Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger

by Lee Israel

Overview

Now a major motion picture starring Melissa McCarthy—Lee Israel’s hilarious and shocking memoir of the astonishing caper she carried on for almost two years when she forged and sold more than three hundred letters by such literary notables as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Noel Coward, and many others.

Before turning to her life of crime—running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI—Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times bestseller, and her second, on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, made a splash in the headlines.

But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she’d received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats. Between 1990 and 1991, she wrote more than three hundred letters in the voices of, among others, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, and Noel Coward—and sold the forgeries to memorabilia and autograph dealers.

“Lee Israel is deft, funny, and eminently entertaining...[in her] gentle parable about the modern culture of fame, about those who worship it, those who strive for it, and those who trade in its relics” (The Associated Press). Exquisitely written, with reproductions of her marvelous forgeries, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is “a slender, sordid, and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures” (The New York Times Book Review).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982100339
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	09/18/2018
Edition description:	Media Tie-In
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	678,355
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Lee Israel was the author of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Estee Lauder: Beyond the Magic, Kilgallen, and Miss Tallulah Bankhead. She also worked as a copyeditor for Scholastic and American Express Publishing. She died in 2015.

Read an Excerpt

Can You Ever Forgive Me?
If with that last letter you pictured the urbane playwright in Switzerland, cigarette-holdered and smoking-jacketed, dashing off a letter in the 1960s from a cozy nook high up in Chalet Coward—the house he bought in the Alps to take advantage of Switzerland’s kinda gentler tax lawsólocated at Les Avants, Montreux, just down the mountain from the David Nivens at Château d’Oex, where Coward entertained guests that included Marlene, Garbo, George Cukor, Rebecca West, and a group that Elaine Stritch once called “all the Dames Edith” . . . you would be wrong.

Every letter reproduced here, along with hundreds like them, were turned out by me—conceived, written, typed, and signed—in my perilously held studio apartment in the shadow of Zabar’s on New York’s Upper West Side in 1991 and 1992. A room with a view not of Alpine splendor, but of brick and pigeons, a modest flat I took in the spring of 1969 with the seventy-five-hundred-dollar advance that G. P. Putnam’s Sons had given me to do my first book, a biography of Tallulah Bankhead. I sold those letters to various autograph dealers, first in New York City, and was soon branching out across the country and abroad—for seventy-five dollars a pop.

Noël Coward’s soi-disant letters were typed by me on what I remember was a 1950ish Olympia manual, solid as a rock, bigger than a bread box, not so much portable as luggable. (Noël’s Olympia was the one I would have the most trouble schlepping when the FBI was about to come calling.) For the nonce, I was content, researching my Tallulah bio—just me, my cat, and my contract, in my cozy, rent-controlled room-with-no-view.

I had never known anything but “up” in my career, had never received even one of those formatted no-thank-you slips that successful writers look back upon with triumphant jocularity. And I regarded with pity and disdain the short-sleeved wage slaves who worked in offices. I had no reason to believe life would get anything but better. I had had no experience failing.

Miss Tallulah Bankhead was a succès d’estime. The book had respectable sales and attracted many admirers, especially in the gay community. (By which I mean men. Lesbians don’t seem to harbor the gay sensibility with the same vigorous attention to detail as the guys who, I suspect, are born with the Great American Songbook clinging to the walls of their Y chromosomes.) I continued to be wined and wooed by publishers, in various venues of young veal and Beefeater gin. My second book, Kilgallen, was conceived at one of those chic, deductible lunches, over gorgeous gin martinis. My work on the book began in the mid-1970s and continued for about four years.

I researched at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, where I was always comfortable. (I had even given the library a percentage of my take on Tallulah.) Kilgallen sold well and made the best-seller list of The New York Times. It appeared for one week with a snippy little commentary by the book-section editor, running as a kind of footer—the commentary, not the editor. Since I had written for the Arts and Leisure section frequently, when it was under the talented editorship of Seymour Peck, the paper’s distaste for my work surprised and chagrined. No matter. I was now entitled to say that I was a New York Times best-selling author, and I frequently did. A particularly compelling part of the Kilgallen story was her controversial death, which had occurred just after she told friends that she was about to reveal the truth about the assassination of JFK. I remember swimming laps, with the mantra “Who killed Dorothy? Who killed Dorothy?” playing under my swim cap. I made money from my second book. Not Kitty Kelley, beachfront-property money, and no more than I would have made in four years in middle management at a major corporation . . . as if any major corporation would have had me, or I it. There was enough, however, to keep me in restaurants and taxis.

Editorial Reviews

"Israel displayed an excellent ear and fine false turn of phrase...Now, all these years later, she's written a slender, sordid and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures...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." —Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review

"Lee Israel is deft, funny and eminently entertaining...She also has a good tale to tell. Can You Ever Forgive Me? offers a gentle parable about the modern culture of fame, about those who worship it, those w ho strive for it and those who trade in its relics." —Jonathan Lopez, The Associated Press

"With her witty, jeweled prose and her troubling antics, literary outlaw and minx Lee Israel is once again causing a ruckus. Do I trust her and her admission of guilt? Do I condone her actions? I'm loving the experience of trying to answer these questions." —Henry Alford, investigative humorist, author of Big Kiss, Municipal Bondage, and contributing editor to Vanity Fair

"Whether she's writing about being banned from the Strand bookstore or stealing authentic letters from university libraries, she does so with honesty and a rapier wit. And in an age of promiscuous apology for the slightest wrongdoing, the fact that Israel never fully apologizes for her crimes is actually part of the charm of her memoir." —VeryShortList

From the Publisher

a slender, sordid and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures…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…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.
—The New York Times

Thomas Mallon

Signature

Reviewed by Edward Dolnick

Forgery 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 financialrespectability 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.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

To start, listeners will hear some of the most interesting letters ever signed by Louise Brooks and Noel Coward. Neither of them wrote those letters, though. Lee Israel did. Jane Curtin narrates the literary forger's memoirs in a defiant, often acerbic tone. Israel shares memories such as her delight in finding a $30 typewriter and her horror at having a nightmare in which Noel Coward chided her from beyond the grave with shameless humor. She also breaks down the steps of forgery, making listeners insiders in her criminal capers. Listeners will find themselves chuckling and smiling through Israel's career decline and rebirth as a forger and thief. Israel's memoir does have serious moments, though. Most notably, she remembers her partner in crime in his final years as he died from AIDS. J.A.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2019 - AudioFile