I’VE never forgotten the day Lee Israel, biographer and literary forger, showed up at my office with a haunted look in her eyes and begged me for the $150 we owed her.
It was 1992 and I was co-editor of TheaterWeek magazine, a tiny publication that was always on the verge of bankruptcy. We owed a lot of writers money back then – Arthur Miller, John Simon, Eric Bentley and Lee, who contributed several terrific articles about the history of Broadway.
Lee stood in our dumpy offices on West 25th Street and pleaded for the money. I said I’d see what I could do, though I doubted our publisher, who was forever ducking angry writers, would cut her a check on the spot.
“Michael, I need it right now because I have to leave the country,” she said. “I’m going to Mexico.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I’m going to be arrested.”
Slight pause. “For what?”
“I’ve been stealing letters by Eugene O’Neill from the Yale library and replacing them with fakes.”
That was a new one, but it worked. I got her the $150 and hustled her out the door.
I didn’t see Lee again until last week, when we met for drinks at Julius, one of her favorite dives in the West Village.
“I don’t remember wanting to go to Mexico,” she said, sipping a scotch, “but I had all sorts of wild ideas at the time. I think my plan was to hide in my parents’ closet in Florida. But I remember you didn’t approve of what I did, Michael.”
Can you blame me?
Between 1990 and 1992, as she recounts in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” – her newly released and gripping memoir – Lee forged some 400 letters by such literary celebrities as Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman and Edna Ferber. Dealers paid her about $100 per letter, which they in turn sold for as much as several thousand dollars.
When some of her letters were revealed as fakes, she switched tactics. Pretending to be working on a book about famous alcoholic writers, she gained access to rare book and manuscript libraries. There she stole genuine letters by William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Kurt Weill and O’Neill. At night, pecking away on vintage typewriters, she’d make forgeries. Then she’d return to the library, substituting the fakes for the real ones.
An eccentric friend of hers (now dead) sold the authentic letters to dealers who, she writes, “thought provenance was the capital of Rhode Island.”
It was an ingenious plan, and it worked – until the afternoon a man tapped her on the shoulder, showed her his FBI badge and asked if they could have a chat.
What tripped her up were some fake Noel Coward letters that revealed too much about his homosexuality. An astute dealer realized that, at the time the letters were supposed to have been written, Coward would never have spoken so openly.
In her memoir, Lee, who was sentenced to six months’ house arrest and five years’ probation, expresses little remorse. There’s a three-page mea culpa, but you’d be hard-pressed to call it “heartfelt.”
“They asked for the mea culpa,” she says of her publisher, Simon & Schuster. ” ‘Oh, Lee, you have to have a mea culpa.’ Well, I do. It’s short and quick and at the end.”
She isn’t wracked with guilt, she says, because she desperately needed the money. Her career as a highly regarded biographer was on the skids at the time because of the failure of her book about Estée Lauder.
“You always said I was too good a writer to be so poor,” she reminded me.
Many of the dealers she fleeced were a shadowy lot, she says, and she suspects they were on to her. They had clients who were easy to fool and were happy to get her letters so cheap, no questions asked.
“There was a guy in New Hampshire who used to call me up and say, ‘Lee, I need a Bill Holden,’ ” she says.
And the people who bought her fakes “probably could afford them,” she says.
Besides, her criminal career got her “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” – which has been optioned by the movie company that produced “The Savages.”
Bob Balaban wants to write it and direct.
A man at the next table who’d been listening to us leaned over and said: “Lee, I have to ask you: Don’t you regret that you didn’t put all your energy and creativity into something legitimate instead of something illegal?”
“No,” she said, laughing. “Because it’s paying off big-time!”