'Can You Ever Forgive Me?'
The remarkable story of Lee Israel
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I watched the 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me? the other night on DVD, not knowing anything about the story behind it, other than that it was about the forgery of literary letters. I was surprised to realise it was based on a true story; the 2008 memoir of the same name by author Lee Israel, a literature biographer who, finding herself struggling to sell her next book, turned to forging letters of famous literary luminaries such as Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward.
Melissa McCarthy, doing an outstanding job of playing Israel in the film, finds herself unable to obtain an advance for her next biography on the American comedian, Fanny Brice. She lives in a small New York apartment with just her cat for company, having lost her long-time girlfriend due to her inability to connect. She is shown as a lonely alcoholic with an acerbic personality that keeps people away.
In walks Jack Hock, someone who recognises her from a literary party some time ago, and whom she distinctly remembers relieved himself in the closet of the host. The two bond over their love of the bottle, and are soon kind-of friends.
Struggling for cash to pay her cat’s vet bills, Israel sells a signed letter from Katharine Hepburn, a treasured personal possession. She then happens upon another letter whilst researching Fanny Brice, and sells that, too. She realises there is a real market for buyers of these kinds of memorabilia, and so begins to create her own. This involves a complicated set-up of different typewriters to emulate the original type of letters already known from these figures.
What is remarkable is just how many letters Israel managed to forge and pass off to various buyers over the next two years. The fifty-three year old biographer and journalist made enough money to pay back her rent arrears, get her cat treated, and enjoy a few drinks with her friend Jack. Not a fortune, but enough to get by. It was, she lamented in the film, her most successful literary achievement, claiming her Dorothy Parker witticisms were funnier than Parker’s own.
Cranking out the letters on various vintage Remingtons and Adlers she purchased from local junk shops, Israel allowed the well-known twentieth-century wits to poke fun at themselves, whilst she had Coward bitching about Marlene Dietrich. The bookshops of Manhattan lapped it up, seemingly never questioning Israel’s provenance of the letters, merely checking that the signature, painstakingly copied or traced by Israel herself, looked acceptable.
Eventually, she made herself just a little too suspicious, and realised that the booksellers- and the FBI- were onto her for literary forgery. But instead of completely laying low, Israel, needing the money (and it appeared getting some kind of buzz from the success of her endeavours) roped her friend Jack in to go out and sell the letters for her.
Her forgery days were over however when, in 1993, Jack was intercepted at a sale of one of Israel’s letters, and the whole house of cards came crashing down. He readily shopped his friend to save himself, and it looked likely that Israel was about to be handed a prison sentence for her fraudulent crimes. In the end, she was sentenced to six months’ house arrest and five years’ probation.
At this point, it would be easy to think that Lee Israel might have faded away into the background, somewhat shamefaced at her misdemeanours. Not so. What Lee Israel did next was to unapologetically write a memoir about her forgery scam.
It appears that she took umbrage with the fact that nobody knew who she was, and suffering from the affliction of a large ego, she was proud of the work she had done, managing to fool so many people with her witticisms and skill. She felt she had utilised a great deal of talent to inhabit the writer’s voices and lives in order to produce her fake letters, producing some 400 letters in all in around eighteen months.
“My success as a forger was somehow in sync with my erstwhile success as a biographer…I had for decades practised a kind of merged identity with my subjects; to say I ‘channelled’ is only a slight exaggeration.”
Far from a sense of humiliation or penance, Israel appeared unrepentant about her crimes, saying: “The forged letters were larky and fun and totally cool.”
Fifteen years following her court appearance, in 2008, Israel published her book: Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger. The title however is not an admittance of her guilt over her crimes; it is merely the line she invented in a Dorothy Parker letter, showing Parker as asking forgiveness for her drunken behaviour. In fact, as some have pointed out, Parker would never have apologised for bad behaviour; and neither did Israel. Her memoir has been read instead as a bold and pleased-with-itself account of how she managed to fool the so-called experts.
It has also been suggested that some of the buyers of Israel’s wares were likely to have suspected that the letters provided by her were in fact fakes. But the industry being what it was at the time, they were happy to do a deal with Israel for a $50 payment in cash, knowing they could make several times that from keen collectors. Israel’s attitude appeared to be that it was a victimless crime, and strangely, she felt that she was receiving just payment for utilising her professional writing skills, when the usual channels open to her had been closed off. The director of Can You Ever Forgive Me? Mariella Heller claims that “Lee Israel’s story is intimately bound up with the fact that the publishing industry no longer wanted her kind of writing. She was disappearing from her own landscape.”
Israel had actually been a pretty successful biographer prior to her letter forging days. Of her three previous biographies, two had been critically acclaimed, with one hitting the New York Times bestseller list. But it appeared that in the early nineties, her writing style and genre was going out of fashion. Now audiences were looking for more sensationalist stories of the rich and famous, something completely different to Israel’s years of slogging away in the archives, painstakingly researching the lives of the people she studied.
As Melissa McCarthy shows in the film, Israel’s request of her agent to obtain a ten thousand dollar advance for her book of Fanny Brice, in order to allow her to simply survive whilst she writes it, was out of the question. As her agent informs her: “You wouldn’t get ten dollars advance for that.”
As the film also portrays, Israel was not blessed in the matter of publicity or of cultivating a brand for herself. Not merely reticent in this regard, she was downright rude, putting off anyone who came close to her. This makes for some great dark humour in the film, but in real-life must have made for a somewhat difficult person to handle.
What also appears clear is that she was not simply a writer who, unable to sell her latest book, decided to become a forger.
We see her living a lonely and isolated life with her cat in her Upper West Side apartment, where the exterminator sent to deal with a fly situation refuses to enter due to the smell. It turns out she has cat mess under her bed, food and dirty dishes everywhere, and it takes herself and Jack to clean the place up. Added to her clear alcoholism, it appeared that Israel was suffering with her mental health.
In an amusing aside, we see her telephoning publishers and imitating Nora Ephron, yelling in their ear “star fucker” when they answered. At the end of the film, we are told that Ephron’s lawyers issued cease and desist letters to Israel following this continued behaviour.
Other pranks such as these begin to escalate as Israel is aided and abetted by her new friend Jack Hock.
Interestingly, in her memoir, Israel does not give much information about Hock. When Richard E. Grant was cast in the role, he read the memoir to glean what she had written about him as a way to enhance the screenplay of his character.
“Lee Israel’s memoir was astonishingly scant on detail about him, which tells me how eccentric she was — thinking that she was the only person involved in this story.” Richard E. Grant
What scant details Grant found about him was that he was originally from Portland, was blonde, tall and charming. He died of AIDS in 1994 at age 47, and smoked using a cigarette holder. He was also good at charming people into paying far more than expected for the forgeries.
What the film does manage to portray is a kind of sympathetic affection for the character of Israel. Although she comes across as a cantankerous character, she also reveals certain vulnerabilities, such as the filthy conditions in which she was living. As director Heller points out, it is refreshing to see a film about a woman who is difficult to love; women are often punished on screen (and in literature) for being less than feminine ideals. In this on-screen life of Israel and her crimes, although Heller shows the difficult sides of her personality, she allows for a deeper understanding of the woman behind the forgery story.
One of the interesting avenues this takes, for me, is the friendship between Lee and Jack, an unlikely bond that grows out of drinking pals - and later, necessity - as she relies on him to sell her letters when she is under suspicion. No longer able to risk selling the fakes, they cook up the idea of Israel visiting various academic libraries, “borrowing” the original letters from the archives, copying them, and then switching the forged copies for the originals. This enables Jack to sell the real thing to the willing buyers, until he gets caught, putting an end to the money-making scheme.
At this point, I found myself thinking it appeared far-fetched: that it would be that easy to waltz out of an institution like Yale with an original artifact seemed too much, and I had to remind myself that this was all based on Israel’s real-life account.
The premise of her book appears to rest on this: if she was making a small living for her “talent”, and the booksellers were making a small profit, and the buyers were excited to think they owned a small piece of their literary heroes: where was the harm? She even believed that what the buyers got was something better than they might have had they had an original piece.
“It was better Coward than Coward. Coward didn’t have to be Coward. I had to be Coward and a half.”
Amazingly, a 2007 collection of Coward’s letters published by Alfred A. Knopf and edited by Barry day, The Letters of Noël Coward, contained two of Israel’s forgeries. Hailed as “first and definitive collection of letters to and from Coward,” the book was acclaimed by critics, praising it for how it captured the clever wit of the famous playwright.
Eventually, the forgeries believed to have been created by Israel’s own pen appeared to garner their own value.
“It has come to my attention that some of the letters are now on the market as Lee Israel’s forgeries…My work has received some attention and marvelous reviews, and people have liked the letters. And so they’re salable, apparently.” Vox
As the Guardian pointed out on its release, the film was not an instantly relatable commodity: not your typical bank heist; no real romance- both Israel and Hock are gay- and both of them are middle-aged, mostly falling out and making up. Towards the end, we see that Hock has AIDS, though this is not a major factor in the schema of the story; simply mentioned as a fact of life in the New York of the nineties.
When asked about the moral of her film version of Israel’s remarkable, striking story, Heller answers in surprise: “I’m not constructing a fable. I’m presenting real lives in all their messy complexity.”
What I think she is getting at - and my own take away from the film - is that we can all find ourselves one step away from falling on bad times, and that we don’t always make the best choices when that happens.
It appears an indictment also of the aching loneliness of modern life experienced by many people living in cities, who find themselves on the margins, unable to cope. Not to mention the fickle mores of the publishing industry.
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Thanks for this interesting essay, Kate. I enjoyed the film and may seek it out again.
Such an interesting story. It makes me want to read her faked letters to see if they're really that good!