Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Memoirs of a Literary Forger

Lee Israel

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781416553779
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

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.

This Ain’t No Country Club, Lee

I t continued to be our modus operandi. Jack would make the sale and then meet me at an appointed restaurant or bar, then to my house to count the money. The sales hardly ever took more than half an hour, especially now that Jack was known to the dealers. Once he took more than an hour to meet me, and I joked, “Thought you’d run into the FBI.”

On July 27, 1992, noonish, I waited at a fancy kosher deli while my partner made a sales stop by appointment. It was ten minutes before I was seated, and another fifteen or so eating coleslaw out of a petri dish before a harried waitress appeared. I ordered pastrami on rye, which took a while to arrive. I ate. I’d been there more than an hour, stressed out and literally chewing the fat, when it occurred to me that Jack had probably misunderstood and gone directly from the dealer to my apartment. I got the check and planned to return home, where I hoped Jack was waiting for me.

I left the deli, hooding my eyes from the sun as I searched for my sunglasses, and was about to put them on—when a man, who’d been walking west fast, stopped very abruptly. I can still hear the braking shush of his shoe on the pavement. He called “Lee” as not quite a question. A native New Yorker, I encounter people all the time whom I cannot immediately place. But I knew then that I had never in my life set eyes on this man or the man who appeared to be with him—one was in my face, the other hung back. They were both short, both in natty suits fitting too snugly around the chest, and knotted ties. The man in my face showed me a big star affixed to his wallet that glinted in the sunlight. The lunch-hour crowd milled around us. I was full-face in a comic-book panel.

I’ve spent my life in a state of high anxiety, waiting for the Cossacks. I am always worried. When one cause of worry exits my skull it is replaced immediately by another. They meet shoulder to shoulder, one entering, the other exiting the cave leading to my tympanic membrane. So the din that had been created by my knowing that the dealers were onto me had not been a whole lot different from the time in high school when I hadn’t studied for a Spanish test; the worry over discovery, moreover, was assuaged by the fact that I thought the dealers would eschew any action that might bring publicity to their murky trade. But the appearance of the FBI agents made a difference. They were incarnational. Pushed my nagging warts into metastasizing tumors, turned my minor-key motif into a symphonic roar.

“We’d like to talk to you,” said the Ed Harris type, clearly in charge, looking over the jamming traffic for a more isolated spot. We crossed the street south. He told me that they had collared Jack as he arrived at the shop of one of the dealers who had become a cooperating witness in their ongoing investigation. The agent repeated to me what Jack had just told him, names of colleges primarily. This is of course a traditional technique, stressing the hopelessness of denying what is already known. There were, disappointingly, no Miranda warnings because I was not being arrested. Neither had Jack been arrested. The agent now tried to draw me into conversation, but I was lawyer-savvy. His mind seemed to be a lot on what he had promised Jack. “Mr. Hock has requested that you not try to reach or telephone or harass him in any way.” Sonofabitch Jack had been worked over by aggrieved tricks who’d blackened his eyes and broken his nose and kicked away his old teeth. But he was afraid of my mouth.

I left the agents and bought an enormous bottle of scotch, out of which, back at my apartment, I drank directly . . . while, hands shaking, I scissor-shredded pounds of research notes and the unused stationery of Noël, Lillian, Edna, Mrs. Parker, et al. I put the shredded paper into multiple Hefty bags. Running up the back stairs of my eighteen-story prewar apartment house, taking the steps three at a time—like a child, only panting—I dropped the individual bags alongside the garbage of sundry neighbors. Then I hied over to my mildewed locker—accessible by a whining and painfully slow industrial elevator—and woke up my gang of typewriters. I deposited them, one by one, in trash cans along a mile stretch of Amsterdam Avenue, watching the traffic to see if I was being surveilled.

Most of the old machines had been purchased at a hardware store on Broadway. After I had bought several of them, Mr. Farber, the owner, got up the nerve to ask me what I did with all the typewriters. I said kiddingly that I gave them to the homeless, a joke that now contained some truth, as they lay separately, their fates undecided, in wire receptacles up and down the Upper West Side.

I returned to my apartment, where I was “between beds.” So I lay on a bare mattress in the living room. I dragged on the scotch bottle and planned a fugitive’s flight to Fort Lauderdale, where my elderly mother and her husband lived, each beginning separate descents into senility. I would disappear from here. I would live with them in their retirement community, where the old men jingled pocket change while standing in line for a four p.m. early-bird seating. I’d hide in their cheesy bedroom closet, coming out for pot roast and an occasional swim. Made good sense to me as I lay there.

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It had been one of the dealers who made the first call to the FBI, and it was another dealer alerted to an imminent sales visit by Jack at whose shop the agents had nabbed my flaky confederate. The first dealer had become suspicious of some of the letters Jack sold to him, all stolen by me from Columbia, which I visited frequently. I wasn’t surprised; he was one of the few in his field who I suspected knew that provenance was not the capital of Rhode Island. The two FBI agents were actually in his office when Jack telephoned to tell him that he had an Edna St. Vincent Millay, a Jerome Kern, and a Thomas Wolfe. It was July 17, 1992. A meeting was set up with Jack for July 21. The dealer agreed to wear a wire. The agents followed Jack after he left the dealer’s office on July 21 and noted his meeting with me at an enormous tourist trap of a bar in the big toe of the Empire State Building, where I was sitting and sipping a Tanqueray martini. Per FBI report: “Hock was observed meeting and conversing with LEONORE ISRAEL. The defendant was later observed boarding a subway train with Israel.”

Developing the case against me was like shooting fish in a barrel, as I had known all along it would be. On every trip to any of the libraries I had to identify myself. I suppose I could have used false documents except that (1) it had never occurred to me, and (2) I wouldn’t have known how to get them. This is a sample of the evidence used by the government: “On July 22, 1992, investigating agents spoke with the Assistant Librarian for Manuscripts at Butler Library. . . . He confirmed that the letters sold to CW-1 did belong to Columbia and that forged copies of these letters were now in the files.” (CW-1 was FBI parlance for Cooperating Witness One: the dealer in this case who had first dropped a dime on me and my partner the rocket scientist.) The reports contained similar narratives about the other libraries I had visited.

Jack and I received subpoenas separately. I was directed to produce documents for a federal grand jury. There was absolutely no more contact between us now. The earlier state grand jury with which Alan Weiner had threatened me had never, for some reason, convened, though I did pay him incrementally the $5,000 he had demanded of me. (The money that I used to pay Weiner I obtained from the money Weiner was paying Jack for the letters I’d stolen from the various libraries which, it occurs to me, made Alan Weiner a sort of tertiary co-conspirator or, at the very least, a blackmailing patsy.) The two FBI agents, Ed Harris and Tonto, rang my bell that same evening after the meeting outside the pastrami palace and served me with a subpoena to produce documents to a federal grand jury appearance on the last day of July. The subpoena commanded me not to destroy any evidence, which was no problem since all of the evidence I could get my hands on had already been destroyed or, at least, scattered.

One of the documents associated with this period describes the agents’ visit to my apartment: “Served subpoena at approximately 6:00 p.m. Lee was at home and had been drinking scotch.” Correct. Lee was at home, and quite alone. I had maintained only casual friendships throughout my crime wave—and not too many of those. I had a mother in Florida and a stepfather; there was no way I was going to tell them how their best-selling author was paying her rent. I had a brother with whom I had never had much in common. Two wealthy and terrific gay men, a couple, Mark Upton and Coby Britton, were among the only outsiders in whom I confided. Coby had come into his considerable money through a forebear, the notorious power broker Mark Hanna, a turn-of-the-century Karl Rove. The descendants of Hanna, lucky Coby among them, owned most of Cleveland. I told Coby and Mark about my celebrity forgeries early in the undertaking. The three of us were lounging around their enormous blue pool in horsy Bernardsville, New Jersey, as one of Malcolm Forbes’s beautiful giant balloons wafted overhead. We had a great, laughing time with Trimester 1. Mark was so amused he turned down Betty Hutton’s “Pistol Packin’ Mama” to give my story his full attention. I can’t recall whether I told them about the letters stolen from universities. Coby was a Yale graduate and a Fulbright Scholar, and I didn’t know how my intellectual banditry would have sat with him. Whether I made full disclosure or not, I did notice in a future visit that the framed, handwritten letter of Virginia Woolf’s, once displayed in a cove underneath a staircase, had been removed.

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I began attorney shopping now. I stupidly surmised that I was owed talented pro bono representation, having written extensively for Ms. magazine and been associated in the past with civil rights causes. Ridiculous, of course. But I was in a protracted breakdown of sorts. I went first to see the formidable black feminist attorney Flo Kennedy, to whom I had spoken once at a party and with whom I had dined at an uptown Cantonese restaurant. She did not take the case. “Honey,” she said, “I’m old. I’m tired. And I’m going to Hawaii any minute.”

Another attorney saw the case as an opportunity to take a tandem media ride: best-selling author forced into life of crime to save cat’s life. He asked me straightaway to think about making a list of everyone I knew in the media. Then told me that I could get ten years for my crimes but that there might be mitigating circumstances. Was I going through menopause? Yes. That was going to be our defense. Temporary estrogen deprivation. Best-selling author undone by radical hormonal tumult. Don’t you hear us knocking, Sally Jessy?

When I came to my senses, I found a lawyer through the Federal Defenders Program. He was a smart, handsome, young Orthodox Jew named Lloyd Epstein. When I called him from a street phone he asked me to come right over. There was never any plea considered by either of us but guilty. And he was incredulous that an attorney had told me that I was looking at ten years. I might conceivably get a year and change. “Oh, my God,” I said. “You’ll bring a book,” Lloyd counseled.

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Many of the things I feared never happened to me. These were mostly dignity issues. My crime, in lawyers’ talk, was a sexy crime. That meant no drugs, no violence—intellectual shadings, literary stuff. I was a white defendant without a record who had written books. Nobody treated me disrespectfully on the federal level. I was never arrested, nor made to do a perp walk, nor put into a cell, nor manacled. The assistant United States Attorney assigned to my case was a thin, chic Asian woman. During our first face-to-face, I told her about why I had begun Trimester 1. She had to hear it, but the feds were interested only in Trimester 2: conspiracy to transport stolen property in interstate commerce, a class D felony. After our first session, Katherine Choo looked at the small watch on her thin wrist and said, “How about eleven-ish tomorrow?”

I was making no sense at all. I was crazed by the prospect of doing any time in jail. Nevertheless, drunk, unable to sleep, and flat broke again, I shoplifte...