Before turning to her life of crime, running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar, and dodging the FBI, Lee Israel had a legitimate, even celebrated, career as an author of biographies. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times bestseller, and her second on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen made a splash in the headlines when Lee revealed in her research that Kilgallen had perhaps been murdered before she could speak publicly about her final, private interview with Oswald-assassin Jack Ruby.

With her reputation soaring as well as her advances, Lee signed on for a biography of cosmetics giant Estee Lauder--and almost instantly, Lauder herself made it clear through lawyer and mouthpiece Roy Cohn that she would not cooperate and would be writing her own side of the story. The biography was a disaster and Lee's career began to sink along with it.

By 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio and care for her adored cat Jersey, Lee made a bold and irreversable career change: inspired by a letter she'd received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats. Between 1990 and 1991, she wrote more than 300 letters in the voices of, among others, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, and Noel Coward--and sold the forgeries to memorabilia and autograph dealers, beginning in New York and soon across the country.