Notes on a life Hardback - 2008 - 1st Edition

Summary

Excerpt

May 12, 1986 Washington, D.C.


I am sitting at an old wooden table in this rented apartment in Washington, D.C., our home for Francis's next film, Gardens of Stone, a military story involving the honor guard who bury the dead from the Vietnam War in Arlington Cemetery. Francis is doing a final rewrite of the script. Gio is here preparing to shoot video of the rehearsals. During the production they will be working closely together as Gio will be responsible for the video tap to the main camera. He will record what the camera is shooting so that Francis can review the shots immediately rather than wait for film to be developed, and he will be electronically editing sequences. It takes a lot of technical skill. I am reminded of how much Gio has learned from working at Francis's side since the age of sixteen.

On the table top in front of me are note cards with reproductions of Matisse paintings. I am writing thank-you notes for gifts I received on my fiftieth birthday last week. Early this year I began to realize my experiences over the years had stretched me, expanded both my threshold of pain and of exhilaration, pushed me far beyond what I thought were my limits. 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.] They are healthy, loving and creative. My fear that our unconventional family life might harm them has begun to fade. I have nearly completed my part in raising them. 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.

By the time my birthday actually arrived, I felt happy and excited. Two days before, I had a dinner party upstairs at Chez Panisse surrounded by ten wonderful women friends. Alice Waters made a beautiful feast. I felt skinny and terrific in a black Donna Karan bodysuit and wrap skirt. Everyone looked radiant. All the gifts had something to do with flowers, a glass basket of miniature wild roses, a vintage flowered dressing gown, a silk scarf with a floral design, a small flowering tree, a photograph of flowers. I felt as if it was a message to me about blossoming. I told the story of visiting a Chinese fortune teller years ago who said, "Your life is like driving a Rolls-Royce over a bumpy road until you are fifty, and reach the pavement." The road ahead looks smooth.

The next day Sofia and I left home in Napa and flew to Washington, D.C., to celebrate with Francis and Gio on location for Francis's thirteenth feature film. Roman arrived from New York City where he is attending New York University. I told Francis what I wanted was to do something I had never done before. On the Sunday morning of my birthday he said, "Get dressed, we're going out to brunch." We drove to the river. I guessed he had made reservations at a restaurant overlooking the water. Instead he led us down a gangway onto a boat. A dozen friends in Washington for the film production were already aboard, along with food, champagne and a band of gypsy violinists. We sailed slowly down the Potomac, stopping for a private tour of Washington's beautiful home, and returned as the river reflected shades of purple and deep orange with the setting sun. I opened the gift from the cast and crew. It was a beautifully faceted Baccarat crystal flower vase. Alex [Tavoularis], from the film's art department, took pictures of our family: Francis in the middle with Sofia and me each tucked under a large arm and Gio and Roman on either side as we sat on the back of the boat, our hair blowing wildly in the wind, smiling happily.


May 13, 1986

Yesterday was Mother's Day. Gio and his girlfriend, Jacqui, invited me for lunch. They finally arrived nearly two hours late, their arms loaded with bouquets. They had driven around Washington looking for flower stores not already depleted by holiday shoppers. They brought nine bouquets. We put them everywhere in the small apartment, arranged in my new crystal vase, in pots, pans and a wastebasket. I felt as if Gio was trying to make up for the hard times he has given me since his teenage years. This past six months he has changed, he is living with Jacqui, is happy and more self-confident and has grown closer to me.

After lunch they took me to the National Gallery and the Smithsonian. I was startled. I brought the children to museums frequently when they were young but when they became teenagers they refused to go. This was the first time a child of mine invited me to a museum. Gio had his camera; he took photos as we walked of Jacqui and me, of street people, of a crowded hot dog stand. I was interested to see what he chose to shoot, how he composed an image, sometimes on the diagonal. His photography skills are developing.

In the evening Jacqui made a salad and Gio barbecued steaks on the tiny terrace of our apartment, trying to keep the thick smoke outside. Francis got home just in time for dinner. We ate in a hurry. I had to catch the last shuttle flight to New York. Gio carried my heavy suitcase out to the waiting taxi. He gave me a lingering hard hug in his distinctive bone-crunching style.

A few hours later I arrived at our apartment in New York City in the Sherry-Netherland hotel, and entered through the side door into the little kitchen. Piles of dirty pans and dishes crowded the stove, the sink and tiny counter; the smell of leftover tomato sauce and garlic overwhelmed the small room. Roman, looking tousled and sweet, gave me a kiss and a hug. As I stepped further into the apartment I could see his clothes in mounds on the floor of the bedroom. He said, "Yeah, I worked out a system, I only have to go to the laundromat once a month." There were guitars, drum pads, tapes, books and art projects strewn over the sitting room. His friend Greg was there. It looked as if they were having perfect college student fun.

I was happy to have seen two of my children on Mother's Day. I opened the doors to the part of the apartment that is usually kept locked and rented by the hotel when we are not using it, where I would be staying. It was clean and spacious. I noticed a smear of tomato sauce on the dining table. The boys confessed they had sneaked in with their dinner.

Today I spent making calls for apartment maintenance; the air conditioner isn't working, the shower ceiling is peeling. I waited for the new bed and headboard to be delivered and installed. There wasn't time to go out. I only took a few minutes to run across the street and look in the windows of Bergdorf Goodman; they often appear as if they are sculptures, well composed with witty elements and good lighting. The mannequins were wearing black cocktail dresses and standing in hundreds of broken white plates. Roman was still at school when I left for the airport. I was sad to miss hugging him goodbye.

Ice crystals are sparkling on the plane's oval window in the late afternoon sunlight. I am flying to San Francisco to be home for Sofia's fifteenth birthday tomorrow. I left some things unfinished in New York but am determined to be at home for her. Last night we talked on the phone. I was trying to complete arrangements for her party. She had changed her mind and wanted to go to a different restaurant after I had asked a friend as a special favor to get reservations at one she'd chosen. I could hardly hear her so I said, "Please speak into the phone, I can't understand what you're saying." She said, "My friends can all understand me. Why are you being so negative?" We began bickering. Finally, exasperated, I said, "I get along with my other kids, their girlfriends, my nephews, other people, the only difficult relationship I have is with you." She began crying. I felt awful. I told her I loved her and looked forward to seeing her. When we hung up I could feel the emotion in my chest radiating out through my arms. I was furious with myself for being unable to transcend a typical teenage daughter and mother encounter.

I am feeling isolated, here on this airplane in a seat next to the window, no one beside me; the members of the family are in different cities and I'm somewhere in between. I feel the contradictions in myself, an ongoing theme in my life, as I both appreciate the solitude of these few hours and also feel lonely and left out. Francis and Gio are excited about the new film on location in Washington, D.C., Roman is enjoying school in New York City. I am going home alone to take care of Sofia, who at the moment doesn't want to be with me.


May 16, 1986 Napa

In the late afternoon I went for a walk. As the back door slammed a large blue heron rose up from the pond. The baby swans had grown from the size of fuzzy tennis balls to large footballs of feathers. Two beautiful pomegranate trees were in bloom, their leaves an intense chartreuse and the small blossoms vibrant vermilion, colors so garish they seemed unnatural. I walked down the lane with vineyards on either side of me and inhaled the perfume of dry earth and thick leafy vines stretched out in the sun. I picked up trash: an empty Marlboro package lying as if it were an ornament on the freshly plowed dirt, a flattened beer can at the side of the road, several small yellow plastic flags left by the telephone linemen. Along the north side of the vineyard where the furrows were smooth I saw lines of jackrabbit tracks in the dirt with dog prints alongside.

Sofia and I had dinner on the porch, then I took her to a friend's house to stay overnight. With just the two of us here now, she tries to spend as much time as possible at her friends' homes. She said, "It's no fun here anymore."

Francis called: "Thursday is the first day of shooting." He said he'd had good rehearsals with the actors and was expecting everything to go well. I asked him how the Nigerian student I'd hired to clean the apartment was doing. "She's doing OK except when she changed the sheets she put the top sheet on top of the blanket instead of under it. Otherwise the apartment is comfortable and I'm looking forward to you and Sofia coming as soon as school is out."

Since Francis completed Apocalypse Now, in 1979, he has made four films on location. One from the Heart, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, and Cotton Club. Over the years I thought by the age of fifty I would surely have resolved basic issues that plagued me as a young woman. Instead I am still groping along looking for solutions. When I go on location I still find myself disoriented away from home and feel the contrast of being simultaneously in Francis's very stimulating creative environment and my own personal dullness as I shop for the mop, frying pan, kitchen towels, firmer pillows, fresh flowers, groceries, wastebaskets, trash bags, laundry detergent, doormats, shampoo, duplicate door keys. I feel cut off from my friends and my creative life. I imagined that at this age I would be wise and able to balance the elements of my life; instead I feel as if my brain is a rusting file cabinet full of useless information: markets, dry cleaners, hardware stores, clothing shops in Los Angeles, Manila, New York, Tulsa, Washington, D.C., and more. In my mind's eye I can see the dry goods store in Ogallala, Nebraska, where we lived during the making of Rain People; there I bought our two little boys shorts and tennis shoes. The grocery store had penny candy machines and an old freezer containing Eskimo Pies covered with frost. I often took the boys to a coffee shop where there was a kind waitress who didn't get upset when they made magic potions of catsup, mashed potatoes and peas in their milk glasses.

Roman was three and Gio was four and a half. Some days I drove them to visit Francis while he was shooting. Other days we went to the dime store and got water guns, balloons, or plastic trucks and went to the small park in town. While the children took naps in the hot afternoons I sewed sitting next to the air conditioner in our motel room. Or I read. I was reading Siddhartha when the news of Robert Kennedy's assassination came on TV. Tears ran down my cheeks, the book was so beautiful and real life so tragic.


May 23, 1986

Roman called from New York. His voice was happy: "School is almost over. I got on the dean's list and am invited to go to London on a summer study program." I think I was more excited than he was. "The air conditioner in the apartment still isn't working. The repair guy says it's not worth fixing." He said he found a notice left by the company that made the headboard for the new bed wanting an additional payment before they would attach the casters. My days are full of the necessary tasks. Today I checked on the progress of the painters in the guest cottage and met with the woman doing the drapery. A workman brought samples of materials to use on a wall that needs repair in Roman's bathroom. The gardener told me that Sofia's small dog has been running into the vineyard with the ranch dogs where she may get hurt and asked me to keep her near the house. He asked where to plant the potted hydrangeas that were left on the porch after Easter.

In the afternoon I drove Sofia's car pool. There were three extra girls who wanted a ride so all seven of us squeezed into our small sedan. The girls gossiped brutally about what different students wore that day. "Did you see her shoes?" "That skirt is her mom's, I know it is." They got out at the market in St. Helena. Sofia stayed in town to visit friends.

I ate an early dinner by myself sitting in a patch of sunlight on the front lawn with my tray in my lap. Sofia came home with Stephanie. I heard them upstairs giggling as Sofia applied a new product tinting Stephanie's long blond hair pinkish-red. I could hear her screech when they used my travel dryer and got her hair caught in the fan. When they came down to the kitchen they decided to make French fries and needed more potatoes. They wanted to go to the little Mexican market across the highway on the motor scooter. It is not legal to drive the scooter on a public street so I made them promise to park it on our side of the highway at the end of the private road and walk from there. I was relieved when they returned. They cooked hot dogs and deep-fried neat little slices of potato.

Francis called. "Tomorrow is the first day Jimmy Caan shoots. He hasn't worked for four years and he's nervous." He said, "Gio is working really hard. There are problems with the equipment in the video van and he is having to be very ingenious to keep it working."

Media reviews

“Winning and quietly provocative.”
–New York Times Book Review

“Notes on the Making of ‘Apocalypse Now,' Eleanor Coppola's 1979 production diary of husband Francis' audacious, flawed film released that year, remains one of the best accounts ever written of the insane difficulties involved in shooting a big-budget movie on location. Nearly 30 years later, she brings the same scrupulous honesty and lucid, thoughtful prose to her memoir Notes on a Life.

Ranging episodically over several decades, Coppola offers a poignant self-portrait of middle age.... The author could have come off as an overprivileged whiner as she describes jaunts to Brazil, Thailand and Bali, a cruise of the Caribbean in George Lucas' chartered yacht, the Coppolas' apartment at the Sherry-Netherland in New York and their mansion in the Napa Valley. But her detailed evocations of such lavish scenes are coupled with an awareness of how rarefied they are….

Like many women of her generation, she pushed aside many of her aspirations when she married and had children. The difference is that she didn't marry a guy with an ordinary job, she married a man who turned out to be one of America's greatest film directors. Francis Ford Coppola is, not surprisingly, the elephant in the room in his wife's memoir, which is a three-dimensional portrait of a marriage unlike any other, and yet not so very different after all….

The fact that she generally was an onlooker rather than a participant in this world was her choice, Coppola acknowledges in this nuanced assessment of her life. Her mature understanding illuminates this engaging memoir, which chronicles with equal acuity regrets over the paths not taken and pleasure in the ones that were.”
–Los Angeles Times

“[An] affecting memoir.... Eleanor is the glue that holds her family together, yet the tone of this memoir is always self-effacing, reticent, reserved…. Eleanor 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.’”
–Carolyn See, The Washington Post

“[An] emotionally naked [book that is] compulsively readable.”
–Houston Chronicle

“Eleanor’s life, the constant push-pull between her desire for her own emotional primacy and her need to be a helpmate to her husband and mother to her children, is most reminiscent of another distinguished diarist: Anne Morrow Lindbergh….although [Eleanor]’s far more emotionally naked than Lindbergh.”
–Palm Beach Post

“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

“Coppola’s most touching memories…are expressed with honesty and dignity…. An intriguing view of one of the central figures in the Coppola filmmaking dynasty.”
–Publishers Weekly

“Coppola has an artist’s eye for the world around her…. What emerges from these ‘notes’ is a portrait of an extraordinary woman who, while traveling the world, renovating huge estates, making award-winning films, and rubbing elbows with celebrities, is also just a woman like any other, struggling to balance work and family, dealing with unexpected grief, and trying to achieve spiritual and creative fulfillment. It is Coppola’s words alone, however, that make these reflections on life so thoughtful, imaginative, and completely absorbing.”
–Bookslut.com

“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

“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

“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