This comparatively reduced terrain has often served as complement to her husband’s much grander vistas. “I am the observer, the audience watching the action as if in a theater,” she writes, in “Two of Me,” of visiting Francis on set while he directs his latest and likely final filmic extravaganza, “Megalopolis” (2024). Similarly, in “Notes: On the Making of ‘Apocalypse Now’ ” she describes a complicated location shoot on a beach, involving the simulation of a napalm bombing. “The napalm went off right with the jets, flying through frame, perfectly. . . . Twelve hundred gallons of gasoline went up in about a minute and a half,” she writes. Stationed half a mile away from the site of the explosion, she records, simply, that she “felt a strong flash of heat”—the 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. “The flabby American men are getting tan and strong,” she writes. “The women look tired.”
Photograph by Jimmy Keane
Among these tired women is Coppola herself, and “Two of Me” suggests that this fatigue didn’t just stem from the nightmarishly long “Apocalypse” shoot she described in her first “Notes.” 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 “adventure” while working on her own “art projects” and raising children on movie sets, “like a circus family,” but had to simultaneously fulfill the demands of her brilliant, mercurial, sometimes wayward husband, who wanted her to be a “very traditional wife, happily devoted to caring for our children, creating a nice home, and supporting his career.” During most of her life, she was indeed—to riff on the book’s title—“Two of Her.” Who among us wouldn’t be exhausted by such an inherently paradoxical position?
“Two of Me,” however, does depict the opening of an unexpected aperture, through which Coppola was able to finally access a measure of freedom from this duality—one that wasn’t available to her during most of her adult life. In 2010, an X-ray scan revealed a rare type of tumor growing in Coppola’s 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—practicing alternative therapies and undergoing scans every six months to monitor the tumor’s gradual progress. (She lived for fourteen more years, experiencing the growing tumor’s considerable ill effects only in the last couple of years of her life.) In the book, she describes her family’s unhappiness at her decision to forego traditional therapy: “Francis 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,” she writes. Coppola, however, refused to bend to their urging, even though, as she admits, she had “no ‘reasonable’ argument or evidence” 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.
But from another, possibly more symbolic perspective, Coppola’s decision made sense, at least according to the terms in which she saw her life. “I was stunned to realize that I was so conditioned by my upbringing to be a good girl and follow doctor’s orders that it had never occurred to me that the choices for my life were mine to make,” she writes. The tumor was “[a] great teacher,” a “swift kick” that finally compelled Coppola to peep “out from behind the shadow of [her] family.” Though the growth was a constraining thing, an obstruction “pressing against [Coppola’s] heart and lungs”—and, as such, not unlike the pressures she was used to navigating during most of her life as a wife and mother—these limitations were what ultimately let her grasp the limits of her own autonomy. “What did I have to lose?” she writes. “I was going to die anyway.” In 2016, Coppola became, as she notes, the oldest woman to direct her first feature film, the romantic comedy “Paris Can Wait.” (In 2020, at age eighty-four, she followed up with the movie “Love Is Love Is Love.”) But these quantifiable achievements weren’t the only markers of her newfound freedom. The book itself is a small-scale cri de coeur, animated by Coppola’s tenacity—by her insistence on tracing the contours of her own world, in writing.
