A few grand to burn? Buy Capote’s ashes
Famous author’s remains to go to auction in September.
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.
A s t h e L o s A n ge l e s T i me s desc ribed it in 2006, Capote had slowly turned a section of her home into his pied-a-terre after he became an ex-Manhattan outcast — the first installment 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 would keep intact the writing room, the room in which he died, as a sort of shrine — mementos included his 6-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 nongrave-robbed human remains, unless the deceased in question is Native American.)
From the news release issued by Julien’s Auctions: “The ashes of Truman Capote are housed in a memorial Japanese carved wooden box. The ashes were ke p t by Jo a n n e C a r s o n who
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