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Notes on a Life

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Consider the problem of the wife who has a successful husband and has for decades put him and their family first, and her own aspirations second. It's not a novel problem, but is instead too common to be of much interest: let's just count on the woman to take care of herself and her family and her career as best she can. The situation might, however, be particularly interesting if the family moves in the highest of Hollywood circles, with many family members involved in moviemaking, and with the wife herself a successful filmmaker, artist, and memoirist. In the beginning of _Notes on a Life_ (Nan A. Talese), Eleanor Coppola says, "I am an observer at heart," and this is manifestly true, but she is also a reporter, whether in her movie _Hearts of Darkness_ which is a documentary about the making of _Apocalypse Now_ by her husband Francis Ford Coppola, or in her previous book which was a memoir of the making of that film, or in her other films about her children's films. As fits a memoir from a devoted and dutiful wife and mother, this is a book mostly about her family and about how she has cared for them. It may have all happened in extraordinary circles, but it is delightful to read this candid memoir and realize that for all the working trips to exotic locales, and the house in Napa Valley, and hobnobbing with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Eleanor Coppola's marriage and family are a lot like anyone else's. They come with problems, and she works on them, and gets things done, and she quite clearly loves what she and they have managed to accomplish.

An idea follows her all through the decades covered in the diary entries here: "I have an ongoing internal war, a conflict between wanting to be a good wife and mother and also to draw, paint, design, write and shoot videos. I focus on the family and imagine there will be time for my interests, but there rarely is." She does manage to make time for herself, but it isn't easy, and there were times she was deeply depressed. Her book often reflects on how she managed to solve the problem in her own ways, knowing that the problem was never completely solved any more than her children's (or husband's) problems were completely out of her thoughts. She has had to be an itinerant mom at Easter times: "I hid eggs in the hotel room in Trieste during _Godfather II_, in the tropical foliage at our house in Manila during _Apocalypse Now_, in the city park in Tulsa during _The Outsiders_, and in the apartment in NYC during _Cotton Club_." As she looks for her place in all this, it might be that she could come off as a whining overprivileged yuppie, but she maintains an amused tone and is constantly self deprecating. She is happiest when her family is all around her, and Frances seems to be the same way. She always has doubts about how well she is taking care of all of them, but she does love the job. When her daughter Sofia was working on Sofia's movie _Lost in Translation_, Eleanor went to see her in Japan: "As we hugged I could feel her thin arms and shoulders. I was glad I'd brought her a Tupperware container of chocolate chip cookies." There are paths not taken, and she is imaginative enough to wonder about them, but has little reason to regret where her eventual path has taken her.

_Notes_ is indeed excerpts from Coppola's notebook, arranged by general themes, with flashbacks through the decades to an old entry as a memory is triggered. Much of it is sweet, and some is deeply sad. A lot is funny; for a scene in _Dracula_, we are introduced to an unusual assistant on the film who is helping in a scene with Tom Waits: "The bug wrangler was standing nearby. He had several additional tins of maggots and beetles. He occasionally prodded the contents of Tom's plate to make sure they were all moving." There are lots of stars wandering through her life, of course. Note, for instance, Brando, whom she met on the set of _The Godfather_: "It was the first time I really understood what charisma was ... I felt as if I were standing in a special beam of light and he found me utterly fascinating." Through all the book, though, are notes of a creative woman taking (usually) the conventional marital role: "Over the years I stopped whatever it was I was doing to go on location with Francis and the children. I sincerely tried to be a good wife and mother to my family. For a variety of reasons, I haven't created a body of notable work in my life when many around me have, and I haven't yet made peace with that truth." I'd venture to guess that even if she had more exhibits, more documentaries, and more books to her name, she'd still have the artist's hunger to do more. There is also the mom's worry that she wasn't doing more for her children, a worry she is letting go of now that they are not children. Worries aside, "long consistent body of work" aside, _Notes_ is a beautifully written record of a life lived well, with the right priorities of convention assumed and convention shunned.

Just finished this extraordinary book. Eleanor comes across as a woman who necessarily wears many hats, putting aside many of her own desires and talents as an artist to satisfy her family's needs first and foremost. Extraordinarily frank and heart wrenching as she wrote about the loss of of her son, Gio, though this book is so much more. At first I found the notes of observation, her writing style, to be hard to grasp, but gradually it was as though she had became a friend with all the details in her many revelations and wonderment. I did enjoy reading and would highly recommend to others who have suffered the pain of loss . . . and, more importantly, endured.

Eleanor Coppola is an artist I genuinely respect. I was honored in 2005 to work on her traveling art installation "Circle of Memory" in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I am both a studio artist and an indie filmmaker and really appreciated her perspective and experiences that she so poetically expresses in her book "Notes on a Life." I loved it!

I had high expectations for this book, afterall, she is a Coppola! And just like her famous family members, she met them. I loved the "time travel" feeling from jumping back and fourth through Eleanor Coppola's diary. What a tremendous person with a tremendous amount to give.

I really loved this book. The pain of losing her son, the behind the scenes look at what glitz and glamour is really like, her observations of nature and life around her. At times I felt like I was watching a scene from one of her daughter's films - the way things are observed on a table, or the unusual slices of life - and by allowing her mind to wander in the structure, it became clearer that it was like a Chuck Close portrait - where when you stand close to it the face disappears, but far away, comes into excruciating focus. Or to gaze upon Seurat's "La Grande Jette," an experience she recounts of "nearly fainting" from the intensity of the experiences. It's an apt metaphor for her writing where one can feel the words as brushstrokes, the points of light as various experiences in her unusual journey. At times reading passages of behind the scenes descriptions of the shoot of Godfather III, or Dracula, or even attending the Oscar ceremony, I felt the same way I do when standing in a room full of Monet paintings, a sense of melancholy, of loss, and when I stand close to the canvas, I can feel the emotion of each brush stroke, but when I stand back across the room, I'm overwhelmed by the structure and clever connections that she's taken the reader through. If someone plans to live a life in the glare of the limelight, this is required reading. If someone wants to know what its like to live a life in the limelight, it's also required reading. The fact that she and her husband have stayed together and laughed and lived such an extraordinary life is worth examining. The incredibly pain and sense of loss of their son permeates the book, but also underlines and expands and reflects the light coming from both of them as they've somehow been able to survive this incredible journey together. And there's fun here as well, sensuality, I can almost taste her description of various meals, a memorably one with Alice Waters, inside Eleanor's Napa valley kitchen as she stirs an espresso or the smell of chicken in the oven. And not to gild the lilly, but the paintings of Edward Hopper come to mind - a sense of isolation betwixt the wonderment of the glare of light surrounding the author. Can't recommend it any higher.

Coppola takes the cake as an ungrateful women who never stops complaining about her life, with an in depth look at her jealousy of her husband, and her daughter, and heads off the road from exotic places all over the world, where the hotel rooms start to "smell of wet diapers and baby Gia is walking around with just a tee-shirt on", to create "art" in her bungalow on her fabulous Napa compound. So she got pregnant and quickly married Francis in Las Vegas, and therefore never really fulfilled herself as a woman.

If she stopped complaining so much, she would have had a lot more time on her hands.

By: Christine Scioli