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Notes on a Life

by Eleanor Coppola

ISBN13: 9780385524995
ISBN10: 0385524994
Condition: Standard
Dustjacket: Standard
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Eleanor Coppola shares her extraordinary life as an artist, filmmaker, wife, and mother in a book that captures the glamour and grit of Hollywood and reveals the private tragedies and joys that tested and strengthened her over the past twenty years.

Her first book, Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now, was hailed as "one of the most revealing of all first hand looks at the movies" (Los Angeles Herald Examiner). And now the author brings the same honesty, insight, and wit to this absorbing account of the next chapters in her life.

In this new work we travel back and forth with her from the swirling center of the film world to the intimate heart of her family. She offers a fascinating look at the vision that drives her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, and describes her daughter Sofia's rise to fame with the film Lost in Translation. Even as she visits faraway movie sets and attends parties, she is pulled back to pursue her own art, but is always focused on keeping her family safe. The death of their son Gio in a boating accident in 1986 and her struggle to cope with her grief and anger leads to a moving exploration of her deepest feelings as a woman and a mother.

Written with a quiet strength, Eleanor Coppola's powerful portrait of the conflicting demands of family, love and art is at once very personal and universally resonant.

Review:

"Coppola (Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now) has gathered together excerpts from 20 years of her personal journals and in the process she captures the experiences of being a wife, mother and artist trying to find her own self-expression in the midst of a talented family. While there's an emotional price to pay in supporting her family's careers, Coppola has expressed herself in painting, conceptual art pieces and her documentary, Hearts of Darkness, which chronicled the creation of Apocalypse Now. As the author confesses: 'I'm an observer at heart.' As befits its source material, this book has a fragmented style; Coppola uses objects to spark memory, such as a pair of patent leather shoes found in 2002, which prompts her to recall a 1998 brunch when her husband advised their daughter about filmmaking. Some of the entries seem aimless and the jumps in time are occasionally forced, but Coppola's most touching memories, following the sudden death of her son Gio, are expressed with honesty and dignity. While this is certainly not a book for film buffs, it does supply an intriguing view of one of the central figures in the Coppola filmmaking dynasty." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

I've never met Eleanor Coppola, but years ago I saw her every night for more than a week. My daughter was enrolled in a Los Angeles school that, thanks to an insanely dedicated drama department, put on three or four almost-professional productions a year. This particular semester there was a run of "Oh! What a Lovely War," featuring a cast of about 50 high-strung teenagers, all decked out in period... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) costumes from World War I. One student's mother, as strict as a drill sergeant, as organized as Martha Stewart, was in charge of costumes. Each night she ruled over increasingly complex rehearsals, temperamental sewing machines, glaring fluorescent lights, weeping adolescent divas, rampant chaos. And right by her side each night, creating her own island of quiet, was her best friend and sidekick, who said almost nothing but stood at an ironing board for hours at a time, ready to help out, to make art, in any way she could. Eleanor Coppola. As I remember, she didn't even have a kid going to that school.

Eleanor Coppola was working on a set, too, when she met the young and brilliant Francis Ford Coppola. One wonders if she knew what she was getting into. He was part of an extraordinary, extended Italian family. His father, Carmine, was a classical conductor; his relatives, Nicolas Cage and Talia Shire, would eventually rise to prominence in their own fields. Later, the couple's daughter, Sofia Coppola, would gain great acclaim as the director of "Lost in Translation."

In her memoir "Notes on a Life," Eleanor Coppola reveals this glamorous background only gradually. The author begins the book on May 12, 1986, just a week after her 50th birthday. At this point, she writes, "I felt the family had somehow survived the highs and lows of our lives. The children are well and essentially grown. (Sofia will be fifteen in two days, Roman just turned twenty-one, and Gio is twenty-two, soon to be twenty-three.) ... I see a time of new freedom for me. A time to pick up threads of my creative life left behind at age twenty-six when marriage and family took over my focus."

She was especially pleased about Gio. For years she and her son had not been on the best of terms, Gio siding with his father during family quarrels, and so on. But by the spring of 1986, Gio had a girlfriend, Jacqui, and for Mother's Day, the couple filled her Washington, D.C., apartment with flowers. A few hours later, Eleanor left for New York to see her son Roman, then returned to the family home and winery in Napa Valley to celebrate Sofia's birthday. But Sofia was rebellious and antsy; Eleanor inexplicably didn't feel very well. With Roman in New York and Francis and Gio in Washington, Eleanor was lonely. It was an ordinary situation, really. It could be any family, enduring some kinks, waiting for better times to come. Then the phone rang. Both Sofia and Eleanor heard Francis' voice saying, "Ellie, we've lost our beloved son. Gio is dead." The death of Gio in a boating accident is the emotional center of this affecting memoir.

Coppola had made her primary life choices long before then. Although she considers herself an artist, she consistently put the needs of her family first. Through the years she managed to meld these two aspects of what might have become a crippling conflict. When Francis Coppola almost suffered a breakdown during the making of "Apocalypse Now," she made a respectful and insightful documentary of his experience, and since then has documented the making of several other of his films. She has become the Coppola dramaturge. She is a talented artist in her own right. She gardens as extensively as Vita Sackville-West. She runs the vast Napa Valley house and its environs. In a wonderful passage she evokes an enormous family dinner studded with famous movie stars, with ethnic food made meticulously by Francis and herself.

Through grief, the family soldiered on. Gio's girlfriend was pregnant by him, and seven months after his death, gave birth to a little girl, Gia, who became a de facto member of the Coppola family.

Despite the plethora of celebrities and the demands of fame, the Coppola clan doesn't fit the profile of the conventional Hollywood family. The Napa Valley vineyard and wine-selling business alone prove that. (Your average Hollywood director lives in a Beverly Hills mansion.) Francis starts a short-story magazine. Then he "discovers" the unlikely tropical area of Belize and sets up a series of resorts there. And then there are the Coppola movies. The author devotes long and thoughtful chapters to what it's like to live on location, where her husband is always busy, but needs her nearby, perhaps as emotional anchor.

As Sofia begins her career as a director, Eleanor is honest enough to say, "I am very happy for Sofia, happy that Francis is being such a good father and mentoring her, but I also feel a hot, aching jealousy in my chest." A life like Sofia's was never in the cards for Eleanor; she was born into the wrong times, too early in the Great Cosmic Movie to express herself as a full-time artist. Over a period of several years, she and a group of women create a cairn, an art object made, oddly, of hay bales, where the bereft can come to honor their lost loved ones. It is a great success and tours many cities, but is certainly not part of the conventional road to fame and fortune.

Eleanor is the glue that holds her family together, yet the tone of this memoir is always self-effacing, reticent, reserved. As she did in that high school costume room so long ago, Eleanor Coppola quietly stands at the ready, watching for opportunities both to help and to make art, giving an entirely different meaning to that old poetic line: "They also serve who only stand and wait."

Reviewed by Carolyn See, who may be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Review:

"Like everything Coppola writes, these are richly told stories of family and film and solitude, spanning years of creation and joy. She is a narrator you trust to pay the most wonderful attention to what is real and human in life, through the highly intelligent and kind eyes of a mother, an artist, a wife." Anne Lamott

Review:

"Eleanor Coppola is a multi-talented artist who reveals in this riveting book how she has managed to help and reinforce her famous film-maker husband and to produce talented, original, and loyal children, while still holding on to her own innate creativity. In this deeply poetic and tantalizing book, replete with accounts of the Coppola appetite for visual beauty and good food, she honestly and generously shares her discoveries, while battling tragedy and disappointment, of her own magic formulas for finding joy and serenity in life." Lillian Ross

Review:

"Eleanor Coppola is inspirational in the way she has managed her complicated life and family, and her artistic life, and for her candor about the frustrations and tragedies too. And how interesting a time she's had as the steady hand on the helm of that talented family." Diane Johnson, the author of Le Marriage and Le Divorce

Review:

"[A] quiet, slow-moving book with lots of detail, giving an intimate, candid look inside a famous family; it is also a universal story of the conflicting demands women face." Library Journal

Review:

"Notes on a Life details the price often paid to attain artistic greatness, and the toll that quest can have on the lives of everyone involved in it....Coppola takes you deeply inside the daily routines, trials, failures and triumphs of an extraordinary family, one that ultimately isn’t really all that different from anybody else, regardless of their celebrity status and awards." Nashville City Paper

About the Author

Elenaor Coppola is an artist, documentary filmmaker and the author of Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now. She lives in Napa Valley, California.

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Product Details

ISBN:: 9780385524995
Author:: Coppola, Eleanor
Publisher:: Nan A. Talese
Subject:: Motion picture producers and directors
Subject:: United states
Subject:: Personal Memoirs
Subject:: Women
Subject:: Coppola, Eleanor
Publication Date:: May 2008
Binding:: Hardcover
Language:: English
Pages:: 290
Dimensions:: 9.50x6.62x.99 in. 1.26 lbs.

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