The Godfather returns

Einstein is not a poster boy for genius. Picasso is not a swarthy bald womanizer. Mozart isn’t an enfant terrible. Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath aren’t tragic affronts to the oppressive male hegemony. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King aren’t harmless, lovable little brown guys white people can feel comfortable endorsing. Babe Ruth isn’t a fat slob who ate hot dogs and visited sick kids in the hospital. Yes, the Mafia fixed the So

Joh

Big deal.

What difference does it make that Fontane gave the Shea campaign a half-million bucks in a satchel that had been a personal gift from Jackie Ping-Pong? Ping-Pong had nothing to do with the money itself. Joh

Fontane introduced Rita Duvall to both Louie Russo and Jimmy Shea (not to mention Fredo Corleone, whose baby she put up for adoption in 1956, right before her career took off). What happened after the introductions had to do with her, not Joh

Once, a sheriff’s deputy who’d taken a swing at Joh

Sure, Fontane was Vito Corleone’s godson. He got along with Michael, too. He was friendly with Russo, with Tony Stracci, with Gussie Cicero, and so on. So were a lot of people (Ambassador M. Corbett Shea, for example). He wasn’t a member of anyone’s quote-unquote crime family. Joh

Butta-beepa-da-boppa-da-boop.

In the end, Joh

He called himself a saloon singer, but at first that was Sicilian humility, then false modesty, then-after the masterpieces of American song that he released in the late fifties and early sixties-a disingenuous joke that the whole world was in on.

Take, as only one of many examples one might cite, his performance at James K. Shea’s inaugural ball.

That famous striped tux would have looked clownish on anyone else, but on Fontane it seems perfectly natural, one of the signal moments in twentieth-century style. All evening, he’s a charming and fu

Fontane’s own set consists of just three songs. The occasion would not seem to play to his strengths. His greatest recordings were either torch songs sung from a singularly male perspective or anthemic renditions of numbers about battered losers who endure-neither of which would have struck the right note for the occasion.

We first see him alone, in a pool of light. The top hat sits on a stool beside him. The music starts, just a piano and drums. Brushes. It’s a slow, loping arrangement of “It Had to Be You.” Fontane holds the microphone away from him at an angle and sings with his head cocked toward the ceiling. Throughout the song, Fontane moves the mike to alter his tone, playing it as well as Charlie Parker played his horn. Great voices abound, but Joh

The crowd bursts into applause. Fontane grabs his top hat and rips into “Ridin’ High,” stalking the stage with an animal ferocity Cole Porter could never have imagined. When Fontane finishes, breathless, the crowd leaps to its feet. Fontane’s grin is unmistakably that of a kid who grew up with nothing and looks out to see he’s got more than everything.

While there may be little to redeem the earnest version of “Big Dreams” that the Shea campaign co-opted as its official theme song (with new lyrics written by Wally Morgan), Joh

Chapter 25

I KNOW YOUR NAME IS BILLY, ” Mary said. “I only call you Bee-Boy because my cousin Kathy who looks just like Francie only without a baby inside calls you that too, even though I thought of it first, back when I was a baby. But I’d been born, of course.”

“I like it,” Billy said, showing everyone inside the apartment, “coming from you.”

Francesca had been up since four, unpacking the kitchen boxes, going to the grocery store, and cooking breakfast. She was exhausted but used to it. The baby kicked so much she hadn’t been getting much sleep anyway.

“Everything’s just about ready,” she said. “Excuse the mess. We’ve only been here two days. Billy, why don’t you give them the ten-cent tour and then we’ll eat. Hey, So