Part of what makes Eleanor Coppola’s 1995 book, Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now, the best of its kind is her. After all, it was her apocalypse, too. Though as she so often denied, or felt she was made to deny, herself, I suspect she would deny her casual artistry was much more than jottings.
Eleanor, whose father was a cartoonist who died when she was young, had always dreamed of living a life of adventure as the wife of a powerful artist, but only a psychoanalyst would say she asked for everything the tropical typhoon she married had in store for her, him, the children. Wife, mother, or artist? Should she leave? Should she stay? This was her theme: How much art and life can we ask each other to sacrifice?
As Notes and Notes on a Life and her lovely final volume, Two of Me, show, Eleanor’s searching double vision, the outrage and self-pity, gratitude and depression, at times clouded her mirror. But, taken together, the diaries she published are as cogent as any that ask the question native to many of us, whether we’re Coppolas or not: If I have everything, why do I feel something’s missing?
She is like a character in a Sofia Coppola movie, waiting, wondering, longing, doubting, seeing anew. But whereas the present, for Sofia, is voluptuous, for Eleanor there exists, always, the possibility of more elsewhere—even when life, it would appear, is vibrantly in front of her.
“Perhaps what I am noticing is after so many extreme experiences I am now longing to retract just a bit,” she wrote, “withdraw somewhat from Francis’s ever-expanding visionary universe, draw closer to my original self. Of course I am the beneficiary of the amazing life ride he has taken me on, but it includes responsibilities on my part. There is a streak of rebellious kid in me, as with everyone I’m sure, that is longing to fly out of my gilded cage.”
Two of Me begins as Eleanor faces her cancer diagnosis. To this, she reacts in character: Should I stay or should I leave? To the choice posed by one doctor, “Quality or quantity,” discussing with Eleanor her potential course of treatment, Eastern or Western, and how chemotherapy, if she chooses it, may affect the life she has left, she, who so often struggled to choose, chooses instantly: quality.
The story that follows is a record of her choice to forgo chemotherapy—a choice hindered and enhanced by the coronavirus, natural disasters near the Coppolas’ home in Napa, the opportunity to direct a film of her own, and, finally, the coming of another typhoon: Megalopolis. A younger Eleanor, mother to young children, would have followed her husband automatically, but she is older now, and the dogwoods bloom outside her window. Should she stay or should she go?
That question is of personal importance to me as a biographer and friend of filmmakers, and as one who has been witness, recurrently, to families challenged, even ruined, by the temptations and demands of location shoots.
When I interviewed Eleanor for my book about American Zoetrope, this condition was foremost on my mind. A filmmaker herself, Eleanor had married one, was mother to two, and grandmother to—so far—one more. That brings the total to five. Was there wisdom to be gained?
The cinema being only a hundred years old, I could confidently say that no one ever had been more qualified to answer the question. She was circumspect. I remember thinking, though she had agreed to the interview, that it did seem she felt she wanted to be elsewhere. Or was she not saying what she was wanting to say?
While reading Two of Me, I was startled to come upon a short mention of our conversation. “I am thinking of calling the interviewer back and saying we are not some ideal family,” she wrote. “We’ve gone through a lot of hard stuff together, including death, jealousies, hurt feelings, and competitiveness. Perhaps what makes us who we are is that Francis and I feel a strong commitment to keeping the family together through it all. We make an effort to solve family problems, or at least agree to accept each other and move on.”
It’s there in every one of her books. Despite her married name, they should not be shelved in “Hollywood memoir”; that would defeat the purpose of Eleanor’s search for self apart from the family. But for Eleanor’s insight into her husband’s character and creative process, her chronicles of a director’s passions are unmatched in the literature. Her candor, when it comes to her husband’s infidelities, is sometimes so revealing one can’t help but be astonished that Francis had read (and, one presumes, approved) the manuscript before it was published. Michael and Kay Corleone this is not.
To me, that has always been among the most moving aspects of Eleanor’s 50-year diary project, in which her 1991 film, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, plays a major part: that husband and wife, for all they had endured privately, would survive the diaries’ publication. Could you imagine if your wife were to publish her memoirs? Or your mother? As love would have it, Eleanor sacrificed for Francis and for her children. By letting her speak to the world about them, they seem to be, even now, after her death, doing the same for her.
“You are like one of those magical-realist families out of García Márquez,” I told Eleanor once. We were sitting amid red and yellow flowers and low-flying purple butterflies outside the big house, eating sliced peaches, her favorite fruit. The sun was high, and down by the pool, her grandchildren were laughing.
“You’re romanticizing us,” she instructed me. “We’re not a fairy tale.”
Sam Wasson is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of several books about Hollywood, including The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, as well as a co-author of Hollywood: The Oral History
