Lee Israel embarked on her writing career with a run of very successful biographies, especially one on Tallulah Bankhead. But when her biography of Estée Lauder flopped in the late '80s, her career hit the skids. A decade later, she tried to sell a couple of real letters by Fanny Brice to an autograph dealer. When he told her he would pay more for "livelier stuff," a light bulb went off. Israel then embarked on a louche yet fascinating career of literary forgery. She immersed herself in the seemingly inimitable styles of such authors and celebrities as Noël Coward and Dorothy Parker, among others. Her letters are brimming with wry wit and a definite patina of authenticity — some of her Coward letters were even anthologized. Israel was eventually unmasked and convicted, but in her mea-culpa memoir, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, she looks back at the over 400 riotous letters she forged. Boldtype's Toby Warner caught up with her to discuss the tools of the trade and why her over-the-top Coward letters gave her away.

Boldtype: How did you get started forging letters?

Lee Israel: With the demise of my career, I was poor. Not eating-roots-in-Niger poor, but poor enough to qualify for welfare; poor enough so that the specter of homelessness was always with me. During this period of penury, a tortoiseshell kitten named Doris presented herself to me from behind the tire of a parked car. How to say no! I took her home, of course, but she soon fell ill and stopped eating. Costly tests were needed to find out what was going on. I didn't have the money, nor could I borrow it. (The magnet of the mini fame I had enjoyed was enfeebled now, and the few people I could once have relied upon were no longer in my life.) During this period, I went pretty regularly to research at the library of performing arts at Lincoln Center, looking to find a promising candidate for a new biography. I was seated one day at a table, ready to begin my work when a box of material containing some letters written by Fanny Brice (Funny Girl) was put in front of me.

They were just little bread-and-butter notes, but they were signed "Fanny," and I knew they would have some value to collectors. So I secreted three or four of them in my Keds and headed across Central Park to the nearest autograph dealer, who happily paid me $40 a piece, adding that she would pay more for livelier stuff by Fanny. I returned to the library and helped myself to more bread-and-butter. When I had first seen the letters, I realized that there was plenty of room in each of them for a postscript underneath the signature. And so I typed in faux postscripts. To one of the notes, for instance, I amended a line or two about Nick Arnstein, the gambler who had been an important part of Barbara Steisand's biopic. I knew that the mere mention of Arnstein would enhance the value of the letter, and so it did. On leaving the dealer after my second visit, I had, for the first time in a long time, some jingle in my jeans. To add to my happiness, Doris, without veterinary intervention, licked her platter clean, her recovery produced, I am sure, by the disappearance in our little studio apartment of the noisome odor of poverty. The slide from adding postscripts to Fanny Brice to creating whole forged letters imputed to other celebrities was quick, painless, and profitable.

BT: Who were some of the authors you forged, and what attracted you to their letters?

LI: There were five authors who made up my major oeuvres: Noël Coward, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Edna Ferber, and Louise Brooks. You ask about "their letters" — in fact, there was only one celebrity whose real letters served as a matrix for my forgeries. Louise Brooks dispatched more than 100 typed letters to a film archivist named Herman Weinberg. I discovered these epistolary gems in my library maundering and I took exhaustive notes on the lot of them. They were remarkable — heady, wide-ranging, literate, angry, underlined with a furious colored pencil, usually red or orange. And during the weeks I spent with her letters, I immersed myself in the style and the substance of this silent-movie star turned writer. When I began to create my faux Louise Brooks letters, I shyly shuffled around Louise's own stuff, only changing a word here and there. But increasingly, as the dealers clamored for more, I improvised, writing in her style but never, as I invented, straying far from the facts of her life. In the case of the other famous folk whose letters I vamped, there was no collection of inspirational letters, though there was always an ur-letter from which I learned the writer's habitual format and did my best to painstakingly replicate the actual signatures. The ur-letters showed me that Noël Coward skipped five spaces between sentences and Edna Ferber buried her salutations in the body of the text. My creations sprang primarily from the iconographies of each subject and the knowledge I had gleaned over decades of reading, and from a lifetime of exposure to these lush and larger-than-life personalities.

BT: What were the tools of your trade? Was it similar to writing biography?

LI: My celebrity letters were all typed. The signatures were difficult enough to forge. To have done a hand-written letter would have been way beyond my ability. I purchased a bunch of old machines manufactured around the time in which the forgeries were supposed to have been written. I had stationery with the original letterheads found in the library and copied there. Dorothy Parker's Hollywood letterhead was taken from an original letter written during the time she lived there while working on a screenplay with her husband Alan Campbell. This, of course, restricted the purview of my letters to that period in her life. I copied Noël Coward's so-clever letterhead from his Swiss address, where he'd moved to take advantage of its kinder, gentler tax laws. Lillian Hellman's letterhead was easy. I copied it from an actual letter she had written to me turning down a request for an interview about Tallulah Bankhead, the subject of my first biography. Louise's own letters were done on plain paper. I found appropriately weathered blank paper at the library. The colored pencils presented no problem. I used an old television set, which now beamed only a bright light, as a light box — the better to see the original signature that I traced at the bottom of my own letters. I created the Noël Coward letters with a British dictionary at my side, so as not to muck up my "humours" and "cosys."

BT: Could you quote from your favorite letter?

LI: I really do love the letters I created. To pick a favorite among them is rather like choosing a favorite child. Sophie's Choice without the Nazis. But I will pick one that was represented as having been written by the master from his chalet in Switzerland. It is set up so that he seems to be responding to a correspondent who had asked the playwright whether he had gone back to smoking. "Noël" writes: "I did try for ten days, but I am back on the weed. There just seems no point for me, two years shy of 70, to continue feeling wretched and deprived. Don't be too terribly disappointed in me. ... If I am sacrificing two or three years of incontinent old age tant pis! [French for 'I saw your aunt in the loo!'] ... We went to the young woman's academy to witness the 'Jodellclub' last week and had a terrible time restraining the giggles. This year, in addition to all the earnest young men in national costume, there was one redoubtable lady also in costume, also yodeling to beat the band. This is a strange and wildly naëve country. I think a good war might do it some good."

BT: When did you know the jig was up?

LI: There were actually two jigs, the latter having to do with a scam I perpetrated after the many dealers to whom I was selling became aware of the fatuity of my letters. I knew the first jig — the forgery jig — was up when some customer on the West Coast was shown some of my Noël Coward's by a dealer there. The man was apparently a friend of Coward's and knew that the saucy homosexual badinage liberally used in the forgeries would have been out of character. I drew much of the material from the Noël Coward Diaries published after his death. They were rife with campy capering, but I made the mistake of confusing what he had confided to his Diaries with what he might have written in his correspondence. Coward came up at a time when homosexuality was a jailing offence. It would have been unlike him, therefore, to have indiscreetly gone gay in the letters he dispatched. In an attempt to please the dealers, my own letters had gone way over the top. The West Coast dealer spread the word about these excesses. That was the beginning of the end. I suspected all along that some of the dealers knew better. But they were making too much money to stop buying from me. (I spotted some of the Dorothy Parkers that I'd originally sold for $80 being offered as "pure Parker" by a dealer at $2,500 a pop.) The world of collectibles is small and incestuous. Once the word got out that the well was toxic, nobody dared drink from it. And so my wonderful career, after two years and 400 letters, was finally over.

BT: What has become of the literary letter these days? It's hard to imagine anyone taking the trouble to forge something as banal as email.

LI: I can't imagine anyone devising an email scam in the way that I fashioned my forgeries. Given the practice of hijacking email practiced by the Bush administration, however, it is possible to imagine that some people have returned to snail mail to protect their privacy. Or carrier pigeons.

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