TALIA MADE IT ON HER OWN

Times-News, Hollywood  ::  4/27/77

Hollywood has long been known as Nepotism City, but the truth is that generally when families have made it here, it's been because they had talent, not merely family connections. Nobody denies that all the Barrymores - John, Ethel and Lionel - had what it takes. Ditto the Bennets - Richard, Joan and Constance. And there have been several more families who played together. But still, whenever a relative of a major Hollywood personality tries to make it, there are always chorus lines of raised eyebrows and behind-the-hand snickers. That's how it was with Francis Ford Coppola's kid sister. How it was, that is, before Rocky.  And an Academy Award nomination.

Talia Shire is doing quite all right on her very own now, thank you. But she remembers vividly what it was like battling the attitude that all she had going for her was a top director for a big brother, that she was trying to hitch a ride on his star.

She had played a big part in both Godfathers, and everybody assumed she got it because of who she was.  The truth of the matter is that Francis didn't want her in the first Godfather. 

"Mario Puzo thought I was right for the part, but not Francis," Talia says. She tested under the name of Talia Shire - it's her married name - so nobody would know she was a relative. Bob Evans, the head of Paramount, saw the test with no name at all. She got the part, strictly became of her talent.

Talia Shire says that, to understand the Coppola family of today, you must first know the Coppola family of Yesterday. It was, first, an Italian family. And, second, it was a musical family. The two traditions went hand in hand. Talia's and Francis' and Augie's father was Carmine Coppola, a musician. 

"He was a conductor," she says. '"And we all grew up with his disappointment. He was supposed to be the star of the family, but he never quite made it. His younger brother conducted on Broadway, but he could only get road companies.  So my childhood fantasies were like most Italian girls'. They were built around the men in my family, that my father would finally be recognized and that my two brothers would become famous."

She sublimated her own wishes and ambitions to that greater good. Through moct of her young years, she was on the road as her father took his road company musicals all over the U.S.

"My mother," she says, "felt that families should be together, so we went with my father on the road. I spent my adolescence in hotel rooms. Augie and Francis, too, although to a lesser extent."

The brothers, of course, were the supposed next generation of stars. She, as the girl in the family, was not destined for much of anything.

Francis became the great director and Augie was a professor of comparative literature until he resigned to write a novel. The old Italian sentiment that women should be at home has carried on, she says, to the current generation of Coppolas.

"Francis is Victorian," she says, "and I mean that in a positive way. He thinks of women as being better off at home." 

Despite its musical heritage, there is no music among the current Coppola crop. Talia says that Francis, in order to get a scholarship to a military academy, took up the tuba but it didn't become a life's work. Augie never played anything. And she plays a little - very little - piano.  "My husband David," she says, "bought me a xylophone which I can play while he plays the piano.'  David Shire is a composer of movie music - he did the scores for The Hindenburg, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 and All the President's Men.

David is Jewish, but that caused no problem in her family, she says. "I think today religion matters less than profession." she says. "My father was delighted when he came into the family, because he's a musician and they can talk about music."