On the Thursday or Friday before Labor Day 1995, Lee Israel leaves a message asking me to call her. I believed that I knew what that was going to be about. Some type of intimidation. I’d put an author’s query in the Equity newsletter re: Tallulah and Lee must have gotten wind.
Didn’t call her back and was away for the weekend.
On the evening of Labor Day, I was back in my apartment, when I screen a call from a strange voice saying that “Ann [e?] Howard” was calling, because she’d seen “your notice in the actors’ paper” and she had a story about Tallulah at the Elysee Hotel that she wanted to share.
For a moment I was taken in and all but reflexively reached to pick up the phone. By that time Ann[e?] Howard was hanging up and I was realizing that, yes, it was Lee in disguise.
A moment later: “What kind of loser. . . .?”
Not to be outdone, the next day, I called her and left a fulsome message letting her know that I’d received her call, that I’d heard so much about her from Stephan Cole (who did like her) and please call me. Not a word about Ann [e?] Howard. Never heard from her again.
The life of a NYC arts writer!