“She drank an awful lot - she was an alcoholic,” friend David Yarnell said shortly after her death. She was an alcoholic who could be nasty at times. It also laid the foundation for her to refine her skills for future forgeries that she sold for slightly more money.ĭolly Wells character, Anna, is fictional. "For the first time in a long time, I had some jingle in my jeans," she said. It was hardly a windfall, but by 1991 it was enough to help her make ends meet. "There was a big white space at the bottom of a letter after 'Yours truly, Fanny Brice.' I got an old typewriter, and I wrote a couple of hot sentences that improved the letter and elevated the price." She sold each one for $40 a piece. Israel tucked them in her shoes to conceal them and walked out the door. "I went to the library and was given a bunch of letters, which I should not have been given in a nonsecure area." Instead of returning all of the letters, she kept a few letters written by stage, screen and radio star Fanny Brice.
" happened incrementally, like most evil things do," Israel told NPR in 2008. What was the first crime that Lee Israel committed? “I had no reason to believe life would get anything but better.” In addition to ending up on welfare, the true story reveals that it wasn't long before Israel committed her first criminal act. “I regarded with pity and disdain the short-sleeved wage slaves who worked in offices,” she wrote in her memoir. A 9-to-5 job was out of the question and friends say that she wouldn't have had the temperament for it. Like in the movie, she was overburdened by unpaid bills and a sick cat that needed veterinary care. "I had never known anything but ‘up’ in my career," she stated in her memoir. After the failure of her 1985 biography on Estée Lauder, her career went into decline and she struggled to make ends meet. "I had made a mistake," Israel would later write in her own memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me? "Instead of taking a great deal of money from a woman rich as Oprah, I published a bad, unimportant book, rushed out in months to beat to market." It was trashed by critics and became a failure commercially as well.
Israel refused and Lauder retaliated by writing her own memoir, which was published in the fall of 1985 to coincide with the release of Israel's biography.Īs a result, Israel had to hurry her book, Estée Lauder: Beyond the Magic, to completion. According to Israel, Lauder tried to repeatedly pay her off to drop the project. They wanted it to be an unauthorized biography that didn't hold back in exposing the less-than-savory sides of the cosmetics magnate. Israel addresses this in her memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me? She explains that Macmillan Publishing gave her an advance in 1983 to start the project on Lauder. Her second book, Kilgallen: A Biography of Dorothy Kilgallen, focused on the journalist and regular panelist on the television game show What's My Line? That book made it onto The New York Times Best Sellers List in 1980, the year of its release.ĭid a poorly received biography of cosmetics mogul Estée Lauder really send Lee Israel's career into a tailspin?
In 1972, she published her first biographical book, Miss Tallulah Bankhead, which focused on the life of the stage and screen actress known for her outrageous personality and husky voice. Israel's work in magazines continued into the 1970s. The piece was published in Esquire in November 1967. She traveled to California to profile Katharine Hepburn shortly after the death of her longtime companion Spencer Tracy. Long before the infamous Lee Israel letters, she started her career in the 1960s by working as a freelance writer for magazines, contributing articles on theater, film and television to The New York Times, Soap Opera Digest, and other periodicals.
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