Believe me, I lied
I've been reading Lee Israel's little book about her life in crime in Manhattan, "Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger," due out August 5. Israel had written three celebrity biographies (Talullah Bankhead, Dorothy Kilgallen, Estee Lauder), but by the early 1990s was deep in her cups, harassing people by telephone and subsisting on welfare. So she took to forging and selling letters from dead literati to keep body and soul together. Eventually, the jig was up and she drew a light sentence with no jail time. She then got a real job at Scholastic, which she insults as "the Spring Byington of the publishing world," and which probably saved her life.
The Times yesterday ran a story about Israel, sensibly raising the question of whether the account of an admitted liar can be believed, but didn't turn up any obvious faults. On the copyright page, in teeny type, we're told that "the characteristics of some individuals and the chronology of some events has been changed." To her credit, Israel doesn't include the caveat that immediately makes me drop a memoir: that some of the characters are composites.
Israel is talented and the writing is amusing -- sort of Damon Runyon with a better vocabulary -- but you can't miss the undertone of loathing. Fortunately, she treats herself no more kindly than anyone else. One can easily see how Israel could channel Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellmann, and Edna Ferber. A typical paragraph:
"About a month before this bad-news period began, I had received a stubby-pencil letter on cheap, lined paper with an odd return address. The first letter I had ever received from prison, it was from Jack Hock, my old bartending acquaintance whom I had kissed off several years previously. Jack was was a tall, wheaten-haired gay man, then in his early forties, though he lied about his age all the time. He kept his good looks in spite of the many beatings he had received, his friends told me, from hustlers for whose services he had refused to pay.... He was a chain-smoker and believed that the little stubby cigarette holder he fastened to the ends of cigarettes would keep him cancer-free. He often had a cigarette in one hand and a toothpick in the other. I don't think he knew about flossing; perhaps he just didn't believe in it."
I'll bet Israel is a hoot at parties, at least early in the evening. Her book is a trifle, but perhaps it will attract some work. A movie option has been sold. She could do a brilliant screenplay.
