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.