"CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger," by Lee Israel. Simon & Schuster; 128 pages; $20.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — This is a curious book on several counts. It tells the story of how Lee Israel, a reasonably well-regarded author of biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen, crashed and burned to such an extent that in the early '90s she began to forge and sell fake correspondence from various cultural eminences, while at the same time dipping deeply into the vodka storage facilities of Manhattan.
In broad outline, then, it might reasonably be considered yet another memoir of debasement and recovery. But there's a manifest element of pride in Israel's telling. She wants us to know that she was very good at what she did — several of her fake Noel Coward letters showed up in last year's authorized volume of Coward's letters!
"For me," she writes, "this was a big hoot and a terrific compliment." On the basis of the copies of the letters she prints in the book - she kept Xeroxes - she ought to be proud, rather in the the same way that Raffles the Amateur Cracksman should have been proud.
The trick was that Israel never went beyond what people already knew about Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, Louise Brooks, Edna Ferber, or some of the other dead celebrities whose letters she forged. She read their biographies, read their diaries, then wrote letters in their voices - not really too difficult for a writer, many of whom can duplicate prose rhythms in the same way actors can imitate accents.
Up to this point, Israel's very minor crimes seem relatively harmless, and her modified mea culpa didn't offend me. If this is fraud, it's minor fraud, and since Israel was only selling her forgeries for $50 to $100 - low prices that should have tipped someone off, because letters from Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich were worth more than that even 15 years ago - it wasn't even felonious.
But when Israel started copying letters at the Beinecke and Cornell libraries, then proceeded to steal the originals and replace them with her own copies, that's when I got off the train. In addition to stealing, it's altering the record, and it's unforgivable for even a lightweight historian.
It all began easily enough. After attempting several books that didn't happen - she mentions abortive projects about Judy Holliday, Bette Davis, Woody Allen, Roy Cohn and Vanessa Redgrave - Israel was commissioned to write a warts-and-all book about Estee Lauder. The big revelation was that Lauder was Jewish. After turning down a $60,000 buy-out offer from Lauder to drop the project— probably the equivalent of the advance — Israel went ahead. Said book was published and dropped dead.
She was drinking too much; her cat was sick and she needed money she didn't have. She sold all the books she could sell. In Israel's telling of her pickled state of mind, the next logical thing was to engage in the creation of fraudulent manuscripts. Nowhere is it mentioned that publishers don't ask you to give the money back if a book fails. Israel's personal issues were obviously interfering with her ability to get another book off the ground.
The logistics of the forgeries are interesting, and really quite easy - she bought old manual typewriters, old watermarked stationery. It turned out that watermarks are dateable and some fake Lillian Hellman letters were bounced back after it turned out that the paper had been manufactured after the the date on the letters. For people who had personalized stationery, she simply Xeroxed a real letter and took it to a printer to have it duplicated.
Ultimately, she got caught, got five years of probation, six months house arrest, and was directed to attend AA meetings, which, she informs us, she never did.
Inflation being what it is, a lot of Israel's letters have been floating around every since, to ever-increasing prices. She tells us at one point that a Fannie Brice letter she forged and sold for $40 was relisted fairly recently for $595.
The book is never dull, and often amusing, if only because Israel affects a slightly archaic literary style reminiscent of either Auntie Mame, or gay man of a certain weathered vintage: "I went on and off welfare, a horror beyond my talent to describe. My most enduring memory is the odor in the elevators: eau de desperation!"
Ultimately, she makes one rather sad confession: "I still consider the letters to be my best work... I was a better writer as a forger than I had ever been as a writer."
But the title is misleading in that the author neither asks for, nor seems to care if anybody forgives her or not.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: seyman AT pbpost.com