Can You Ever Forgive Me? by Lee Israel

Author:Lee Israel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

The ten or so Lillian Hellmans I created were based on an actual letter to me, which I discovered in my files late in my criminal career. I’d written to her to request an interview for my Tallulah biography. Portraying the wicked Regina Giddens in Hellman’s The Little Foxes had been the capstone of Tallulah’s acting career and I wanted to talk to the playwright about that time. Not surprisingly, since a Hellman turndown is standard issue in the kit bag of American biography, she refused to cooperate. She was a difficult woman: happily, her signature was easy.

I rehashed her refusal letter in several of my own, this one to Cousin Sidney, all about her initial real-life rebuff of me. Sidney was used in my letters from time to time. I’d grown rather fond of him, and missed him since I had invented his move to London.

The undated faux has Lillian again turning Sidney down; here, in London, he has involved himself with a biography of Dorothy Parker. Mr. Ringrose and his book were made up, but the possessive and proprietary actions of Hellman toward Dorothy Parker were not. In her book about Parker, Marion Meade writes, “Hellman’s attitude toward her guardianship of Dorothy’s and Dashiell Hammett’s estates was essentially negative. As one of her biographers later noted, she did not encourage those ‘who would like to keep books on Hammett and Parker, whose literary papers she keeps safely out of sight.’ She refused to cooperate with anyone who wished to write about Dorothy.”

With regard to “Dear Sidney,” undated: there was no “Steve and Martha,” but there was certainly a Vanessa Redgrave, brilliant as the Julia about whose provenance there was a storied dispute. Redgrave, a Trotskyite who paid dearly for her militancy, adored Hellman and read aloud to her when the writer was nearly blind toward the end of her life. And only weeks before her death, Hellman submitted an affidavit to the court defending Redgrave, who had been fired by the Boston Symphony with which she was to have performed.

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