Francis Ford Coppola has made anumber of attempts to play impresario over the years, but one of his most successful acts of patronage over the years may have one that was partly incidental: he's given Eleanor Coppola, his wife of more than forty-five years, plenty to write about. Eleanor Coppola kept a diary of the making of Apocalypse Now from the period when her husband was assembling his cast and crew to the movie's completion and published her observations in a book called Notes that was published when the movie was in 1979. (That book, and footage she had shot, subsequently served as the core of the classic making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.) Now Coppola has published her second book, a follow-up volume called Notes on a Life. Coppola told interviewer Margaret Wapper that the new book, which covers events in her family's life from the 1980s to the near-present day, ""doesn't have a specific projection or underpinning, but it's reflective of the way we think. In the present time, we are aware of something, but maybe it reminds us of something else and then we're in the past and then we're back to the present again. . . . As I looked back on the notes, I could see strong themes emerging, repeating themselves, certain images or ideas."
The first Notes came out at a time when Francis was on top of the world, and the book was something of a revelation for the clarity, sensitivity and precision of Eleanor's prose and insights. A reader didn't have to work too hard to attach to it the subtext of a gifted, intelligent woman with creative yearnings of her own who had spent years living in the shadow of a superstar movie director and holding his family together while he devoted more and more time to his increasingly glamorous dream career. In twenty-five years since, Eleanor Coppola has had to watch, and deal with, her husband struggle to find fulfillment in his career as more and more of his big projects went bust and he's struggled to remake himself as a working director. (While making The Godfather, Part III, Francis snaps and, she writes, "spoke so convincingly about all the things wrong in his life: how he hated that he was doing the same thing again that he had done nearly 20 years ago . . . he talked about his family, he complained about me. I sat there while he ran it all out. . . . I went for a walk outside. I tried to visualize all his dark words draining out of me, dripping off the ends of my fingers and running out my toes through my shoes.") She's also been through some things, the most obvious being the 1986 accidental death of her 22-year-old son Gian-Carlo, that make career problems seem very petty. Describing her process, she told Wapper that "I write as if I have a friend who I want to tell something to that I just experienced or thought about or was intrigued by. . . . I keep a little notebook in my purse for conversations I overhear or what people tell me." She also said, by way of indicating just what a long, strange trip it's been, "I never expected Francis to be a celebrity when we got married. He was making [Dementia 13], this black-and-white film, very low budget. I thought we were going to live in the Valley. I was just as startled and unprepared for how our lives evolved. . . . I really feel very strongly that he should be whatever he wants to be. That's why I could always be supportive of his projects, because I felt like this is artwork and he wants to make it as much as I want to make mine."