The Last Supper: Frank J. Coppola
On April 22, 1978 Muriel Hatchell was murdered in her home during a robbery. She was bound with the cords of her Venetian blinds and her head was pounded against the floor repeatedly. An autopsy identified the cause of death as a combination of brain hemorrhaging and asphyxiation on vomit. The assailants made off with $3,100 in cash and a handful of the dead woman’s jewelry.
Former police officer Frank Coppola was convicted of the crime. Coppola was executed by electrocution on August 10, 1982, having waived his appeals and stated on numerous occasions that he wanted to die in order to “rescue any semblance of dignity I have left”.
Coppola’s execution was botched. It took two 55-second jolts of electricity to kill the man; during the second jolt Coppola’s head and leg reportedly caught fire. The death chamber filled with smoke and the stench of burning flesh.
Frank J. Coppola’s final meal was an egg and cheese sandwich.
Symbolism and Interpretation
Coppola reportedly maintained his composure and was unwavering in his resolution that he wanted to die, even up until his final moments. Just days before his execution he spoke to a reporter over the phone, saying: “I had it with the courts dangling my life in front of me, holding the death penalty over me. I felt I owned it to myself total control of my own destiny… They’ve said to me, ‘We’re gonna take your life.’ I say back to them, ‘Come on, do it.’ It’s my decision… What the hell, we all have to die. At least I can say when.”
In this composition Coppola’s egg and cheese sandwich is presented intact and and in a more-or-less edible state. This is a slight departure for me — often I lean towards abstraction and prefer to base my arrangements around items that are less like finished meals than they are like collections of ingredients. Here there was something about Coppola’s disposition that seemed suggested a less abstract approach. Coppola’s sandwich is arranged flaccidly, somewhat in disarray, in a kind of parody of the artificially flawless photographic presentation of food items that we are all accustomed to from advertising. The yolk, still runny, drips slowly onto the tablecloth, perhaps suggesting blood. As always in still life, the dead flower represents death; this is placed in memory of the victim, Muriel Hatchell, about whom very little seems to have been written. In still life tipped cups are usually understood as a reminder of the fragility of life. Here I have placed the tipped wine goblet in such a way as to guide the viewer’s eye from the dead flower downwards, towards the broken egg shells, suggesting the brutal violence that ended Hatchell’s life.