Eleanor Coppola tried to start a wronged wives club with Hillary Clinton - and got a blunt reality check
Eleanor Coppola sits for a portrait at Cafe Zoetrope on Wednesday, April 12, 2017, in San Francisco. Her posthumous memoir, "Two of Me: Notes on Living and Leaving" is on sale now. (Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle)
With a history of agonizingly tolerating her husband's affairs, Eleanor Coppola once found herself seated next to Hillary Clinton at a White House event when the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky relationship was dominating the news cycle.
As Coppola recounts in her memoir, "Two of Me: Notes on Living and Leaving," she finally mustered up the courage to talk to the then-first lady over coffee at the end of the meal.
"I said to her, ‘We should get a group of women together who have powerful husbands with bad behavior and talk,'" Coppola writes.
Clinton, she said, "answered instantly": - "‘Oh there'd be too many of us.'"
- Related: Sofia Coppola says Dad's sets were her film school, but a birthday gift from Mom changed everything
Eleanor Coppola, wife of "The Godfather" director Francis Ford Coppola, was always a truth teller, but nothing provides perspective quite like impending death.
Diagnosed with a life-threatening tumor in 2010, the matriarch of the Bay Area's famous filmmaking family made a crucial decision to forgo aggressive chemotherapy treatment with the determination to live her remaining life her way.
The book cover of Eleanor Coppola's posthumous memoir, "Two of Me: Notes of Living and Leaving," published Nov. 11, 2025. (A24)
As she put it, she chose "quality over quantity."
More Information
Two of Me: Notes on Living and LeavingBy Eleanor Coppola (A24; 204 pages; $20)
She lasted 14 more years, directing her only two feature films and writing her memoirs before dying at age 87 on April 12, 2024, just one month before the world premiere of Francis' dream project "Megalopolis."
"Two of Me: Notes on Living and Leaving," published posthumously in November with a forward by filmmaker daughter Sofia Coppola and an afterward by Chez Panisse restaurateur Alice Waters, is filled with both gratitude and regret.
When, as an assistant art director, she first met Francis on the set of his first low-budget film, the Roger Corman-produced "Dementia 13" (1963), she imagined a creative life collaborating on small independent films.
She was unprepared for the monster success of "The Godfather," which made her husband one of the most famous people in the world. Just as women were fighting for their power in the 1970s liberation movement, Eleanor assumed what would today be called in some circles a "trad" wife - raising the children of a genius, larger-than-life artist, with her own career ambitions scuttled.
Yet, because of the children - Oscar-winning Sofia, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Roman and Gian-Carlo, who died at 22 in a freak boating accident - she would have done it all over again.
Photos included in Eleanor Coppola's posthumous memoir, "Two of Me: Notes of Living and Leaving," published Nov. 11, 2025. (A24)
And, of course, she really did love Francis, and he loved her. Even though she once caught him in bed with another woman, and called a divorce lawyer when she found out that he took one of their children on a date with one of his girlfriends, they stayed together.
"Somehow we made our way back from the edge," Eleanor writes. "Our children have thanked us and we have thanked each other."
Decades later, over the breakfast table, Francis was reading in the newspaper about a high-profile divorce settlement, and blurted out, according to Eleanor, "See? You've saved me a lot of money. I could be paying alimony to three or four wives by now."
Eleanor's third memoir - after the great "Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now" (1979), as well as "Notes on a Life" (2008) - goes to astonishing depths, considering its modest 204-page length.
There are some great celebrity tidbits. She muses about Elizabeth Taylor stealing a White House ashtray at an event during the Jimmy Carter era; Andy Warhol signing a Campbell's soup can in their kitchen; George Lucas screening a rough-cut of "Star Wars" in their screening room ("I didn't get it," Eleanor admits); and escaping her San Francisco house for a much-needed drink at Tosca and finding herself sitting next to Soviet-born ballet dancer and choreographer Rudolf Nureyev.
There's even a great story about how Eleanor and Francis' 14-year-old nephew Nicolas Coppola, later to be known as Nicolas Cage, came to live for a year with them in San Francisco as his parents were going through a nasty divorce.
Nicolas Cage, left, with his uncle Francis Ford Coppola, cousin Sofia Coppola and aunt Eleanor Coppola on Jan. 24, 2004 at a Focus Features Universal Studios party. (J. Vespa/WireImage/WireImage)
"We created a room for him in our attic," Eleanor writes. "I let him select a new bedspread and I can still remember the hippie patchwork red velvet one he chose. … Nicolas was a good sport. … I could see his wild imagination at work and his interest in being an entertainer as he pranced around the house doing Elvis impersonations."
But the most moving parts of the memoir are how Eleanor finally found herself and flowered in the last quarter century of her life.
Some relevant background: Eleanor, born Eleanor Jessie Neil in 1936, grew up in a modest Southern California beach shack that her mother lived in for 77 years, beginning with her wedding night. Her father died when she was 10, leaving her mother with three young children.
Even as Francis' fame and wealth increased, her mother resisted moving out of her home to something bigger. Cleaning out the place after her death, Eleanor found things that "brought me to tears."
"She was a Depression-era woman and could never indulge herself," Eleanor writes. "In her closet, I found a cheap little housedress that I recognized. After having worn it for years and finally giving it to the Salvation Army, she happened one day to visit the Salvation Army and saw her dress hanging on a rack for sale for 50 cents. She felt sorry for it, no one wanted it, so she bought it."
In a time when there were no grief counselors, Eleanor said her mother "suffered alone."
Eleanor Coppola poses in January 1992. Coppola, who documented the making of some of her husband Francis Ford Coppola's iconic films, including the infamously tortured production of "Apocalypse Now," and who raised a family of filmmakers, died April 12, 2024 at 87. (Craig Fujii/Associated Press)
Perhaps being raised by her mother explains partly why, although she was "the beneficiary of an amazing life ride," she felt "it would be good to be a bit more visible in a family of high visibility where I am seen as the nice wife, mother, grandmother at the edge of the frame, or just cropped out."
Diane Keaton often said her portrayal of Kay Corleone, put-upon wife of Al Pacino's mafia boss Micahel Corleone in "The Godfather" films, was based on Eleanor, a description which Eleanor always hated. But quotes like that lend credence to the influence.
When Eleanor turned 60, she finally mustered up the courage to ask for her own studio away from the family house in Rutherford. No one objected; she could have asked years ago. For decades, she had been doing art projects in the attic, where she could always be interrupted. The new space was a revelation, she writes.
"What was most surprising to me when I moved in was that I could hear myself," she writes, "hear my inner voices that had previously been drowned out by the noise of my life."
She soon entered the most creative period of her life, which included the films "Paris Can Wait" (2017) and "Love Is Love Is Love" (2020).
Quality over quantity indeed.
