Lee Israel, who wrote biographies of Tallulah Bankhead, Dorothy Kilgallen and Estée Lauder before becoming a literary forger, died December 24. She was 75. Israel composed and sold "hundreds of letters that she said had been written by Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, Lillian Hellman and others," the New York Times reported, adding that this eventually became the subject of her fourth and last book, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
