Salon.com > Camille Peri

Don’t call her Mrs. Corleone

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:16:00 +0000

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.

Prayin’ hard for better dayz

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:26:00 +0000

I have to tell you: I hate rap. I hate the bitches and the asses and the 'ho's. I hate the in-yo'-faceness, the pumped-up testosterone, the butted-out chests, the finger-jabbing, the ice, the six-packs, the balloon pants, the rings like brass knuckles. The pervasive boxer shorts, the Jockey bands where belts used to be. In yo' face is not an attempt to connect. It means shut up, stay away. Move bitch. Get out the way, as the song says.

I know the socioeconomic justifications and the political roots. I like some of the bravado and the clever wordplay. There are songs that have opened my eyes and forced me to think. But most of it pretends that glamorizing guns and gangstas is keeping it real; it is misogyny decked out like a Courvoisier ad. I'm into havin' sex, I ain't into makin' love, 50 Cent sings. No intimacy or mystery or love, God forbid any allusion to or regard for what comes next. Just poses and postures selling a crude idea of what it means to be a man.

Dancing with death

Wed, 05 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Rose opens her eyes and he is there -- his breath soft on her face, hollow little chest, eyes lit like half-moons in the night. When he was 4, nightmares of fire would send him bursting into their bed to wedge his body between hers and his father's. Now he is whispering to her to come and see the midnight stars. They stand outside, two tiny human figures under an enormous sky. Rose is shivering in her robe and slippers. Toby's feet are on the ground but his head is floating somewhere above, her 8-year-old guide through the galaxy.

Rose opens her eyes again. He is not there. Toby, the eldest of her three sons, died eight years ago, but he comes back to her often in her dreams. A parent's worst nightmare. Now she wonders, Is that watching your child die or outliving him? For a while, it seemed that she was sentenced to live out the nightmare literally. Sleep would plunge her back into his early dreams of burning buildings and dizzying cliffs, and she would be helpless to save him. After a while, his dream-self got older. Now sometimes he is a young man, robust and healthy, as he was before cancer killed him at the age of 30. When she has these dreams, she knows it will probably be a good day.

Can this marriage be saved?

Fri, 23 Jan 1998 11:55:00 +0000

Six years ago, when Bill Clinton's presidential bid was rocked by the first "bimbo eruption," the Gennifer Flowers allegations, it was Hillary Rodham Clinton who responded first, saving his campaign with her passionate defense of their marriage. "That's an issue [faithfulness] that we are very comfortable with in our marriage," she said on the eve of the 1992 New Hampshire primary. "We love each other. We support each other ... We've stood by each other through thick and thin."

Wednesday, while the president awkwardly struggled to make his denial of the latest bimbo explosion, the Monica Lewinsky affair, stronger and more convincing as the day wore on, Hillary Clinton again stood by her husband, saying emphatically that she believed the latest allegations were false and politically motivated. But this latest controversy, involving a woman not much older than the first couple's daughter who worked in their home, may be the ultimate test of the Clintons' relationship.

Can this marriage be saved? Even if Kenneth Starr fails to dig up proof of adultery and perjury in the Oval Office, will the strain of battling through one more public scandal be enough to destroy the first marriage? Salon canvassed a range of Clinton intimates, observers and psychologists for their views of whether the Clintons will survive the latest barrage of media scrutiny and allegations.

My grandmother, the godfather

Mon, 28 Jul 1997 17:15:00 +0000

Johnny Fontaine, the Sinatra clone in "The Godfather," is
caught in a private moment of weakness in the shadows of Vito Corleone's
study, away from the adoring swoons of his female fans. His face hidden in
his hands, he whispers that his voice has gone weak and his career is
faltering, thanks to a certain female actress who has made him lose his
senses. "You let women dictate your actions and they are not competent in
this world, though certainly they will be saints in heaven while we men
burn in hell," admonishes the Don, exhorting him to stop whimpering about
his voice and act like a man. It is the kind of wisdom about family and
manhood and business that the Mafia hero dispenses throughout the film --
and that took on a jarring new dimension when author Mario Puzo announced this spring that
the old Don himself was actually based on, well, his mother.

"Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth, in my own mind I heard the
voice of my mother," Puzo confessed in the new preface to his novel "The
Fortunate Pilgrim," which was re-released in April. "I heard her wisdom,
her ruthlessness, and her unconquerable love for her family and for life
itself, qualities not valued in women at the time."

birth doctor, mother, abortionist

Mon, 23 Jun 1997 08:37:00 +0000

An intimate conversation with a woman on the front lines of America's most emotionally charged debate.

BY CAMILLE PERI | She knows it is killing, but she doesn't believe it is wrong. As a
doctor, she has performed hundreds of abortions, but as a mother of three
small children, she has been forced to reexamine the values that propelled
her to become pro-choice. Over time, says Dr. X, who requested anonymity out of concern for her safety and that of her family, her views about abortion have changed.

That kind of admission is rare in a public debate in which the truth
has generally been the first casualty. The latest battle in this epic war has raged
over "partial birth" or "late-term" abortion (depending on whose language
you use), with pro-life activists charging that some women are terminating their pregnancies in the final days before delivery for reasons as trivial as not
being able to fit into a prom dress -- a sensational charge that was never substantiated. The pro-choice side lost some of its own credibility when
Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion
Providers, announced that he and his colleagues had similarly misled the
public by claiming that late-term abortions were performed rarely and only
on women whose lives were in danger or whose fetuses had multiple
deformities -- true for last-trimester abortions, but not necessarily for
those done earlier.

Why it's time for mothers who think

Mon, 16 Jun 1997 17:40:00 +0000

Two months before her first child was born, Jane Smiley was suddenly struck by the seeming contradiction of teaching a course on Kafka and being pregnant. First, she wondered, would the baby somehow be marred for life by its in utero exposure to literature's master of gloom? Second, would she be forced to repudiate great novels with grim parent-child relationships such as "Native Son" or "To the Lighthouse" for family romps like "Please Don't Eat the Daisies"? But in giving birth to a child, Smiley found that she also gave birth to her subject, the interplay of love and power that was the seed of her novel "A Thousand Acres." "Far from depriving me of thought, motherhood gave me new and startling things to think about and the motivation to do the hard work of thinking," she wrote in her essay "Can Mothers Think?"