Talk:The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions

Latest comment: 7 months ago by DavidLJ in topic A Mario Puzo Story.

ISBN

edit

For some reason I can't find the ISBN for the original Putnam's 1972 edition of this book, so I left it out of the citation. Per$1$tenceofv1$1on (talk) 14:01, 10 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

A Mario Puzo Story.

edit

I was sorta Puzo-adjacent in the late 1960's, in part because I was an editor at American Heritage before it was bought out by The Green Monster, McGraw-Hill.

Puzo, pre-Godfather, was a hero in the publishing industry because his short stories were just so goddam good, and everybody was both puzzled and sorry that he was starving poor.

A bunch of the publishing heavies had a weekly poker game, no big deal, a hundred bucks would have been a very big pot, and Puzo was a regular. Then The Godfather came out, and after a while Mario got his first royalty cheque, six hundred thousand dollars and change. He didn't show up for that week's game.

The next week he turned up again. Broke again. He'd gotten his cheque, joined a different poker game, and lost the whole thing in a long night of gambling. Why did he do it? Who was he playing with? What had happened? Everybody wanted to know.

"Sometimes you just gotta give it back," he explained.

DavidLJ (talk) 03:37, 3 April 2024 (UTC)Reply