The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
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that girl turning him down, she had been nice and smart and acting sort of hip, but would 
she have been so cool if he had really been at the top? Now with the Don backing him 
with dough he could be as big as anybody in Hollywood. He could be a king. Johnny 
smiled. Hell. He could even be a Don. 
It would be nice living with Ginny again for a few weeks, maybe longer. He’d take the 
kids out every day, maybe have a few friends over. He’d stop drinking and smoking, 
really take care of himself. Maybe his voice would get strong again. If that happened 
and with the Don’s money, he’d be unbeatable. He’d really be as close to an oldtime 
king or emperor as it was possible to be in America. And it wouldn’t depend on his voice 
holding up or how long the public cared about him as an actor. It would be an empire 
rooted in money and the most special, the most coveted kind of power. 
Ginny had the guest bedroom made up for him. It was understood that he would not 
share her room, that they would not live as man and wife. They could never have that 
relationship again. And though the outside world of gossip columnists and movie fans 
gave the blame for the failure of their marriage solely to him, yet in a curious way, 
between the two of them, they both knew that she was even more to blame for their 
divorce. 
When Johnny Fontane because the most popular singer and movie musical comedy 
star in motion pictures, it had never occurred to him to desert his wife and children. He 
was too Italian, still too old-style. Naturally he had been unfaithful. That had been 
impossible to avoid in his business and the temptations to which he was continually 
exposed. And despite being a skinny, delicate-looking guy, he had the wiry horniness of 
many small-boned Latin types. And women delighted him in their surprises. He loved 
going out with a demure sweet-faced virginal-looking girl and then uncapping her 
breasts to find them so unexpectedly slopingly full and rich, lewdly heavy in contrast to 
the cameo face. He loved to find sexual shyness and timidity in the sexy-looking girls 
who were all fake motion like a shifty basketball player, vamping as if they had slept with 
a hundred guys, and then when he got them alone having to battle for hours to get in 
and do the job and finding out they were virgins. 
And all these Hollywood guys laughed at his fondness for virgins. They called it an old 
guinea taste, square, and look how long it took to make a virgin give you a blow job with 
all the aggravation and then they usually turned out to be a lousy piece of ass. But 
Johnny knew that it was how you handled a young girl. You had to come on to her the 
right way and then what could be greater than a girl who was tasting her first dick and 

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