There had been some snide little items about her (Dorothy Kilgallen) in the columns, an occasional short profile in the magazines, and frequent strafing from television performers. Jack Paar led the pack in 1960, taking up Sinatra's slack. That tempestuous round began when Dorothy swiped at him in the column over his impassioned support of Fidel Castro. She was violently opposed to the new Cuban leader and peppered her column with anti-Castro items, many of which appear to have been fed to her by Miami-based exiles or CIA fronts on an almost daily basis. Paar retaliated on his prime-time, high-rated television show.

Under the headline NEW DOROTHY KILGALLEN EXCLUSIVE - TALE OF "RICH OIL MAN" AT RUBY CLUB - Dorothy printed Mark's secret testimony. But his testimony implicated a trio at the Carousel: Ruby, Tippit, and Weissman. Reexamining the transcript of Ruby's testimony before the commission, she noticed that the questions posed to him concerned not a trio, but a quartet. Earl Warren, in his questioning, informed Ruby that Lane had said: "In your Carousel Club you and Weisman (sic) and Tippit... and a rich oil man had an interview or conversation for an hour or two."

Dorothy, who did not have access yet to the complete Warren Report, had to deduce:

"The mention of the "rich oil man" by Chief Justice Warren would indicate then, that the Commission was informed of the meeting by a source other than Mr. Lane, and that this second source provided the name of a fourth party - the oil man. If that is not the case, if the Commission had only Mr. Lane's testimony to go on, it would appear that the oil man was "invented" by the investigators. And it is difficult to imagine the Commission doing any such thing.

The introduction of the rich oil man into the questioning effectively discombobulated the already-confused Jack Ruby.

When the report was released, it was clear that no testimony was given by any of the 552 witnesses about a rich oil man. Either there was a significant omission in the report of the Warren Commission, or the oil man was part of the unofficial corpus of information to which Warren was privy, or Dorothy's thesis - however "difficult to imagine" - was correct.

During one of her (Kilgallen’s) visits - sometime in March, before the verdict – she prevailed upon Joe Tonahill to make arrangements through Judge Brown for a private interview with Jack Ruby.

Brown, awestruck by Dorothy, acceded readily to Tonahill’s request. The meeting room in the jailhouse was bugged, and Tonahill suspected that Brown’s chambers were as well. Brown and Tonahill chose a small office off the courtroom behind the judge’s bench. They asked Ruby’s ubiquitous flank of four sheriff’s guards to consent to remain outside the room.

Dorothy was standing by the room during a noon recess. Ruby appeared with Tonahill. The three entered the room and closed the door. The defendant and Dorothy stood facing each other, spoke of their mutual friend, and indicated that they wanted to be left alone. Tonahill withdrew. They were together privately for about eight minutes, in what may have been the only safe house Ruby had occupied since his arrest.

Dorothy would mention the fact of the interview to close friends, but never the substance. Not once, in her prolific published writings, did she so much as refer to the private interview. Whatever notes she took during her time alone with Jack Ruby in the small office off the judge’s bench were included in a file she began to assemble on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

As the thirtieth anniversary of the JFK assassination approaches, I must tell the world about a 58-year-old man who can identify the conspirators. What follows has never been published before. I am a journalism student at Virginia Commonwealth University who was born after the assassination. I don't have the money to travel to New York City where I know of people who can testify that this 58-year-old man holds the key. In the limited time I have had to solicit media people who could expose this story, they have all dismissed the idea as libelous. The Washington Post and the New York Press (a free weekly) turned it down. My faculty has no pull.

So please, somebody, steal the following story! I'm a poor student who must prepare for final exams. Can you send this along to a journalist you know who can publish or broadcast it? He or she knows that the best defense against libel is the truth, which is:

The JFK assassination conspirators recruited Ron Pataky, now 58, to seduce and kill journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. Their motive was to prevent her from printing the truth about November 22, 1963 in her widely read newspaper. She had already published front-page stories in newspapers around the country implicating Chief Justice Earl Warren and the Justice Department in the cover-up. She worked closely with Mark Lane, a lawyer who in 1964/65 was working on his ground-breaking assassination book "Rush To Judgment." He gave Kilgallen leads for her news stories. In the fall of 1965, she told him and other friends that she was about to travel to Dallas, where she expected to find evidence that would break the JFK case wide open.

But on November 7, 1965, a newspaper columnist named Ron Pataky waited for his intimate friend Dorothy Kilgallen to arrive for a prearranged meeting in the cocktail lounge of New York's Regency Hotel. That night she appeared as usual as a panelist on the TV game show called "What's My Line?". Millions of people around North America saw her figure out the careers of two contestants as CBS broadcast the series live from 10:30 to 11:00 pm. She then joined Bob Bach, the producer of "What's My Line?", at a club called P.J. Clarke's, whose employees later admitted having seen her. After midnight, she left Bach to visit the cocktail lounge of the Regency Hotel (Park Ave. and 61st St.), whose employees have never admitted what they saw.

One Regency employee, Harvey Daniels (press agent), did tell a writer in 1976 that he saw Kilgallen enter the cocktail lounge at about 1:00 am on November 8. But he did not pay attention to where or with whom she sat. He left the building shortly thereafter. This writer who interviewed him is Ms. Lee Israel, a veteran magazine journalist whose conversations with Helen Gahagan Douglas and Katherine Hepburn had appeared in Esquire and Saturday Review. When Ms. Israel tried to interview other Regency employees for the Kilgallen book she was working on, the management (Loews Hotels) warned her away.

I found out earlier this month (November 1993) that several employees of the Regency who were on duty that night still work there. The only name I know is John Mahon, a bartender. He told me that he and various waiters and bellhops will talk if you clear it with Loews Hotels. The contact person, Debra Kelman, did NOT work there in 1976 when Loews told Lee Israel to keep away.

The direct line to Debra Kelman is 212-545-2833. On the phone she sounds too young to remember the assassination. But I don't have the money to stay in New York to interview anyone.

What could you get out of an interview with a Regency employee? Well, the official cause of Dorothy Kilgallen's death is an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol, "circumstances undetermined." I interviewed Ron Pataky and I believe he gave her a Mickey Finn in that hotel lounge. When Loews Hotels warned away Lee Israel in 1976, the media did not have the power it has today. Oprah Winfrey and cable TV had not yet come along, and the JFK assassination was still largely a taboo topic. Someone who approaches Loews and then bartender John Mahon and other Regency employees may get better results today.

You might wonder about contacting Ron Pataky. I already interviewed him on the phone for three hours and taped it. In the beginning of the conversation he became very upset when I asked about his frequent stays at the Regency in 1964/65. He then rambled on about his "close friendship" with Dorothy Kilgallen. He later admitted to talking to her on the phone long distance five times a week, often at three in the morning. He revealed that she made overseas calls to him from a vacation she made to Europe, and she sometimes used his Regency Hotel suite to change clothes before they painted the town in New York. He says he wrote the lead paragraph to one of her JFK articles. He first met her a year and five months before she died, but he denies that they had an affair.

Kilgallen ran one last column on the JFK assassination on September 3, 1965. It was little more than a rehash of questions surrounding the photos, and an assertion that if Marina Oswald could explain the "real story" it would undoubtedly cause a "sensation." She closed by vowing, "This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive - and there are a lot of them."

She evidently found time to investigate one lead on her own in New Orleans. Her make-up artist for "What's My Line?" recalled Kilgallen telling him in October that she had planned to go to New Orleans to meet someone who would give her "information on the case." The appendix to Israel's book indicates that the contact was either Jim Garrison or one of

his associates. This would make a great deal of sense. Mark Lane, in addition to providing Kilgallen with information, would also become a prime source of assistance to Garrison once his "investigation" kicked into high gear, and it may be possible that he or one of the other conspiracy authors he associated himself with, had referred Garrison to Kilgallen. It is worth noting that the connections of Lane and his associates to Garrison is never mentioned in Israel's book.

What she learned, if anything, was never written up. In the early morning hours of November 8, 1965, just four hours after doing the live broadcast of "What's My Line?" and not long after she had left her next-day's column under the door of her apartment, Dorothy Kilgallen died under circumstances that remain puzzling to this day. The official explanation of complications from barbiturates and alcohol remains dubious to some people because they felt that Kilgallen was largely over her addictions by 1965, especially since she had recently begun a happy affair with a gentleman Israel describes as "The Out-Of-Towner". The tape of the "What's My Line?" broadcast however, clearly shows her slurring her speech at various points (not "crisply perfect" as Israel falsely claims). None of this affected her game-playing abilities, which were always superior to any other member of the panel, but it is clear that she was not in the best of health that particular night. In 1978, HSCA counsel Robert Blakey asked for a review of Kilgallen's autopsy (a copy of which is in the JFK Assassination files in the National Archives), but he and his staff evidently found nothing worth pursuing since no mention of Kilgallen ever made it into the final report.

Someone might be able to prove someday that there was more to Dorothy Kilgallen's death than met the eye that night. But if someone succeeds in doing that, he will still not be able to show that it could have had any remote connection with the JFK assassination. If one encompasses everything she knew at the time of her death, it is clear that she did not have a clue as to what the truth really was. Her entire investigation had consisted of shoddy detective work on her part, coupled with false and misleading information from a dishonest gentleman named Mark Lane. Had she been able to tell the world everything she knew on the night of her death, they would have been given another sneak preview of some of the stories Mark Lane would trumpet in his book (I) Rush To Judgment (I), as well as a possible preview of some of Jim Garrison's outlandish assertions that culminated in his witchhunt against Clay Shaw. In both instances, Kilgallen had been nothing more than a courier, not an investigator. Considering that no ill-fortune befell either Lane or Garrison when their respective work appeared in full bloom by 1966 and 1967, the likelihood of Kilgallen's death being assassination-related becomes even more remote. Indeed, the FBI files available to us, indicate that at no time were they ever concerned about the nature of any of her 1964 assertions about the case that were fed to her by Lane. The only thing about Dorothy Kilgallen that ever worried the FBI was the prospect of more columns unjustly maligning their image if they continued their investigation of who leaked the Ruby transcript to her.

Dorothy Kilgallen was without question a bright, intelligent woman who had solid credentials as a reporter, and who was the key to much of the success of "What's My Line?". It is unfortunate that at a time when she was not up to her best standards of health and deductive reasoning, she became a willing target for the deceptions of Mark Lane and company. She would not have been the first intelligent person to fall victim to Lane's chicanery. The distinguished historian Hugh Trevor-Roper also would be suckered by Lane, when he agreed to write the introduction to (i) Rush To Judgment (ii) and made assertions about the case that only repeated unchallenged what Lane had told him. So too, did Dorothy Kilgallen have a bizarre willingness to accept everything Lane had given to her without utilizing any of her usual skills of reporter's skepticism and investigative prowess. The end result caused her tragic death to be surrounded in pointless sensationalism and disinformation that ultimately did her memory a tragic disservice.

So posterity needs to evaluate each mysterious death according to how plausible the murder theory is. Lee Israel puts in this book some evidence that a broken love affair with Johnnie Ray and the fall of the Hearst newspaper empire gave Dorothy Kilgallen trouble sleeping, and she could have mixed barbiturates with booze. But Lee also details the strange circumstances of Dorothy's death. Police and medical examiner reports say her body was found in a bed in which she never slept. Nobody slept in it. It was a showroom to convince celebrity houseguests who partied in the next room that everything was hunky dory in the 25 - year marriage of Dorothy and her husband Richard Kollmar.

There was no pill bottle on the bedside table or anywhere else in the death scene. Dorothy had fallen "asleep" while reading a new novel by Robert Ruark, even though she had said in her newspaper column four months earlier that the protagonist of the book dies in the end. She had discussed said novel with her hairdresser Marc Sinclaire some weeks before cops and doctors found the book in her dead hand. She had told Mr. Sinclaire that she had enjoyed the work after having finished reading it.

That's what you will find in this book. Now I'll add the two things I've seen while sight seeing. First, you can find Dorothy Kilgallen's death certificate at the National Archives in Maryland, a popular tourist site. In the section where the doctor makes the classification of natural causes, suicide, homicide, etc., the thing says "undetermined pending further investigation." Strangely, the deputy medical examiner of Brooklyn signed it "for James Luke," the chief medical examiner. Kilgallen died in the borough of Manhattan, and Dr. Luke had no reason not to sign it. He visited the death scene for 45 minutes, according to the Washington Post obituary. That Brooklyn deputy M.E., Dominick Di Maio, is still alive.

The second thing I've seen that's not in the book is a video interview with criminal defense attorney Joe Tonahill preserved at Lamar University in Texas. On it he says his last telephone conversation with Dorothy Kilgallen happened a short time before she died, "maybe a week before." They planned to participate in a radio talk show about the JFK assassination, but she died before the plans could materialize. Shortly before that conversation, Dorothy visited Miami to discuss Oswald, etc. on the talk show of a young Larry King. The same Larry now on CNN.

John Simkin: Does Florence Pritchett’s son object to his mother being named as the long-time mistress of JFK or by the suggestion that she might have been one of Kilgallen’s sources?

Lee Israel: Yes. He says his mother lay dying of leukemia for months so she couldn't have been Kilgallen's source on anything but side effects of medication that was scarcely available then.

John Simkin: In your book you do not mention that Pritchett was JFK’s mistress. Is that because you did not know or was it a case of you protecting her privacy?

Lee Israel: It was totally irrelevant. I didn't drop the name Judith Campbell Exner, either.

John Simkin: You do not mention that Pritchett was married to Earl E. T. Smith, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Cuba (1957-59). Did you know that at the time you wrote the book? Is it not possible that Pritchett passed on information to Kilgallen as a result of her relationship with her husband and JFK?

Lee Israel: Yes, I did know that. I also knew that when Kilgallen visited New Orleans and Dallas, the poor ambassador was preoccupied with his dying wife.

John Simkin: In your book you make a lot of Kilgallen’s relationship with the man you call the "Out-of-Towner". In fact, you imply that he was in some way involved in her death. Is it correct that the man’s name is really Ron Pataky?

Lee Israel: Yes.

John Simkin: Did you find any evidence that Ron Pataky was working for the CIA?

Lee Israel: No. Only that he dropped out of Stanford in 1954 and then enrolled in a training school for assassins in Panama or thereabouts.

John Simkin: Do you believe that Ron Pataky murdered Dorothy Kilgallen?

Lee Israel: He had something to do with it.

The book (Miss Tallulah Bankhead) had respectable sales and attracted many admirers, especially in the gay community. (By which I mean men. Lesbians don't seem to harbor the gay sensibility with the same vigorous attention to detail as the guys who, I suspect, are born with the Great American Songbook clinging to the walls of their Y chromosomes.) I continued to be wined and wooed by publishers, in various venues of young veal and Beefeater gin. My second book, Kilgallen, was conceived at one of those chic, deductible lunches, over gorgeous gin martinis. My work on the book began in the mid-1970s and continued for about four years.

I researched at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, where I was always comfortable. Kilgallen sold well and made the best-seller list of The New Y.ork Times. It appeared for one week with a snippy little commentary by the book-section editor, running as a kind of footer - the commentary, not the editor. Since I had written for the Arts and Leisure section frequently, when it was under the talented editorship of Seymour Peck, the paper's distaste for my work surprised and chagrined. No matter. I was now entitled to say that I was a New York Times best-selling author, and I frequently did. A particularly compelling part of the Kilgallen story was her controversial death, which had occurred just after she told friends that she was about to reveal the truth about the assassination of JFK... I made money from my second book... Not.... beachfront-property money, and no more than I would have made in four years in middle management at a major corporation. There was enough, however, to keep me in restaurants and taxis.

In a rented storage locker on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the writer Lee Israel kept a cache of antique typewriters: Remingtons and Royals, Adlers and Olympias. Each was tenderly curated, hung with a tag whose carefully lettered names � Edna, Dorothy, Noël, Eugene O'Neill, Hellman, Bogart, Louise Brooks � hinted at the felonious intimacy for which the machines were used.

Ms. Israel, who died in Manhattan on Dec. 24 at 75, was a reasonably successful author in the 1970s and '80s, writing biographies of the actress Tallulah Bankhead, the journalist Dorothy Kilgallen and the cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder.

In the early 1990s, with her career at a standstill, she became a literary forger, composing and selling hundreds of letters that she said had been written by Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, Lillian Hellman and others. That work, which ended with Ms. Israel's guilty plea in federal court in 1993, was the subject of her fourth and last book, the memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?,  published by Simon & Schuster in 2008.

The memoir drew mixed notices. But if nothing else, it remains a window onto its author's hubris and nemesis, and onto the myriad discontents of the freelance writer's life, a  "New Grub Street"  for the late 20th century. As Ms. Israel told it, her forgeries were born less of avarice than of panic and began after a stretch of poor reviews and writer's block, mixed with alcohol and improvidence. What was more, those who knew her said this week, she possessed a temperament that made conventional employment nearly impossible.

"She drank an awful lot - she was an alcoholic," David Yarnell, a friend, said in an interview on Monday. "And she was very feisty, and people did not want to work with her."

Ms. Israel's criminal career married scholarship, fabrication, forgery and outright theft. Using the research skills she had honed as a writer, she scoured her subjects' memoirs for salient biographical details; their published letters for epistolary style; and their original, archived letters for typing idiosyncrasies. She bought a flock of period typewriters from secondhand shops and, on furtive library visits, tore blank sheets of vintage paper from the backs of old journals.

She managed to fly under the radar by charging little, selling her creations to autograph dealers around the country for about $50 to $100 each. She made it up in volume, she said in her memoir, generating some 400 letters over about a year and a half.

Ms. Israel was, by all accounts, a remarkable literary mimic. "She was brilliant," Carl Burrell, a retired F.B.I. agent who was the lead investigator on her case, said on Tuesday.

He recalled one letter with particular fondness. "My favorite was Hemingway," Agent Burrell said. "He was complaining about Spencer Tracy being cast as the main character in ‘The Old Man and the Sea.' "

Two of Ms. Israel's gossipy Coward impersonations - one of which describes Julie Andrews as "quite attractive since she dealt with her monstrous English overbite" - found their way into "The Letters of Noël Coward," published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2007. Of her body of forgeries, Ms. Israel wrote in her memoir, "I still consider the letters to be my best work."

By dealing in typed letters, Ms. Israel was obliged to copy only the signatures. This she did by tracing over the originals, first covertly in libraries and later in her Upper West Side apartment, originals in hand. For over time, after whispers among dealers about the authenticity of her wares made composing new letters too risky, Ms. Israel had begun stealing actual letters from archives - including the New York Public Library and the libraries of Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities - and leaving duplicates in their place.

"She would go into these libraries and copy the letter in question, go back to her home and fake as best she could the stationery and fake the signature, and then she'd go back to the institution and make the switch," David H. Lowenherz, a New York autograph dealer, said on Monday. "So she was actually not selling fakes: She was substituting the fakes and selling the originals."

Leonore (some sources spell it Lenore) Carol Israel was born in New York City on Dec. 3, 1939. After attending Midwood High School in Brooklyn, she earned a bachelor's degree in speech from Brooklyn College in 1961. In the 1960s and '70s she was a freelance writer, contributing articles on film, theater and television to The New York Times, Soap Opera Digest and other publications.

Ms. Israel's first book, Miss Tallulah Bankhead, was published in 1972; her second, Kilgallen, spent one week, at No. 15, on the Times best-seller list in 1980. Her third, Estée Lauder: Beyond the Magic (1985), was largely eclipsed by Ms. Lauder's own memoir, published pre-emptively at the same time.

Reviewing Ms. Israel's biography in The Times Book Review in 1985, Marylin Bender faulted its "incoherent style," adding that the book "comes off as a cut-rate job." Until then, Ms. Israel wrote in her memoir, "I had never known anything but ‘up' in my career." But even afterward, when she went on welfare, a 9-to-5 job was beyond contemplation. "I regarded with pity and disdain the short-sleeved wage slaves who worked in offices," she wrote. "I had no reason to believe life would get anything but better."

When life did not, Ms. Israel, visiting the  New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, slipped three letters by Fanny Brice into her shoe, and by 1991 her new calling was underway. It ended the next year, after Mr. Lowenherz learned that an original letter he had purchased from Ms. Israel - from Ernest Hemingway to Norman Cousins � was actually owned by Columbia. He met with the university librarian.

"He had a forgery," Mr. Lowenherz said on Monday. "I said, ‘Is there any way you can tell who had recent access to this letter?' He came back and said: ‘We have this card. It's signed by Lee Israel.' "

Mr. Lowenherz alerted the F.B.I., and in June 1993 Ms. Israel pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to transport stolen property in interstate commerce. She was sentenced to six months' house arrest and five years' probation. The court also directed her to attend an alcohol-treatment program, "which," Ms. Israel wrote breezily in her memoir, "I never did."

The letters she stole have been returned to their archives. It is likely, however, that at least some of Ms. Israel's outright forgeries remain in circulation, Agent Burrell said. Ms. Israel, whose death, from complications of myeloma, was confirmed by Mr. Yarnell, lived alone and had no children. Information on other survivors could not be confirmed. In recent years, she earned her living as a copy editor for Scholastic magazines, commuting daily to the company's office in Lower Manhattan.

In 1993, New York author Lee Israel found herself staring down the barrel of a prison sentence. Following an investigation by the FBI, she had been busted as a literary forger. For the past two years, the 53-year-old biographer and journalist had made a killing – not a fortune, but enough to pay the arrears on her rent and get her beloved sick cat treated by the vet – by inventing letters from well-known wits of the mid-20th century. In a series of clever fakes bashed out on vintage Remingtons and Adlers sourced from local junk shops, Israel had ventriloquised funny one-pagers from the likes of Noël Coward, the actor Fanny Brice and, her particular favourite, the satirist Dorothy Parker. With Israel in charge, Brice, of Funny Girl fame, quipped about the size of her nose, Parker apologised for being drunk yet again – "I'm sure that I must have said something terrible" – and Coward was bitchy about Marlene Dietrich, that "canny old Kraut", whom he nonetheless professed to cherish. These amuse-bouches were then fenced for cash by Israel in those venerable independent bookshops of Manhattan that did a bit of literary memorabilia-dealing on the side. As long as the signature looked OK - and Israel practised those to perfection – no one bothered to ask searching questions about provenance.

In the end, Israel didn't see the inside of a cell, getting off instead with six months' house arrest and five years' probation. Nor did she go down as one of the great forgers of literary history: no one mentioned her in the same breath as Thomas Chatterton or even the "Hitler diaries". In fact, no one mentioned her at all, which for any writer is galling, but for one with Israel's ego was simply unbearable. She was justly proud of her work, of the way she had immersed herself in her subjects' lives and writing in order to absorb their voices by osmosis before sending them out again into the world, duly refreshed. Nor did she regard this is as a mere sideline, but instead turned out fakes on an industrial scale, generating 400 letters in a year and a half.

"My success as a forger was somehow in sync with my erstwhile success as a biographer," Israel wrote later. "I had for decades practised a kind of merged identity with my subjects; to say I ‘channelled' is only a slight exaggeration." She was careful to add just enough juice to make her documents piquant without making them so improbable that flags would be raised. In Israel's letters, Coward snipes mildly about Julie Andrews' overbite, while Ernest Hemingway grumbles about Spencer Tracy being cast in The Old Man and the Sea. Israel remained unrepentant about these literary larcenies: "The forged letters were larky and fun and totally cool."...

The film of Can You Ever Forgive Me? has had a long and troubled genesis, as any film as interestingly genre-busting as this is likely to have. It is not a heist movie, though the scenes where Israel is in danger of getting caught smuggling letters out of research libraries will get your heart racing. The central love story is a platonic one between a gay man and a gay woman, both aged over 50, who spend a large part of the film quarrelling with a viciousness that goes far beyond the cliched animosities of odd-couple pairings. Nor is it a film that wears any particular subject on its sleeve. That Hock is dying of Aids is shown as a bleak fact of life of NYC at the time, rather than an issue around which to organise the plot. "Sometimes people ask me what is the moral of the film, which I find surprising," says Heller. "I'm not constructing a fable. I'm presenting real lives in all their messy complexity." If the film has a message it is perhaps this: any of us at any time could find ourselves as achingly lonely, hopeless and desperate as Lee Israel and Jack Hock.

Israel died in 2014. "I exchanged a lot of emails with her when I was writing my script," recalls Holofcener. "She was polite, she gave me some useful notes." Nevertheless, Holofcener was nervous when the time finally came to meet. "I thought she would be a bitch, and a drunk bitch at that," she says. In fact, the frail old lady was a more reserved, contained presence than Holofcener had anticipated. "We had just a single cocktail, and dinner lasted an hour." Israel, who was by now dying of cancer, took a taxi home. All the same, says Holofcener, her overwhelming impression of Israel was that she was "immensely entitled, even all these years later. Naturally she was flattered that a film was being made of her life but she wasn't remotely surprised. She felt it was entirely her due."

Lee Israel had tasted success. Her career as a freelance journalist started in the 1960s, and she'd also published two successful biographies: one of actress Tallulah Bankhead in 1972, and one of journalist and game-show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen in 1979. The latter had even been a New York Times best-seller.

But her third book - a biography of cosmetics mogul Estée Lauder published in 1985 - didn't do as well, and Israel found herself falling on tough financial times. Those were only complicated by her alcoholism and what her 2015 New York Times obituary described as "a temperament that made conventional employment nearly impossible." To cope, she turned to a life of crime.

It wasn't that Israel became a hit man or a bank robber; her misdeeds were smaller and more specialized. Beginning in 1990, she started forging letters from literary figures like Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Lillian Hellman, selling them to rare book dealers - with the help of her friend Jack Hock - for several hundred or even several thousand dollars. She also stole original letters from archives and libraries, forged copies, replaced the originals with the copies, and then sold the originals to dealers.

In 1992, she got caught and later pleaded guilty in federal court. Her days as a forger were through. But in 2008, she published a barely contrite memoir about that period in her life, entitled Can You Ever Forgive Me? It received only middling reviews, but that didn't stop it from getting picked it up for a big-screen adaptation. The new film that's based on it did much better with critics during its September festival run in Telluride and Toronto.

Starring Melissa McCarthy as Israel and Richard E. Grant as her partner in crime, Can You Ever Forgive Me? feels like a buddy caper, and it's often very funny. But it has a dark side, too. Directed by Diary of a Teenage Girl's Marielle Heller with a screenplay by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, it's about loneliness and anxiety, about having barely two nickels to rub together, about panicking over a situation you feel powerless to fix.