, unusually agile for a portly man. The interior of the Puzo home is as colorful as his fiction. Opposite a fake leopard-covered lounge chair hang two Writers Guild award plaques for Godfather I and II; the Oscars anchor a shelf. Another wall contains sliding glass cabinets holding copies of all his books with the fronts of their dust jackets facing out. Puzo is an avid and serious reader, but there is no library in sight. "I don't have much of one," he explains. "Books I don't like I throw away, or somebody comes and borrows them."

Upstairs, past a 5-ft. stuffed tiger in the hallway and through his purple-carpeted bedroom, is what Puzo calls his "peasant's study." It is a no-frills working area with an oak desk and a Naugahyde couch on which he broods and dozes. He writes in concentrated bouts; though, as he says, "my wife has never seen me work." A small table holds a worn portable Olympia. "If anything ever happened to it I would have to stop writing," he claims. Old personal objects have a talisman's significance. He is likely to wear the same light cord trousers, sports shirt and suede Bally slip-ons until his wife throws them out. He has even kept his lower-class New York accent--an obvious cover for a refined literary sensibility. Pretentiousness and a flashy style disturb him. Says Puzo about the gunning down of one of New York's flamboyant mobsters: "Whenever I see a guy with panache, I get scared. Now, Joey Gallo had panache. He wanted me to write his autobiography. I ran like a thief. I told my publisher that he would be dead in six months. And he was. I knew he would be killed because he had too much panache. More pasta and less panache is a good saying to remember."

It is a godfather's view of the world. Indeed, the old don embodies Puzo's heroic ideal. "A hero," he insists, "is a guy who is very, very careful. He takes risks while he takes precautions. Like in my own family, I am very careful with my kids and my wife. My idea of a hero is a guy who never discloses any of his responsibilities or duties but glories in fulfilling them."

Puzo glories in monetary gifts to relatives, and in large trust funds for his children, Tony, 31; Dorothy, 29; Eugene, 27; Virginia, 24; and Joey, 19. The generosity amounts to workmen's compensation for years of deprivation. He is a lavish tipper and a restless traveler who spends as much as $30,000 a year on airfare. But charity begins and stays at home. "Italians never give money to charity," he says. "It is what they call 'the Red Cross syndrome.' When you appeal to Italians to give to the Red Cross, they never do because they expect to get money from the Red Cross. It is a psychological fact that Italians do not give to organized charities. They send money to their relatives."

The son of a railroad laborer, Mario was born into poverty in New York's Hell's Kitchen. He was pitching pennies at six; by adolescence he was playing poker with workingmen beneath lampposts on Tenth Avenue. Gambling became part of Mario's life; but so did reading. Puzo has described his flowering literary imagination in an essay titled Choosing a Dream: "In the summertime I was one of the great Tenth Avenue athletes, but in the wintertime I became a sissy. I read books. At a very early age I discovered libraries, the one in the Hudson Guild and the public ones. I loved reading in the Hudson Guild, where the librarian became a friend. I loved Joseph Altsheler's (I don't even have to look up his name) tales about the wars of the New York State Indian tribes, the Senecas and the Iroquois. I discovered Doc Savage and the Shadow and then the great storyteller Sabatini. Part of my character to this day is Scaramouche, I like to think. And then maybe at the age of 14 or 15 or 161 discovered Dostoyevsky. I read the books, all of them I could get. I wept for Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, I was as guilty as Raskolnikov. And when I finished The Brothers Karamazov I understood for the first time what was really happening to me and the people around me. I had always hated religion even as a child, but now I became a true believer. I believed in art. A belief that has helped me as well as any other."

Aliterary career was a long time in coming. First he tried a series of odd jobs, fought with his family ("My mother thought I was crazy to be a writer, and she may have been right") and wondered about a steady job and a steady girl. "Then I was saved," he recalls. "World War II broke out and I was delighted. I was delivered from my mother, my family, the girl I was loving passionately but did not love. I drove a Jeep, toured Europe, had love affairs, found a wife and lived the material for my first novel."

The book was The Dark Arena, published in 1955. Despite its warm critical reception, Puzo remained obscure. Recalls his old friend, Novelist George Mandel (The Wax Boom): "My vision of Mario then? He used to go to his brother's in a taxi to borrow money for his kids' shoes. My vision of Mario still is him leaving a building, putting a cigar in his mouth with one hand and holding up his other for a cab. Same vision, rich or poor."

In 1955 Puzo had a vision of his own. "It was Christmas Eve and I had a severe gall-bladder attack. I had to take a cab to the Veterans Administration Hospital on 23rd Street, got out and fell into the gutter. There I was lying there thinking, here I am, a published writer, and I am dying like a dog. That's when I decided I would be rich and famous."

In the hospital, he hit a lucky streak betting on baseball. The money allowed him to quit his night bank job and devote more time to writing. His other job, as a G55 clerk administrator at the Army Reserve unit at the 42nd Street Armory, ended in 1962 when he resigned after the department was plowed by scandal and a fellow worker was sent to jail for taking bribes. The episode is similar to the far more incriminating and candid one described in Fools Die.

The shake-up was another stroke of luck. It separated Puzo from his civil service security blanket and drove him to the offices of Magazine Management. The company owned such macho publications as Male, Men and Man's World. Puzo wrote battle stories. "I became an ace pulp writer," he recalls. "I wiped out whole armies. I wrote a story about an invasion in which I killed 100,000 men and then later read the statistics. There were only 7,000 killed. But in the process, I became an expert on World War II. I knew more than anybody because I read all the books." His editor, Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman, remembers his new writer "leaning back in his chair, a large cigar in his mouth, reading six books at once, three in each arm, like he was tasting food."

Unfortunately, Puzo also eats like he reads. He has attempted to leave 50 excess pounds on fat farms in the U.S. and Europe but the burden always finds its way back home. "My wife tries to feed me salads and my kids wrestle me from the refrigerator door," he says. But in the middle of the night, insomniac Puzo frequently drifts down to the kitchen and prepares his favorite snack: spaghetti smothered in butter sauce.

During his Magazine Management days, Puzo never stopped his intake of calories or his output of serious fiction. His second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, drew heavily on his childhood experiences. Again he found an audience of enthusiastic reviewers, but few paying readers. The author remained a hermit to New York literary life, though he had some close writing friends. Among those in his regular card-playing group was Joseph Heller. Recalls Puzo: "I used to get mad at him and throw his papers around. How could I know that the stuff was going to be Catch-22?"

He had other reasons for rage. Both of his books had been commercial flops, and his family began to tire of his ambition and their deprivation. "I came to the point where I was terribly angry at my wife, at my brothers and sisters, at my mother," he remembers, "because nobody was on my side in this struggle. Then I sat down one day and said, why should they care because of my eccentricity? What did it have to do with them? They were perfectly right in the way they felt, and I was perfectly right in the way I felt."

His stubbornness was justified. Late in 1965 a Putnam editor stopped in at Magazine Management's offices, overheard Puzo telling Mafia yarns and offered a $5,000 advance for a book about the Italian underworld. The rest is publishing history--and American sociology. Puzo's saga of blood and money, treachery and revenge, class injury and ferocious pride, is one of the most gripping stories in modern popular fiction. Despite its cast of venal monsters and hired killers, The Godfather offered a nostalgic view of the embattled family defending and enriching itself in a ruthless world. Don Corleone even became a Pop father figure--a fascinating inversion of Walter Cronkite--whose distinctively throttled voice conveyed authority, sincerity and trust.

The tone and settings of The Godfather were so authentic that many readers thought Puzo himself had underworld connections. But the novel, which never once mentions the word Mafia, was written entirely from research and anecdotes the author had heard from his Italian immigrant mother and on the streets of New York. Recalls Puzo: "After the book became famous, I was introduced to a few gentlemen related to the material. They were flattering. They refused to believe that I had never been in the rackets. They refused to believe that I had never had the confidence of a don." But Puzo did have a godfather's understanding of the relationship between power and luck. "A lot of it has to do with luck," he muses in a precis of his life. "Luck and strength go together. When you get lucky, you have to have the strength to follow through. You also have to have the strength to wait for the luck."

Today, when Puzo gets the urge to press his fortune, he heads for the gaming tables of Las Vegas. He is no longer a "degenerate gambler," his description of a guy who would rather gamble than do anything else. The compulsion was lost years ago when the casinos cut off his credit and demanded cash. Even the desperate excitement of changing one's life with a bank-breaking night is now denied him. It is one of life's happier problems: "having more than enough, he has too much to lose. Gambling is simply a $20,000-a-year relaxation and a chance to visit with Las Vegas friends. He can usually be found prowling the Tropicana, one of the older casinos off the glittering Strip, where he has invested in the hotel's new tennis facilities.

In New York, Puzo may walk the streets unrecognized. But in Las Vegas he is a celebrity--"Mr. P." to the dealers at the baccarat tables and Mario to the casino managers and habitual high rollers. He takes fame in his slow, fluid stride, even when confronted by admirers like the young hulk in a white suit who a few weeks ago grabbed Puzo's hand and babbled, "I shoulda been Sonny. All my friends told me so. I'm tough, I'm big, I'm comical, I'm smart and I'm an action guy."

These days Puzo's idea of action is to hole up in one of the Tropicana's gilded suites, kick off his shoes, open his shirt and play pinochle with his cronies. As much as $10,000 may ebb and flow around the table, but the atmosphere is casual, full of kibitzing and smoke from 8-in. Monte Cruzes.

It is a scene sometimes repeated for lower stakes in New York with his closest and oldest friends, Novelists Mandel and Heller, Diamond Merchant Julie Green and a retired clothing executive named Speed Vogel. The group has been meeting and eating together for more than 15 years, most recently at Heller's Manhattan apartment where Puzo pays part of the rent and which he uses when he stays in town.

When he arrives, Mario likes to strip down to his underwear and light up a cigar. He is a reluctant housekeeper. Says Heller: "For a while, I tried to get him to make his bed, but there was no use. He says he never made his bed in the Army and he can't start now. He leaves crushed-out cigars all over the place and ashes where they happen to drop. Now, we are not the odd couple, it is just that I don't like his mess."

What his fellow novelist does like is Puzo's "deceptive incongruity between his personality and his highly discriminating intelligence." It shows clearly in his early novels and the book reviews he wrote during the '60s. It flickers promisingly around the edges of The Godfather and Fools Die and could well flare in his future project, a novel that connects the Sicilian and American Mafias. If Mario Puzo never writes another word he will already have earned the title of Godfather of the Paperbacks. Like his friend Joe Heller's Catch-22, Puzo's The Godfather and "an offer you can't refuse" have already become part of the language. This may find him a niche in American letters. He is already assured a place in American numbers.

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