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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.