Family Secrets

[still lookin 4 the face i had b4 the world was made]

On Tue, 13 May 1997, Jules Siegel wrote:
> At 04:21 PM 05/13/97 -0400, "Meg Larson" <mgl at tardis.svsu.edu> wrote:
> >Jules, I went to the URL below, and read your "interview."  Out of
> curiosity, I would like to know what you mean(t) when you say (said), and
> I'm paraphrasing here, that you gave Mario Puzo the research materials,
[...] 
> He didn't use anything I gave him to write The Godfather (although some of
> it did point him in the right direction) but it mainly inspired some aspects
> of the character of Don Vito Corelone, especially his intelligence and
> sensitivity and his love of family.

Ah.  So, Puzo had never personally met anyone with intelligence, sensitivty,
or love of family?  He couldn't find these traits in the Italian culture he
was writing about, and needed Siegel _pere_, Jewish bank robber, to give his
Sicilian mobster true depth?

> One of my father's aliases was Jean Valjean. My father, Eli "Jimmy" Siegel,
> was a lifelong professional criminal who in his youth served eight years in
> special solitary confinement in Danemorra, the New York State maximum
> security prison at Clinton, NY, like the Bird Man of Alcatraz. I was told by
> his brother, that he had been convicted of participating in the armed
> robbery of a factory payroll. The security patrol arrived ahead of schedule
[...] 
> Mario used to urge me to write a novel about him and he often jokingly said,
> "If you don't do it, I will." I very sincerely told him to go ahead. I knew
> very little about my father and was reluctant to invent anything, as I held
> his memory sacred and cherished every little scrap I knew about him. He was
> a great man.

Not a great bank robber...

> In 1964 or 65 I gave Mario a book called The Honored Society by Norman Lewis
> and some excerpts from Congressional hearings that I came across while I was
> free-lancing for North American Newspaper Alliance. 
[...] 
> I gave Pynchon the material on
> Alderson Research's radiation dummies in 1959, I believe. I didn't hand it
> to him and say, "Tom, here's something that would make a great scene in
> whatever you're writing." It was a press kit I had lying around at home when
> he visited me and my then-wife, Phyllis DeBus. He picked it up and studied
> it and asked if he could take it.

So...you can legitimately say that you were almost sort of a research
assistant for two famous novels, forty years ago. 

Max

M a x i m u s  D a v i d  C l a r k e | A true act of love, unlike
         http://www.afn.org/~traveler | imaginary love, is hard
                "Surrealist-At-Large" | and forbidding.
                     traveler at afn.org | --Dostoevsky