How Did Truman Capote Die? A Fellow Writer Said His Death Was ‘A Wise Career Move’

How did Truman Capote die?

How did Truman Capote die? Capote died in his sleep on August 25, 1984, at age 59. The death certificate declared his cause as “liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication”. According to the New York Times, “He essentially died from natural causes,” a coroner’s spokesman, Bill Gold said at the time.

Apparently, the novelist’s health had been deteriorating because of the liver disease and was worsened by the infection in his legs. He also had emphysema, a lung disease caused by smoking. “Toxicological findings in the case showed that Mr. Capote had consumed only prescribed medications for sleep, anxiety, leg pains and epileptic seizures,” Gold said.

“No alcohol was detected. The drug levels, although contributory, were not lethal and indicated regular usage in accordance with his past medical history. Had he not had the health problems, the medications would not have been a contributory problem.” Capote passed in the Bel Air home of Joanne Carson, who was a close friend and the ex-wife of the legendary Tonight Show host, Johnny Carson. He’d been a guest there five days prior to his death. Gore Vidal, a long-serving literary rival, declared Capote’s death “a wise career move.”

Where is Truman Capote buried?

Truman Capote was cremated and his remains were reportedly divided between Carson and his partner, novelist Jack Dunphy. Carson reportedly kept the urn of Capote’s ashes in the room where he died.

During a Halloween party in 1988, Capote’s ashes along with $200,000 in jewels were reportedly stolen but returned six days later, having been found in a coiled-up garden hose on the back steps of Carson’s Bel Air home.

There is a memorial to Truman Capote at the Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles. Two years after Dunphy died in 1992, both his and Capote’s ashes were reportedly scattered at Crooked Pond, between Bridgehampton, New York, and Sag Harbor, New York, where the couple had maintained a home for many years.

What happened to Truman Capote's unfinished novel, Answered Prayers?

In the summer of 1958, Capote was in Greece when he promised he was working on “a large novel, my magnum opus,” he wrote in a letter to Random House, his publisher. “The novel is called, Answered Prayers; and, if all goes well, I think it will answer mine.”

Capote had received a generous advance for the book—$1 million—and had failed to meet three deadlines. Random House re-negotiated to a three-book deal for an advance of $750,000 ($4.3 million by today’s standards) by September 1973. While Capote continued to talk up the novel to those in his inner circle, he never delivered a manuscript.

He told his biographer Gerald Clarke that “my principal work… almost everything in it is true. I have a cast of thousands.” The book was “going to do to America what Proust did to France,” he told Marella Agnelli, one of his Swans.

The title Answered Prayers, he long claimed, came from an epigraph uttered by St. Teresa of Avila. “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones,” which is fitting for the writer’s premature demise.

When Esquire published the first 11,000 or so words of Answered Prayers, Capote’s social currency took a swan dive (pardon the pun). He was ostracized and his life began to spiral. An incomplete version of Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, was published in 1986 but of course, fans are hungry for the mysterious missing chapters.

What’s more, on the morning of his death, Capote had given Carson a key to an undisclosed safe deposit box, saying, the chapters “will be found when they want to be found”. They haven’t made themselves known yet.

Answered Prayers by Truman Capote

For more about Truman Capote’s Swans, you can’t miss Answered Prayers , his unfinished book that was published posthumously; the preview of which was published by Esquire led to his exile from New York high society. It includes such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead, as well as cunning beauty and nasty husbands. “What did they expect?” Capote famously said after the controversy. “I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?”

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