Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

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. Johnny had to carry it in something. (And, anyway, he lived in a world where people gave a lot of gifts. Once, he’d had an accountant who told him to cut back on all that. Fontane sent him a Rolex.) Fontane raised millions for that campaign, so what does it matter that this particular half million was part of the skim from the Kasbah, a Chicago-owned casino in Las Vegas? What difference does it make who in West Virginia wound up with it, or how exactly those recipients might have used it to ensure that Jimmy Shea won a state that he might have won anyway?

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 Johnny Fontane.

Once, a sheriff’s deputy who’d taken a swing at Johnny Fontane after Fontane had fucked the guy’s wife died mysteriously in the desert. So what? Fontane fucked a lot of men’s wives. People die mysteriously in the desert every day. There was never a shred of evidence of any causal connection between those two terrible but commonplace truths.

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. Johnny Fontane was just loyal to people who were loyal to him when his life was nothing but Mondays.

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

In the end, Johnny Fontane was a singer. The world will not see his like again.

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 funny master of ceremonies, with none of the boys-will-be-boys dicking around from his nightclub act or the ponderous showbiz patter of his late-career arena shows. He is, when called upon, a brilliant duet partner-most notably with Ella Fitzgerald on a quiet, stirring a cappella version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

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 Johnny Fontane is something rarer: a great singer.

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), Johnny Fontane, suffused with the triumph of the moment, gives it a hero’s try. He certainly seems sincere. After the opening verse, a curtain behind him rises, and the rest of the night’s acts stride forth and join in for the chorus. When the camera cuts to the audience, the houselights are up and everyone’s standing and singing along, too. The president kisses his first lady. Fontane throws them his top hat. The president catches it and puts it on. It fits.

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, Sonny ! Get over here, right now! We have guests!”

Her son got up from in front of the TV and ran and tackled Tony. Sonny was just shy of his third birthday. Tony was nine. Tony took it well. Uncle Mike noted his son’s patience with obvious approval. She’d never noticed much resemblance between Uncle Mike and Grandpa Vito, but suddenly it was there in her uncle’s weary eyes, so much so it was spooky.

“So this is Sonny,” Michael said, picking him up. “I’m your Uncle Mike. You’re pretty tough, huh?”

Francesca rolled her eyes. “Sonny won’t take that helmet off. Half the time he even sleeps in it. It’s Frankie’s fault. At Christmas, all he did was teach Sonny how to play football.”

Billy, for no apparent reason, eyed Uncle Mike as if he thought he might drop Sonny.

“Good teacher, I bet,” Michael said. Frankie Corleone, as a sophomore, had started at linebacker for Notre Dame.

“You like football, sport?” Billy asked Tony.

Tony shrugged.

“That’s the way I am, too,” Billy said, mussing the boy’s hair.

“He hates that,” Mary said.

“I don’t mind,” Tony said.

She reached for his hair herself, and he slapped her hand. Michael set Sonny down, scooped Mary up in one arm, and held Tony by the hand with the other.

“Sorry,” Michael said. They immediately calmed down. He was an amazing father.

“Don’t be,” Francesca said. “They’re just being kids. I bet you fought with your brothers and Aunt Connie worse than that. I’m lucky I never killed my sister.”

“Nice apartment,” Michael said.

The building was more than a hundred years old. It was once a mansion and had been divided into four big apartments. Theirs was on the ground floor and included most of what must have been a ballroom and was now their living room, dining room, and kitchen. The wooden floors were sloped and buckled enough that Sonny’s toys and marbles were forever rolling across rooms. Francesca loved it. She’d never lived anyplace that was more than twenty years old before, and certainly nowhere so elegant, however faded. Several times a day she’d walk to the curb just to look at it and marvel that this was where she lived.

Thinking of this, she looked out at the curb and saw Al Neri still sitting in the car. “Your driver can come in, too, you know,” she said as everyone sat down. “I bet he’s hungry.”