The Strange Case of Jean Harris

For a variety of hilarious reasons, I was put in charge of two massive, important projects during my time as a temp at the University of Virginia Law Library. One was a database of human rights documents which necessitated regular communication with United Nations librarians in Switzerland.

The other was an art exhibit. Specifically, it was a collection of over 6,000 court sketches drawn by a woman named Ida Libby Dengrove. Dengrove was a court sketch artist from 1975-1985, and she worked in New York and New Jersey. She documented proceedings that ranged from Watergate to Donnie Brasco to Son of Sam.

The day these beautiful drawings came in, I said to my boss’s boss’s boss, “I know how to do this. You need context for the sketches. Let me write them.” I got to do nothing but read true crime for four months. I learned about the Palm Sunday Massacre, the Johnson & Johnson inheritance scandal, Abscam, and a guy I’d never heard of who tried to abduct a little girl by wearing a previous female victim’s scalp as a disguise (the girl didn’t buy it; she got away). If you’re interested, you can check out all the profiles I wrote here—and please go ahead and be impressed that I condensed the complexity of Jonestown to 200 words.

It’s hard to pick a most fascinating case (the drama of Dr. X reads like a spy novel), but certainly one of the most bizarre was a single-victim shooting on a rainy night in 1980. It doesn’t sound remotely interesting when I put it like that, does it? The bizarreness lies in where it took place—Pleasant, NY, which had a crime rate that lived up to its name—as well as the identity of the victim—Dr. Herman “Hi” Tarnower, bestselling author of The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. But mostly, the weirdness is centered on the perpetrator: a prim, proper girls’ school headmistress named Jean Struven Harris.

***

Jean Harris and Hi Tarnower met in 1966 at one of those parties where people drink manhattans and talk about, well, Manhattan. Very upper crust, very good grammar, lots of fake laughs like that one Chandler uses on his boss in Friends. To hear it from their acquaintances’ testimonies, Harris and Tarnower were perfect for each other: icy, private, ambitious, and tough. They began an affair that would last 14 years.

Harris helped Tarnower with the diet book, receiving prominent acknowledgement for a role he seemed to believe was merely clerical and which she would later claim was more like co-authorial. It hit the bestseller list in 1978 when they’d been together 12 years, and with Harold’s new celebrity came new affairs. He began not-so-subtly phasing Jean out of his life, taking up with Lynne Tryforos, a secretary from his office who was nearly half his age. He had also, years earlier, put Headmistress Harris on a prescription for methamphetamines.

Which is where we must pause and assume that Harold Tarnower, a reputable cardiologist and a pretty smart guy, was somehow not a subscriber to Cheating Scumbags Weekly, whose masthead clearly reads: If you’re going to flagrantly fool around on your girlfriend, maybe don’t give her a shitload of uppers.

Especially if that girlfriend is already a tad high-strung. Jean Harris ran the Madeira School in McLean, Virginia with an iron fist and all the flexibility of a two-by-four. It was like she was on a one-woman campaign to make sure the grounds of her educational establishment would forever remain in the year 1950.

Her students, as you would assume of rich teens in the cocaine-y 80s, rebelled at this.

Those students’ parents, as you would also assume, thought that morals and values were great, but not if enforcing them meant Millicent got expelled and it risked her spot at Harvard. A few called their lawyers. The students started a protest.

So Jean Harris was in a seriously embattled position at work, she was addicted to prescription meth, and her boyfriend of a decade and a half was slo-mo dumping her for a twinkie he had on the side. If she’d just outlined all that for the jury (the humiliation, the stress, the drugs) and followed it by saying, very simply, “Then I lost it and shot him,” she’d have been a free woman in a couple of years.

This is not even debated, anywhere, in the ridiculously plentiful literature on Jean Harris’s case.

But here’s what she said instead.

On March 10, 1980, she hopped in the car to make the five-hour drive from Virginia to Tarnower’s home in New York. She brought a .32 caliber pistol that she’d purchased for protection two years prior. She intended to commit suicide, but she wanted to see him again.

Tarnower was asleep when she arrived. In his bedroom, she found Tryforos’s lingerie scattered around and decided to yell at Tarnower about that for a while before shooting herself in the head. Tarnower’s housekeeper heard him shout, “Jesus, Jean, you’re crazy! Get out of here!”

This was followed by gunshots. Four hit Tarnower: hand, arm, shoulder, chest.

Jean Harris would later claim she held the gun to her own head and Tarnower grabbed it, trying to wrestle it away. She would also claim, at different junctures, that the gun went off accidentally, and then she tried again to shoot herself when he fell back and the gun wouldn’t go off and when she did get it to go off she shot him accidentally, again. She would also claim she only remembered shooting him in the hand and everything after that was a blur. She would say there were no more bullets after Tarnower was down and she didn’t know how to reload in order to commit suicide. She would say she tried to use the phone in his bedroom but it wasn’t working, so she left the scene of the crime in her car to go get the police, then she saw the police headed for his house and turned around and followed them.

This is when we mercifully have corroboration in the form of the police officer who listened, stunned, as the rain-soaked woman who looked like a kindly grandma got out of her Chrystler and said, “I did it.”

***

Jane Pauley interviewed Harris in the early nineties, when Jean had been behind bars for 11 years. I’m not sure if the program intended the effect it achieved, but it presents an intriguing side of Jean Harris’s psyche via a trio of quotes.

First, Jean Harris admits she should have plea-bargained but insists she had “very bad legal advice.” Next, her attorney states that he did try to get her to plea-bargain but she refused. Finally, after Pauley confronts her with this, Jean Harris says, “I should have had a stronger lawyer who didn’t listen to me, I guess. Who said, ‘Look, shut up and sit down and I’m going to tell you what to do, you’re not going to tell me what to do.’”

Let’s marinate in this a second. Harris’s defiance and shifting position on this issue points to an acute unwillingness to take responsibility for her actions and a disturbing malleability when it comes to the truth, an inclination to bend and stretch it when honesty doesn’t quite fit her needs. But still, you have to admire the chutzpah of swearing in a court of law (she took the stand in her own defense, likewise against her lawyer’s advice) and professing with a straight face that you shot your cheating boyfriend four times by accident. If I were on that jury, I’d put her away whether I believed her or not, just to significantly reduce the odds that she’d ever hold a firearm again.

In an uncomfortable number of trials, it really does come down to who tells the better story. And unfortunately for Jean Harris, it also counts for a lot if the jury likes you. With only second degree murder on the table, they found her guilty, and the judge gave a mandatory fifteen to life. She received clemency in ‘92 and died quietly 20 years later. What secrets did she take with her?

The thing is, three of Tarnower’s wounds do correspond to trying to disarm somebody. I don’t strongly doubt that he’d try. He loved her; he was with her for a long time. Even if the thrill was gone, he wouldn’t have wanted to watch her blow her brains out in his bedroom. But if your former lover were holding a gun to her head, and you got your hand around it, and it fired and blew a hole through your palm (and you’re a doctor, remember; hands matter), wouldn’t you let go? Except, okay, it’s a reflex. Your hand tightens and the trigger keeps getting squeezed. Now you’re shot in the hand and the arm and the shoulder . . .

You’d let go. Pretty fast. It wouldn’t even be a thought process at that point; your body would just relent.

So where’d that fatal chest wound come from? Not too many people trying to take a loaded gun off a lunatic would pull the muzzle toward themselves.

If you’re Jean Harris, and you went there to commit suicide, at what moment in this utter botch of the process do you finally put the gun to your head? After you’ve wounded him once or twice and he lets go? If you’re high and raving and completely out of it, do you deliver a kill-shot in self-protective instinct before you take your own life?

Or do you think ahead of time: He’ll go for the gun if I put it to my head. And when he does, I’ll pull the trigger as many times as I can. Then I’ll kill myself. If I’ve got any bullets left.

Maybe.

***

A big part of why I write is my enduring interest in human motivations. I’ve had this interest for as long as I can remember. I came to understand that there is at least one moment in almost any life when a human being’s character is laid bare by adversity — adversity either self-created or outwardly imposed, often a combination of the two — and in that moment, the best and worst of that person are in easy reach. There is a choice between kindness and grace, or cruelty and cowardice. It is both cliche and accurate to call this a moment of truth.

Moments of truth are fascinating and, to the person experiencing them, often frustrating. They can happen very quickly. You may think afterward: It went by so fast, I didn’t have time to make the morally right choice. Yet that is what makes a moment of truth pure. It is a distilled test of who you really are.

I think Jean Harris believed she went to Pleasant, New York to kill herself. We know for a fact she was addled, confused, strung out and exhausted from a laundry list of meds and stressors that would make a mess of absolutely anybody. So I suspect the surface-level motivation was exactly as she said: she went there to die.

But I wonder if she got in that bedroom, saw the love of her life groggy and asleep, saw some sexy panties lying around, and a different intent—one she hadn’t consciously acknowledged beforehand and never would after—reared up from under her self-hate as it meant to all along and shouted, with the same rigid discipline she used on truant teenage girls: No. I wonder if she baited him into grabbing the gun, then fired three shots that missed center-mass, and, watching him reel back, squeezed the trigger one more time to make sure. I wonder most of all if the thought of suicide floated away then, no longer necessary as a smokescreen for what she really wanted, since what she really wanted was finally done. Whether she fled the crime scene with no plan, no coherent next steps, and realized at the sight of the cop car that she’d taken no measures to get away with this. Whether her self-delusion became her story once again, masking forever the suppressed, compressed, nuclear-grade anger that serves as premeditation in so many homicides.

This is where our justice system, and any justice system presided over by mere mortals, fails. You can’t prove that the darkness won out in a human heart’s moment of truth without corroborative evidence, and so that mortal jury with its mortal frailties will look on a prim headmistress with mercy.

I wonder if that’s really why Jean Harris wouldn’t allow a plea-bargain.

I wonder if her deeper wish was to be punished as severely as possible.

***

Ida Libby Dengrove, the artist whose work led me to learn about this case, struck up a friendship of sorts with Jean Harris. She was the only defendent with whom Dengrove ever portrayed herself in a sketch. Barbara Walters and Joan Rivers were ardent supporters of Jean, and numerous activists still decry the verdict and sentence as gross miscarriages of justice. But amongst the hundreds of cases I pored over, amongst convictions obtained with absurdly thin evidence, blatantly racist prosecutorial tactics, and zero influential white ladies clamoring for the defendants’ acquittals, I think Jean Harris’s trial is a rare instance where the verdict was bang-on and the sentence was fair and appropriate. The fact that she practically wove the rope to hang herself strikes me as poetic, for if her story was truly true, and she went to New York determined to end her life, then she succeeded.

And if, as I suspect, her story was only somewhat true, if what she profoundly and honestly desired was freedom from Hi Tarnower and the hold he had over her feelings of self-worth, if Jean Harris made that long drive on a dark and stormy night determined to create an identity of her very own? Then she succeeded there, too.