Eleanor Coppola

Eleanor Coppola is dead at 87. Known as the wife of director Francis Coppola, Eleanor was a creative force in her own right -- as well as a mother and anchor to a volatile genius. I knew her slightly, because I'm a former tenant of the Zoetrope building, the copper-plated San Francisco landmark owned by Eleanor and her husband, who always kept the rents low for working authors and artists like me. And my wife Camille Peri interviewed her long ago for Salon -- an in-depth conversation that Eleanor later told Camille she particularly appreciated.

One time, when I pushed our first baby Joe in a stroller in North Beach, I recall that Eleanor and Francis looked at him from a restaurant window with warmth and sadness in their eyes. Their first-born son Gino had recently been killed in a boating accident.

Eleanor Coppola was quiet, dignified and intelligent. She wrote the revealing diaries about her turbulent married life -- including the inside story about the making of Apocalypse Now, one of her husband's masterpieces -- that later became her gripping 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness. In her 80s, she also made two dramatic films.

I like how she described the way she navigated her long marriage to Francis. They were "opposites in every way," she remarked, and they weathered "plenty of friction." But, she added, "it's good friction, it's a creative friction. You grow from it. You don't go to sleep at the wheel."

There are ghosts that loom large when I walk the streets of North Beach these days. Eleanor Coppola's spirit is now one of them.