Don't call her Mrs. Corleone

Eleanor Coppola -- Francis Ford's wife and Sofia's mom -- talks about life in a famous Italian-American family and finding her artistic voice.

By Camille Peri

Read more: Books, Movies, Francis Ford Coppola, Interviews, Salon Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment, Entertainment, Authors, Books Interviews

Author photo by Gundolf Photenfauer

June 26, 2008 | A friend once told Eleanor Coppola, "Life is like knitting an argyle sock. You can't see the pattern until you're nearly finished." In her new book, "Notes on a Life," Coppola takes up the work she started 30 years ago in "Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now": her struggle to establish her own professional identity in the dynamic, engulfing world of America's first family of film. It's a battle that she often seems to be losing, but by the end of her second book, as she nears the age of 70, the threads of an artistic life stitched together in starts and fits emerge into a beautiful, integrated pattern.

"I am an observer at heart," Coppola tells us in the opening of "Notes on a Life," and her honest and ironic takes on celebrity from its fringes are sometimes reminiscent of the reporting of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. When Marlon Brando charms her on the set of "The Godfather," she writes that it was "as I imagine a hit of heroin to be: stunning, short-lived and dangerously seductive"; later he ditches her when she has arranged to interview him for her documentary on "Apocalypse Now." (By contrast, Kevin Costner's deliberate attention to her when they meet suggests to her that his wife trained him to understand "how uncomfortable it is to be the invisible person.") When the family is photographed after one of her proudest moments as a mother -- when Sofia, accepting her best screenplay Oscar for "Lost in Translation," thanks her mom for her encouragement -- the only trace of Eleanor in the newspaper photo the next day is her elbow.

Part of the tension in the book comes from the seeming contradictions in Coppola's life: She is a soft-spoken, introspective artist married to one of the world's most flamboyant and ambitious filmmakers; a mother who longs for solitude yet feels left out when not with the family; a wife who deals with mundane domestic tasks while the rest of her family is in the exciting throes of filmmaking wizardry; a millionaire several times over who was raised to write grocery lists on the clean insides of used envelopes for thriftiness.

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Coppola was raised in the small town of Sunset Beach, Calif. Her father, a political cartoonist for the Los Angeles Examiner, died when she was 10; her mother, a housewife, was more interested in books than housekeeping. (Eleanor's teenage rebellion was "baking perfect lemon meringue pies, sewing all night, and working two summer jobs.") She met and began dating Francis Coppola in Ireland when he was directing the Roger Corman splatter film "Dementia 13" and she was an assistant to the art director. In 1963, several months into their relationship, she discovered that she was pregnant and considered giving the baby up for adoption. But Francis was ecstatic: "I've always wanted a family," he said, and the couple was married the next weekend. Another child followed soon after, leading her to write, "My life was shaped by pregnancy." In 1986, her son Gian-Carlo was killed in a horrific boating accident. The Coppolas immediately took in his girlfriend, Jacqui de la Fontaine, who was two months pregnant at the time, and they found solace in the gift of a granddaughter, Gia.

Outside of her book and documentary about the making of "Apocalypse Now," "Hearts of Darkness" (co-directed by George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr based on her footage) which won several awards, Eleanor Coppola is relatively unknown for her own work. Her early artwork in the '70s included conceptual installations with artist Lynn Hershman Leeson in a fleabag hotel above the Broadway strip joints and in the Coppolas' 22-room home in San Francisco. Playing on the idea that many visitors to the latter came mostly to see a famous filmmaker's home, she removed his five Oscars from their glass case and replaced them with the miniature Oscars given to the winner's wife to wear as a necklace. She also paid Sofia and son Roman to stay in a bedroom where a TV played a video of Sofia's birth and a sign read: "The author's most important work, expected to take 21 years to complete."

But it seems that it was after the death of Gian-Carlo that she truly found her voice in "Circle of Memory." The installation consists of a circular chamber with straw bale walls, where salt falls in a thin stream into a glowing mound in the middle of the room and a soft wash of children's voices recite the alphabet. Visitors are invited to call up memories of children who are missing or who have died, and write messages to insert in the walls. The installation broke attendance records at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, where it was first exhibited.

For many women, one of the most fun aspects of reading Coppola's new book is discovering how much of her life seems like ours -- albeit in more spectacular settings. She gets caught up in stupid arguments with her kids, eavesdrops on their conversations in carpools, brings a Tupperware of chocolate chip cookies to Sofia on the set of "Marie Antoinette" when she is worried that her daughter is getting too thin. Doing mundane household chores, she admits that she sometimes feels "as if my brain is a rusting file cabinet full of useless information." Yet she persists and ultimately triumphs. For any woman who is struggling with career and family, or whose husband's work always seems to take precedence over her own, "Notes on a Life" is a bittersweet portrait of modern American womanhood.

I spoke with Eleanor Coppola on a soft, breezy day in early summer on the porch of her 1885 Queen Anne Victorian in Napa Valley, as we sipped glasses of spring water and nibbled on cookies from a plate neatly pressed with a single forget-me-not stem.

You met Francis on the set of his film "Dementia 13," where you were both working. Why didn't you continue to work together in film?

I thought we were going to be working together, and that he was going to make these little low-budget, Roger Corman black-and-white films. In fact, I went on the next film with him and I was making sets, and then I discovered I was pregnant and we got married. We had two children back-to-back, and by the time I was ready to go back to work and wanted to work, his career had advanced way beyond me. The people he was hiring were professionals; they weren't just friends and everybody kind of helping out.

That kind of left me in this limbo because we had a deal that if he was going to be gone more than two or three weeks, we'd take the whole family on location. So that, of course, uprooted me to go with the children and cut off projects that I might have started outside the family. When we got to "Apocalypse Now," and I got this idea to shoot a documentary, it was a lifesaver because it gave me a form of expression on these locations where everyone else is engaged in some creative process and I'm the one shopping for the mop.

Next page: What is it like to be the model for Kay Corleone?