”I was playing cards with one woman from the mental ward the other day and I said, `Oh, Ellen. It was just a couple of months ago that you got out. What are you doing back in?` And she said, `Oh, it ain`t bad being back, Jean. You should see where I was sleeping before. It was terrible. This is much better.”`
She recalled an irony of her past, when she was living in New York City and involved with the Junior League.
”Their big project was going over and visiting women on Ryker`s Island
(a New York prison) and I thought to myself, `Gee, I can`t do that. I wouldn`t know how to talk to those women. I`d probably be more of a nuisance.` And I didn`t do it, because I really didn`t think I`d be any good at it. So now I live with all those ladies I didn`t want to talk to.”
She laughed, then sighed, an expression of weariness, frustration and affection.
”I`m still not all that good with talking to them,” she said. ”I`m good when we`re talking on certain subjects, but I can aggravate them as much as they aggravate me sometimes because we have such totally different value systems. It`s not getting any worse. It`s about the same and now I think it`s kind of funny. The one thing I can`t argue with them about is that I am old and they love to throw that in my face because I`m 40 years older than most of them.”
Her two sons, Jimmy and David, are a great source of strength to her, though she refers to them as yuppies.
”I was saying to David the other day, `I should never have made you get your hair cut. I don`t know why I made such a fuss about it but you were such a laughable slob and now you`re sitting there in your gray flannel suit and I think I like the other version better sometimes.`
”Oh dear, they`ve been so great. They really are fabulous. This is murder for those two kids, for children of any age, even though mine are grown. It`s really tough. I`m sure it`s harder for them than it is for me because they have to meet the rest of the world every day. I don`t. I`m hidden away.”
Jimmy is able to visit her once a week. David, who lives in New York City, gets up only about half that often.
”I talk to them a lot,” she said. ”In fact, I see them a lot more than if I were down in Virginia. I`m sure I wouldn`t feel it was so important to touch base all the time. That makes me one of the lucky ones because my kids are grown and they can get here. If they were 10 or 12 I`d be out of my mind by now. I don`t know how these women stand that.”
In all, she gets about four visits a week, many from teaching colleagues and students from Madeira. One girl recently came to show her a photograph of the man she was going to marry.
But for much of the time Harris is alone, and she cherishes the solitude. ”I`m very lucky because I have many people who send me books and I love reading,” she said. ”And I`ve always spent a lot of time alone. I always worked with a lot of people but after work was over I was almost always alone. And I don`t mind that. In fact, I think I probably enjoy it.”
She said she tries not to think about herself and her predicament–and not reflect on her past life. She does not think about James Scholes Harris, a decorated World War II flyer from Grosse Pointe, Mich., whom she married in 1946–”because that`s what girls did”–and divorced in 1965, after a petty quarrel over her failure to make her boys brush their teeth before going to bed: ”Jim, it`s 10:30 and starting right now I`m not your wife anymore.”
”Being with the boys makes me constantly aware of those ties to the past, but my husband has been dead for many years and I really don`t think about that,” she said. ”I left Grosse Pointe because I wanted to leave Grosse Pointe.”
She talks with much fondness of the slain Dr. Tarnower, whom she met at a dinner party in 1966, as a continuing presence in her life. The shooting is referred to as ”Hy`s death” or ”when Hy died.”
In a prison journal she kept, now part of ”Strangers in Two Worlds,”
she noted some five years after the shooting: ”I can feel anger at Hy now. It comes suddenly and goes as suddenly–but love goes on.
”Hy judged a man from the neck up and by the money and power he wielded. He judged a woman from the neck down, and by the money and power her husband wielded. As I think of the simple truth of that I am left with no logical explanation at all of what drew him to me, or me to him, or why he turned to me one day and said, quite out of the blue, `I love you, Jean Harris, and you`re the second woman I`ve said that to in my life.”`
She said her book served in part as catharsis for her, ”because there were things I wanted to say and I spent six years reading the garbage that other people were writing.” But she added, ”I also thought it was important for someone to say something positive about Hy, because he had a lot of very good qualities and, from what I`ve heard, not many people seem to point them out.”
If she writes another book, it will be in part because of her desperate need to keep busy.
”I never do nothing. And when I have to wait, I go crazy. Absolutely. I`ve gotten a little bit better about that, but usually if I don`t have a book or my knitting with me, I get very unpleasant after about five minutes.”
She said she reads the New York Times ”from cover to cover” every day and is a frequent writer of letters-to-the-editor columns of newspapers.
”I`ve had some published,” she said.
Harris is complacent about the precarious state of her health. She takes medication for her heart condition and a drug to combat depression (”I`m going to see if I can`t try to cut down on them”). She is obviously relieved to be free of her dependency on the amphetamine ”speed” that Tarnower kept her on for 10 years.
She tires easily. ”I really get to be exhausted about 3 o`clock to the point where it looks like an awfully long walk back up to where I live,” she said, but she noted she is able to garden in good weather.
Though she is bombarded by Bibles and clerical tracts through the mail, religion does not play a major part in her prison life.
”I had a devoutly religious mother,” she said. ”And we never missed church as we grew up, and both of my children went to Sunday school and were confirmed in the Episcopal Church, but in the last 10 years I really haven`t been that religious,” she said. ”There are a lot of people here who get a lot of comfort out of church, but hard work and caring about other people is as close to religious as I get. . . . My life here and the activities with the children are the same, as far as I`m concerned. The thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is having the children`s center to go down to.”
About 180 children of inmates are able to spend their days with their mothers at the center and board with families in the surrounding community at night. In addition to her work with these children, she helps in the prison nursery, where there are as many as 30 babies at any given time, and also in the prison mental ward.
”They`re great kids,” she said.
The proceeds of her book are to go to a foundation created to help the prison children and their mothers.
”You know, it`s presumptuous to say you hope this book is going to accomplish something,” she said, ”but I do hope it makes people more aware of what a waste prisons are and, most important of all, what they do to children.”
A difficult moment came for the interviewer when he remarked on the odd coincidences that connected them. He went to high school in Bedford not far from the prison and now lives in Virginia just down the road from the Madeira School. His son`s kindergarten teacher is the wife of the man who replaced Harris as headmaster at Madeira, and he has been a guest in the house overlooking the Potomac where Harris used to live.
The difficulty came with the realization that talking about these things in common only underscored what so demonstrably is not. That world is on the outside, for now–perhaps forever–denied Jean Harris. Hers now is the world of strip searches and concertina wire.
The most obligatory question can only be answered by Gov. Cuomo: Does Jean Harris belong in prison? Her contention is that Tarnower was killed accidentally during her attempt at suicide. The prosecution argued that she went to his Westchester home intending to kill him and then take her own life. Clearly, she considered the gun the ultimate if not only tool at her disposal in her frantic effort to resolve matters with Tarnower and end her torment.
Some questions have been raised about the manner in which the prosecution selected and presented its evidence. She was still on amphetamines when she testified. It`s commonly felt that if she had pleaded guilty to manslaughter, instead of making an all-or-nothing attempt to win acquittal on second degree murder charges, she probably would be out of prison by now. Manslaughter carries a two-year minimum sentence. The judge at her trial has said he would support clemency for her.
A decision by Cuomo is not expected before the November elections, when he will be seeking another term. A complicating factor is the attack already made on Cuomo by Vice President George Bush and other Reagan Republicans for giving clemency to Gary McGivern, a New Yorker serving 25 years to life for complicity in a murder.
In the meantime, Harris must do what she hates most–wait.
”I always thought bad things only happened to bad people,” she said.
”I really did. It`s hard to believe but that`s what I thought. I guess I was very lucky to go on thinking it for 57 years. I got to be a pretty old lady before I found I was wrong.”
