The Art of Forgery: Lee Israel and
Can You Ever Forgive Me?

⭐️⭐️ Watch it. You can read the book tomorrow.

Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Photo by Mary Cybulsky/Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures

This film is based on the real-life story of a highly successful forger, who gets caught. The forger, Lee Israel, is sensitively played by Melissa McCarthy. Israel produced four hundred fake celebrity letters. She sold them to thirty, seasoned autograph dealers in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and all over the world for sometimes thousands of dollars. She always got cash. Two of her “Noël Coward” letters are included in The Letters of Noël Coward (2007).

She had been a reasonably successful biographer but fell on hard times.

Her books weren’t selling, she gets behind on her rent, and her cat was sick. Her agent (Jane Curtin) will not give her an advance payment on her current project—a biography of Fannie Brice—because “no one knows who Fanny Brice is anymore.” The agent suggests Israel “find another way to make a living.” Israel tries to get publishing people to talk to her by claiming to be Nora Ephron. Israel got a Cease-and-Desist letter from Ephron’s lawyers and an uncomfortable visit from Ephron’s private detective.

Melissa McCarthy as Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Fox Searchlight Pictures.

In addition to being broke, Israel was a misanthropic, chronically depressed, curmudgeonly alcoholic. Her apartment is so filthy the exterminator refuses to enter. Yet Melissa McCarthy makes her sympathetic.

Israel takes a series of lowly jobs for which she is comically overqualified. In one scene, she is ordered to rearrange some books but not to touch the books, one of which turns out to be one of Israel’s biographies. She has hit rock-bottom. Israel sells an authentic letter once sent to her by Katherine Hepburn and discovers the marketability of celebrity letters.

The title of the movie comes from one of Israel letters “by” Dorothy Parker. “I have a hangover that is a real museum piece; I’m sure then that I must have said something terrible. To save me this kind of exertion in the future, I am thinking of having little letters runoff saying ‘Can you ever forgive me? Dorothy.’

Israel realizes provenance is a crucial part of authenticity and concocts a story about a relative socialized with the elite of the literary and entertainment worlds. This relative allegedly left his valuable celebrity correspondence collection to her.

Israel had to put a lot of effort into learning how to imitate signatures. She used an old black and white television as a lightbox. She bought manual typewriters and had stationery with celebrity’s addresses printed on antique paper. The film shows her baking paper in her oven to make it look old.

But mainly the believability of the letters came from Israel’s punctilious attention to the style, rhythm, word use, spelling, and unique humor of the celebrities. “I stuck to basic biographical and emotional truths.” So, Israel was, in a twisted and criminal way, making a living as a writer, while also, obliquely, getting her revenge on the publishing world that discarded her.

After about a year and a half, one dealer became suspicious. The ethical standard of the Professional Autograph Dealers Association (PADA), then and now, stipulates that dealers forever guarantee the authenticity of their letters. A dealer returned some Lillian Hellman letters, but Israel is not told why. She discovers that watermarks can be dated, and the one on her Hellman letters was after the date Isreal had put on them. Israel stops dating letters preferring ambiguous chronological markers such as “Thanksgiving.” Another dealer told her that a line in a Noël Coward letter about his homosexuality was anachronistic. Coward would not have been so upfront about it at the time of the letter.

The film becomes an unlikely and charming buddy movie at this point. Israel decides to step away from the day-to-day sales of letters and instead relies on her delightful, roguish friend Jack Hock (winsomely played by Richad E. Grant). Hock turns out to be a better con artist than she. The relationship between the two is in many ways the centerpiece of the film.

The FBI got involved in the prosecution of Israel and Hock with the cooperation of an autograph dealer. Israel says that dealer “was one of the few in his field who I suspected knew that provenance was not the capital of Rhode Island.”

Israel lucked out in the judge assigned to her case: the eminent Robert W. Sweet. Israel pled guilty in 1993 to conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines. The authentic letters she stole were returned to their rightful institutions. Judge Sweet let her off easy with five years of probation and six months of house arrest. She was banned for the rest of her life from archives and libraries in the New York area. The court ordered her to undertake alcohol treatment, but she did not comply. At trial, the FBI said it suspected some of her letters were still in the hands of collectors.