More than just an auteur’s wife: The extraordinary life and work of Eleanor Coppola (2024)

Eleanor Jesse Neil was a fledgling art director when she met Francis Ford Coppola on the set of 1962’s Dementia 13, a low-budget horror picture that was one of the first features directed by the man. She was a couple of years older than the brash, ambitious, practically larger-than-life filmmaker who valued family nearly as much as he valued art. And once they married, and she took his name, they set about building a family quickly; their son, Gian-Carlo, was born in 1963.

For the better part of the next decade Eleanor, who died on Friday at the age of 87, managed that family, bearing two more children, Roman in 1965, Sofia in 1971. She was Coppola’s confidante throughout his machinations in the movie business, a repository for the recollected currents of his inspiration. There’s a bit in the wedding scene of The Godfather in which a couple of kids are tossing sandwiches around. “That’s something [Francis] remembers as a child – throwing these football wedding sandwiches as they were called. They would be prosciutto on a roll wrapped up with some wax paper, and they would like to throw them across the room to each other.”

When Coppola embarked on the gargantuan task of making the Vietnam fantasia Apocalypse Now, he summoned Eleanor to the Philippines to shoot “making of” footage for potential publicity use. Nobody conversant with the history of American film needs to be told that the making of Apocalypse Now was a tortured journey not likely to yield anything like publicity-friendly footage. What Eleanor ended up chronicling was something between a Sisyphean exertion and an attempted career/actual suicide.

Years later the documentarians George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr made Hearts of Darkness, A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, a retrospective chronicle of how what’s come to be acknowledged as a vexed classic came together. The picture has the usual arsenal of talking head, participants in the process looking back – writer John Milius, Coppola collaborator George Lucas, cast members Martin Sheen and Robert Duvall, among others. But what really makes the picture is the footage shot by Eleanor, who also anchors the picture by narrating it. She certainly deserves a co-director credit.

Eleanor is kind of amusingly circ*mspect as she narrates the portions of the film in which she comes on the scene. We are treated to cute shots of Gio, Roman and Sofia as little tots, all at the time looking very much like their mother. She maintains an air of sweet reason throughout her vocal retelling. But the footage she shot has a sly resourcefulness.

In much of the material Eleanor shot of Francis talking directly to the camera, she is in “let him cook” mode. From our very first glimpses of the man we can see he’s in what one might charitably call an enhanced mode, explaining how he’s not making Apocalypse Now in the tradition of David Lean, constructor of distinguished epic war films, but of schlockmeister Irwin Allen, the vulgar virtuoso of the disaster picture. She’s an exemplary recordist. (And when it came down to brass tacks, Eleanor chose to commit a mild betrayal of confidence by allowing Hickenlooper and Barr access to audio recordings of conversations with her husband that were intended to be confidential references for both Francis and Eleanor.) But in her journal, which itself was later published as Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now, she wrote of her husband’s “franticness” and lack of “discrimination,” the discrimination that “draws the line between what is visionary and what is madness.”

Even after the madness of Apocalypse, Francis Coppola’s expansive personality, and incredibly daredevilish adventures and misadventures in gaining and losing and gaining Zoetrope Pictures, his studio cum production shingle (founded in 1969), yielded unusual behavior both on and off the set. His follow-up to his gargantuan war film was to be an intimate musical, called One From The Heart. But this too metastasized into a supersized production, this time in interiors rather than unpredictable exteriors. It’s rumored that Coppola directed much of the picture from the inside of a trailer parked on the Zoetrope soundstage. Some sources imply that cocaine was involved. In Wim Wenders’ 1982 The State of Things, made in the wake of Wenders’ quarrelsome collaboration with Coppola over theHammett, a Coppola surrogate played by Alan Garfield, is on the run from loan sharks and being driven around Hollywood in a Winnebago 24/7.

Peter Biskind’s 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is packed with (often anonymously sourced) accounts of Coppola’s blatant womanizing during this period, which the director has issue with. (I had breakfast with Coppola shortly after the book was published, and he was indignant: “And what’s with that kid Peter Biskind? What’s this nonsense about a hot tub? I never bought a goddamn hot tub!”) But it’s worth noting of all his peers and friends in filmmaking, Coppola’s marriage one of the very few that endured. (Another is Steven Spielberg’s marriage to Kate Capshaw, which has lasted 33 years to Coppola’s 61.) If Eleanor ever spoke about the accounts of infidelity, I’ve not been able to find any quotes. In Hearts of Darkness, appearing onscreen, she states simply, “I always support him as an artist.” And when, after years of documenting the artistic efforts of Francis and other family members, Eleanor ventured to make cinematic art entirely her own, Francis supported her: Zoetrope co-produced her first feature, 2016’s Paris Can Wait, and entirely produced her second, 2020’s Love Is Love Is Love. Both are personal movies: Love is a three-story anthology meditating on work and family tensions, and on grief. In Paris Can Wait Diane Lane’s character mourns the loss of a child.

In 1986 the Coppolas were visited by an unspeakable tragedy: their first son, Gian-Carlo, was killed in a speedboat accident. He was only 22. Francis was shattered by the tragedy, and it informed much of his subsequent work, including The Godfather Part III and his experimental features including Youth Without Youth and Twixt. Eleanor created an art installation inspired by Gian-Carlo called Circle of Memory, which has toured galleries worldwide.

In the wake of Eleanor’s death, various personages on social media and elsewhere have commented that the women who worked with the great directors of ‘70s Hollywood don’t get enough recognition. This is inarguable, and I won’t go into all the strong evidence here. The case of Eleanor is of special interest in part because she kept her own counsel in terms of how “recognized” she wanted to be. She didn’t hide her light under a bushel, she didn’t act as a “muse” to Francis. When she wanted to be seen, she was seen, but one senses that a lot of the time she merely didn’t want to. She was an artist, but she was also an extremely loving and devoted mother, and the work of parenting was something she did outside the spotlight because that was the best place to do it. And when she wanted to speak as an artist, she did.

Let’s get back to that question: What is visionary and what is madness? Eleanor’s death occurs at a time when her husband, now 85, is showing around Megalopolis, a passion project in which he invested a reported $120 million (money derived from selling off portions of his remarkably successful winery). The trade reports around this effort seem to be rooting for Coppola to fail – just as the trade reports for Apocalypse Now looked, come to think of it. We can only wish Coppola grace and love and the blessing of her memory as he soldiers on without her by his side.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, atSome Came Runningand tweets, mostly in jest, at@glenn__kenny. He is the author of the upcomingThe World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for pre-order.