1The Lady and the Doctor
(1980)
They had been friends and frequent companions for at least fifteen years. He was a prominent cardiologist who last year, at sixty-eight, became famous when he published a best-selling book, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. She was a well-bred socialite who was headmistress of the Madeira School near Washington, one of the nation’s toniest private schools for girls. One night last week, Jean Struven Harris, fifty-seven, drove to Dr. Herman Tarnower’s 6½-acre estate in Purchase, New York, with a strange request: She wanted him to kill her. But before the night was over, it was Tarnower who lay dead—and Harris stood accused of his murder.
Tarnower was shot just before 11 p.m. Police received a report of a burglary in progress at Tarnower’s secluded, Japanese-style home. When patrolman Brian McKenna arrived, he met Harris coming out the long driveway in a Plymouth sedan. “There’s been a shooting in the house,” she told the officer, who raced inside to Tarnower’s second-floor bedroom. There, the cop found the doctor lying in his pajamas between two twin beds, bleeding from bullet wounds in his shoulder, arm, and chest. Tarnower was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died about midnight.
Two other policemen who arrived later at the house found Harris standing by inside. “I shot him. I did it,” she told patrolman Daniel O’Sullivan. “She stated that she had driven with the weapon in the car from Virginia with the intent of having Dr. Tarnower kill her,” O’Sullivan testified at a court hearing last week. “She said she had no intention of going back to Virginia alive. She stated they had an argument in Tarnower’s bedroom, that he pushed her away and said, ‘Get out of here, you’re crazy.’” Precisely what happened is unclear, but police say that Harris led them to a .32-caliber revolver in her car. It was the gun that killed Tarnower.
* * *
Bruises: Harris was charged with second-degree murder and released on $40,000 bail. Her defense attorney, Joel Aurnou, noted that she had severe bruises on her face and arm and hinted that she might have acted in self-defense. “We have not ruled out the possibility that Jean Harris might be a victim,” Aurnou insisted. Countered Assistant District Attorney Joseph Rakacky: “We will contend that the dispute rose out of the personal relationship.”
By all accounts, Hi Tarnower was a quiet and private man, a bachelor devoted to his cardiology practice, an outdoorsman who enjoyed fishing, hunting, and golf. Through his work with heart patients, Tarnower developed a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that he mailed free to anyone who asked. In 1978, he teamed up with Samm Sinclair Baker and presented the diet in a book that became a bestseller and sold 2½ million copies in a paperback edition. But the fame didn’t seem to change him. “The last thing he would have wanted was to be known as the diet man,” said longtime friend Sidney Salwen. “The diet was incidental. He was first and foremost a cardiologist.”
* * *
Romance? The first of several acknowledgments in Tarnower’s book thanks Jean Harris “for her splendid assistance in the research and writing of this book…” Coauthor Baker balked at the acknowledgment. “Whatever she did for him, I don’t know,” he says. What was clear was that Tarnower and Harris, a divorced mother of two grown sons, had been close friends for many years, and some suggested that they were romantically involved. She had been a frequent visitor at his home, and though she lived on the Madeira campus in Virginia, she owned a house not far from Tarnower’s. A friend of Tarnower’s who sometimes teased him about being a bachelor said that he had “lots of dates. But he never indicated that there was anyone special.”
Recently, Tarnower was seen socially with Lynne Tryforos, a divorcée in her mid-thirties who worked as his assistant at the Scarsdale Medical Center. Tryforos dined with Tarnower, his sister, and his niece the night he was killed, but they had left by 9 o’clock, before Harris arrived. Tarnower’s relationships with Harris and Tryforos led some to speculate that jealousy might have been a motive for the killing: “This was a lovers’ triangle,” insists one neighbor. “Mrs. Harris was quite a refined lady and he baited her by taking on a young, exotic looking and beautiful assistant.”
But if Jean Harris was a refined lady, she also seemed quite troubled and nervous at times. Before coming to Madeira, she was director of the now-defunct Thomas School for girls in Rowayton, Connecticut, where she was said to have shown a violent temper and was given, said one associate, to “unexplainable emotional outbursts.” In her early days at Madeira, there were some complaints that she was too demure in her stewardship and ill at ease in her new surroundings. Though parents applauded her emphasis on discipline, the students found her so obsessed with honesty and self-responsibility that they nicknamed her “Integrity Jean.” Two weeks ago, she expelled several students for drinking and smoking marijuana. The episode seemed to upset her. Two days before Tarnower’s death, a student found her normally immaculate living quarters in disarray.
The full story of Harris’s relationship to Tarnower may come out in the trial. For now, there is only speculation. At Madeira last week, students recalled a sentence that Harris once wrote in the Madeira alumna magazine. “If my educational philosophy has a schizophrenic ring to it, perhaps the same could be said of myself as a woman.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE GILDED AGE. Copyright © 2022 by The Julia Evans Reed Charitable Trust.
