THE JEAN HARRIS STORY
Solomon, Barbara P.
The Jean Harris trial has mesmerized Americans. It has received an unprecedented amount of publicity. Diana Trilling, Shana Alexander, and Lally Weymouth, daughter of Katherine Graham, owner of...
...The German Jews who arrived in the United States in modest number early on had made a 438 secure place for themselves within Protestant America...
...After World War II many members of the middle and upper classes moved to suburban communities within commuting distance to New York...
...The model female writer would have been Dorothy Parker, the model movie actress Katherine Hepburn in A Philadelphia Story...
...other days she showed up in the tweed suits and mink scarfs expected of suburban housewives of her age and class...
...Mexicans perceive themselves the illegitimate sons of Indian mothers raped by Spanish conquerors and they frequently cast their women in the "Malinche" role...
...In hypocritically egalitarian America, one woman sleeping with a man is presumed the equal "sister" of another woman sleeping with the same man...
...in a Columbia University elevator was scrawled FREE JEAN HARRIS...
...But in the United States, more often than we admit, our hidden romance involves miscegenation, assimilation, and ambitions of class...
...Instead, Harris tried to make her Jewish lover fit her notion of love writ on a perfect Greek vase—"Herman read Herodotus," she explained to the jury...
...Jewish men were considered to be wonderful husbands, loyal mates, good providers, and intellectually superior...
...We do not have a mistress psychology...
...So, say, she was upset and the gun went off...
...Jean Harris had puritanical notions of integrity and good behavior, and for many years chose to ignore Tarnower's waning interest in her, as well as Lynne's overt attacks...
...He established himself as society cardiologist, and apparently— although a cold man—was a good doctor to the rich...
...American women are very puritanical about money...
...Am I a lady...
...Traditionally, Madeira produces high-boned blondes— young Grace Kellys—who ride horseback well, have fine manners and have been provided the polished rudiments afforded by an old-fashioned conservative academia...
...Not dumbness—Jean Harris is an intelligent woman—but she was a midwestern innocent severely hampered by being locked into the mores of another era...
...NOW YOU CAN BE THE JUDGE: GUILTY OR INNOCENT" ran the advertisements for the hastily put-together drama...
...So, what's with that jury...
...She married, had two sons, divorced and supported herself and her children by becoming headmistress in a variety of fashionable Eastern secondary schools for women...
...Unfortunately, Jean Harris gave a Southern defense in a Northern court...
...That's a sweet, refined lady who never did no one harm...
...In soap-opera movies such as An Unmarried Woman Jill Clayburgh, who is rejected by her husband, looks younger than her daughter, and soon has a famous artist madly in love with her, urging on Jill happiness and sexual fulfillment in his Soho pad...
...The Atlantic Seaboard was mysterious territory to the conquered by Fitzgerald's Middle America Gatsbys—the East was the ultimate terrain of Ivy League colleges, New York "artistic culture"— a world peopled by exotic Jews and blacks...
...Listen, woman to woman, all that business about weeping means nothing—the worst bitch can break down and cry...
...Jean Harris was aware of his other women and finally began to suffer from severe depressions...
...All cultures have a secret love story that embodies their covert national history...
...Why wasn't psychiatric evidence given for Mrs...
...She graduated in 1945 from Smith with top honors...
...We are not a nation of Marilyn Monroes, Jane Fondas, chick feminists, or Vanessa Redgraves...
...she had left letters of resignation as head mistress at Madeira...
...Are we back in the Middle Ages, auto da fe and public trials to be used for mass entertainment...
...How was a poor young Jew to climb up the social ladder and become an "American" if even his own ethnic group denied him access...
...she was asking herself...
...At the turn of the century, millions of Jews from Eastern Europe crowded into New York...
...Tarnower —who during his 14-year liaison with Jean Harris had affairs with many other women—clearly was something of an exhibitionist...
...Unfortunately, Jean Harris identified with a privileged group when, in reality, without a job, without a home, without a man, just before she shot Tarnower, she was at the bottom of the heap...
...In the early 1950s Herman Tarnower moved his practice to Scarsdale, a suburb for the affluent, and formed the Scarsdale Medical Group...
...Just as black men stood for sex and jazz, Jewish men, in the eyes of wistful, wondering adventurous midwestern women, were the symbol of the "good male...
...Why has this case aroused so much furor...
...she sought to explain to the jury and the press the reason for her existence...
...several days prior to the event, she had made out her will in favor of her two grown sons...
...In crisp headmistress style Harris reprimanded the prosecutor for his bad grammar...
...With all the nuts and murderers walking the streets of New York, going free for the most brutal crimes they got to make an example of this one...
...But to understand who Jean Harris and Herman Tarnower really were, one must roll back to the America of their youth...
...Due to his mental confusion he will not stand trial...
...She had two grown sons testify to the healthy family ambience of her relationship...
...Jean Harris had upper-class mores...
...Woody Allen, Philip Roth are at least a generation younger than Tarnower...
...For Harris, to be headmistress of Madeira, to be the mistress of a diamond-intherough Jewish doctor was the myth—and indeed one of the reasons the intelligent Jean Harris was so incapable of making concrete demands on those whose world she inhabited was that she lived inside her own myth...
...But the case was tried in White Plains, Westchester County, which was Tarnower's turf...
...Whether she has landed in jail for the next 15 years because of her inner guilts, or because Tarnower was shot, or because of the unseemly intensity of her passion, or because of reverse discrimination against her upper-class manner remains unclear...
...When Tarnower, in the early phase of their romance, gave her a ten-carat diamond ring to celebrate their engagement, and soon panicked at the idea of marriage, Jean Harris felt impelled to act the lady...
...The just-plain-folk jury was shocked at her upper-class ways, which they held against her—the jurors, and indeed many observers, were appalled that she had referred to her young rival as a whore...
...You call that jury normal—all those women, and not one says, okay, I'll save her life—okay, so Jean Harris didn't weep...
...The questions being asked by thinking people: in an attempt to prove the "fairness" of the system, are people such as Patty Hearst and Jean Harris penalized by receiving stiffer sentences than the average citizen...
...Although the German Jews did good works among poor Jews, the social barriers were impenetrable...
...Last March, when Tarnower was shot, he was preparing to celebrate his seventieth birthday—Jean Harris, then, was fifty-six years old...
...Instead, in a bloody embattled bedroom, Tarnower was killed by four bullets, which left none for Jean to take her own life...
...Her story is that she intended to see Tarnower, say a quiet, despairing farewell, go to the waterlily pond on the estate grounds and shoot herself...
...Tarnower had her on increased dosages of amphetamines, which, if taken over a long time period, can produce dangerous behavior...
...Jean Haris remained her idea of a lady...
...The Scarsdale Diet Book made Tarnower a celebrity and a multimillionaire...
...Are defendants penalized for not plea bargaining...
...Two lower-class women were acquitted of crimes similar to Jean Harris's...
...She infuriated the jury—instead of making clear to them that she was no whore, she convinced them she was a snob—and she lost her case...
...Listen, somebody ought to tell her lawyer, when he appeals the case, get it away from that rotten bunch in Scarsdale...
...Although Tarnower's lush estate was in Harrison, New York, his medical practice was in the nearby suburban town, Scarsdale...
...Suzanne van der Vreken, his housekeeper, was also instructed to keep detailed guest lists, menu lists, and a record of the visits to the Tarnower estate of his two steady mistresses...
...440 Whatever happened in Tarnower's bedroom, I believe Jean Harris is telling the truth when she claims she is innocent, meant to kill herself, and accidentally shot Tarnower...
...the jury, which found her guilty, was "just plain folk...
...The press flip-flopped and more sympathetic interpretations of Jean Harris began to appear...
...Since her incarceration at Bedford State Prison for Women Jean Harris has been permitted to watch the TV special based on transcripts of the trial...
...At the trial Jean Harris's problem was that instead of fighting to save her life, she decided to save her love...
...He enjoyed rotating the visits from his women and fomenting jealousies: his Belgian couple were instructed to remove each woman's belongings from his bedroom before the visit of the next rival...
...But American women of Jean Harris's background and time were raised to wear white gloves and become wives, not mistresses...
...Many Americans, especially city dwellers, felt outraged...
...One of my women friends who comes from the South informed me that many Southerners felt that Harris had disgraced Madeira by having the 14-year affair...
...as Irving Howe pointed out in World of Our Fathers, the Lower East Side, suddenly, had a density greater than Bombay...
...I think she's innocent—but say, she got a little disturbed—what woman hasn't gotten disturbed at least once in her life...
...Another myth shattered in this trial is that America is a society of equals rather than a stratified society with class barriers...
...both liberated and nonliberated women are ambivalent about what they would permit a man to pay for...
...Ironically, this woman so phobically afraid of being mistaken for a mistress or whore may spend the next 15 years of her life in the company of hardened prostitutes...
...But that woman is not evil...
...In the South, my friend pointed out, Harris would have been ostracized for her private behavior—but of course no jury would have convicted her for killing Tarnower, since he hadn't behaved like a gentleman...
...How does this tragic mess end up becoming first-page news over a period of three months...
...In those final distressed weeks no doubt Jean Harris struggled to bridge the split between the idealized lover she carried in her head and the actual Tarnower who was rejecting her for Lynne Tryforos...
...The jury was modest and she acted as though the jury were Madeira students to whom she was explaining a Platonic ideal of life...
...We Americans are more phobic than Europeans in our use of strong language—Jean Harris damaged her image in the press by describing her rival as a "whore...
...these Jews, with lice in their hair, their Yiddish, their Zionism, their overenthusiasms for God, religion, anarchism, socialism, threatened their discreet German coreligionists...
...In Goodbye Columbus Roth's hero loses his true love object, the rich Jewish princess, Brenda Patemkin, who is standing firmly on prime Eastern territory, Radcliffe, to whose brother college the unpolished Rothian hero has no entry...
...In face of a tremendous media blitz this totally private, unknown fifty-sevenyearold matron struggled to desexualize her relation to Herman Tarnower...
...Jean Harris clearly had no more of a clue what Tarnower was about than the heroine of Annie Hall...
...at seventy he could afford to dump his WASP upperclass Jean, and prove himself with her rival, his office assistant, thirty years his junior, good-looking but uneducated Lynne Tryforos...
...As motherhood, wifehood, or grandmotherhood has no special status in this country, in many ways the typical woman, as she grows older, is deprived of a basic honoring of her life's "work...
...Jean Harris believed in those myths...
...By returning Tarnower's ring and telling herself that she continued to live with this man out of passion, out of weakness, Jean Harris managed to retain her image of herself as a lady, a part-time wife...
...The 19th-century European drama circled around class and ambition...
...The blonde WASP women are shown attempting suicide for him, the Jewish women are depicted as quarrelsome...
...in Manhattan where we got real killers to worry about, we would have given Jean Harris a break...
...Diana Trilling, Shana Alexander, and Lally Weymouth, daughter of Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, have been commissioned to write books on the subject...
...Blacks, Chinese, Italians also maintain sharp class distinctions within their own groups...
...In her puritanical imagination she was attempting to resolve: Am I a whore...
...The Harris case shatters several American myths...
...The defense attorney and prosecutor "bargain" for a shorter sentence, the defendant pleads guilty, and is rewarded for not using the state's money in an elaborate trial...
...Instead— perhaps it was the sight of Lynne's nightgowns and clothes in what she considered her bedroom—Jean Harris lost control, and one form or another of a suicide-cumcrime passionel occurred...
...When Jean Harris maintains that Tarnower died trying to save her life, I do believe she is telling the truth as she now perceives it to be...
...Tarnower's wellheeled society patients seem to have adored him...
...This benign view of him was not shared by many others...
...Late in life Tarnower, through his medical practice and his elaborate entertaining, was able to establish friendships with important people, among them the longedfor German Jewish bourgeoisie of his childhood...
...Like many Americans she was rootless—in Madeira she was living as handmaiden to the children of the rich, her genteel home of faded Southern grandeur was lent to her by the school's administration...
...Of the South, Faulkner drily observed, "it's truly about miscegenation...
...Ironically, poor Jean Harris was more the victim of her puritanical, suppressed upbringing than of snobbery...
...Should I have let him pay for my expensive wardrobe...
...One of his male colleagues described him as "one of the most killable of men...
...Americans have no provision for crime passionel—what we do have, and what many criminals use to their advantage, is "plea bargaining...
...In subsequent Roth novels, the Rothian antihero—confused and bitter over his loss of his original dream love, the Jewish princess— assumes an attitude of a plague on all your houses...
...she came dressed to the trial some days as a proper headmistress of a girl's fine finishing school...
...She should have either remarried or done without...
...Women were shrewder about men from their own cultures...
...still one detects a touch of bad faith...
...In a jealous rage Lynne slashed a wardrobe-full of Jean Harris's elegant clothing...
...We shared Herodotus, it was an amour spirituel...
...On Tarnower's suburban Harrison, N.Y...
...Immediately after the trial Ellen Burstyn starred in a TV drama, The People vs...
...After the death of the cold impostor, the man who got in the way of this all-consuming passion, the split within her mind could heal, and in her memory Tarnower is permanently fixed as the idealized lover...
...The backlash to the verdict was immediate: the jury claimed that after an eight-day deliberation they had wept copious tears before arriving at a unanimous decision of guilty...
...Eventually Tarnower sold the diamond and used the money for a downpayment for a home for Lynne Tryforos, Jean Harris's young rival...
...A more realistic woman would have acknowledged to herself that she was Tarnower's mistress, that she was cash-short and he was rich, would have kept the ring, sold it, invested in her own real estate, and her own ego, and saved her own life...
...Should I have let Herman pay for all those trips to Paris, Nepal, and the Caribbean...
...Jean Harris berates Tarnower for his adulation of women like Iphigene Sulzberger: but WASP Jean Harris was never part of Tarnower's true goal—she was merely part of the decor he established in order to impress key people he fantasized about in his youth...
...estate she was also—over 14 years—the shadowy female guest...
...Hasn't she 437 suffered enough already...
...More ominous is the news, since the Harris case, that under a new ruling future trials now may be televised...
...She went to private school in a "nice suburb"—the Laurel School in Shaker Heights, her father was a middlerung army officer, she was one of those midwestern girls coming of age in the late 1930s whose tremendous vulnerability was their awe of the magical East...
...American women are reasonably casual about going to bed with a man, that can be considered "love"—but they become uptight if men pick up too many of the bills...
...When the jurors announced the harsh sentence, guilty of second-degree murder— the only more severe charge is for killing a policeman—Americans were stunned...
...We are used to writing impassioned protests concerning unfair treatment of blacks by white juries in the South, we know that Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island because he was a Jew, but progressives have always been highly 436 selective in their choices for compassion—the rights of the WASP upper class have never come high on the injustice priority list...
...No, I am Herman's wife—she (the other woman) is the whore...
...In referring to Lynne Tryforos as a whore, she wasn't making a social distinction but was being old-fashioned female: Am / a whore...
...Thus, all the energy Jean Harris should have used to keep herself out of prison was spent appeasing the Middle America of her childhood—Jean Harris tried to convince the jury she was not Tarnower's mistress, but rather his wife/ soul mate...
...But I did return the ring...
...at the time of Tarnower's death she was headmistress at Madeira, a huge sprawl of a school whose gracious buildings overlook the Potomac outside Washington, D.C...
...But despite her lost freedom she has remained oddly loyal to her love...
...she freely admitted, under cross examination, that she was not the sort of person to make friends with the servants—many observers feel that piece of snobbery may well have cost her the trial...
...441...
...An old American love sport has been the cross-cultural, cross-racial affaire du coeur...
...Malinche was the Maya princess who deserted her people for Hernan Cortes...
...Tarnower had his problems: he had been born ugly, dirt poor, the child of immigrant Jews, and was a man of overwhelming social ambition...
...Jean Harris was only, as she put it, "dumb" because she misread the cultural signals of the world she had joined in her great "East Coast adventure...
...Both Tarnower and Harris may have been victimized by their idealization of upper-class values, but neither of them were from that background...
...She returned the diamond, and asked him to keep the ring for her in his bank...
...The cross-cultural love affair is a handy route...
...An ordinary despondent, rejected middle-aged woman goes to the home of her lover, who has replaced her with a younger woman—she makes a distraught attempt to kill herself—the only question to be solved is whether this was indeed a suicide attempt gone wrong, or whether it was a more conventional case of crime passionel...
...Despite the cool instructions given to American women by modern analysts, by group therapy, sex therapy, and that last great breed of valiant optimists—the American feminists—the human condition of the average American woman is closer to the universal condition of woman than most observers of the American scene would like to believe...
...Jean Harris came from a "nice" Cleveland, Ohio, family...
...Why wasn't she indicted on a lesser charge of murder, such as manslaughter...
...The criminal courts in New York City are in total chaos, hardened murderers are going in and out of prison as though through a revolving door...
...Jean Harris ruefully commented to writer Shana Alexander, "My sons can say their mother died of dumbness...
...That same day Jean Harris drove the five hours from Washington, D.C., with an armed gun at her side...
...The same week that Jean Harris was convicted John Lennon's killer was sent to a psychiatric hospital...
...It was as though Jean Harris's act of desperation had suddenly cut through our national puritanical censorship, which prohibits empathy for the aging woman, and every American woman "became" Jean Harris...
...She never sought any of the protections of a more pragmatic woman...
...Was reverse class prejudice a big factor in the jury's unanimous, harsh verdict of guilty...
...She represents the misery of real life suffered, rather than the mythic American plan in which nobody gets hurt and everyone has the illusory option of a fresh start...
...it is the very ordinariness of Jean Harris's ordeal to which Americans respond...
...Could a plea of temporary insanity have been used...
...even so, their novels and movies reflect the dilemma of the young man on the way up...
...To have plea bargained or admitted to temporary insanity would have meant, for Jean Harris, the death of the heart, the relinquishing of her idea of Herman Tarnower, a public invasion into the privacy of her troubled mind...
...Bolen, the prosecuting attorney, portrayed Harris to the press and the jury as an undemocratic and unrepentant member of the super privileged...
...If one can imagine oneself into the troubled heart and mind of Jean Harris, undoubtedly she inflicted self-torture by placing herself on personal trial for her own failure to adhere to the value system of her own time and her own place...
...Jennifer Jones has contracted to do a movie on the subject...
...Does the indiscriminate use of plea bargaining prejudice the rights of those who consider themselves innocent...
...But Tarnower had more driving him than a fine appreciation of the classics...
...Her problem is that four bullets were fired...
...Despite this barrage of zapped-up sex, many Americans are walking about still locked into the lonely sadness engendered by their old-fashioned 19th-century hearts...
...under an over-barrage of questions she deemed undignified, she lost her temper, but she never wept nor sought mercy from the jury...
...In the last few years he became a minor national celebrity as "Diet Doc," the author of the Scarsdale Diet Book, which grossed millions...
...Meanwhile, after midnight, American cable television goes porno: "midnight blue" films the ritual group-sex scenes, the hosts of the various sex clubs give over the TV channels the telephone numbers of the clubs and escort services for both men and women...
...The suburbs had neither the variety of the big cities nor the individuality of the small town...
...Jean Harris undoubtedly fantasized that at 439 the final moment Tarnower would save her life, and their love would be rekindled...
...A less spectacular piece of information, but news that may have more bearing on the events that led to Jean Harris's act of desperation, is the report in the New York Times from social welfare agencies that women over fifty-five are classed among the most economically underprivileged groups...
...The school has an indoor riding rink and eight tennis courts...
...Jewish women rarely romanticized the macho Jewish male and, indeed, managed to survive by making heavy demands on their men, which their WASP sisters, fearful at being considered possibly anti-Semitic, would have thought "unfair...
...But just as Jean Harris didn't notice that she infuriated the jury by behaving uppity, she failed to realize that much of what motivated Tarnower in his sadistic relation to a variety of women was sour vengeance...
...Woody Allen, portraying Woody Allen in Annie Hall and Manhattan, also perceives his love affairs with naive midwestern beauties as proof of authentic Americanization...
...Harris had a suicide note in her purse...
...Why...
...Finally Jean Harris's own anger broke through, she wrote Tarnower an upset furious letter referring to Lynne Tryforos as a "psychotic whore," and berating Tarnower for his behavior...
...Suddenly it occurred to us the drama had been for real...
...She tried to be a gallant a la Katherine Hepburn, witty and rueful like Dorothy Parker...
...In Tarnower's pre-World War II America, the battles between the German Jewish bourgeoisie and the poor Jews of Eastern Europe, from which his family came, were ferocious...
...A New York City woman taxi driver commented to me on the case: "the guy's a mean bastard, uglier than Dracula...
...First she taught in Connecticut...
...Women from minority cultures intuitively understood that the terrible feelings of social and professional rejection experienced by their men as they ran the rocky road of assimilation frequently produced revenge love affairs...
Vol. 28 • September 1981 • No. 4
