The Independent published some choice excerpts a couple of days ago from Notes on a Life, the recently published collected journals of Eleanor Coppola––wife of Francis Ford, mother or Roman and Sofia, and co-director of the making-of-Apocalypse Now doc, Hearts of Darkness. The book was already on my shopping list, but it’s moved up a bit in urgency now that I’ve read the excerpt about how Eleanor struggled to define herself in the mid-70s, while her husband was out winning Oscars and she was pretty much just expected to stay home with the kids.

Eleanor met artist Lynn Hershman (now Hershman-Leeson, she directed the excellent post-9/11 paranoia doc Strange Culture) through Roman’s nursery-school car pool, and the two moms became partners in conceptual art crime. Francis went out of town one weekend, and the girls threw a party where Eleanor moved her husband’s five real Oscars from a display case, and replaced them with her own five, keychain sized consolation prizes, apparently given to the wife of every Oscar winner. Then they had guests peel potatoes and, inspired by a Joseph Beuys quote, made everyoe decide whether or not their potato was art. It sounds like typical, 70s California stuff, but apparently Francis was not amused. From the book:

His feelings were hurt. He thought I was making fun of him, his Oscars, our house. He worked long and hard on his films, and thought conceptual art was too easy. “So some guy shoots himself in the arm [Chris Burden] or pisses off a ladder in a gallery [Tom Marioni] and that’s a big deal?” The only thing Francis finds OK about that period is a Joseph Beuys sculpture I bought him that he didn’t like at the time but is now worth 30 times what I paid. I was not a good wife, by his definition or mine.

I assume she, like, got better at being a wife, either by her standards or his or both, since they’re still together, but the excerpt then jumps ahead ten years. What a tease!