Don Rickles? Don Rickles

The three most interesting things about this Vanity Fair piece on The Godfather? 1) A Phyllis McGuire mention! 2) Talia Shire barely makes it into the story. 3) This is how James Caan prepared for the role of Sonny Corleone: "He adopted the strut and copied the way he’d seen gangsters always touching themselves, and he bought two-toned shoes that gave Sonny his lady-killer gait. 'I didn’t have to work on an accent or anything, but I couldn’t quite get a grasp,' he says. He was stuck on the scene where Sonny interrupts the Don during the meeting about going into the drug business with Sollozzo. One night he tried to come up with a solution. 'I was shaving to go to dinner or something, and for some reason I started thinking of Don Rickles. Because I knew Rickles. Somebody was watching over me and gave me this thing: being Rickles, kind of say-anything, do-anything.' The next morning he had Sonny’s personality down cold. 'Oh, are you telling me that the Tattaglias guarantee our investment?' he cracked, with a rapid-fire, Don-Rickles-meets-the-Mob bravado that elevated his character to a whole new level." Do you see it?

Also, if you read the book -- it's not really the shoes that make Sonny Corleone such a lady killer.