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Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger
Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger
Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger
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Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Before turning to the criminal life, running a onewoman forgery scam out of an Upper West Side studio shared with her tortoiseshell cat, and dodging the FBI, Lee Israel enjoyed a celebrated reputation as an author. When her writing career suddenly took a turn for the worse, she conceived of the astonishing literary scheme that fooled even many of the experts. Forging hundreds of letters from such collectible luminaries as Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Lillian Hellman -- and recreating their autographs with a flourish -- Israel sold her "memorabilia" to dealers across the country, producing a collection of pitch-perfect imitations virtually indistinguishable from the voices of their real-life counterparts. Exquisitely written, with reproductions of her marvelous forgeries, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is Israel's delightful, hilarious memoir of a brilliant and audacious literary crime caper.

Editor's Note

Stealing celebrity style…

Hilarious reflections on petty crime ensue in this memoir about forging celebrity letters. Once a biographer, Lee Israel turned to impersonating celebrities in letters, which she says were her best writing. See celebrity culture through a new lens and ponder the irony of Melissa McCarthy playing Israel in the film adaptation.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 5, 2008
ISBN9781416553779
Author

Lee Israel

Lee Israel was the author of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Estee Lauder: Beyond the Magic, Kilgallen, and Miss Tallulah Bankhead. She also worked as a copyeditor for Scholastic and American Express Publishing. She died in 2015.

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Reviews for Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Rating: 3.2905404864864867 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I found it not overly interesting. It seemed almost as though she was bragging about what she had done. If it was me I would be wanting to keep it quiet.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This book might actually be the rare case where the movie might be better than the book!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This sketch of a book amounts to little more than a magazine article about Israel's career as a thief and forger. To fill it out, she includes multiple examples of the fake letters she created, pointing out which bits were hers and which came from the famous people she was aping. She is obviously proud of her work and generally seems unrepentant.But her fuck 'em attitude and snark kept me reading even as it repelled me. Looking forward to seeing the movie now.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Down-on-her-luck celebrity biographer Lee Israel came up with a money making scheme that both stretched her creativity and got her in trouble with the FBI. Using both her literary gifts and her research skills, she forged autographed letters supposedly written by twentieth century luminaries such as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, and Noel Coward, and sold them to brokers, who in turn sold them to collectors. Two of her Noel Coward forgeries even ended up in a book of the composer's collected correspondence. As her involvement in her crimes deepened, she even stole materials from archives and academic libraries.Eventually Israel had to face the music, but I don't have the impression that her conscience bothered her very much. She seems to have fancied herself as a folk anti-heroine, like Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde.This witty memoir, which can be read in about an hour, provides an interesting look at an uncommon crime.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    If you've seen the movie you can more or less skip the memoir but it's interesting if you want to see how true to life the movie was. The movie is a bittersweet delight thanks to the actors; the story as recounted in the book is tawdry and cheap. Israel's tone is matter of fact and even a little defiant; she comes across as largely unsympathetic although her writing is crisp and skillful. So if you're thinking about choosing, I would pick the movie, as the book is a largely unpleasant experience.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    No. No, I cannot. Not cool, Lee Israel. Lee was poor so she faked correspondence between famous people and other people. She got caught and now she's poor again so she writes a memoir. She tries to pretend to be reformed and Sorry, but she's not and you can tell by how gleefully she relishes her tale and how super clever and talented she still thinks she is. Ick.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    It is noticeable that this is titled memoirs of a lterary forger, rather than confessions. And that sets the tone of the piece. It is an odd combination of misery memior about her descent from making a living as an author to being broke enough to consider forgery. Then there is a sense of bragging about the letters she forged, which are quoted extensively, and how those who she fooled were clearly schmucks who deserved it. There's some interesting detail about watermarks and typewriters and the mechanics of the process, and that for me was the most interesting. The rest of it was a puff piece and overly full of padding. The author sounds unpleasant and unrepentant and I can't say I feel at all sorry for her and her self-inflicted predicament.The title is taken form a phrase she put into the Dorothy Parker letter and not a sense of the author's repentance for her crime.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Israel is incredibly entertaining in this slim memoir -- funny, insightful, and absolutely unapologetic. I recommended this to one of my favorite library patrons, a very discriminating reader, and he enjoyed it so much, he bought some as gifts. Those unfamiliar with the authors whose letters Israel forged will find the story interesting, but it is truly wonderful when you can appreciate her gift.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Interesting and at points hilarious, but her voice really pains me--snobby, bitchy, privileged. However, she led a fascinating life and I'm glad I had a chance to see part of it through this book.

    1 person found this helpful

Book preview

Can You Ever Forgive Me? - Lee Israel

Brick and Pigeons

I f with that last letter you pictured the urbane playwright in Switzerland, cigarette-holdered and smoking-jacketed, dashing off a letter in the 1960s from a cozy nook high up in Chalet Coward—the house he bought in the Alps to take advantage of Switzerland’s kinda gentler tax laws—located at Les Avants, Montreux, just down the mountain from the David Nivens at Château d’Oex, where Coward entertained guests that included Marlene, Garbo, George Cukor, Rebecca West, and a group that Elaine Stritch once called all the Dames Edith . . . you would be wrong.

Every letter reproduced here, along with hundreds like them, were turned out by me—conceived, written, typed, and signed—in my perilously held studio apartment in the shadow of Zabar’s on New York’s Upper West Side in 1991 and 1992. A room with a view not of Alpine splendor, but of brick and pigeons, a modest flat I took in the spring of 1969 with the seventy-five-hundred-dollar advance that G. P. Putnam’s Sons had given me to do my first book, a biography of Tallulah Bankhead. I sold those letters to various autograph dealers, first in New York City, and was soon branching out across the country and abroad—for seventy-five dollars a pop.

Noël Coward’s soi-disant letters were typed by me on what I remember was a 1950ish Olympia manual, solid as a rock, bigger than a bread box, not so much portable as luggable. (Noël’s Olympia was the one I would have the most trouble schlepping when the FBI was about to come calling.) For the nonce, I was content, researching my Tallulah bio—just me, my cat, and my contract, in my cozy, rent-controlled room-with-no-view.

I had never known anything but up in my career, had never received even one of those formatted no-thank-you slips that successful writers look back upon with triumphant jocularity. And I regarded with pity and disdain the short-sleeved wage slaves who worked in offices. I had no reason to believe life would get anything but better. I had had no experience failing.

Miss Tallulah Bankhead was a succès d’estime. The book had respectable sales and attracted many admirers, especially in the gay community. (By which I mean men. Lesbians don’t seem to harbor the gay sensibility with the same vigorous attention to detail as the guys who, I suspect, are born with the Great American Songbook clinging to the walls of their Y chromosomes.) I continued to be wined and wooed by publishers, in various venues of young veal and Beefeater gin. My second book, Kilgallen, was conceived at one of those chic, deductible lunches, over gorgeous gin martinis. My work on the book began in the mid-1970s and continued for about four years.

I researched at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, where I was always comfortable. (I had even given the library a percentage of my take on Tallulah.) Kilgallen sold well and made the best-seller list of The New York Times. It appeared for one week with a snippy little commentary by the book-section editor, running as a kind of footer—the commentary, not the editor. Since I had written for the Arts and Leisure section frequently, when it was under the talented editorship of Seymour Peck, the paper’s distaste for my work surprised and chagrined. No matter. I was now entitled to say that I was a New York Times best-selling author, and I frequently did. A particularly compelling part of the Kilgallen story was her controversial death, which had occurred just after she told friends that she was about to reveal the truth about the assassination of JFK. I remember swimming laps, with the mantra Who killed Dorothy? Who killed Dorothy? playing under my swim cap. I made money from my second book. Not Kitty Kelley, beachfront-property money, and no more than I would have made in four years in middle management at a major corporation . . . as if any major corporation would have had me, or I it. There was enough, however, to keep me in restaurants and taxis.

Wretched and Excessive

I was imprudent with money and Dionysian to the quick. Having worked so long and hard on the last book, I took many months off to play. I fell in love with a brilliant, beautiful bartender named Elaine, a lapsed Catholic who now observed only Bloomsday and St. Patrick’s—the first with solemnity, the latter with wretched excess. And so I took more time to play.

There were several false starts on various projects, which meant months of research, working on a particular book only to find that there was no book there. Not my kind of book. I had to abandon Judy Holliday, Bette Davis (she wanted me to co-author one of her several autobiographies, and when people asked me what had finally gone wrong with the project, I told them I yelled back!), Roy Cohn, Vanessa Redgrave, and Woody Allen. Of course, advances had to be returned, and in their entirety, though many thousands had been spent by me in determining that a book was not doable. Writers, unlike lawyers, doctors, agents, and Verizon Information, do not get paid when they fail or misjudge.


Just as I was down to the last five hundred of my remaining IRA, along came Estée Lauder, the colossus of fragrance and cosmetics, about whom Macmillan wanted an unauthorized biography—warts and all. I accepted the offer though I didn’t give a shit about her warts. I needed the money badly. Macmillan paid in the high five figures.

Before I could say gift with purchase, I was made another offer not to treat Estée’s warts. The counteroffer came from Estée herself through the late and unlamented attorney Roy Cohn, with a man named Lou Katz acting as intermediary and bag man in the wings. (In 2002 Katz would be extradited from Panama, where he had fled after being convicted of the murder of the new lover of his old boyfriend. He had been free for thirteen years before his capture.) He communicated with me through a mutual friend, Jack Hock, who had worked for him when Katz owned a gay bar called Uncle Charlie’s . . . which had seemed to me, on my several visits, not the least bit avuncular. The first offer from Estée-Cohn-Katz was $60,000—enough to settle the back taxes I owed the feds and to return an advance

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