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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?"