Mark Winegardner picks up the reins to The Godfather saga and isn’t letting go.

By Robert Pool

“What are you waiting for?” Tessio whispered. “Sono fottuto. Shoot me.”
Geraci shot.
Tessio’s body flew backward so hard his knees made a sound like snapped roof shingles. The air was filled with a glowing pinkish gray mist. A yarmulke-sized piece of Tessio’s skull caromed off the wall of the garage, smacked Neri in the face, and clattered to the floor...

New York City’s underworld has never been a pretty place. But in 1969, the town’s legendary grit and blood took on a new face, this one literary. Mario Puzo’s blockbuster novel, The Godfather, released that year by Putnam, changed forever the public’s perception of organized crime and the nasty characters who run it.

The real otherworld of crime and violence that spawned Puzo’s idea for his famous bestseller is, of course, far removed from the quiet halls of academe. But millions of Godfather fans out there now celebrate an implausible link between Puzo’s masterful legacy and one very serious-minded professor of English at Florida State University.

In 2004, the release of The Godfather Returns met a tumultuous reception that made author Mark Winegardner an instant favorite among readers of the genre. It was the happy culmination of news made two years earlier, when in 2002 Winegardner, then a little-known but critically acclaimed novelist and professor in FSU’s Creative Writing Program, was tapped by Random House to write the sequel to Puzo’s only novel based on the Mafia. The Godfather Returns quickly became a critical and a commercial success. (The excerpt above appears early in the book and introduces the reader to Nick Geraci, a major new character in The Godfather saga.) Publishers Weekly called the sequel “a phenomenally entertaining, psychologically rich saga,” and the book spent many weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list.

All of these details about the book are by now well known, of course, and the word that Winegardner is now working on a sequel to the sequel, The Godfather’s Revenge, is already the buzz among a legion of Godfather enthusiasts.

What isn’t so well known, however, is just how Winegardner managed to do what he’s done. Writing a sequel to a successful book is a notoriously tricky business, even for the original author, and when a writer other than the original author takes on the task, the results are seldom pleasing. Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett, the authorized sequel to Gone With the Wind, for instance, is widely pointed to as an example of how badly a sequel can turn out. But Winegardner, at least in the judgment of a fair number of critics, avoided the curse of the sequel and wrote a book that was a worthy successor to the original. How he did it is a story worth telling in its own right.

At first, Winegardner might seem like a strange choice to follow in Mario Puzo’s footsteps. He’s not Italian, for instance—he’s German-Irish—and he didn’t grow up anywhere near the concrete jungle of Manhattan’s Little Italy, in either the geographic or the sociological sense. His boyhood was spent instead in Bryan, Ohio, a small, friendly Midwestern town that bills itself as “Tree City USA” and is the home of the Etch-a-Sketch and Dum Dum Pops.

Winegardner enrolled at Miami University of Ohio in Oxford, a somewhat larger but still friendly Midwestern town, whose main claim to fame is the university itself. And for his Master of Fine Arts degree, Winegardner jumped to George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., a then-sleepy bedroom community outside Washington, DC.

Furthermore, Winegardner made his reputation writing about things he knew and loved—many of which were quintessentially Midwestern and none of which had much overlap with the world of Puzo’s Godfather. Winegardner’s first book, published in 1988, was Elvis Presley Boulevard: From Sea to Shining Sea, Almost, a nonfiction account of a two-month, cross-country road trip he took after graduating from Miami of Ohio. Two years later he relied on his knowledge of and love for baseball when he published Prophet of the Sandlots: Journeys With a Major League Scout (Atlantic Monthly, 1990) about a summer spent with Tony Lucadello, who signed more players to the major leagues than any other scout of his generation.

In 1996 Winegardner revisited baseball with Veracruz Blues (Viking, 1996), a novel based on the 1946 “raid on Major League baseball,” when a number of pro baseball players defected to the Mexican League. It became a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In 2001 Winegardner published Crooked River Burning (Harcourt), an ambitious and well-reviewed novel that took place in Cleveland from the late 1940s to 1969, when the polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire. Along the way Winegardner wrote a large number of short stories and essays as well, published in such places as The New York Times Magazine and GQ. In all of this work, as he told one interviewer, he wrote from “a hopelessly Midwestern sensibility.”

Still, in 2001, when Jonathan Karp, Puzo’s editor at Random House, went looking for a writer to carry on the Godfather saga, Winegardner made it onto his short list of possibilities.

“We wanted an original voice, someone who would bring artistry and vision to the Corleone saga,” Karp said, as reported in a news release by the N.Y. artist community Yaddo where Winegardner sometimes works. “From the dozens of contenders, we unanimously agreed that the best candidate was Mark Winegardner.”

Puzo, Winegardner notes, had never wanted to write a sequel to The Godfather. He had written the screenplay for the movie adaptation of his book and then penned the screenplays for the two movie sequels, but he had a bad experience with Godfather III and never went back to the saga again.

Still, as Winegardner tells the tale, Puzo told his executor that he would agree to having a sequel written if three conditions were met: “One, they find a good writer. Two, wait until I croak. Three, make sure you get my family a lot of dough. If you do all those things, you have my blessing.” Puzo died in 1999, and within a couple of years, Karp, along with Puzo’s oldest son, Anthony, and literary agent Neil Olson were discreetly contacting a select group of writers and asking them to submit proposals for a sequel to The Godfather .

Winegardner seemed a natural choice to Karp for a number of reasons. In his early 40s, he was about the same age as Puzo had been when he wrote The Godfather, and, more important, he was at about the same stage in his career. At the time, Puzo had established himself as a serious writer with a number of literary novels under his belt. The Godfather was a complete departure for him, Winegardner notes. “He was trying to sell out and write a bestseller.”

And, although Winegardner had never written anything specifically about the Mafia or set in New York City, his subject matter was not as far from The Godfather as it might first appear. Winegardner describes reading a review of one of his books in which the reviewer had observed that his subject had always been American mythology. “I read the review, and I thought, ‘He’s right. Those are the subjects that speak to me.’ And the godfather figure is as central to American mythology as anything.”

Furthermore, as luck would have it, Winegardner was already somewhat familiar with the Mafia. The novel he had just finished, Crooked River Burning, touched on organized crime, as the father of its main protagonist is a mob-connected Teamsters Union official, and he had been working on mapping out a new novel that would have a lot to do with the Cleveland Mafia in the 1970s. “A lot of the story that I wanted to tell about the Cleveland Mafia ended up in the two Godfather novels,” Winegardner says.

So Winegardner was receptive when Karp approached him. The major question he asked himself was whether he could write the sort of book he wanted to write while still carrying on the Godfather franchise: “Could I write a very complex, layered, literary book in the guise of a thriller? I wanted enough texture and depth to have plenty of interesting things that you only see on the second or third time through.”

To come up with a book proposal for Karp, Winegardner went back and read The Godfather closely. “I was looking for holes. Where is another story to tell? If I hadn’t found that, I wouldn’t have done it.” Meanwhile, he was doing further research on the Mafia.

“The moment I realized there was a good book to be written,” Winegardner says, “was when I realized that the most important emotional issue in the Godfather saga was still on the table—Michael’s desire to take the family business legitimate. At the end of Part II he has lost his soul and is left with a hollow desire. By the end of Part III he’s been partially successful. He has at least a veneer of legitimacy. But none of that is ever dramatized. The most important thing was still unwritten.”

At the same time, Winegardner continues, the second most important emotional issue in the saga was also unresolved: Tom Hagen’s relationship with the Corleone family. Hagen, who is Don Vito Corleone’s “semi-adopted” son and a semi-adopted brother to Michael, Sonny, and Fredo Corleone, is really “jacked around” in The Godfather: Part II, Winegardner says. He is the family’s lawyer and, briefly, its acting don, but his position is ambiguous, and he gets increasingly frustrated with his lack of advancement.

“In a more docile character you’d accept it,” Winegardner said. “But he’s not a guy who will be Michael Corleone’s lapdog. Then in Godfather III he’s dead. There is no explanation of how he died and only one mention of him in the whole movie. Yet of the 2½ brothers, Michael ultimately respects Tom the most.”

There were plenty of other issues left open by the book and the movies as well, he added.

“Fredo supposedly betrays Michael because his ambition is thwarted, but we never see any sign that he has ambition. That’s a story-telling screw-up.”

Or whatever happened to Johnny Fontane, the Frank Sinatra-type character who set in motion the most famous scene in the first movie—the leaving of the horse’s head in the bed of a recalcitrant Hollywood producer?

So Winegardner proposed a book that would fill in some of these holes and weave in and around the Godfather saga as it had appeared in the original book and the movies. This set him apart from the other writers who had been requested to submit proposals, he says. Many of them didn’t want to mess with the original saga and suggested ways of telling a completely different story.

“Someone wanted to retell it among Native Americans in the 1850s,” he says. “A British writer reimagined it in Britain, with Michael moving to London.”

But Winegardner didn’t think Puzo would have minded him wading into the saga and embellishing it. “Puzo said he thought it was his worst novel, and he said he would have written it better if he’d known how popular it would be. He wouldn’t have had a problem messing with it.”

Besides the proposals from writers Karp had contacted, there were a number of unsolicited proposals, Winegardner says. “They came from prisoners, housewives, a Danish janitor.” None of them got read.

In November 2002, Winegardner got a call from Karp: The job was his. Now all he had to do was to write a sequel to one of the best-known and best-loved books of American literature.

Winegardner acknowledges feeling some nervousness about following in Puzo’s footsteps. The challenge was his alone, and the pressure to succeed, too.

“I said I’d do this, but I didn’t know. It’s hard to write a book anyway, and I was writing a book where I knew if I did a good job, people would want to read it.”

Fortunately for Winegardner, he had already been scheduled to take a sabbatical during the 2003-2004 school year, so he would have a large block of time that he could devote almost completely to the book. He would need it: The first step was research—and lots of it.

“I don’t ever want to be vulnerable on the ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about’ flank,” he said.

Even before he wrote the proposal for the sequel, he had been researching the Mafia for the novel he had in mind previously, so he was able to get off to a “rolling start,” as he put it.

“I did a lot of research, probably read a couple of hundred books. A couple of dozen I read carefully from the beginning to the end, and I had the others to draw from.”

In this, Winegardner says, he actually had a big advantage over Puzo.

“Puzo always resented it when people assumed that because he was Italian, he knew about the Mafia. He actually learned about it in the New York City library.” At the time, though, Puzo had relatively few resources. “Only one mob guy had ever flipped at the time,” Winegardner notes. “There was very little known about the Mafia, and only a few books had been written.” But by 2003, Winegardner says, “there were whole wings of books on the Mafia.” And not only books, but he could also get access to transcripts of wiretaps of Mafia members, which he devoured.

“I also talked to some guys,” he adds, somewhat cryptically. “They were people who know people—low- to mid-level guys who’d seen things.”

The research was crucial for creating a realistic picture of the Mafia of the time, he said. When Puzo was writing, Americans knew very little about the Mafia, so it was possible to get away with a less-than-accurate version of mob life—and indeed The Godfather did much to create the modern idea of what the Mafia is. But after 30 years of books, movies, and TV shows devoted to the mob, including most recently The Sopranos, readers expect much more.

“I wanted to make it more real than Puzo had,” Winegardner says. Not completely real, of course. The original Godfather was a “romanticized operatic take” on the Mafia, Winegardner notes, and that was a large part of its appeal. “I wanted to maintain the tone, particularly the operatic part,” he says. “But I wanted to make the sex and violence more realistic.”

The first part did not demand any new research, Winegardner says dryly. (“Sex I know something about.”) But he did need to do a great deal of research on violence to get to the point where he could depict that part of mob life realistically. He read descriptions of what it feels like to kill people, and he studied psychological literature on what it takes to manipulate people into killing other people.

“Mafia people are trained to kill just like the armed forces—an us-versus-them mentality is created, and killing becomes a way of protecting the people who are important to you.”

In one of the two epigraphs Winegardner included in The Godfather Returns, he quoted Audie Murphy, the most-decorated U.S. soldier of the Second World War, on how he found the courage to take on a whole German infantry company. “They were killing my friends,” Murphy said.

One part of the Mafia’s genius, Winegardner learned, is that members refer to their business organization as “family,” so that eliminating a threat to that organization seems more acceptable, even admirable.

“If it comes down to family,” he says, “everybody likes to think they could kill.”

After finishing the research phase, Winegardner set down to write, working from copious notes.

“I didn’t know exactly where I had to start and where I had to end,” he says. “I had a framework of things.”

He had already made one crucial decision when he had chosen to fill in the gaps left by the book and the movies, but how exactly was that to be done? As a sequel to the original book, The Godfather Returns would pick up where The Godfather had left off and, Winegardner decided, would include a flashback that would pick up pieces of Michael Corleone’s childhood. In this way it would mirror the original book, which had included a flashback to Vito Corleone’s childhood.

But while his book would take into account events from the second and third movies in the sense that the book would lead up to some of those events and also look at their consequences, he decided that his sequel would not explicitly mention any of the events from the movies.

“What was complicated,” he says, “was figuring out how to snake around the events of II, which is an eventful six months.”

The challenge was similar to the one he faced in his first two novels, which took place against the backdrop of real historical events. In The Veracruz Blues, for instance, one of the fictional characters is a baseball reporter and frustrated novelist who hung out with Ernest Hemingway.

“It was only after I’d written quite a bit of The Godfather Returns that I realized it wasn’t any different,” Winegardner recalls. He had a history that he had to respect—the story as told in the original book and the movies—but otherwise he was free to create.

Similarly, he came to realize that writing about characters that someone else had created was much like writing a biography—he would act as if Michael and Sonny and Fredo and all the rest of Puzo’s characters were real people and would try to see the world through their eyes.

In the beginning, he was nervous about being influenced by the characters as they were played in the movies. He wanted his characters to be Puzo’s characters, not the screen characters created by Pacino, Duvall and the rest. But he discovered once he got into the book that he didn’t see those movie characters at all.

“If you’re really writing well, you’re writing about the character from the inside out,” he says. “You are Michael Corleone. It’s a kind of method acting. I don’t do anything goofy, like act it out. But you can’t have a character look out a window and see what you would see. They have to see what they would see.”

As a novelist, though, he also felt it important to have characters in the book that he created. The major character he added to the Godfather saga is Nick Geraci, a soldier in the Corleone family who though his ambition and intelligence—and willingness to do what needs to be done—rises to a position of power in the family.

“I wanted to give Michael a truly worthy adversary,” he explained. In the saga as written, there had never been any worthy adversaries. “Once the family recognized them, they could easily dispatch them.”

So Winegardner created Geraci to be as smart as Michael and tougher—and also to be an adversary that Michael himself has created by sacrificing Geraci like a pawn in a chess game. Unfortunately for Michael Corleone, Geraci survives the sacrifice, and the resulting conflict between them becomes the major plotline in the book.

In the original book and the movies, Michael never makes a strategic error. So although he ended up losing the war—he wanted legitimacy and to have his family near him, but he got neither—he won all of his individual battles.

“The things he paid attention to, he got too easily,” Winegardner said, which resulted in a tale that was “very operatic and Shakespearean.” But, he pondered, what if Michael also screws up? So in The Godfather Returns, Michael Corleone does make mistakes, and those mistakes lead to a dramatic tension that was not present in the original.

Once he had the general outline of the book mapped out, it was time to fill in the story arc.

“That’s the fun part,” Winegardner says. “The reader has to believe it, but it has to be surprising as well. The characters have to develop in ways that aren’t predictable, or who would want to read the book?”

Winegardner had fun with the book in other ways as well. He consciously included a motif of doubles in the book, for example: double doors, double Scotch, double-parked cars, a baseball double-header, and a restaurant named Two Toms, to name just a few. There’s a pair of twins, Francesca and Kathy, who are Michael Corleone’s nieces, and also a number of character pairings, or “figurative twins,” as Winegardner calls them: Michael Corleone and Nick Geraci, Michael Corleone and Tom Hagen, Francesca and her father, Sonny Corleone, plus others. Two different characters survive assassination attempts by employing a double. At least twice, a mirror is broken. And so on. It’s something that isn’t obvious, but rather it is a little treat left for the observant reader to discover.

The actual process of writing the book was painful, Winegardner admitted, borrowing a line from the late Dorothy Parker about hating to write, but enjoying “having written.”

“I actually find it miserable writing. I find writing really, really, really difficult, but the rewards are greater than the cost.

“I spent two years on that book, including one in which I did almost nothing else, including my personal life. It had my utter, undivided attention for over a year.”

During the 2003-2004 school year, while he was on sabbatical from his FSU teaching duties, Winegardner spent time at several artist colonies. The appeal of those places, he says, was the total solitude they offered: When he was in his room, no one could contact him, and he could focus completely on his writing.

“I don’t believe in the muse,” he says. “I don’t believe in being inspired. Even if you believe in the muse, it’s a good idea to sit down at your desk so your muse knows where to find you.”

When he sits down to write, Winegardner has an idea of where the story is going, but mainly it takes shape as he writes, he said.

“You have to trust what goes down on the page. What emerges as you write—that’s the real stuff. A bad draft is better than a good idea. Every once in a while you will look back at it and wonder, ‘How did I do that?’”

The year spent totally focused on the book was particularly tough on his wife, he said, who was left to run the household while he was away for weeks or months at a time. On the other hand, given the sizeable advance that came with the contract for The Godfather Returns, “the stress put on my family was much different than the stress of a first novel. You can pay people to cut the grass, babysit, etc.”

When the book was released in November 2004, it met generally favorable and often quite glowing reviews. Sarah Vowell in the New York Times Book Review termed it “a real pleasure, a fine, swirling epic—bitter, touching, funny and true.” Jeff Guinn of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram described Nick Geraci as “one of the most interesting, multi-dimensional characters in recent fictional memory,” and concluded, “Most Puzo fans would have gladly settled for more of exactly the same, and Winegardner instead is giving them something that, in critical ways (more character development and depth, more subtle storytelling) exceeds the original.” And Liz Smith of the New York Post summed it up this way: “A mighty wow of a read. I couldn’t put it down and spent two feverish days and nights putting off everything else to finish the saga of the Corleones.”

What was most important to Winegardner, however, was that he himself was happy with the book.

“I’m proud of Godfather Returns,” he says. “I think it’s a good book. There were a lot of reviewers whose attitude was, ‘Gee, I thought it would suck, and it doesn’t.’ My feeling was, I’d always written books that hadn’t sucked.”

And, he admits, he is happy that the book has done well commercially.

“Being on the bestseller list is like being invited to a party you never expected to be invited to, but when you go, you don’t want to leave.”

Since the release of the book, Winegardner says, his life has changed in various ways, most noticeably in the demands on his time.

“Exponentially more people want something from me,” he says. Advice about writing, a blurb for a book, money. As a result, he says, “my life has fewer and fewer other things in it.” He doesn’t spend as much time with friends as he would like to, for instance.

The book has also brought him a certain amount of fame, but not as much as some might guess, he says. This could change if Hollywood puts Nick Geraci on screen though there’s no word on a movie deal yet.

“There’s famous-famous, and there’s writer-famous, and I’m not even writer-famous.”

Nonetheless, he admits, there are occasions when he is recognized.

“I was in Po’Boys (Creole Cafe) the other week, and the waiter was star-struck.”

And, of course, the book has brought a significant financial payoff, although Winegardner downplays that as well.

“I’d never written a book that had sold a couple of million copies worldwide, but that’s not something that you notice on a day-to-day basis. The dog doesn’t feel different to you.”

The bottom line, he says, is that although the book has changed his life in certain ways, none of it has been fundamental.

“I’m still married to the same wife. I still drive the same, beat-up old jeep. I still work at the same university.

“At times it’s been a challenge to keep my life normal,” he says, “but by and large I think I’ve succeeded, and I’m proud of that.”