Life on the edge of a famous family

This relatively low terrain often served as a complement to her husband’s more picturesque vistas. “I am the observer, the audience watching the action as if in a theatre,” she writes in Two of Me about visiting Francis on set as he directs his latest and most likely final blockbuster, Megalopolis (2024). Likewise, in Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now, she describes a complex location shoot on a beach, including a simulated napalm bombing. “The napalm exploded right along with the jets, flying through the tire, perfectly… 1,200 gallons of gasoline went up in about a minute and a half,” she wrote. Stationed a half-mile from the site of the explosion, she simply records that she “felt a strong flash of heat”—spare prose that suggests her status as a mere body in the landscape, sensing rather than analysing, experiencing rather than reacting. In an earlier blog post the same day, I talked, again in a bit of detail, about the difference between the very few women and the many men you see on set. “Flabby American men are getting darker and stronger,” she writes. “The women look tired.”

Photography by Jamie Kane

Among these tired women is Coppola herself, and “Two of Me” suggests that this fatigue did not stem solely from the long, terrifying “Apocalypse” shoot she described in the first “Notes.” It also came from underlying tensions within Coppola’s own marriage. Eleanor Coppola was a woman, she writes, who dreamed of living her life “as an adventure” while working on “art projects” of her own and raising children on film sets, “like a circus family,” but who at the same time had to meet the demands of her brilliant, mercurial, sometimes wayward husband, who wanted her to be “a very conventional wife, happily devoted to looking after our children, making a nice home, and supporting his career.” For most of her life, she was really—to mock the book’s title—”two of them.” Who among us would not be overwhelmed by such an inherently contradictory situation?

However, “Two of Me” depicts the opening of an unexpected opening through which Coppola was finally able to achieve a measure of liberation from this duality—one that had been unavailable to her for most of her adult life. In 2010, an X-ray scan revealed a rare type of tumor growing in Coppola’s chest. Although the doctors she consulted advised her to start chemotherapy to shrink the growth, she feared that the treatment would reduce her quality of life, and decided to wait instead – practicing alternative treatments and undergoing check-ups every six months to monitor the gradual progression of the tumor. (She lived another fourteen years, and did not suffer significant ill effects from the growing tumor until the last two years of her life.) In the book, she describes her family’s unhappiness over her decision to forego conventional treatment: “Francis told me that he and the children had to come first in any decision I made, and they were keen to move forward with the treatment, the action, the solution that would get me out of danger.” However, Coppola refused to yield to their urging, even though, as she admits, she had “no ‘reasonable’ argument or evidence to support her decision, and as I read, I imagined how frustrated and perhaps angry I might have felt if someone close to me had rejected conventional medicine to treat a serious illness.”

But from another, and perhaps more symbolic, perspective, Coppola’s decision made sense, at least on the terms in which she saw her life. “I was stunned to realize that my upbringing had been so conditional on me being a good girl and following doctor’s orders that it never occurred to me that my life choices were my own,” she writes. The tumor was[a] “Great Master,” “Swift Kick” finally forced Coppola to peek “from behind a shadow [her] Family.” Although growth was something restrictive, the constraint “squeezed.” [Coppola’s] “Heart and lungs”—and, as such, not unlike the pressures she had been accustomed to dealing with for most of her life as a wife and mother—it was these limitations that finally allowed her to understand the limits of her independence. “What do I have to lose?” You write. “I was going to die anyway.” In 2016, Coppola, she notes, became the oldest woman to direct her first feature film, the romantic comedy “Paris Can Wait.” (In 2020, at age 84, she followed up with “Love is Love is Love.”) But these measurable accomplishments weren’t the only signs of her newfound freedom. The book itself is a small-scale heartfelt cry, driven by Coppola’s determination and her insistence on tracing the contours of her own world, in writing.