Counterfeiterature

Lee was nice enough to send us some copies (the originals are long gone) of unpublished letters from her halcyon days of chicanery.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.

Soap Opera Digest

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

Memorabilia dealers could never get enough of the Dorothy Parker letters. However, Lee wasn’t able to produce many because Parker resided at the address on this particular letterhead for only a few years. Most of the source material came from the biography Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade.

Vice: Hi Lee. What’s the last lie you told?

Lee Israel:

Sure. But the reason I ask is because it’s been about six months since the release of the book you wrote about living off wonderfully intricate and fascinating paper-based deceptions, and now you’re doing the opposite by making a living off the truth of the whole ordeal.

Things took a turn for the worse when you wrote the Estée Lauder biography after declining a counteroffer from her to write an official version. Now that you’re at the other end of years of lying and all the crap is off your shoulders and the new book is out, do you feel back on top?

Do you miss writing the letters? It seems like they might have been addicting.

jeu d’esprit

Because of its nature, I assume that the fact-checking on the book was very rigorous.

Noël Coward was the only male subject of Lee’s letters (apart from a few one-offs). She got more creative here, and her inclination to fill the letters with sensational allusions to Coward’s homosexuality and refusals to get off “the weed” put them in high demand. It also led to her undoing. The notes you see in the margins were made by Lee to keep track of who bought which letter and the price it fetched.

You created a pretty elaborate backstory to explain how you obtained the letters, all to establish provenance because you were worried about dealers questioning their authenticity. How scrupulous were they?

But if you would have brought them to Antiques Roadshow…

Laughs

Well, it could’ve been that they didn’t fuss because you went to such great lengths to make the content of the letters believable and entertaining.

In the book you say that your forgery subjects were chosen mostly by coincidence—the ability to obtain letterheads and the ease of copying their signatures being two of the main factors. But I can’t help but think there’s something more there. A lot of them had associations with the Algonquin Round Table and your earlier biographical subject matter. It almost seems too good to be true.

The ease of forging Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber’s signature was the main factor in Lee’s decision to add the author and playwright to her roster. Again, research gleaned from biographies was the crux of the letters’ subject matter.

And part of your unraveling, when the dealers began to become suspicious, was writing candidly about Noël Coward’s sexuality. In one letter you have him commenting on some guy named Kevin’s “beautiful ass.” It was almost like a taunt.

So you’re saying the majority of memorabilia dealers aren’t exactly reputable? What a shock.

You mentioned in the book that you also did a few one-off letters from people like Humphrey Bogart. What happened with those?

The title of the book comes from a closing line you came up with for a Dorothy Parker letter. You were using it as a tongue-in-cheek, catchall apology for her drunken mishaps and bad behavior she couldn’t recall. Is the title meant to be taken in the same context? Are you remorseful?