Truman Capote's Sagaponack Treasures Head to Auction in November

Cornell Auction will sell nearly 400 lots of Truman Capote's personal belongings on November 21, with online preview and bidding opening October 26. The Bellport, New York, auction house says most of the items appeared almost exactly 50 years ago, in a 1976 Architectural Digest spread on Capote's house in Sagaponack, Long Island.

The objects come from Gerald Clarke, the journalist and Capote biographer who inherited many of the writer's effects. Capote died in 1984 at 59; Clarke, now 89 and downsizing, published his biography of the author in 1988.

What's actually up for sale?

The full catalogue isn't out yet, but images shared with The New York Times confirm that part of Capote's famous paperweight collection is included. The scribe "became addicted to paperweights and collected so many of them," Clarke told the Times. Some pieces — flowers preserved in resin — were crafted by Capote himself. One paperweight incorporates rocks from the Kansas farm made famous by In Cold Blood.

Other confirmed lots:

• A signed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Capote's longtime friend
• A bronze frog inkwell
• Capote's house keys

The auction house revealed the connection to the 1976 shoot in an Instagram video, noting the items "were photographed almost exactly 50 years ago in 1976 in an Architectural Digest spread about Truman's house here in Sagaponack."

The house that produced the photographs

The January/February 1976 Architectural Digest story, by Rosemary Kent, found Capote's two-story, weathered-gray beach house hidden behind scrub pine, privet hedges and hydrangea bushes near Sagaponack. He'd owned the six acres since 1962 and had the box-shaped, flat-roofed house built by a local carpenter "to my directions. It's exactly the way I wanted it. I work at this untended look. It's intentional. … This is a place to be alone."

He called Sagaponack "Kansas with a sea breeze," and the piece frames it as a rural Montparnasse: James Jones, Willem de Kooning, Jean Stafford and Joseph Heller all lived nearby. But Capote used the house as a retreat, not a party spot. "In the past 14 years, since I've had this house, I've gone out six times for dinner," he said. "Now that's quite a record for someone known for being so social, isn't it? Besides, whom would I entertain? I only know about four people I'd really have over!"

He described the house as a "raincoat" — the exterior walls were left open to show vertical studs and horizontal bracings, so the skin protects the interior the way a raincoat does. "I call it 'run-down comfort,'" he said. "I like the effect of texture in rooms — the rawness of the wood plus the mirrors that line one end."

The collection, seen up close

The AD piece is essentially an inventory of what may soon cross the block. A floor-to-ceiling window overlooked the sea 200 yards away. A spiraling steel staircase led to a second-floor study with red sofas, wicker chairs and a René Bouché sketch of Capote. A Tiffany lamp sat beside a worn yellow velvet easy chair. Needlepoint pillows by friends and silver-framed photographs of Lee Radziwill were scattered around, along with those clusters of shiny paperweights.

Capote collected openly and abundantly. "I like to collect things, Victorian things, and mix everything together," he told Kent. "I enjoy looking for and at all of them. I'm not sure I need them. I've got too much, and I haven't edited myself lately!"

He designed his own interiors — "it's a bore to use a decorator" — and kept a strict Sagaponack routine: work from 7:00 to 11:00 a.m., again until lunch, then the post office, a walk, dinner by 7:00 and bed by 9:30 with a book. At the time he was writing Answered Prayers and had just filmed his first screen role, the lead in Neil Simon's Murder by Death, alongside Peter Sellers, Orson Welles and Peter Falk.

What does this change for collectors?

Anyone wanting a piece of the writer now has a direct route: the October 26 online preview is the first chance to match lots against the 1976 photographs. Bidders should watch the paperweights especially — the resin flowers Capote made himself and the Kansas-farm rocks tie the objects directly to his most famous book.