Writer who turned to literary forgery as her career as a biographer stalled

Lee Israel, who has died aged 75, was a professional writer who became rather better known after a trial in 1993 as an accomplished literary forger.

In a rented storage locker on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she kept a cache of carefully maintained antique typewriters: Remingtons and Royals, Adlers and Olympias, each hung with a tag whose carefully lettered names – Edna, Dorothy, Eugene O’Neill, Noël, Hellman, Bogart, – hinted at the felonious purposes for which they were to be used.

Israel was a reasonably successful author in the 1970s and 1980s, writing biographies of actor Tallulah Bankhead, journalist Dorothy Kilgallen and cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder. In the early 1990s, with her career at a standstill, she became a literary forger, composing and selling hundreds of letters that she claimed had been written by Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway and others.

That work, which ended with her guilty plea in federal court in 1993, was the subject of her fourth and last book, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. The memoir drew mixed notices, but if nothing else it remains a window on to its author's hubris and the myriad discontents of the freelance writer's life.

Feisty

As Israel told it, her forgeries were born less of avarice than of panic and began after a stretch of poor reviews and a bout of writer’s block, combined with the effects of heavy alcohol consumption and improvidence. What was more, those who knew her said this week, she possessed a temperament that made conventional employment nearly impossible. “She drank an awful lot – she was an alcoholic,” David Yarnell, a friend, said in an interview after her death. “And she was very feisty, and people did not want to work with her.”

Israel’s criminal career married scholarship, fabrication, forgery and outright theft. Using the research skills she had honed as a writer, she scoured her subjects’ memoirs for salient biographical details; their published letters for epistolary style; and their original, archived letters for typing idiosyncrasies.

She bought a clutch of period typewriters from second-hand shops and, on furtive library visits, tore blank sheets of aged paper from the backs of old journals.

Low price

She managed to fly under the radar by charging little, selling her creations to autograph dealers around the country for about $50 to $100 each. She made up for the low price in volume, she said in her memoir, generating some 400 letters over about a year and a half.

Israel was, by all accounts, a remarkable literary mimic. “She was brilliant,” Carl Burrell, a retired FBI agent who was the lead investigator on her case, said.

Her gossipy Coward impersonations – one of which describes Julie Andrews as "quite attractive since she dealt with her monstrous English overbite" – found their way into The Letters of Noël Coward, published by Knopf in 2007.

When whispers among dealers about the authenticity of her wares made composing new letters too risky, Israel began stealing actual letters from archives and leaving duplicates in their place.

“She would go into these libraries and copy the letter in question, go back to her home and fake as best she could the stationery and fake the signature, and then she’d go back to the institution and make the switch,” autograph dealer David Lowenherz said. “So she was actually not selling fakes: She was substituting the fakes and selling the originals.”

Leonore Carol Israel was born in New York in 1939. She earned a bachelor's degree in speech from Brooklyn College in 1961 and over the next two decades was a freelance writer, contributing articles on film, theatre and television to the New York Times, Soap Opera Digest and other publications.

Her first book, Miss Tallulah Bankhead, was published in 1972; her second, Kilgallen, spent one week at No 15 on the Times bestseller list in 1980. But her third, the Estée Lauder biography, was sabotaged by its subject's own autobiography and savaged for its writing style by the New York Times.

Wage slaves

Until then, Israel wrote in her memoir, “I had never known anything but ‘up’ in my career.” But even afterwards, when she went on welfare, a nine to five job was beyond the pale for her. “I regarded with pity and disdain the short-sleeved wage slaves who worked in offices,” she wrote. “I had no reason to believe life would get anything but better.”

When life did not, she embarked on her criminal career, which ended when David Lowenherz learned that an original letter he had purchased from her – from Ernest Hemingway to Norman Cousins – was actually owned by Columbia.

He met the university librarian and asked: “Is there any way you can tell who had recent access to this letter?” He came back and said: “We have this card. It’s signed by Lee Israel.’” Lowenherz alerted the FBI, and in June 1993 Israel pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to transport stolen property in interstate commerce.

She was sentenced to six months’ house arrest and five years’ probation. The court also directed her to attend an alcohol treatment programme, “which,” Israel wrote breezily in her memoir, “I never did.”

The letters she stole have been returned to their archives. It is likely, however, that at least some of her forgeries remain in circulation.