{"id":136589,"date":"2025-11-15T16:03:04","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T16:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/136589\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T16:03:04","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T16:03:04","slug":"life-at-the-edge-of-a-famous-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/136589\/","title":{"rendered":"Life at the Edge of a Famous Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

This comparatively reduced terrain has often served as complement to her husband\u2019s much grander vistas. \u201cI am the observer, the audience watching the action as if in a theater,\u201d she writes, in \u201cTwo of Me,\u201d of visiting Francis on set while he directs his latest and likely final filmic extravaganza, \u201cMegalopolis<\/a>\u201d (2024). Similarly, in \u201cNotes: On the Making of \u2018Apocalypse Now\u2019\u00a0\u201d she describes a complicated location shoot on a beach, involving the simulation of a napalm bombing. \u201cThe napalm went off right with the jets, flying through frame, perfectly.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Twelve hundred gallons of gasoline went up in about a minute and a half,\u201d she writes. Stationed half a mile away from the site of the explosion, she records, simply, that she \u201cfelt a strong flash of heat\u201d\u2014the spare, withholding prose suggesting her position as a mere body in the landscape, sensing rather than analyzing, experiencing rather than reacting. In an earlier journal entry from the same day, she reports, again with little elaboration, on the difference between the very few women and the many men she watches on set. \u201cThe flabby American men are getting tan and strong,\u201d she writes. \u201cThe women look tired.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Figure<\/p>\n

Photograph by Jimmy Keane<\/p>\n

Among these tired women is Coppola herself, and \u201cTwo of Me\u201d suggests that this fatigue didn\u2019t just stem from the nightmarishly long \u201cApocalypse\u201d shoot she described in her first \u201cNotes.\u201d It also came from the elemental tensions within the Coppola marriage itself. Eleanor Coppola was a woman who, as she writes, dreamed of living her life as an \u201cadventure\u201d while working on her own \u201cart projects\u201d and raising children on movie sets, \u201clike a circus family,\u201d but had to simultaneously fulfill the demands of her brilliant, mercurial, sometimes wayward husband, who wanted her to be a \u201cvery traditional wife, happily devoted to caring for our children, creating a nice home, and supporting his career.\u201d During most of her life, she was indeed\u2014to riff on the book\u2019s title\u2014\u201cTwo of Her.\u201d Who among us wouldn\u2019t be exhausted by such an inherently paradoxical position?<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo of Me,\u201d however, does depict the opening of an unexpected aperture, through which Coppola was able to finally access a measure of freedom from this duality\u2014one that wasn\u2019t available to her during most of her adult life. In 2010, an X-ray scan revealed a rare type of tumor growing in Coppola\u2019s chest. Though the doctors she consulted with advised her to begin chemotherapy to shrink the growth, she feared that the treatment would reduce her quality of life, and decided to wait, instead\u2014practicing alternative therapies and undergoing scans every six months to monitor the tumor\u2019s gradual progress. (She lived for fourteen more years, experiencing the growing tumor\u2019s considerable ill effects only in the last couple of years of her life.) In the book, she describes her family\u2019s unhappiness at her decision to forego traditional therapy: \u201cFrancis told me he and the children must be paramount in any decision I made, and they were eager for me to proceed with a therapy, an action, a solution that would take me out of danger,\u201d she writes. Coppola, however, refused to bend to their urging, even though, as she admits, she had \u201cno \u2018reasonable\u2019 argument or evidence\u201d to support her decision, and, as I read along, I imagined with what frustration and perhaps anger I might have reacted had someone close to me rejected conventional medicine to treat a major illness.<\/p>\n

But from another, possibly more symbolic perspective, Coppola\u2019s decision made sense, at least according to the terms in which she saw her life. \u201cI was stunned to realize that I was so conditioned by my upbringing to be a good girl and follow doctor\u2019s orders that it had never occurred to me that the choices for my life were mine to make,\u201d she writes. The tumor was \u201c[a] great teacher,\u201d a \u201cswift kick\u201d that finally compelled Coppola to peep \u201cout from behind the shadow of [her] family.\u201d Though the growth was a constraining thing, an obstruction \u201cpressing against [Coppola\u2019s] heart and lungs\u201d\u2014and, as such, not unlike the pressures she was used to navigating during most of her life as a wife and mother\u2014these limitations were what ultimately let her grasp the limits of her own autonomy. \u201cWhat did I have to lose?\u201d she writes. \u201cI was going to die anyway.\u201d In 2016, Coppola became, as she notes, the oldest woman to direct her first feature film, the romantic comedy \u201cParis Can Wait.\u201d (In 2020, at age eighty-four, she followed up with the movie \u201cLove Is Love Is Love.\u201d) But these quantifiable achievements weren\u2019t the only markers of her newfound freedom. The book itself is a small-scale cri de coeur, animated by Coppola\u2019s tenacity\u2014by her insistence on tracing the contours of her own world, in writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This comparatively reduced terrain has often served as complement to her husband\u2019s much grander vistas. \u201cI am the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,3623,156,424,35763,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-136589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-celebrity","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-life","12":"tag-memoirs","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}