Which unnamed soprano murdered Noel Coward's tropical pet fish? CRAIG BROWN delves further into bogus letters written by talented celebrity forger

By Craig Brown for the Daily Mail
Published: 01:16 GMT, 22 January 2015 | Updated: 01:33 GMT, 22 January 2015

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Talented forger Lee Israel published a series of bogus letters, including ones 'written' by Noel Coward
On Tuesday, I wrote about Lee Israel, who died in New York on Christmas Eve, aged 75.
In the Seventies and Eighties she had been a successful biographer, but had taken to drink, and fallen out with her publishers. She was clearly impossible.
‘I was not in the flower of mental health,’ she later admitted, having been thrown out of a New York bookstore for drunkenly berating the staff.
She began executing malicious pranks, getting her own back on those who had rejected her. ‘The AA crowd calls it “drinking and dialling”,’ she recalled.
‘Loaded up, usually on gin, and adoring my own larkiness, I’d telephone somebody who was once my buddy but was now in “meetings” all the time. I’d make a second call, with just a slight change in attitude and voice, identifying myself often as Norah Ephron. The erstwhile confrere would come on in a trice, usually with a warm, “Hiya, Norah,” whereupon I shouted, “Star f*****! Is that one word or two?” and hung up.’
Alerted by Norah Ephron, two detectives arrived at Lee Israel’s apartment.
‘They used words like harassment. ‘“Well,” I said, “if she can’t take a joke...” I promised to cease and also desist, but knew the impulsivity that gin induces would inevitably chivvy me to the telephone. Fortunately, it was disconnected for non-payment before I could get myself into serious trouble.’
Around this time, she diverted her talents for mimicry into the forgery of letters by famous people, among them Noel Coward, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill and Humphrey Bogart.
Over a period of 15 months she composed roughly 400 bogus letters, using a variety of ancient typewriters, for added authenticity. She sold these letters to dealers at such knockdown prices that they never bothered to check their provenance. ‘Most dealers didn’t know that Provenance was not the capital of Rhode Island,’ she observed, wittily.
Lee Israel had a pitch-perfect ear for literary mannerisms. Some of her imitations are as good as the originals, perhaps even better. ‘Ms Israel’s career married scholarship, fabrication, forgery and outright theft,’ read her New York Times obituary. A more gracious obituarist might have added ‘brilliance’, as she possessed an uncanny ability to get to the heart of those she imitated.
For instance, she once faked a letter from Dorothy Parker, the famous New York wit and alcoholic. It matches Parker’s caustic tone precisely.
‘Dear Joshua,’ it begins. ‘Alan told me to write and apologise. So I am doing that now, while he dresses our turkey dinner with the boys across the road. I have a hangover that is a real museum piece; I’m sure then that I must have said something terrible.
The writer had a pitch-perfect ear for literary mannerisms, which included Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill, Humphrey Bogart and Clifton Webb (pictured)
'To save me this kind of exertion in the future, I am thinking of having letters run off saying, “Can you ever forgive me? Dorothy.” ’
But, as I mentioned in my last column, Noel Coward was her piece de resistance. ‘I loved doing Noel,’ she wrote later. ‘I sat down with his diaries and a British dictionary and a collection of Noelisms for inspiration. He was so outre. It was such fun.’
In one of her Coward letters, she has the ageing playwright hit out at the up-and-coming ‘kitchen sink’ school of dramatists.
‘My professional demise has been predicted gleefully for years now by the same types who blame the Queen Mother for their own dreary lives and meagre talents . . . Any intercourse with them leaves me bored and inordinately depressed.’

In one of her Coward letters, she has the ageing playwright question which unnamed soprano killed his tropical fish - though he concedes that it 'could have been a suicide'
In another, her Coward criticises an unnamed soprano: ‘I am quite certain that it is her high “C” that killed my tropical fish, though he conceivably could have been a suicide.’
Her ability as a mimic was so fine that two of her Coward forgeries found their way into the authorised edition of his letters, published in 2007. ‘For me, this was a big hoot and a terrific compliment,’ she said, adding that all her forgeries ‘were fun, and nobody got hurt, and everybody made money’.
But, after a while, dealers began to grow suspicious and alerted the FBI. She had to act quickly. In her memoirs, Israel writes of the difficulty of getting rid of all her vintage typewriters, dumping them ‘one by one in trash cans along a mile stretch’.

Lee Israel had far more success with her celebrity letters than she did with books published under her own name — including biographies of Tallulah Bankhead (left) and Estee Lauder (right)
The typewriter she used for the Coward letters, a Fifties Olympia, ‘solid as a rock’, was, she said, ‘the one I would have most trouble schlepping when the FBI was about to come calling’.
And come calling they did. For these and other offences, Lee Israel was sentenced to five years’ probation and six months’ house arrest. But even those who secured her conviction couldn’t help but admire her.
‘She was brilliant,’ said the lead FBI investigator, Carl Burrell, after her death this Christmas Eve. He suspects some of Lee Israel’s forgeries are still in circulation. It makes you wonder how many will pop up in the next grand volume of letters by Hemingway, Coward, Parker or O’Neill. And how will we know when they do?

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