The Things She Did for Love

By WALTER ISAACSON

A headmistress details her last date with the diet doctor

Jean Harris, high-minded headmistress of Virginia's starchy Madeira girls' school, was deeply in love with Dr. Herman Tarnower, inventor of the famous Scarsdale diet. Of that there is no doubt.

When Harris recounted the vicissitudes of their affair to an eight-woman, four-man jury--and some 100 spectators--in the Westchester County, N.Y., courthouse, there was hardly a dry eye in the place.

The question, however, was not one of variously requited love but of murder. The headmistress, 57, admits that she shot and killed the cardiologist, 69, on the night of March 10. But did she shoot him in a cold rage over his affair with a younger woman? Or did she kill him accidentally in a near midnight struggle over the .32-cal. revolver she had brought to his suburban New York estate, intending to kill herself after a farewell visit?

"There was an instant where I thought I felt the muzzle of the gun in my stomach," she testified, describing the fatal struggle on his bed that rainy night. "I pulled the trigger. I thought: 'My God, that didn't hurt at all. I should have died a long time ago.' " But it was Tarnower, not she, who was mortally wounded.

He was shot again and again --Harris could not recall how many times--before she fled into the night to summon help.

When she took the stand in her own defense last week--at various times contrite, teary, arrogant and bewildered--Harris brought near a climax a two-month courtroom drama that has combined the dime-store romantics of a Barbara Cartland novel with the sizzling melodrama of a Perry Mason episode. The trial has produced steamy headlines across the country and attracted the toniest of courtroom spectators, at least five of whom are writing books on the case. "I feel Mrs. Harris' behavior on the witness stand is outrageous," said one of them. "She sits there outsmarting everyone, trying to seduce the jury without the slightest remorse." Said another author, Shana Alexander, looking up from her note pad: "I feel great sympathy for her because I recognize bits of myself. I've had the same problems with pills and men. I've been there." The defendant's younger son, Marine Corps Lieutenant James Harris, paced outside the courtroom, reluctant to enter. Said he: "All she needs to do is get up there and tell the truth, and then it will be a great day for America and the Marines."

When Harris finally did take the stand last week, it was after the prosecution had painted the bachelor doctor's sexual profligacy in vivid detail, portraying the shooting as the act of a woman consumed by jealousy. The housekeeper at Tarnower's $500,000 estate told of removing Harris' clothes from the closets when her rival Lynne Tryforos, 38, Tarnower's clinical assistant, arrived for a tryst, and removing Tryforos' clothes when Harris showed up.

Harris was well aware of the existence of her younger rival, whom she disdainfully alluded to in a letter to Tarnower. "If it's any help, darling," she wrote, "I can find someone who would be thrilled to give the same 24-hour door-to-door services, and take shorthand, too." Chiding him for his "unconstitutional" chauvinism, she wrote, in a more serious vein: "If one of the few women you do admire [listing a group of New York's prominent women] were to adopt the male equivalent of Lynne as lover and richly rewarded boy Friday, you wouldn't ask them back to dinner a second time."

Pale but primly attired in a tan silk blouse and wool skirt that would have made a Madeira mother proud, Harris described for the court in harrowing detail a growing desire to kill herself, an urge compounded by Tarnower's infidelity and her own job pressures. Things were not going well at Madeira. Harris had disciplined a student for sorority hazing, and, more recently, expelled four others for evidence of marijuana use. Then she received a critical letter from the girl who had been the victim of the hazing. The school's trustees were beginning to question Harris' competence. Said she: "It put a box on my life. I couldn't function from then on." Dabbing the tears from her eyes, she described her despair: "I wasn't sure who I was. I was a person sitting in an empty chair." Her only desire, she said, was to die and have her ashes scattered by the pond near Tarnower's house, "where the daffodils grow in the spring."

On March 10, her despair unbearable, she drove five hours to Tarnower's home, where her only worry was "What if Hi says something that spoils my resolve to die?" She went in through the garage and up to the bedroom where he was sleeping. Let's talk, said she. Not now, said he. Then she went into the bathroom, where she found a nightgown and a set of curlers, neither of them hers. "The script was not working as I had intended," she testified. Harris threw them into the bedroom. Suddenly, she said, Tarnower struck her. "Hit me again, and make it hard enough to kill," she screamed. Then, reaching into the purse for her gun, she yelled, "Never mind, I'll do it myself." They struggled, the gun went off, and the doctor lay dying.

In an attempt to show his client was not consumed by murderous jealousy, Harris' defense attorney, Joel Aurnou, read a Christmas poem the headmistress had written to Tarnower making light of his sexual flings.

Two months before the shooting, while Harris and Tarnower were visiting friends in Palm Beach, she wrote a parody of Clement Moore's A Visit from St. Nicholas: "In the guest room lay Herman, who, trying to sleep/ Was counting the broads in his life instead of sheep./ ... There were ingenues, dashers and dancers and vixens./ I believe there was even one Cuban, one blitzen."

That very weekend a small ad appeared at the bottom of the New York Times front page, using Tarnower's nickname: "Happy New Year Hi T., love always, Lynne." Did Harris burst into jealous rage as the prosecution contended? No, she testified last week, she made light of it. "I said, 'Hi, why don't you suggest she use the Goodyear blimp next year? I think it's available.' " Cross-examination will continue this week. Harris, who struggled to keep her composure under the gentle prodding of her own attorney, will face the more pointed questions of the prosecutor, George Bolen, who will be trying to elicit jealousy rather than love. But he will have to tread carefully, lest the jury forget that Herman Tarnower, not poor Jean Harris, was the victim. --By Walter Isaacson.

Reported by Audrey J. Ball and James Wilde/ New York

With reporting by Audrey J. Ball and James Wilde/ New York

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.