Her profile of Katharine Hepburn, whom Israel had visited in California shortly before the death of Spencer Tracy, ran in the November 1967 edition of Esquire magazine.
In the 1970s and 1980s, she published biographies of the actress Tallulah Bankhead, the journalist and game-show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen, and the cosmetics tycoon Estée Lauder.
[6] Novelist and book reviewer Rita Mae Brown told readers of The Washington Post in 1979 that Kilgallen had expressed much curiosity about Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, despite the prevalence of show business gossip in her newspaper column.
[10]: 17 [11] In the book, Israel discredited Lauder's public statements that she was born into European aristocracy and attended church regularly in Palm Beach, Florida.
"Instead of taking a great deal of money from a woman rich as Oprah, I published a bad, unimportant book, rushed out in months to beat [Lauder's own memoir] to market.
Later, she began stealing actual letters and autographed papers of famous persons from libraries and archives, replacing them with forged copies she had made.
[10] This continued for over a year, until two undercover FBI agents questioned Israel on a Manhattan sidewalk outside a delicatessen from which they saw her exit, according to her memoir.
They believe the sheer abundance of letters being sold by Israel aroused suspicion among autograph collectors, dealers and used bookstore owners.
Some researchers suspect Israel's use of very ordinary (aged) paper raised an alarm because the sophisticated letter writers were likely to have owned the finest stationery.
[citation needed] Israel's memoir makes clear that her name suddenly became toxic among autograph collectors, dealers and used book merchants no matter exactly how they caught on.
Israel points out that their own code of conduct required all of them to be able to attest unquestioningly to a detailed account of the provenance of each document.
[4] At this point, the FBI was called in and an investigation showed that Israel had stolen authentic letters, replacing them with forged copies, from several institutional collections.
[10] She describes her encounter with two FBI agents on a sidewalk outside a Manhattan delicatessen where she had waited for Jack Hock to meet her so they could count the cash from a sale he had made (she had caught him stealing when they had met at her home several weeks earlier).
[10] She immediately returned to her apartment and started to destroy all evidence of her crimes, discarding in public trash cans more than a dozen typewriters she had used to emulate the look of the famous writers' letters.
[10] Israel also claims she was never arrested or handcuffed, instead receiving summonses for federal court dates,[10] though Lowenherz's account contradicts hers on this point.
"[10]: 111 In April 2015, it was announced that a film version of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Julianne Moore and directed by Nicole Holofcener, would be produced.