The screenwriter writing a biopic is perhaps as instrumental to better understanding a subject as the biographer. Or, in certain cases, autobiographer. That said, Nicole Holofcener is a screenwriter with ample experience in the realm of adaptations, her last script, Every Secret Thing, being based on Laura Lippman’s 2004 novel of the same name. Her latest co-written adaptation with playwright Jeff Whitty, however, is of a much more linear, realistic bent, specifically rehashing the story of how a New York biographer came to find herself forging letters and signatures from literary titans like Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward and Lillian Hellman, to name just a few.
The natural metaness of a biopic about a biographer is not lost on its director, Marielle Heller (best known for her writing and directing debut, The Diary of a Teenage Girl), who frames her anti-heroine in the sort of scenarios that find her prank calling her agent, Marjorie (Jane Curtin), as Nora Ephron and declaring to her only friend, Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant), “I’m a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker!” This type of vaguely self-effacing assertion of her talent is some aspect of the reason Lee (Melissa McCarthy, whose part in this might have been taken by Kathy Bates if she was younger) has never been able to look fully inward to the point of finding the courage to write anything even remotely autobiographical, instead settling for the celebrity profiles she built her career on, including one of her more renowned pieces on Katharine Hepburn in the November 1967 issue of Esquire. During her time with the quippy Hollywood star, Israel managed to draw her out to the point of finagling a personal letter that would eventually serve as the inspiration for her foray into the forging racket, in a scene that finds her staring at the framed piece of paper with almost the same look as Lucy Ricardo when crafting any scheme so harebrained it just might work.
Set in the New York of 1991, when the pinnacle of Israel’s professional and emotional decline was at its zenith, we’re given the portrait of a period in the city’s history when it was still possible to truly relish in the potential of the hustle and the con essential to survival in a place that so often renders everyone an alcoholic. Including Jack Hock–it is somewhat key to note his name is spelled in a manner that connotes hocking goods as opposed to a bird that is quite important to Owen Milgrim in Maniac. As one of those figures “on the scene” of NYC that has become increasingly rare as a result of how much more of a revolving door the town has become, Jack happens to be acquainted with Lee as he sits down next to her at their mutual haunt, Julius’, in the West Village. Lee suddenly remembers how she knows him: he once pissed in a closet filled with expensive furs at a party they were both at. Lee, who lives on Riverside Drive, might have fallen on hard times, but not quite so hard that she doesn’t have a relatively cush place to live (despite being months behind on rent, but so are the benefits of squatters’ rights). Jack, on the other hand, is, for all intents and purposes, homeless, simply relying on any kind stranger to take him back to their apartment for the night–but at his age, this is not so easy to come by as it once was, hence a perfect time to endear a “fag hag.” Lee, herself a lesbian, is reluctant to get too close to anyone (still an emotional wreck from her last and only serious relationship, in which her significant other, Elaine [Anna Deavere Smith] expected her to actually get involved), but considering her cat, Jersey, has been her only source of meaningful conversation for some time now, she’s more open than usual to taking on a sidekick.
In between losing her job as a copy editor (shamelessly packing up her drinking glass along with her after being fired) and generally being treated like scum of the earth for being poor (which is, quite simply, the New York way), it is only after failing to even sell more than five dollars’ worth of books at Crosby Street Booksellers (better known in modern times as the Housing Works on Crosby Street) that Lee reaches the point of no return in what she’s willing to do to pay the bills–especially when her vet turns her away with her sick cat in tow for being unable to give them even half of the balance she owes. This is what really galvanizes her to cease playing by the rules, in a strong attestation for her preference for felines over humans, something she’s all too happy to tout.
It’s not as though Jack himself hasn’t already gone down this path long ago, selling cocaine in the bathrooms of diners and that sort of thing–but it’s still not enough to pay the rent for a place of his own. Even though Lee picks up on this (kind of like Angela Chase with Juliana Hatfield in the requisite Christmas episode of My So-Called Life) the first night they re-encounter one another, she doesn’t feel inclined to open her door to him just yet. That’s simply not the kind of person she is–though she doesn’t mind carousing through the quiet Upper West Side streets gnawing on a baguette of bread from Zabar’s to temper the drunkenness in Jack’s company. It’s just not something she wants to bring into her fly-ridden (the source of which will eventually horrify you) apartment when she’s got so much else to focus on. Like shelving her speculative Fanny Brice biography to begin her jaunt into the lucrative realm of forgery. And it all truly started with going back to the same woman who had bought her authentic Hepburn letter, Anna (Dolly Wells), an obviously trusting soul and an admitted fan of Lee’s work. With a Fanny Brice letter stolen from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to sell this time, Lee is disappointed to find that the price offered is lower due to the lack of scintillating content.
Realizing she’ll have to up the ante herself if she wants to make more money, the forgeries commence, with the help of a slew of different typewriters assigned to each author behind the fake letters, and the ability to trace the author’s signature from a book with use of her TV screen. As the money starts to roll in (particularly when considering how much more affordable New York used to be), Lee regains the old self-confidence she once had during her initial glory days of being a writer, one of the last periods when “respect for the written word” was still employed if not by society, at least by a small sect of New York editors. And with this rediscovered assurance, she opens up more to Jack as she shares her wealth with him, confessing conspiratorially over drinks, “I finally found a way to make money that doesn’t involve shoveling shit.” Her admission of the truth to Jack eventually forces her to bring him in on her scheme out of necessity as the “business endeavor” starts to hit a few major icebergs.
“I was supposed to be more than this,” she says at one point when rock bottom looms large again. This is, in many respects, the expression of failure of every writer who does not feel their success has been large enough–proportionate enough to their talent. Does this speak to the overall ego of writers or to the fact that writing–truly good and creative writing–is the most undervalued art of them all, forcing all scribes to wonder what went wrong in their life to be so poor? In Lee’s case, it’s a little bit of both, for she was, indeed, a too underemployed book writer when revisiting her biting and, yes, Dorothy Parker-esque style. It vaguely reminds one of another New York City legend with a too small breadth of work: Fran Lebowitz.
In the face of being caught, Lee doesn’t admit to feeling remorse (that just wouldn’t be who she was), but instead explains that it has been one of the best times of her life because, even if no one knew it was her work, the words were being treated with reverence again after so many years of writing in her name being rejected. So effective were Lee’s forgeries in capturing the essence of someone she had studied that two of the fake letters she wrote as Noël Coward appeared in one of his biographies in 2007.
The basest “why” behind her motives in doing it, in the end, accent a reality that most rich people fail to take into account in thumbing their nose at poverty–for it does often force innovation that is later sure to make for a tale that proves life is stranger than fiction.
“I was imprudent with money and Dionysian to the quick,” Israel wrote in the book the screenplay was adapted from. And well, shouldn’t every writer with a story worth telling be?
