Wendy Doniger, circa On the Road.

Wendy Doniger makes a cameo in a Time arti­cle about Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s new movie Youth With­out Youth:

One friend who sent Cop­pola encour­ag­ing notes on his Mega­lopo­lis script was Wendy Doniger, the first girl he had ever kissed and the one who gave him On the Road when they were stu­dents at Great Neck High School in Long Island, New York, in the ’50s. (Cop­pola has optioned the book.) He flew his pri­vate plane to Chicago to pick up Doniger, now a Uni­ver­sity of Chicago pro­fes­sor of Hin­duism and com­par­a­tive mythol­ogy, and bring her back to Napa to dis­cuss her ideas with him and his wife Eleanor. Over the house wine and Coppola’s cook­ing, they talked about his career. “He was stuck,” says Doniger. “For the first time in his life, he could finance a movie, and there­fore he didn’t have to do what any­body else said, and that par­a­lyzed him. He had no excuse this time if the film was no good. What froze him was having the power to do exactly what he wanted so that his soul was on the line.”

Hoping to help him with some of the themes he was strug­gling with on Mega­lopo­lis, Doniger gave Cop­pola some of Eliade’s works, includ­ing Youth With­out Youth. The book, meant to be inspi­ra­tional, became Coppola’s light­ning bolt. “I real­ized, well, I can just go to Roma­nia and make this movie and not tell anyone. I optioned the script on the sly, didn’t tell my wife. I was so wounded for those five, six years that it felt good to have a secret project. It’s like if you had $1 mil­lion cash in your purse that no one knew about, you’d feel empowered.”

This isn’t Wendy’s first brush with movie fame: she loaned her office to Anthony Hop­kins for the movie ver­sion of David Auburn’s Proof.