Author forged a career in letters
Meet the real faker behind memorabilia-crime flick
S HE was somebody, once. Lee Israel had been a successful journalist, author of biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen. The latter, titled “Kilgallen,” even made The New York Times’ best-seller list in 1979.
Then it fell apart. Bad luck and shoddy handling of her finances had drained her savings and left her with few prospects. A Bette Davis biography failed to pan out when she clashed with the star. When asked what happened, she would reply, “I yelled back!” After agreeing to write an unauthorized biography on Estée Lauder, she received an offer via the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn to drop the book for $60,000, a sum she could have easily negotiated higher. She refused and wrote the book anyway. No one bought it.
She took odd jobs, from personal assistant to legal proofreader, but got fired from all of them.
Trying to sell books at the Strand, Israel became incensed when a surly book buyer refused her offerings. She slammed the books to the floor and was banned for life.
She got her revenge by calling one of the employees who had her banned, claiming to be his neighbor, and telling him his house was on fire. She also began prank-calling former friends and others in the industry pretending to be various celebrities, earning herself a legal letter from Nora Ephron’s lawyer and a visit from two detectives.
Now it was 1990, and the 51-year-old Israel was struggling with her rent, her gin habit and her love of a stray cat with big veterinarian bills.
Israel visited the research library at Lincoln Center to report an article for Soap Opera Digest on Fanny Brice. She found some letters from the vaudeville star and was reminded of a letter she once received from Katharine Hepburn, whom she had interviewed for Esquire, about Spencer Tracy’s death. The letter was soaked with Hepburn’s tears, and Israel later sold it for $250.
When no one was looking, Israel sneaked the Brice letters into her shoe. They sold for $40 each.
The purchaser told her that, in the future, she would “pay more for better content.”
Lee Israel had a new career.
BETWEEN April 1990 and the following summer, Israel faked roughly 400 letters from celebrities, filling them with salacious details and selling them to (mostly) unwitting dealers before the law caught up with her.
Israel died in 2014 at age 75. On Friday, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” the film version of her 2008 memoir of the same name, will be released starring Melissa McCarthy as Israel. The memoir was rereleased last month by Simon & Schuster.
For her first fakes, Israel bought a used typewriter — one that would have an “old” quality — and returned to the library for more Brice letters. This time, instead of selling the letters themselves, she brought them home, retyped them, and juiced them up, adding comments about Brice’s very public relationship with gambler/con man Nicky Arnstein. The next letter sold for $595.
Israel expanded her range of celebrities, eventually writing letters “from” the likes of Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. She sought out old, weathered blank paper to serve as her canvases, traced celebrity signatures until she could duplicate them exactly, and mimicked her subjects’ writing styles.
She made the letters livelier than the originals when she could, but ensured they remained believable.
Dorothy Parker, in Israel’s hands, wrote to a friend, “I have a hangover out of Gounod’s ‘Faust.’ ” Novelist and playwright Edna Ferber mentioned that the noise of the construction workers outside her apartment will “make a Tory out of me yet.” Sharp-tongued actress Louise Brooks wrote, from Israel’s pen, about how she thought Joe Kennedy was a “Tyranny Adict [sic]” and a “terrible old fart,” and that Humphrey Bogart was a “woman-beater and bully.”
Israel sold her creations to a network of around 30 dealers nationwide, sometimes collecting significant fees. Six Noel Cowards sold for $1,200, allowing her some much-needed root-canal work.
But Israel made mistakes. In some of the more than 150 letters she wrote from Coward, she made explicit reference to his homosexuality. But in Coward’s lifetime, being gay was a criminal offense. When people who had known the actor/ playwright saw the letters, they immediately pegged them as fakes, noting he would never have been that open about that area of his life in writing. The memorabilia-dealer community was small, and word spread.
Israel soon heard tales of a dealer at memorabilia shows going around to every booth that carried her letters and screaming, “Fake!” Famed radio announcer Paul Harvey began cryptically speaking of a “shakeup in the autograph field” on his show, and The Post’s Cindy Adams ran a warning in her column for Dick Cavett, a collector, that fake celebrity letters were beginning to surface.
Soon, a regular customer contacted her to say he had been called to testify before a grand jury about her, and offering not to for $5,000. She agreed, paying in increments over time.
SHE was persona non grata in the memorabilia field. And once again, she needed money. A plan came into view when she was contacted from prison by an old friend.
Jack Hock had a history of suffering beatings from “hustlers for whose services he had refused to pay.” He was in prison for robbing a cabdriver at knifepoint and wrote to Israel that he would soon be released on probation because he had contracted AIDS.
Israel had once granted Hock an option on a book she had written to allow him to try to sell it to Hollywood, but she ended the friendship when she learned he had kept trying to sell it beyond the expiration of his option, forging her name to keep on. Despite his ironic betrayal, Israel now had use for him and agreed to meet for a drink.
In need of $5,000, she planned to steal more letters from libraries, duplicate them, then replace the originals with her copies. Then, she wanted Hock to sell the originals, since she could no longer show her face in the dealer community. For this, Hock would get 50 percent plus expenses.
This arrangement worked well for the first half of 1992, despite Israel’s discovery that Hock was skimming off the top. “Grifters’ habits die hard,” she would write in her memoir.
But the real beginning of the end came during the summer, when Hock told her that a dealer in Philadelphia canceled an appointment because his sister was in town and that the dealer had made no effort to reschedule.
Israel knew the field well enough to know that no dealer would pass up potentially valuable letters for a family visit. She immediately began wondering what prison might be like.
On July 27, 1992, she waited outside a deli for Hock, who was supposedly in the midst of a deal, when she was stopped by an FBI agent who told her they knew everything. One of her regular customers had been cooperating.
Israel was sentenced to six months’ house arrest and five years’ probation, and Hock received three years’ probation. Hock, played by Richard E. Grant in the new movie, died in October 1994 at age 47.
While barred from the libraries she once held dear, Israel became a copy editor at Scholastic, which offered veterinary benefits, providing all the kitty health care her pets required.
Israel estimated she wrote 100,000 words during her forgery career, and came to consider them her greatest accomplishment.
“The forged letters were larky and fun and totally cool,” Israel wrote in her memoir. “I still consider the letters to be my best work. Reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman’s summing up in ‘Tootsie,’ I was a better writer as a forger than I had ever been as a writer.”