Picture this: you’re broke. You’re way behind on your bills, and when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, your cat gets sick. You take it to the vet, praying that the doctor’s goodwill will save it, but you still owe them the previous bill, and they won’t treat your cat unless you pay at least half of that debt. You’re desperate to save its life, but you literally can’t find a way to make some money, or at least, that’s what you think… What would you do? a) Swallow your pride and beg someone to lend you the money; b) Take whatever job is available, even if it’s not in your field; c) Sell some of your stuff; or d) Become a criminal to get easy money.
For most of us, any of the first three options would be the logical answer, but not for Lee Israel. The way she saw it, necessity pushed her into a life of crime. It all started in 1991, when Israel, a forgotten and unsuccessful author trying to live from her glory days, took a signed letter and modified it to sell it as a rare collector’s item. The ease with which she made money and the adrenaline she felt soon possessed her, leading her to forge and manipulate over 400 letters in a period of less than a year. But who was she and how did she become so notorious, to the point that there’s a movie about her life of crime? Here we have the true story of Melisa McCarthy’s character in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”
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Leonore Carol Israel was born in New York City in 1939. After getting her BA from Brooklyn College in 1961, she was eager to pursue a career as a writer, and she turned out to be quite successful during the sixties and seventies. Her area of expertise was biographies, and throughout these decades, two of her bios became bestsellers in The New York Times and the Soap Opera Digest. Israel thought a brilliant life as a writer was just starting, so she let her pride and arrogance take over.
In the early eighties, Lee Israel started working on her third biography, confident it was going to be a massive success like her previous works. However, she didn’t calculate the risks of using a living subject, and as Lauder’s team found out, they kept offering to pay her to drop the project and work on something else. This gave Israel a sense of confidence that blinded her from seeing the bigger picture. The biography was published in 1985, and to her surprise, not only did the critics smashed her work, Lauder herself fought back and immediately published her own memoirs making Israel’s book a total flop.
In 1991, after what she thought was a perfect crime, Israel saw a great business opportunity and a way to use her writing talents for her own benefit and not give a publisher all her money. To make the letters look authentic, Israel would read and read about their subjects to really understand them. One of the things her editors had criticized about her work in the past was the fact that she blended her voice with that of their subjects, making her works sound like memoirs instead of biographies. Turns out, that ability allowed her to create convincing letters “by” some of the most important American writers, like Ernest Hemingway, Noël Coward, Dorothy Parker, and Louise Brooks.
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She would also go to old libraries to rip off black pages from old books to write her forgeries. She also bought tons of vintage typewriters, so that each author would have a distinct font and ink. This was completely premeditated and, for that reason, so shady and scandalous. Nevertheless, there’s no perfect crime, and her greed made her make one terrible mistake: assume things about her subjects. Specifically, one of her Noël Coward letters raised a red flag, and a buyer and actual friend of the writer alerted the authorities about the forgery. In the letter, Coward spoke openly about his homosexuality, something impossible at the time, since it was still considered a crime.
Her photo was sent to all bookshops and collector’s stores to prevent them from buying more letters from her. On top of that, the FBI started a thorough investigation that didn’t end until Israel was caught. You’d think this was a wake-up call for Israel, but it wasn’t. She came up with a brilliant idea to sell real letters again, like she’d done in the past. This time, though, she would replace the fakes with the originals, so sellers would get the real thing. Still, she was soon found out, and the case against her became even stronger.
In 1993, Israel was arrested and sentenced to six months of house arrest and five years on probation. She was also sent to mandatory AA meetings (which she never attended) and forced to take a regular office job, something she had always avoided. In her memoirs, she confessed that, beyond the money and the adrenaline her times as a forger brought her, what she loved the most was seeing how amazing her work was, to the point that people actually thought the letters belonged to great authors. She never regretted her actions and was even proud of her literary abilities.
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You would think that she made a fortune as a forger, but she actually didn’t. To avoid drawing attention from the authorities and experts, she would sell her letters for really small amounts of money that ranged from 50 to 100 dollars. When you add it all up, she barely made about 40,000 USD, which is actually not that much, considering all the effort and risk involved. At the end of the day, her greatest success was her own autobiography; she managed to do what she did best and became the author of her own story, a shady one, but her own story nonetheless.
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