COUNTERFEITERATURE - PART 1Literary Forger Lee Israel Is Sorry but Not THAT Sorry
INTERVIEW BY ROCCO CASTORO FAKE LETTERS BY LEE ISRAEL
| Lee was nice enough to send us some copies (the originals are long gone) of unpublished letters from her halcyon days of chicanery. Some of her earliest stabs at forgery were closely based on real Louise Brooks letters. Brooks was fond of saying stuff like “I wouldn’t fart in his direction” and “My cat has spit up hairballs more attractive than him,” so embellishment wasn’t really necessary. Her tactics here mostly relied on massaging and rearranging. |
In the 70s, everything was tip-top for biographer and editor Lee Israel. Two best-selling books had allowed her the publisher-courted and martini-lunched bon vivant life of a successful writer. Then Israel’s third book, an unauthorized bio of Estée Lauder, tanked. Her situation went from no worries, to unreturned phone calls, to being fired from graveyard-shift jobs, to welfare, to being so kooked out that it took an exterminator’s refusal to enter her Upper West Side apartment for her to realize that the swarms of flies in her apartment were being attracted by a treasure trove of cat feces under her bed. Lee Israel had gone off the rails.
Lee had been scraping by on a combination of one-off articles for magazines like Soap Opera Digest and selling her personal library to the pissants at the Strand bookstore. Then the inconceivable happened. Jersey, her 21-year-old cat, died. She soon found another cat in the street, but it refused to eat and desperately needed an appointment with the vet. Around the same time Lee was doing some research at a library when she happened upon a few letters by Golden-Age actress and singer Fanny Brice. She did what any hard-up pet owner would do: slipped three letters into her shoe, walked out the door, and sold them. It was easy money but she quickly realized the scheme was too risky to be a real solution to her financial woes. Then she came up with a better idea: forgery!
Over the next two years, most of Israel’s income came from fabricating missives from Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, Edna Ferber, and Lillian Hellman. Israel spent countless hours carefully studying her subjects’ styles, rhythms, tics, and signatures. From there it was just a matter of Xeroxing the letterheads, scouring biographies, obtaining the proper vintage typewriters, and keying out convincing imitations. It was something akin to literary bodysnatching.
Memorabilia dealers paid about $75 a pop for her fakes, which they would then sell at outrageous markups. Eventually the dealers grew suspicious of the seemingly limitless supply and one day a couple of feds dropped in on her at a restaurant where she was waiting for her accomplice to return from a transaction. The jig was up. She was found guilty and sentenced to five years’ probation with six months of house arrest.
Shortly after her half a year of time-out, Israel landed a gig as a copy editor at Scholastic and shared her story with anyone who asked. An old editor friend caught wind of the tale and pushed her to put it on paper. Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger was released earlier this year and it’s a nice little unconventional crime caper that you can get through in less than a day. We’re real big fans of deception and cunning ruses, so we had to ask Lee about the ins and outs of becoming a professional bullshitter.
CONTINUED
COUNTERFEITERATURE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | >
 Anonymous, on Dec 20, 2008 wrote:
fast, somebody call woody allen | |
| cynthia, on Dec 19, 2008 wrote:
i remember seeing an article about this lady. it’s awesome that you got these copies. nice article. | | Anonymous, on Dec 19, 2008 wrote:
great idea for the fiction issue, guys | | Anonymous, on Dec 18, 2008 wrote:
are the fakes worth anything now that israel is famous for forging them? | | Anonymous, on Dec 18, 2008 wrote:
this all worked out for her in the end. prison isn’t fun. but she did go from writing for soap opera digest to scholastic. | | Anonymous, on Dec 17, 2008 wrote:
how many of these did she write? she had to know that it was only a matter of time before she got popped. each new letter would increase the dealers’ suspicions, if they cared to begin with. | | Anonymous, on Dec 17, 2008 wrote:
she got the letterheads at the library, right? what about the one-offs she did? did those authors not use a definitive letterhead? | | Anonymous, on Dec 17, 2008 wrote:
i think everyone should go back to old typewriters. their flaws are what make them so great. look at those uneven lines and typed-over fuck ups. e-mail has taken all that from us. oh well, i guess we have lolcats. | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
so did her biography of estee lauder flop because of the shitty subject or because it was poorly/boringly written? | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
did the memorabilia dealers have to testify against ms. israel? if so, did any of them admit to knowing that they were peddling ripoffs? | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
another notch in the cat-people-are-crazy belt. you guys know how bad cat shit smells, right? anyone that could let it pile up under their bed is bonkers. no other way about it. | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
where was she editor? i bet they didn’t take too kindly to their head honcho being busted for forgery. | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
i’m surprised scholastic would hire israel after her release. i would have thought forgery would incur the literary death penalty. won’t everything she ever writes be scrutinized considerably? i guess sometimes bad publicity is the best publicity. | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
you’re both wrong. the forgeries were written in the early 90s. | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
These weren’t made a couple years ago, they were made back in the late 70s. | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
it’s a pretty shitty way to make a living but she did a hell of a job doing it. whether or not the dealers knew the letters were fake or not, she knew how to pull it off. | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
not to mention that everyone and their mother knew coward was into guys back then | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
You idiot, Noel Coward died in the fucking 60s. These forgeries were all made in the last few years. What, you think she was making up letters by a living fag in the middle of the 40s and never got caught? The only person’s ass on the line was her own. | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
"I don’t like the fact that people call me a forger, a thief, a crook, or whatever."
Well, tough. You kind of had it coming... | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
i would LOVE to see her tennesssee williams letters | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
whoa whoa whoa!!! this lady forges a guy’s letters, outs-him in a round about way, then jokes about it at a time when he could have been jailed for being homosexual!? what a fucking bitch! i know she probably thought it was all in good fun (and money) but when you put someone’s ass on the line, that’s not right. | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
how the hell did she get away with this for two years? these dealers had to know this was a complete farce. they must have just not cared as long as people were buying them. | | Anonymous, on Dec 16, 2008 wrote:
i didn’t think you could profit from a crime? does she receive the proceeds? | | |
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