Didn't Kay search out Michael, and not the reverse?

In the movie, after Michael returns from Italy, he goes up to New Hampshire to find Kay. She says something to the effect that he's been back for a year....etc.etc.

If memory serves me correctly, In the book, isn't Kay the one who comes to the Corleone compound to see Michael after he comes back from Italy? Wasn't there a chapter telling how Mama Corleone welcomed her into the home and as she was sitting there Michaels car pulled up and he got out and seeing him for the first time since he came back from Italy, she sees his disfigured face? Does anyone remember this?


Don Cardi

Your memory serves you well, Don Cardi. Thats exactly how it happened in the book.

Kay had become a teacher after getting her degree, and after awhile she stopped calling the Corleone compound inquiring about Michael. Six months after Mike returned from Sicily, and after Kay's school year was done, she took a train ride down to New York to go shopping. On a whim she called the compound, and Carmella told her to come out to the compound because Michael was back in the country. She did, and the rest is history.

This is another example of how the book and the movie is different.

Yeah that's right. She calls first and is answered by Mama Corleone who informs here that Mike's back and asks her to "come" to Long Island and promise the cab driver double the amount....later on it was paid by a man at the gate (I wonder if he was reimbursed... )

Also, in the movie, Kay turns up at the compound before Michael gets back from Sicily (that's the scene with the deathless Hagen description of a car blocking the compound driveway: "That was an accident but nobody was hurt.").

Moma always knows best...

sez who? Mama?

I'm looking at some of the good older threads about the book - it's an interesting question as to why they might have changed things so that Michael went to see Kay when he returned to the States. One possibility is that Kay and Mama had something of a relationship in the book, because Kay occasionally called Mama when Michael was first gone to Sicily. That would have required interrupting the film for chatty phone calls.

More important, though, is that in the book the scene where Michael tells Kay how things are for him now is a sex scene, and that Copolla wouldn't want Michael to be seen in a tender light at that point. Better to have him in a suit and an oversized hat, lumbering down the street with his driver creeping along behind, so that the audience can see that he's a different man now, even if Kay can't see it yet.

...a pint-sized banker sizing up a merger partner...