The Way to Treat a Lady

By R.Z. Sheppard

MRS. HARRIS: THE DEATH OF THE SCARSCALE DIET DOCTOR

by Diana Trilling; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 341 pages; $14.95

The killing of Dr. Herman Tarnower by Jean Harris was--in current parlance--an "upscale" crime. Accordingly, three upscale women were contracted to write books about it. Shana Alexander and Lally Weymouth are journalists with good exposure and better connections. Diana Trilling is a redoubtable essayist whose clear thinking and case-hardened prose have cut through much of the intellectual and political lard of the past 40 years.

The betting was that Trilling, 76, would turn out the most thoughtful account, though not the fastest or most marketable. One hesitates to deliver a verdict before all the evidence is in, but it is unlikely that Trilling's treatment of Tarnower's death and Harris' conviction will be bettered. As the 1981 calendar flattens against the wall, Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor seems the best nonfiction trade book of the year.

This is due largely to what is known in the author's literary circle as resonance--the rich tone that even a tabloid subject causes when drawn across a perceptive and deeply cultured intelligence. Where newspaper readers saw the case as little more than an upper-middle-class rendition of Frankie and Johnny (he done her wrong. Bang! Bang!), Trilling sees a drama worthy of the talents of Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She also teases out enough class conflict to spin a dark web of one of egalitarian America's most sensitive subjects.

For hundreds of hours, Trilling observed the adjudication of this "respectable murder" from a press seat in the White Plains county courthouse. Little escapes an eye trained by the textures and details of the 19th century novel of manners. In fact, the Jean Harris case provides Trilling with all the things that she has found lacking in serious contemporary fiction: "Love and sexual passion, honor, money, envy, jealousy, greed, death, greatness and meanness of spirit, the anguishing anatomy of class differences: all these which were once major themes of the novel were disappearing from literature to find their home in television, whose falsifications steadily weakened our understanding of life even while we boasted our superiority to its influence."

The author does her bit to change this condition with a work of social criticism hat reads like a novel, though she makes no Mailerian claims for the achievement. She heartily dislikes Tarnower, his "repilian" face, his dictatorial and unimaginative diet book and his Westchester, N.Y., house, which she finds "Japanoid" and "claustral." From testimony and private conversation, she concludes that the cardiologist was "a small-time emotional imperialist," and "a glutton for other people's vulnerabilities." She gleefully notes that he took a nightly laxative mixed with applesauce and that, according to the autopsy report, the deceased was overweight by the standards set forth in his book, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet.

Still, Tarnower is the real victim of the events of March 10, 1980. He is dead forever while Harris, once headmistress of the Madeira school in Virginia, has found a new outlet for her formidable organizational and tutorial talents among the inmates at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. The author admits to an early sympathy for Harris, then 57, whom Tarnower replaced as No. 1 companion with his secretary Lynne Tryforos, then 37. But as the trial progresses, Trilling grows increasingly disturbed by the accused's air of cultural superiority and emotional disengagement. At the evidence table, Harris examines her ex-lover's bloodstained bedsheets with the dispassionate look of a dry cleaner. She takes notes and shuffles papers as if she were her lawyer's assistant, not his client. Her references to Tryforos are redolent with snootiness. Of Harris, says Trilling: "La-dylikeness is her great stock-in-trade."

It was also her undoing, along with the mink hat she wore before the jury and the incriminating "Scarsdale letter" to Tarnower in which Harris sounds like anything but a lady. The defense contended that, despite the doctor's multiple bullet wounds, his death was "a tragic accident." Harris, it was argued, had driven all the way from her home in Virginia with a .32-cal. revolver to commit suicide after seeing "Hi" just one more time. The defendant described an ensuing struggle for the gun, which went off more than once. The jury did not buy the story and convicted Harris of murder in the second degree, defined as killing with a conscious intent. Trilling does not buy the verdict. She believes that Jean Harris harbored a murderous rage but not premeditation.

Of the lethal event itself, Trilling suggests that Harris did not lie; instead, her need to be right and respectable drove the truth into her subconscious. This conclusion is a long way from the annals of law. But in the court of literature, Trilling's Jean Harris is a great portrait of an American aberration. --By R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Mrs. Harris is still convinced ... that when she drove to Purchase for a last moment of peace and security with her lover, suicide was the only purpose she had in mind. If one grants that this was so, one can't help but wonder what the outcome of the evening would have been had Dr. Tarnower, instead of refusing to open his eyes, instead of just lying there hugging a pillow--Mrs. Harris didn't make that up--had bestirred himself, talked to his night visitor and tried to comfort her, perhaps made love to her. At least for the time being it might have dispelled her distress, bought the doctor his life and bought Mrs. Harris her life."

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