“Armed with Noël Coward's diaries and a British dictionary, a New York author turned out some 150 forged letters... Down on her luck and desperate for money, Lee Israel sold the phony missives - along with hundreds of other notes in the name of such American literary luminaries as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman - to dealers in autographs and letters across the US.
To her delight… two of her compositions ended up in the critically-acclaimed Letters of Noël Coward when it was published last year… Indeed, she considers the inclusion of the bogus billets in the new collection, a 10-year project edited by Barry Day, one of the world's foremost experts on Coward, to be her greatest triumph. "For me, this was a big hoot and a terrific compliment," she writes in her book…
Miss Israel, who is unmarried, turned to a life of literary forgery in 1990 when her own writing career dried up and she was desperate to pay her rent and meet the vet's bills for a beloved cat…
She copied letterheads and signatures… then went to work with her ageing typewriter at home. She found a ready market from autograph dealers willing to pay her from $80 to $250, no questions asked, for each letter - including a one-off Humphrey Bogart…
Miss Israel was caught in a sting operation after she expanded her operations to stealing original letters from libraries - the one act that she admits causes her deep shame.
By contrast, she has no guilt about her output of forgeries. "I hewed close to the facts and didn't take real liberties with the truth. People enjoyed reading them and I don't feel any shame for that."
[Her memoir] is already causing a huge buzz in New York literary circles, with opinions sharply divided over whether Miss Israel should be condemned for her offences or hailed for her talents, [and it] has already been optioned for film rights…"
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