Capote’s ashes take unlikely route to auction
On Aug. 25, 1984, just shy of his 60th birthday, Truman Capote died in California.
The In Cold Blood author’s death, of liver disease exacerbated by drug abuse, occurred in one of the two rooms he kept in the Bel Air house belonging to TV host Joanne Carson, ex-wife of Johnny Carson.
As the Los Angeles Times described it in 2006, Capote had slowly turned a section of her home into his piedà-terre after he became an ex-Manhattan outcast — the first instalment of his unfinished book Answered Prayers, published in Esquire in 1975, was a jet-set exposé too thinly disguised as fiction to keep Capote’s New York friendships intact.
His relationship with Carson weathered the East Coast storm. “He had a writing room in my house — he spent a lot of time here because it was a safe place and nobody could get to him,” Carson told Vanity Fair in 2012.
Capote made such an impression on Carson’s life that she kept intact the writing room, the room in which he died, as a sort of shrine — mementos included his six-foot teddy bear and his computer — until she began auctioning off his belongings in 2006.
What Carson kept, until her death in 2015, was half of his body. In ashes, at least.
And now, if you are so inclined, the writer’s remains that once belonged to Carson can be yours for a few grand, when Capote’s ashes go to auction in September. (Broadly speaking, under U.S. federal law you can purchase non-grave-robbed human remains, unless the deceased in question is Native American.)
From the news release issued last week by Julien’s Auctions: “The ashes of Truman Capote are housed in a memorial Japanese carved wooden box. The ashes were kept by Joanne Carson, who was one of Capote’s closest friends. She often said the ashes brought her great comfort.” The wooden box bears the date of Capote’s cremation, Aug. 28, 1984.
The seller estimates that when the box goes to auction in late September, the remains will fetch between $4,000 and $6,000.
It is safe to say Carson cherished his remains. Visitors to her house coveted them, too. At a Halloween party Carson held in 1988, someone burgled Capote’s urn, along with hundreds of thousand of dollars of her jewelry.
Less than a week later, according to People, someone mysteriously returned the remains, tucking them amid a loop of garden hose in Carson’s yard and speeding away to thwart identification. Carson then interred the urn in a vault in Los Angeles