ALL IN THE FAMILY
posted by James Reel
Last night I had dinner with actress Talia Shire (and nine other people). Toward the end of the meal, her son, actor Jason Schwartzman, called to find out how she’d done in that afternoon’s Chamber Music Plus Southwest show, in which she’d portrayed Fanny Mendelssohn (she was splendid, by the way). Earlier in the evening, Talia had been talking up her son’s latest film, The Darjeeling Limited, which she assured us wasn’t the usual oddball Wes Anderson sort of movie, but a serious and witty film that all serious and witty people should see, even though audiences have so far been in short supply.
On the subject of Talia Shire’s family, I took an opportunity to point out that her father, composer Carmine Coppola, was a character in a deleted scene of Godfather II, directed by her brother, Francis Ford Coppola. (Talia played Connie Corleone in the Godfather movies.) In this scene, young Vito Corleone (Robert DeNiro) and his associates take a bag of guns to an immigrant identified as Augustino Coppola (the name of Talia’s grandfather; according to family lore, Augustino Coppola did, indeed, once receive a visit from what Talia calls “some very scary guys” like these). While Augustino sorts through the guns, he tells his young son, Carmine, to come out and play his flute for the visitors.
The real Carmine Coppola started out as a flutist; he played for Radio City Music Hall from 1934 to 1936, the Detroit Symphony from 1936 to 1941 and the NBC Symphony (under Arturo Toscanini) from 1942 to 1948, after which he worked as a music director in New York theaters and wrote film music. According to Talia, her father claimed to hate the flute, but he played it with a beautifully full, round tone. He said that Toscanini hired musicians for the NBC Symphony—bowers and blowers alike—on the basis of their vibrato. I’d never heard of that being used as the main criterion for working in an orchestra, but it does fall in line with Toscanini’s famous insistence on unanimity in all things musical.
