STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS: Johnny Carson
(Above: The Tonight Show’s Johnny Carson and second wife, Joanne Copeland Carson, who died in 2015 at the age of 83. Johnny died in 2005 at the age of 79. This photo could have been an example for all the Rubrics today - this one, as well as SOME JOY and BEFORE GOOGLE. But there are connective ones below)
Joanne was herself the co-host of an early 1960s game show, Video Village, and later had her own syndicated health-and-fitness talk show, Joanne Carson’s V.I.P.’s. She went on to earn a master’s degree in psychology and a Ph.D. in nutritional biochemistry and physiology.
The recent airing of the latest iteration of the FX series Feud, subtitled Capote Vs. The Swans, revived interest in Joanne who offered Truman Capote some solace and a southern California poolside escape hatch after he was ostracized by his New York sorority of society grand dames, a bank of the old birds blasé with too much Blass and the salty aftertaste that a tad too much beluga and another pool boy named Tad could leave in their wine-stained mouths. They refused to forgive Truman for not only his utilization of them in his slightly fictionalized versions for his short story “La Côte Basque” in Esquire, but also, in doing so, for making them jesters in his literary court instead of his being satisfied to remain theirs in a court of pruned gardens and preening luncheons, a jester who could filter their tendency for malicious gossip about others through his southern sissy survival instinct that had been sharpened into the wit they themselves couldn’t attain but in their acquisitive wantonness hungered to own.
Tru died at Joanne’s home in 1984. He was cremated and she kept some of his ashes in a wooden box. During a 1988 Halloween party at Carson’s home, someone, she claimed, made off with the ashes, plus around $200,000 worth of her jewelry and some more of Capote’s personal effects he had left to her. Carson later claimed in 1994 that a car drove into her driveway in the middle of the night; the sound of it startled her awake before it abruptly sped off. She fearfully, groggily went outside to investigate such an odd occurrence and discovered that Capote’s remains had been returned and were nestled within the coil of a garden hose which she first mistook as a serpent of some sort. The box of ashes was sold at an estate auction after her own death. The hammer price was $43,750. An anonymous buyer purchased it. Its whereabouts - as well as the buyer, as far as I can tell - remain mysteries. Carson had the rest of Capote’s cremated remains interred in Westwood Memorial Cemetery. She is buried next to them.
(Above: A manuscript by Joanne Carson edited by Truman Capote. It was sold at auction in 2006 at Bonhams. Its estimated value was $10,000 - $15,000. I can’t find the hammer price.)
Another of Carson’s possessions that was auctioned after her death was a manuscript she wrote which Capote then edited for her. It was Lot 1070 in the 2006 auction at Bonhams which was billed as “The Private World of Truman Capote.” This is the description of it from the Bonhams website:
A 38-page typed essay by Joanne Carson, narrating the story of her early relationship with Johnny Carson, heavily annotated on every page in blue and black pen by Capote. During the course of their friendship, Capote encouraged Carson to write about her marriage to talk show host Johnny Carson. Sometime during the 1970s, she produced this chapter-long essay and gave it to Capote to review. He read and carefully revised her work, streamlining her prose, punching up her descriptions, and occasionally providing new text altogether, turning a generally well-written piece into a dynamic memoir. Carson writes of her move to New York from San Francisco in the late 1950s to pursue a modeling career, her determination to be signed by an agency (after a curt dismissal by Eileen Ford), and her introduction to Johnny Carson.
Examples of Capote’s editorial flourishes include changing "Being shy by nature, I’m not the one to start a conversation" to "I’m shy; I can never start a conversation." Capote also revises the following: "I grabbed him around his neck and tried to communicate to him through my hug what my voice had failed to do, but I couldn’t hold back my tears of joy for this wonderful man" to "I threw my arms around him and tried to express with hugs what my voice could not convey: the gratitude I felt for this man, his pragmatic sweetness and generosity...." Capote also provides an entirely new conclusion for the essay: "If only I could have held that moment, crystallized it, preserved forever that shining feeling, the rush, the rapture that only love, first love, provides. Thank God it happened. Because I was never again to experience that feeling, that intense satisfaction; never, not quite."
(Above: Lot 1015 in the Bonhams “The Private World of Truman Capote” auction. A first edition of In Cold Blood that he inscribed to Joanne. It sold for the hammer price of $2,688.00.)