I learned today that one of my heroes passed away recently from a heart attack at age 75.
My first encounter with August Coppola came shortly after I graduated from high school in 1966. (Yeah, I know, 90% of the world’s population wasn’t born yet and I just dated myself.) I had won a couple of scholarships, which I planned to put to use when I entered California State University-Long Beach in the fall. I was flattered to get an invitation from Augie—then a renowned professor of comparative literature—to apply for the General Honors Program. When I interviewed he asked me if I knew what “interdisciplinary” meant (remember, this was 1966) I gave him my best explanation. He smiled broadly and said, “This kid is the first to answer the question right.” I am sure he lied, but I walked out feeling taller and smarter than I ever had. I felt like I could take on the world.
I was accepted into the program, so I assumed there would be hundreds of others. There were only a couple dozen and they were the brainiest people I’ve ever dealt with. I was in his Freshman Honors Colloquium class for my full freshman year. In his class I did my first serious reading of Freud, Darwin, Kant, Marx, Jefferson, Sartre, Aristotle, Heidegger, the Beats, Saint Augustine, Buddha, Auden, Weiner, Yeats, Jung, Camus, Hesse, Mann, Kieerkegaard, Maslow, Kafka, Beckett, Buber, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Aquinas, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, a pile of contemporary playwrights, and so many more. Our reading list was 47 books long and included Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. I had never read so much in my life!
When we studied film he brought in his brother, director Francis Ford Coppola. When we studied Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf he brought in its playwright Edward Albee. When we studied music, it was for six weeks with fellow professor Frank Pooler, who had just finished his collaboration with Karen and Richard Carpenter on the Christmas standard “Merry Christmas, Darling” but had time to teach us about electronic music and had us composing music on synthesizers. Augie had us doing painting and writing poetry. And we felt good about it, even though we knew our work probably sucked.
(He even introduced me to his aspiring actress sister, Talia, with whom I had a memorable movie date. She went on to marry film composer David Shire a few years later and was nominated for an Oscar as Rocky’s wife Adrian, played a young bride in “The Godfather,” and many other roles.)
Our final project was a film based on Hesse’s Siddhartha. We adapted the script, acted, manned the cameras, edited the film, composed and played the music. His reluctant 3-year-old son Nick (now known as Nicholas Cage) was in the film (maybe his first acting role). When we held the premier of the film you would have thought the red carpet was waiting for us.
After my freshman year, I took some time off, then decided to serve a Mormon mission. I had talked to him about my faith and he had talked me through the writing of a paper on Mormonism and Existentialism. I gained a great deal of confidence from him because he accepted what I had to say and treated me with respect, as if I were the real adult I was. I returned to campus before heading to Peru and he was excited for me. He asked me to report my adventures when I returned. Lesser students and professors had ridiculed my decision to abandon my studies for at least two years to go off to South America to teach.
He later went on to become dean of the School of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University. He was a champion of the arts, working tirelessly and stubbornly to see that they got their due. As a result, in 1997 the school dedicated The August Coppola Theater in the Fine Arts Building in honor of his efforts.
About 20 years after having Augie as a teacher I had lunch with him in San Francisco. I waited nervously in a restaurant he had chosen, knowing he would never recognize me. He did, of course, and remembered much about my work. We talked about the nature of creativity in human beings, and how it manifests itself so differently in individuals, families, societies, and times. I was working for Gibbs Smith, Publisher, at the time and I was interested in the amazing creativity demonstrated by his family. His brother was one of the greatest film directors in the world, his son had won a Best Actor Academy Award, his sister Talia Shire is a much-lauded actress and producer and mother of actors Robert and Jason Schwartzman, his niece and nephew directors Sophia Coppola (”Lost in Translation”) and Roman Coppola, and his father was Oscar-winning composer Carmine Coppola. (See the Coppola Family Tree.)I wanted him to consider writing about his family as a study in creative influences. I had read his brother Francis Ford say that Augie was the intellectual core of the family. He took the project under consideration but eventually decided against it because he didn’t think he was talented enough to do it justice.
He was a true eccentric. He was often serious, but never took himself too seriously. He was a kid at heart, playful all the time and willing to entertain any idea—no matter how wacky. He was a visionary in every sense of the word, reaching farther than anyone I have ever known to understand how things connected. He opened up in me a sense of wonder and an intense desire for learning about how things relate to each other: history, literature, film, music, art, political thought, and theatre. When I went on to teach at a university, I tried hard to help my students find those same connections. He cracked the door to a whole new world for me and that door has always remained open. I’ll always be grateful that he introduced me to a true interdisciplinary way of viewing the world.
Looking back at this blog post, I realize that it is as much about me as about Augie Coppola. He had that effect on people. Many of the news items are about the death of Nicholas Cage’s father. But all who knew him will smile at that irony. He will be greatly missed.
Some obituaries:
- August Coppola Remembered, Golden Gate Press, Nov. 6.
- August Coppola, professor, director’s sibling, Boston Globe, Nov. 3.
- August Coppola, arts educator, dies at 75, San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 4.
The 46th Annual DeCelle Memorial Lake Tahoe Relay will take place on June 12.
The race is named after Robert DeCelle, Sr’s son, Captain Robert DeCelle, Jr. “Bobby” as his family called him, an avid high school runner. Drafted into the Army in 1966, he flew a helicopter during the Vietnam War. In February 1971 his helicopter was hit and he suffered severe injuries, yet he managed to pilot it away from the battle and thus saved the lives of his crew. He died from his injuries about a week later on February 21, 1971. He was heavily decorated by the Army and a base in Vietnam was named for him. At that time, the Lake Tahoe Relay was renamed in his honor.
