Rest in Pieces
The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses
by Bess Lovejoy
Simon & Schuster
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez died this week, and was laid to a peculiar sort of rest.
Instead of being buried or cremated, Chavez’s embalmed corpse will become a permanent exhibit, eternally on display at the country’s Museum of the Revolution.
That the rich and famous are not like us is often as true in death as it is in life. Bess Lovejoy’s new book shares the surprising ways that more than 50 famous people throughout history had their corpses displayed, stolen or mangled.
Here are a few of the famous historical figures who were prevented from resting in peace — and often, instead, wound up resting in pieces.
Einstein, who died in 1955, wanted to be cremated so that his body could not be worshipped in some ill-advised personality cult. But one key part of his body never made it into the fire — his brain.
The genius’ pathologist, Dr. Thomas Harvey, kept the brain hoping to study it, but instead allowed it to “languish in obscurity for decades.” Sliced into “more than a thousand pieces” and “preserved in formaldehyde . . . the brain followed Harvey from job to job in New Jersey, Kansas, Missouri, and back to New Jersey, housed in a glass jar inside cardboard boxes, beneath beer coolers and in closets underneath socks.”
Harvey hoped that brain science would evolve enough to allow scientists to glean valuable information from Einstein’s brain, and he got his wish. By the 1980s, scientists were able to determine that an area of the famed physicist’s brain “heavily involved in language, math, and processing visual stimuli and complex reasoning” had 73% more glial cells — which “protect and nourish the brain’s neurons” — than the average person. This was the first of numerous studies conducted on Einstein’s brain, and the organ eventually wound up in the possession of Princeton Hospital, Harvey’s old employer.
The grave of the poet, who passed away in 1674, went unmarked for over a century, and his body was exhumed in 1790 so he could be buried in a proper monument.
But the day after the exhumation, the church warden and some friends, after a night of heavy drinking, gathered to view his coffin and, for reasons unknown, vandalized the renowned poet’s corpse.
The men “began picking apart the bones, knocking the skull’s teeth out with a stone, and pulling out clumps of the corpse’s long hair. When it didn’t come out easily enough, two of the men went home to get scissors.”
They finally grew bored, but desire to desecrate or possess souvenirs from Milton’s corpse was now in the air, with one church repairman allowing people to view the body in exchange for “a pot of beer.” Soon, “Milton’s relics” became in-demand items throughout London, with one report claiming that “several thousands of Milton’s teeth had been purchased in the days after the desecration.”
In death, the skull of the notorious Indian chief, who died in 1909, came to be regarded as a sacred prize by a group who reveled in that sort of thing — the Order of the Skull and Bones at Yale University. Legend has it that the secret society keeps Geronimo’s skull “preserved in a glass case near the front door of [its] tomb, where all new initiates must kiss it.”
As legend has it, the skull was purloined during World War I by soldiers stationed not far from his grave in Fort Sill, Okla. One of the six thieves was purportedly Prescott Bush, father and grandfather to our future Bush presidents. A private history of the society written in the 1930s claims that the men “used an ax to pry open the iron door of Geronimo’s tomb,” then “dug out the warrior’s head, which had ‘only some flesh inside and a little hair,’” and later cleaned it with acid before putting it on display.
The Apache Nation has battled Skull and Bones in court for the skull’s return, while the society has claimed that the tales of it possessing the skull are false. While representatives from both sides have met several times on the issue, the creepiest revelation came from a meeting between the chairman of the Apache Nation and several decedents of the supposedly thieving Bonesman, including Prescott Bush’s son Jonathan. According to the Apache chairman, Bush and his compatriot claimed that the skull that sits aside their entrance belongs not to Geronimo, but instead to “an anonymous child.”
Hell hath no fury like a populace abused. When fascist Italian strongman Mussolini was killed in 1945, Italians celebrated by doing to him in death what they wish they could have in life.
The day after Mussolini’s death, the resistance fighters who killed him dumped his corpse, and those of several of his compatriots, at a spot in Milan called Piazzale Loreto, where Mussolini’s regime had once dumped murdered political prisoners.
As day broke, a gathering crowd made the formerly feared Il Duce their own personal pinata.
They began by “dragging the corpses into a pile and then kicking them, beating them, spitting on them.”
Then things got really nasty.
“Gradually Mussolini’s head, once practically a piece of sculpture, begin to look more like a smashed pumpkin. One woman fired a gun toward the ex-dictator’s body, yelling, ‘Five shots for my five assassinated sons!’ ”
Mussolini’s corpse and three others were then hung by their feet, again echoing one of the dictator’s own tactics.
He and his fellow fascists were finally buried at an unmarked location, but his corpse was later stolen by sympathizers, and wound up in his hometown for reburial, arriving in a wooden box marked “church documents.” But instead of being buried, Mussolini’s corpse “spent 11 years in a monastery, first near the alter, then in a cupboard after people noticed the smell,” before finally winding up in a proper tomb.
The author of “Common Sense” provided the intellectual fuel for the American Revolution. But his remarkable contribution to our country was sadly forgotten with his later publication of “The Age of Reason,” an anti-religious tome that turned Paine from beloved to reviled. So when he died in 1809, Americans were not inclined to give him a hero’s farewell.
Buried on a Quaker farm, his “simple tombstone” was “pelted with stones” until little was left. Years later, a man named William Cobbett — an enemy of Paine’s during his life who later changed his views — dug him up, placed his bones in a trunk, and brought him to England, hoping to give him a proper funeral and “a magnificent mausoleum.”
But the English — at a time when grave robbing there was a serious problem — viewed Cobbett as a “bone grubber,” and he was denounced in newspapers nationwide and in the House of Lords. With no support for his endeavors, Cobbett “left the bones to rot in a corner of his house while he turned to other pursuits, like tax reform and gardening.”
The trunk containing Paine’s bones eventually wound up with his former secretary, a tailor who used it as a stool in his shop. After bouncing between several others, Paine was supposedly finally buried in the late 1800s, but not intact. Along the way, his skull and right hand had been tossed in the trash, and his brain reportedly made it back to America, where it was given its own burial on Paine’s old New Rochelle farm.
While infamous for her way with a pointed jab, writer Dorothy Parker had alienated many of her surviving friends by the time of her 1967 death, leaving few to be concerned with the fate of her remains.
Author Lillian Hellman was the executor of her estate, and while she arranged for Parker’s cremation, she abandoned the ashes — and left the crematorium bill unpaid — for six years. Hellman finally, mysteriously, left word for the ashes to be mailed to her lawyer, who kept them “in a box in the filing cabinet of his Wall Street office for 15 years.”
In 1987, Parker’s biographer, Marion Meade, learned of this sad state of affairs, and prompted Hellman’s lawyer to seek a better solution. Several ideas were discussed at a meeting at Parker’s infamous old haunt the Algonquin Hotel, including “using her ashes as part of a mural on the wall,” or “putting them on display in one of the hotel’s bars.” But when the hotel rejected this, an unlikely savior came forward.
Parker, a civil rights advocate, had left her entire estate to Martin Luther King Jr., whom she had not known personally. Parker was finally given a proper farewell in 1988 by the NAACP, who had her “laid to rest in a pine grove at the NAACP’s Baltimore headquarters.”