It was seventh grade and I can see the dimpled, clownish face of the boy who brought the book, but I can’t recall his name. He read the section where Johnny Fontaine’s actress wife came home from a night of adultery and Johnny couldn’t even bring himself to hit her in the face. I think the line that moved us to awed silence was “Johnny never fucked me.” I was already quite the dirty-book specialist, but this was a DIRTY BOOK. I bided my time, knowing it would come into my hands eventually.
Strangely, the place where I finally got a little quality time with Mario Puzo’s go-for-broke bestseller (Puzo had been a pretty serious literary writer pre-Godfather) was at my maternal grandparents’ home over Christmas break. I have no idea how the book came to be in my Grandmother Mabry’s house. (Okay, who am I kidding? We called her ‘Big Mama’ as noted elsewhere on this blog.) I cannot imagine my grandmother reading it, or even my grandfather. And, of course, except for the bits of sex that everyone remembers, it’s actually not that dirty a book. Grace Metallious was far dirtier. Although, in some of its passages about women, THE GODFATHER could not be more profoundly stupid.
Okay, what’s the harm? None, really. Or maybe some. Perhaps THE GODFATHER is ripe for a retelling, a la THE WIND DONE GONE, from sister Connie’s POV. And wouldn’t it be refreshing if Lucy was finally allowed to say: “My vagina’s not too big — your penis is just too small!”
In short — hah! — Mario Puzo did more for the myth of the vaginal orgasm than anyone since Freud. There are myriad reasons to admire Francis Ford Coppola, but the loss of that particular subplot from the movie version is among them.
Where were you when you read it? And where were you when you read FEAR OF FLYING, a book that’s probably better than its current rep would have it — smart, funny, punny? Interestingly, Erica Jong was called a “mammoth pudenda” for writing that book, but no one ever called Puzo a “little prick.” Doesn’t seem fair.
Me, I read “Fear of Flying” chapter by chapter, standing up in the Waldenbooks at Columbia Mall. I read Rumer Godden’s “Greengage Summer” the same way, Lord knows why. Thirty years later, Rumer Godden is known, if she’s known at all, for inspiring the name of Demi Moore’s and Bruce Willis’s daughter.
“Mammoth pudenda” is a pretty good insult. Not up to the standard of “festering cockmonkey”, but it has a certain ring to it.
No idea why someone would’ve called Erica Jong that for FoF, though. Baffles me. Sounds like missing out on the 70s and its attitudes was a good thing all round.
But then I’ve never read either book (and, oddly, the first Godfather is the one film of the trilogy that I haven’t seen).
I can remember my Mom had this book SHANNA when I was a little girl, and even though I never read it I just KNEW it was the dirtiest book ever written. I am tempted to read it now to see if I was right.
As for The Godfather, I remember a whole lot of talk about Lucy and her monster “southern region” — as well as about Sonny’s “special part” , and that is all I remember.
John,
I agree with the conventional wisdom that the second film is the greater achievement, but the first is wonderful. A “10″ in watchability; the wedding scene is a mini-film unto itself.
As for “mammoth pudenda” . . . FEAR OF FLYING sold 12 million copies in paperback. For a determinedly literary writer at the time, it was unheard of. (Still rare now, although I suppose THE LOVELY BONES sold millions.) A backlash was probably inevitable. Is the novel as good as Updike said it was? It’s hard for me to judge. The ending’s a bit of a cop-out, but it was extremely autobiographical and Jong may have needed the ending more than her character did. But it’s well-written and funny and very frank about sex.
To bring this full circle — in her second novel, a sequel to FoF, Isadora meets a screenwriter at a Hollywood party. “Perhaps he could have [written a novel] once, but by now it was too late. And besides, how could he work three years for a $20,000 advance on a novel when he made that much in two months, writing screenplays . . .He was a beaten man, an intellectual derelict, A Bowery bum of letters. They had taken away his words and given him money instead. It was a lousy bargain. He spent an hour wishing he were me.”
In her memoir, FEAR OF FIFTY, she recounts this conversation with Mario Puzo: “Write screenplays. There’s more money in it. . . .
‘If I don’t write the second, how can I write the third?’ I asked Mario. ‘If I don’t write the third, how can I write the fourth, if i don’t write the fourth, how can I write the fifth . . .’ Et cetera. . . .
‘Fools die,’ muttered Puzo. Or maybe he only said, ‘Schmuck.’”
(Jong was one of my first author profiles, but lord knows why I remembered all this.)
The Godfather trilogy? Superb. The wedding scene? Incomprable! It took me back to my childhood-each shot in that scene was a masterpiece of Italian-American reality.
Dirty books? Pshaw. Harold Robbins was the master.
Speaking of full circle — one of my very first booksignings, if not the first, was in that store where I had read so many books standing up. The store invited me, so I assumed they had, well, a plan. When I arrived, the manager had no idea I was coming. He tossed a dozen copies of my book on a card table and left me to my own devices. I decided to move those puppies, which is not my usual style. I sold them all within less than the allotted 90 minutes, then went back to the storeroom to check out with the manager. He had turned out all the lights so he could play with his glow-in-the-dark cutout of the Millennium Falcon. “You sold them all!” he said. “No one ever does that.”
But I’m a slow learner. It took me several more mall signings to learn a key fact of life: Lots of people come to the mall, but not that many come to buy books. You’re better off in a stand-alone bookstore where every customer is a book-buyer, rather than in a mall, where far more people are there to buy underwear and accessories at Claire’s Boutiques.
When *did* The Godfather come out in paperback?? I don’t remember where or when I read it. I do remember being fascinated with the intricacies of the plot and astonished at the idea that virtually every character was corrupt in some way. What I mostly remember, though, was being really struck by the unending violence (and all those sphincters releasing).
I never considered it a “dirty book” — I had long since read the “turned-down pages” of Valley of the Dolls and more than my share of Harold Robbins.
I’m obviously going to have to read Fear of Flying — as soon as I finish the mystery novel I just started
“Mammoth Pudenda” would be a great name for a rock band.
[/Dave Barry]
We had a paperback copy of the Godfather at about the same time you read it Laura, but I never picked it up to read. I seem to recall a black cover with red or silver writing. I wasn’t interested in Mafia books, and the adults who discussed the book when I was around usually just talked about the horse head scene.
My awakening came when I read “Summer of 42″ when in 8th or 9th grade. A friend gave it to me at school, and I read the entire book the same afternoon. While I was reading in my room a thunderstorm passed through the area, and afterwards the late afternoon sun shone brilliantly. I kept the book hidden on the far side of the bed so my father wouldn’t see it when he came home from work.
I feel fortunte to have made it through adolescence without ever having as embarrassing an episode as Hermie had with his date in the movie theater.
I agree with Elaine. The GF I, II and III are among my favorite films. Very few capture the sense of time and place that they do, whether the wedding, the Sunday morning on Long Island leading to Sonny’s ambush, Manhattan or Sicily.
When I read Puzio’s GF novel, I don’t remember it being particularly “dirty.” A lot of the vocabulary was familiar to just about everybody–especially those of us who had worked at blue collar jobs or on farms. I like the Byzantine complexity of the families.
The “dirty” books that were popular in my youth were the detective novels–especially Mickey Spillane. As I look back on them, they seem really silly–especially the “dirty” parts. I never got past the turned down pages of Peyton Place, although I read all of them.
And then, there’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover–with so many turned down pages and such explicit “dirty stuff.” Since there were so many turned down pages, I figured I should read the whole thing and was really surprised at how good the novel is–that it’s really about the dehumanizing effects of war and capitalist industry, and that the
descriptions of such commonplace things as the sun shining through a cottage window on a brick floor are so compelling. This raises another point–why is it that we read so many things at the wrong time? “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” made no sense to me in high school and little sense in college. In my mid-60s it makes a lot of sense.
One more in this long ramble. When we were kids, my sister and cousin found a copy of “Forever Amber” (scandalous in the 40s and 50s). My grandfather said “it must have belonged to one of Aunt Nell’s Protestant husbands.”
Never did read Fear of Flying but I have been to the Columbia Mall.
If I can sell 12 million books, they can call me anything they want.
David “Gaping Bunghole” Montgomery
It appeared in hardcover in 1969 and the film was released in 1972, so I’m going to infer it has to be between those dates.
The “Forever Amber” reference brought back some memories! I remember reading that about the same time I was reading “The Godfather”. Ended up using Don Corleone’s speech to the other mafia heads for our forensics exercise.
(RIP Judith Rossner)
I remember watching the third one at about 16. I’d come home drunk from a friend’s house late one night in the belief that my parents would be in bed and thus I’d get away with it, only to find my dad had stayed up to watch Part III.
Desperately trying to act sober, I sat down in the front room and tried to be engrossed in the film to give the beer time to leave my system. Sadly, with a plot as bizarre as III (especially never having watched I or II), I was forced to keep asking my dad for explanations as to who everyone was and what they were doing.
I *think* I got away with it, though…
Thanks for sharing that image there, David.
BTW, the first two Godfather movies are the pinnacle of American cinematic achievement.
The third is a Foul Reek in the Nostrils of God.
I’m home from two weeks out West, and it’s such a coincidence that your topic is about “The Godfather.” We saw very little TV while on vacation, but happened to flip some channels while in Tahoe and landed on the pivotal scene in which Michael Corleone decides to “join the family” for the first time. My husband, who has been researching a nonfiction book about the Mafia in New Haven, and I have seen this movie more times than we can count, and even took a special trip into NYC for the 25th anniversary release so we could see it on a really big screen. As for reading the book, I saw the movie first and read Puzo’s “Fools Die” first, which was my favorite of his books.