Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
CHICAGO, Oct 5, 2006 (UPI via COMTEX) -- The executor of comedian Del Close's will has come clean, admitting that the human skull sitting in Chicago's Goodman Theatre is not the improv legends'.
Close willed his skull to the theater before he died in 1999 and Charna Halpern maintained for seven years that the skull she donated was in fact his, the Chicago Tribune reported Thursday.
She even stuck to her story during the newspaper's investigation in July as to whether or not the skull actually belonged to Close, a director of the "Second City" and other improvisation theaters.
However, in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker, Halpern comes clean, saying that she tried her best to carry out Close's wishes but ended up having to buy a skull from the Anatomical Chart Company in Skokie.
Halpern said in an interview that she chose to go public "because the Tribune had already exposed it and I was getting snide responses."
"But I loved (Del) and I really tried to get it done," she said. "As far as I'm concerned, the skull still invokes the image of Del and I hope everyone still sees it as Del. In the end, Del is still getting publicity, so he gets the last laugh."
URL: www.upi.com Copyright 2006 by United Press International
