Lee Israel

Leonore Carol "Lee" Israel (December 3, 1939 – December 24, 2014) was an American author known for committing literary forgery.

Researchers have doubted that Coward believed authorities in Jamaica, where he lived from 1956 until his death, in his native United Kingdom or in the United States might tamper with his mail.

These researchers have noted that Israel never had Coward make an explicit reference to a sexual act.

They believe the sheer abundance of letters being sold by Israel aroused suspicion among autograph collectors, dealers and used bookstore owners.

Other researchers believe they became suspicious of paper with anachronistic watermarks.

Some researchers suspect Israel's use of very ordinary (aged) paper raised an alarm because the sophisticated letter writers were likely to have owned the finest stationery.

Israel's memoir makes clear that her name suddenly became toxic among autograph collectors, dealers and used book merchants no matter exactly how they caught on.

Moreover, she criticizes the guild of autograph brokers: before they became suspicious, they never required her to recite her prepared lies about how a letter came into her hands.

Israel points out that their own code of conduct required all of them to be able to attest unquestioningly to a detailed account of the provenance of each document.

Her criminal prosecution was set in motion not over the forgeries she was selling to collectors, but over the forgeries she was slipping into library and museum files to replace the genuine letters she was stealing.

The forgeries she sold had not involved interstate commerce or great sums of money, and so were overlooked by the FBI and other law enforcement.

But when autograph dealer David Lowenherz learned that an Ernest Hemingway letter he had purchased from Israel's accomplice, Jack Hock, was supposed to be in the Columbia University archives, it was then discovered that Columbia's letter had been replaced by a forgery and Israel had signed the register for having examined that folder.

Israel began a career as a freelance writer in the 1960s.

She graduated from Midwood High School, and in 1961 from CUNY's Brooklyn College.

Her profile of Katharine Hepburn, whom Israel had visited in California shortly before the death of Spencer Tracy, ran in the November 1967 edition of Esquire magazine.

Israel's magazine-writing career continued into the 1970s.

In the 1970s and 1980s, she published biographies of the actress Tallulah Bankhead, the journalist and game-show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen, and the cosmetics tycoon Estée Lauder.

The Kilgallen book was well received upon its publication in 1979, and appeared on The New York Times Best Seller List.

Novelist and book reviewer Rita Mae Brown told readers of The Washington Post in 1979 that Kilgallen had expressed much curiosity about Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, despite the prevalence of show business gossip in her newspaper column.

Brown added that Israel's book “deserves to be ranked with serious biography just as its subject deserves to be ranked a serious journalist” despite the possibility that some “political movements would probably find even the mention of [Kilgallen’s] name a cause for hilarity.”

In 1985, Lauder wrote an autobiography that her publisher timed to coincide with Israel's book.

Israel's book was panned by critics and was a commercial failure.

"I had made a mistake," Israel said of the episode.

"Instead of taking a great deal of money from a woman rich as Oprah, I published a bad, unimportant book, rushed out in months to beat [Lauder's own memoir] to market."

After this failure, Israel's career went into decline, compounded by alcoholism and a personality that some found difficult.

By 1991, Israel's career as a writer of books and magazine articles had ended.

She had tried and failed to support herself with wage labor.

To make money, she began forging letters (estimated to total more than 400) of deceased writers and actors.

Later, she began stealing actual letters and autographed papers of famous persons from libraries and archives, replacing them with forged copies she had made.

She and an accomplice, Jack Hock, sold forged works and stolen originals.

(Hock had been released from prison a short time earlier for the armed robbery of a taxicab driver).

This continued for over a year until two undercover FBI agents questioned Israel on a Manhattan sidewalk outside a delicatessen from which they saw her exit, according to her memoir.

It is unclear how her forgeries were detected, but in her memoir she indicates that her ability to sell letters ended abruptly and universally.

She mentions in her memoir that a Noël Coward expert insisted that Coward would not have referenced his homosexual activities so enthusiastically in letters at a time when such behavior would be punished with a prison sentence.

Her 2008 confessional autobiography Can You Ever Forgive Me? was adapted into the 2018 film of the same name starring Melissa McCarthy as Israel.

Israel was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family.

Her parents were Jack and Sylvia Israel; she also had a brother, Edward.

In her 2008 memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Israel claimed that in 1983, four years after the Kilgallen publication, she had received an advance from Macmillan Publishing to begin a project on Estee Lauder, "about whom Macmillan wanted an unauthorized biography — warts and all. I accepted the offer though I didn't give a shit about her warts."

Israel also claimed that Lauder repeatedly attempted to bribe her into dropping the project.

In the book, Israel discredited Lauder's public statements that she was born into European aristocracy and attended church regularly in Palm Beach, Florida.