Note: This review was originally written for a library service called Tele-book in which people could call a special number to hear reviews read. I also used this book extensively in the article I wrote about the Jean Harris-Herman Tarnower case that appears at http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/women/harris/1.html.
Very Much A Lady by Shana Alexander, author of a book on Patty Hearst called Anyone’s Daughter, is the sympathetic and immensely readable story of Jean Harris. For anyone who has lost track of yesterday’s headlines, Harris is the headmistress of a posh girls’ school who shot and killed her lover, Herman Tarnower, a respected cardiologist who authored the best-selling Complete Scarsdale Diet Book. To this day, Jean Harris maintains that the fatal shooting of Dr. Tarnower was an accident that occurred when the doctor fought with Harris over the gun she planned to use to kill herself.
Alexander traces the lives of both major characters from childhood on and sees the seeds of their destruction planted early on. The same character traits that brought them together as lovers doomed them to a terrible and sad ending. Harris’ relationship with her impossible-to-please father formed her early identity as a “good girl” and led to her powerful need for a dominant male image to shore up her shaky sense of self. The classic overachiever, Harris had to excel in any project she tackled. She craved a stimulation that she failed to get from her brief first marriage to a decent but unexciting mate. Harris divorced him and began a fourteen-year-long affair with Dr. Herman Tarnower. Tarnower was a dedicated physician with old-fashioned attitudes toward women and a deep fear of marriage. After breaking their engagement, he urged Harris to find a man who would marry her. But Harris could not break the psychic and sexual attachment that bound her to the self-centered Tarnower.
There is one puzzling aspect to the Jean Harris-Hy Tarnower story that deserves fuller attention than Alexander gives it. That is Jean Harris’s religious background. According to Alexander, Jean Harris’s Mom was a devout Christian Scientist who saw her kids through the usual childhood illnesses without the benefit of medical treatment. When the Struven youngsters took sick, they were tucked in bed and given chicken soup while their mother read to them from the works of Mary Baker Eddy. The one time this formula didn’t work and a son almost died, Mrs. Struven rushed him to the hospital. In the words of the author “The woman was a believer but not a fanatic.”
The heavy irony of Jean’s passion for a doctor should have been examined in light of the Christian Science beliefs in which she had been indoctrinated. The additional irony of Jean’s being (perhaps) the victim of misguided medical practice, i.e., her dependence on amphetamines prescribed by her lover-doctor, should have been explored. Indeed, one reading of the Harris case might be the irony that the deterioration of her health could conceivably be traced the her new-found faith in medical science.
The jury rejected Harris’ version of events and found her guilty of murder. Alexander, who is unabashedly Harris’ partisan, brilliantly dissects the defense errors that led to Harris’ conviction. Among the chief of these were her attorney’s misguided interpretation of the explosive Scarsdale Letter (a chronicling of her woes and complaints that she mailed to Tarnower but which he never received), the jury’s class and background distance from the accused, and the failure of her defense lawyer’s to understand the personality of this brittle, high-strung “lady.”
In a story laced with ironies, the greatest is that in the version of events told by the prosecutor and accepted by the jury, Herman Tarnower is just another murder victim whereas according to Harris’s defense Tarnower died a heroic death, tragically putting his life in jeopardy to save hers.
