Review by New York Times Review
IN the annals of literary forgery, William Henry Ireland had Shakespeare ("Vortigern and Rowena" - who knew?), Thomas Chatterton the nonexistent medieval poet Rowley, and Lee Israel, well, the silent-film star Louise Brooks. Pretty far down Parnassus, you say? Don't be a snob. Israel displayed an excellent ear and fine false turn of phrase during the 15 or so months in the early 1990s when she sold hundreds of phony celebrity letters - and a lot of filched real ones - to about 30 different dealers. Now, all these years later, she's written a slender, sordid and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures. Kept to the straight and narrow, Israel coulda been somebody. In fact, she was: a well-regarded biographer of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen who, around 1990, was about to enter what "a court officer would later describe ... as a 'rough patch.'" She was drinking and spending too much, and romancing too hard ("a brilliant, beautiful bartender named Elaine"). A third biography, of the cosmetics queen Estée Lauder, bombed with reviewers and book buyers. Israel soon found herself hitting 50 and on welfare, harassing professional acquaintances and exasperating friends. She tried to keep going by selling some of her home library to the Strand bookstore, whose clerks eventually threw her out. "I was not in the flower of mental health," she admits, with understatement worthy of the above-quoted court officer. Her West Side studio apartment began to accumulate cat feces and flies. Then the cat died and its replacement, Doris, needed a vet whose bills Israel couldn't pay. It was about then that criminal inspiration struck. In the course of researching an article for Soap Opera Digest at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, she stole three rather ordinary letters by Fanny Brice and was able to sell them for $40 each. Israel, who would come to believe that most dealers didn't know that "provenance was not the capital of Rhode Island," felt no guilt: the letters she'd stolen "were from the realm of the dead. Doris and I were alive." Having learned that the first dealer "would pay more for better content," Israel was soon advancing to her own full-tilt production of letters from other luminaries. She bought a gaggle of vintage manual typewriters, had famous letterheads printed up on antique paper and used an old television as a light box on which she could trace signatures. Even so, while writing as Noël Coward, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber and, most convincingly, Louise Brooks, Israel remained more an enhancer than an outright fabricator. She would use some of her subjects' best real lines (Brooks on the studio head Harry Cohn: "My cat has spit up hairballs more attractive than him") and take care with the chronology of their lives. The seams rarely showed. Indeed, the editor of "The Letters of Noël Coward," published only last year, included two Israel pastiches - "a big hoot and a terrific compliment," thought the erstwhile forger. (I reviewed the book and never batted an eye.) One of Lee Israel's forged letters, reproduced in "Can You Ever Fogive Me?" Still, a bit of implausibility where Coward was concerned - having him write more candidly about his homosexuality than he would have allowed himself to - raised suspicions in one of the playwright's friends who was also a collector. Israel fell into her first pot of hot water. Some outlets would no longer touch what she was selling; a grand jury began investigating; one New York dealer said he'd refuse to testify if she paid him $5,000. The danger blew over, but Israel, now living in a "constant state of anxiety," decided to move on to a surer-fire if less creative m.o. - having a middleman, a wacky ex-con pal, fence only actual letters she stole from archives. To throw off the archivists, she would leave behind well-crafted replicas that she had prepared after careful study and note-taking. Sometimes she would spirit the originals past reading-room attendants in her shoe. Even so, the F.B.I. eventually caught on to the new scheme, and she couldn't get rid of those manual typewriters fast enough, dumping them "one by one, in trash cans along a mile stretch of Amsterdam Avenue." Thanks to a hard-working lawyer from the Federal Defenders Program as well as a kind-hearted judge, she got away with five years' probation and six months' house arrest. This second phase of her forgery career - purely mechanical and almost as dreary as plagiarism - makes one long to hear more of the first, in which Israel could be seen using talents she once brought to legitimate biography. She acutely characterizes her various ventriloquial quarries: Edna Ferber is "a scold, a snob, a low-profile dominatrix whose corseted asperity was never far from busting out," and Brooks is "the left-hemispheric actress turned essayist and critic" who during the 1960s found "her legend among cinéastes swelling like popcorn." Any guilt that Israel does feel, vet bills notwithstanding, comes from considering the upand-up work she once managed to do in archives and libraries, and her realization that "messing with those citadels was unequivocally and big-time wrong." ISRAEL is the kind of Manhattan eccentric who might once have caught the attention of Joe Mitchell. Fortunately, she's a vivid enough writer to capture, memorably, her own nerve and occasional nastiness. Israel is very hard to like on a couple of occasions, each candidly recounted, and it doesn't surprise a reader to hear that Jack Hock, her partner in the second forgery phase, was "somewhat afraid" of her. But he too goes into this book's wonderful little gallery of grotesques, recalled by the author as a chainsmoker who "believed that the little stubby cigarette holder he fastened to the ends of cigarettes would keep him cancer-free." Israel is, of course, her own best character, frantically riding the subway toward her scheduled guilty plea while hearing "some kind of hum from the older back of my brain ... the hum chewing over the horror of imprisonment... out of earshot, maybe in Yiddish so as not to upset me." Told by the merciful judge "that he never wanted to see me again 'in this context,' " she hears the words as being "not a total rejection." There's no honor in anything she did, but after reading "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" it's hard to resist admitting Israel to the company of such sharp, gallant characters as Dawn Powell and Helene Hanff, women clinging to New York literary life, or its fringes, by their talented fingernails. Israel tells us she went on to spend "six sufferable years" as a copy editor of "classroom magazines at Scholastic, the Spring Byington of the publishing world." That still, rather ominously, leaves a lot of time unaccounted for. If I were a librarian, I wouldn't let Lee Israel through the door, but I'd certainly make sure I had her latest book on the shelves. If I were an editor, I'd sign her up to write a biography of Louise Brooks - and not just to keep her out of trouble. Thomas Mallon is the author of "Stolen Words: Forays Into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism." His study of letters, "Yours Ever," will be published next year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Israel was the author of three unsuccessful biographies; when the last one met with poor reviews and abysmal sales, she remained determined to make her living as a writer even if she had to do it illegally. Hence, her new project: forging letters, hundreds of them, ostensibly written by famous names such as Noel Coward, Edna Ferber, and Dorothy Parker. This tantalizing memoir recounts how she created the letters (using vintage typewriters), how she sold them (through reputable dealers), and how the scam came crashing down around her. It's a fascinating story, very much in the spirit of literary-fraud stories like Clifford Irving's faking of Howard Hughes' autobiography (recounted most recently in the film The Hoax). Israel's tale is so intriguing we want to hear more; unfortunately, the book seems hurried, as though she put it down on paper in a burst of writing and then quickly sent it off to the publisher. It's a fascinating book even so, but many readers will sense how much more it might have been if Israel had taken the time to add more depth and texture.--Pitt, David Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
SignatureReviewed by Edward DolnickForgery is a strange crime because, until the police show up, the victims never know they've been done wrong. Muggings and thefts leave no such doubts. Even so, forgers themselves are seldom captivating figures. Reliant on the artists they imitate, they give off only reflected light. Lee Israel specialized in forged letters. Over the course of two years (1991-1992), she churned out hundreds of brief letters supposedly written by the likes of Noël Coward, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker and a host of lesser names from the suburbs of celebrity.Most of the letters are mundane. That sounds like trouble, but Israel knew better. Her buyers didn't mind. They didn't want art; they wanted the whiff of authenticity. A few homey sentences only strengthened the illusion. Once Israel had tossed in a tiny joke and added a bold signature, she was home free. I loved your flowers, thoughtful boy, Edna Ferber supposedly wrote to an unnamed acquaintance. They were waiting impatiently for me when I returned from Main Chance.But Israel overreached. When she turned from peddling her own fakes to selling genuine letters she had stolen from libraries (after substituting her forgeries), the FBI came calling. She tells her story briskly--at 128 small pages, the book is thin to the point of anorexia--and devotes more time to self-mockery than self-justification. Israel had learned to recognize a grabby letter in the course of researching celebrity biographies. She produced books on Tallulah Bankhead, Dorothy Kilgallen and Estée Lauder, then fell on hard times. She conned her way back to financial respectability by peddling gossipy, scandalous forgeries to spectacularly incurious dealers. Crime hardly gets more small-time. Israel sold her letters for $100 each. The most famous literary forgers, like Clifford Irving, played for million-dollar stakes. Israel stuck to smaller game. She needed hardly any equipment beyond some vintage typewriters from a secondhand shop and a stack of biographies and collections of published letters. Then she plucked out the best lines, added a few innocuous sentences as padding and occasionally threw in one-liners of her own. Can you ever forgive me? is a line she put in the mouth of Dorothy Parker.Two of Israel's fakes made it into The Letters of Noël Coward, published in 2007. So she tells us, at any rate, and probably it is true. Israel reprints both letters; she might have copied them from the Coward volume, but that seems like a lot of trouble.But who can be sure? The hard fate of forgers is that, even when they tell the truth, they find themselves caught like the boy who cried wolf. Illus. (Aug.)Edward Dolnick won an Edgar award for The Rescue Artist. His new book, The Forger's Spell, was just published by Harper. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
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