This relatively small area often served as a complement to her husband's much grander views. “I am an observer, an audience watching as if in a theatre,” she writes in “Two of Me,” about visiting Francis on set as he films his latest, and likely final, film extravaganza, “Megapolis(2024). Likewise, in “Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now,” she describes complex location filming on the beach, including a simulated napalm bombing. “The napalm exploded right along with the planes, flying through the frame, perfect. . . . Twelve hundred gallons of gasoline rose in about a minute and a half,” she writes. Half a mile from the site of the explosion, she simply records that she “felt a great flash of heat”—the sparse, understated prose suggesting her position as just a body in the landscape, feeling rather than analyzing, experiencing rather than reacting. In an earlier journal entry from the same day, she reports, again with little detail, the difference between the very few women and the many men she watches on set. “Fabby American men are getting tanned and strong,” she writes. “The women look tired.”
Photography by Jimmy Keene
Among these tired women is Coppola herself, and Two of Me suggests that this weariness was not just due to the horribly long Apocalypse shoot that she described in her first Notes. It was also due to elemental tensions within Coppola's marriage itself. Eleanor Coppola was a woman who, 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 who had to simultaneously meet the demands of her brilliant, mercurial, sometimes wayward husband, who wanted her to be “a very traditional wife, joyfully devoted to caring for our children, making a good home, and supporting his career.” For most of her life, she really was—to judge by the title of the book—“There Are Two of Her.” Which of us would not be tired of such a paradoxical position in its essence?
However, Two of Me does depict the opening of an unexpected opening through which Coppola was able to finally access some measure of freedom from this duality—one that had been denied her for much of her adult life. In 2010, an X-ray revealed a rare type of tumor growing in Coppola's chest. Although the doctors she consulted advised her to start chemotherapy to reduce the growth of the tumor, she feared that the treatment would reduce her quality of life and instead decided to wait, practicing alternative treatments and undergoing scans every six months to monitor the gradual progress of the tumor. (She lived another fourteen years, experiencing the serious negative effects of the growing tumor only in the last couple of years of her life.) In the book, she describes her family's dissatisfaction with her decision to refuse traditional therapy: “Francis told me that he and the children should be paramount in any decision I made, and they wanted me to take the therapy, the action, the decision that would get me out of danger,” she writes. Coppola, however, refused to comply with their insistence, although, as she admits, she had “no ‘reasonable’ arguments or evidence” to support her decision, and as I read on, I imagined how disappointed and perhaps angry I would have been if someone close to me had turned away from conventional medicine to treat a serious illness.
But from another, perhaps more symbolic, perspective, Coppola's decision made sense, at least in terms of how she saw her life. “I was stunned to realize that my upbringing had so conditioned me to be a good girl and follow doctor’s orders that it had never occurred to me that the choices in my life should be mine to make,” she writes. The tumor was[a] great teacher,” a “quick strike” that finally forced Coppola to peek “from behind the shadows [her] family.” Although growth was a limiting factor, an obstacle, “pressing [Coppola’s] Heart and Lungs”—and as such, not unlike the pressures she had been accustomed to dealing with for most of her life as a wife and mother—it was these limitations that ultimately allowed her to recognize the limits of her own autonomy. “What did I have to lose?” she writes. “I'm 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 Love Is Love Is Love.) But these measurable accomplishments weren't the only indicators of her newfound freedom. The book itself is a small cry from the heart, inspired by Coppola's tenacity, her insistence on drawing the contours of her own world in written form.
