Grant), an eccentric gay accomplice recently released from prison for armed robbery. Business is so good that she takes on a “partner” named Jack Hock (a funny and masterful Richard E. Swigging down scotch, she finds herself tracing the signature of Noël Coward at the library to pass the time.Ĭapitalizing on the public’s superficial obsession with fame, she extends her talent to composing witty letters on a variety of ancient typewriters, signing them Marlene Dietrich, Dorothy Parker, Fanny Brice and Fred Astaire, and selling them to book stores as literary artifacts to pay her bills. Lonely and deeply in debt, with no tolerance for people, all of her old bridges burned behind her and no other skills to make a living, she starts going to parties to steal everything from rolls of toilet paper in the guest bathrooms to winter coats in the check room. By 1991, she found herself so out of sync with the new wave of trashy tell-all bestsellers that her new book about Estée Lauder was a bomb and her cold, business-like agent (a great bitchy turn by Jane Curtin) wouldn’t even return her calls.įacing a mid-life career crisis fueled by writer’s block and the kind of boredom that drove her to a pattern of professional suicide, Lee was a drunk, a lesbian without love, and a cat lover who lived in filth without so much as a litter box for the droppings that piled up under her bed. Once a distinguished and respected author of celebrity profiles who published well-received biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen, she hit a blank wall.
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