A write wrong ’un!
We examine the shocking real-life crimes given the Hollywood treatment
New York City, 1939. And a writing star was born. Her name? Lee Israel.
After earning a degree at university in 1961, Lee became a successful freelance writer.
She contributed film, theatre and TV articles to The New York Times and Soap Opera Digest, amongst others. Made a name for herself.
Two successful biographies were to follow.
The first was of Hollywood movie star Tallulah Bankhead in 1972, then a bestseller about journalist Dorothy Kilgallen in 1979. Lee’s star was on the up. Until her third book, a 1985 biography on cosmetics mogul Estee Lauder, flopped
Lee’s career floundered, she struggled to pay the rent.
Her gin habit didn’t help. Plus her sick cat needed life-saving medication Lee couldn’t afford.
Then, in 1990, while researching an article about singer and actress Fanny Brice for Soap Opera Digest, she went to the New York Public Library.
There, in an unsecured area, she was handed letters written by Brice.
Opportunistic Lee quickly swiped them, slipping them into her shoe.
She sold some to a store dealing in rare books, for $40 (around £30) each.
It was enough to cover Lee’s bills.
But she quickly realised that dealers would pay extra if the letters were a bit juicier.
So she added a few sentences about Brice’s scandalous relationship to the bottom of one letter, elevating the price.
After that, Lee stopped stealing. Instead, she used her talents for something new.
Buying second-hand typewriters, she began forging new letters on vintage paper torn from old journals. Not just from Fanny Brice. Using her biographical knowledge and research skills, Lee took on the voice of some very famous literary figures…
Poet Dorothy Parker, playwright Noel Coward and screenwriter Lillian Hellman.
And what did they have in common? They were all dead. None of them were around to call out the fakes.
Between April 1990 and summer 1991, Lee faked around 400 letters from celebs, filled with salacious details.
She sold them to unwitting dealers for hundreds, often thousands of dollars.
Lee claimed a cousin had died and left her the letters, only later admitting this was a ‘cock-and-bull story’. Unfortunately for Lee, she made a few mistakes – and dealers smelt a rat.
In Coward’s letters, she wrote explicitly about his homosexuality. It was an area of his life he wasn’t open about, as in his lifetime, being gay was a crime. Word spread. Other dealers and experts began to realise there was a forger in the ranks.
One regular customer threatened to testify before a grand jury unless Lee paid him $5,000 (around £4,000). Lee agreed. From then on, her name was blacklisted in the memorabilia field.
But she still had bills to pay...
And an old friend, Jack Hock, was about to be released from prison for robbing a taxi driver at knife-point.
So Lee headed back to libraries across New York.
Raiding the shelves and archives, she stole original letters that literary figures had sent and received.
This time, she’d replace the originals with duplicates she’d forged.
She asked Hock to help her flog the originals to dealers, in exchange for half the profits
She made a few mistakes and dealers smelt a rat
– plus expenses.
On 27 July 1992, Lee waited outside a deli for Hock, supposedly in the midst of a deal.
Only, she was stopped by an FBI agent.
He told Lee he knew everything – one of her regular customers had been co-operating. Her time was up.
It later transpired New York autograph dealer David Lowenherz had discovered an original letter he’d purchased from Lee was stolen.
The letter, from Ernest Hemingway to Norman Cousins, was the property of Columbia University.
Determined to get to the bottom of it, Lowenherz visited the librarian at the university. And it was there that Lee’s criminal escapades began to unravel.
The librarian discovered Lee had visited to look through the letters.
Lowenherz alerted the FBI and the investigation began.
A year later, Lee appeared before a federal court.
She pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to transport stolen property in interstate commerce and was sentenced to six months house arrest and five years probation. But the worst part for Lee? She was banned from libraries across the country.
Jack Hock received three years probation for his part in the crime, and died in 1994, age 47.
In 2008, Lee published her own memoir, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and became infamous for her forgeries.
In one interview, she called her forged letters ‘larky and fun and totally cool’.
‘I still consider the letters to be my best work. I was a better writer as a forger than I had ever been as a writer,’ she said.
Lee Israel died in Manhattan on Christmas Eve 2014, aged 75.
Many of the letters she stole have since been returned to the archives.
Yet several of Lee’s forgeries made it into a collection called The Letters Of Noel Coward, published in 2007.
To this day, the FBI believe some of Lee’s outright forgeries remain in circulation.