”You`re just like everyone else, you know,” corrections officers at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility keep warning Prisoner 81-G-98, also known as Jean Harris.
”I wonder how many times I`ve heard that during all these years, always from a woman, never a man. I wonder why they are the truly vicious ones,”
writes Harris in a letter to her friend and confidant, journalist Shana Alexander.
Whether Harris is ”just like everyone else” is a lurking undertheme in her book, ”Marking Time, Letters from Jean Harris to Shana Alexander”
(Charles Scribner`s Sons, $19.95).
Harris, former headmistress of a prestigious girls` school, was convicted in February 1981, for the second-degree murder of Dr. Herman Tarnower, developer of the so-called Scarsdale Diet.
She wrote the letters from January 1989 to December 1990 in the maximum-security New York penitentiary where she is serving the 11th year of her 15-years-to-life sentence.
The book resulted from a suggestion by Harris` editor that she write about her prison experience in the form of letters to Alexander. Harris had been suffering from writer`s block and this literary form dissolved it.
By turns gripping and heartrending, ironic and humorous, compassionate and intelligent, the letters make up the most intimate book that Harris has written. (She`s also author of ”Stranger in Two Worlds” (1987) and ”They Always Call Us Ladies” (1990)).
The letters are Harris` lifeline to the outside world and sanity, from a place where ”One is quickly swallowed up by the tiresome, the useless and the absurd. To speak the truth is considered arrogance. To speak logic is to be considered a fool or at best a misfit,” she writes.
”Each letter is the rung of a ladder that keeps my head above the frustrations that lead to heart attacks and strokes, at the very least above boredom, depression and that most unforgivable thing of all, giving up.”
(Harris, 69, has suffered three heart attacks while in jail.)
”Shana is that rare friend to whom one can tell all,” she writes.
The result is a nerve-crawling picture of prison life, told by one woman to another. ”It is a reflection, of course, of my character and its flaws as well as the character and flaws of a prison system. So be it,” Harris writes. She seems to keep to honest introspection in the face of her struggle to find self-esteem in the face of a system that reflects ”a terrible and constant fear in here that we are not being punished enough,” she writes.
The letters vividly describe her relationships with the women inside the prison walls, along with the bouts of depression, the fits of anger, the moments of dread they provoke.
She gives readers a stark look at life in prison, the daily meanness and pettiness, the unending red tape, obsession with trivia, the overlooking of human feelings.
One has to wonder what the aftermath of the book will be for Harris, so candid are her anecdotes. She relates how a corrections officer she calls the ”Witch of Endor” in her book ”always greets me in a high falsetto voice.
`Well, here come Princess Di. Where you goin` in such a hurry, Princess Di?
You ain`t in no hurry. You got time. You got plenty of time,”` Harris is taunted.
From the officer`s point of view, perhaps Harris deserves the sobriquet because she is too unwilling to give in to being like ”everyone else.”
For two years she ate meals alone in her cell, ”anything to avoid the noise, the pushing and shoving in the hallway to the dining room, and the ugly, ugly language that are all a part of standing in line to be fed here.” The last time she went down to eat in the communal dining room, tempted by a baked potato being served, two inmates banged their table hard three times to dislodge the cockroaches that live underneath, she writes. ”Rather have `em on the floor than in my lap,” said the one inmate.
Harris also disdains using prison bathtubs. ”There`s something about sharing a tub in an institution where herpes, gonorrhea, syphillis and TB are on the rise and one in five test positive for the AIDS virus that quenches one`s thirst for a nice, hot bath,” she writes.
”There are no straws under the fingernails in here, just daily doses of gratuitous unkindness and nastiness. They kill the spirit the way they tell me arsenic kills the body-a little bit at a time,” writes Harris in a letter she sardonically signs, ”Love, Princess Di.”
”It`s usually my mouth that causes my biggest problems,” writes Harris. For example, subjected to body searches after visitors leave-all inmates, naked and squatting, must cough for a staff member who examines her-Harris tells the corrections officer she is disgusting, though she is only doing her job.
”I`m afraid I will never be an admirable inmate, if that is Bedford`s notion of an admirable one. Brown-nosing is the furthest thing from my style, and blurting out my very honest opinion is the kiss of death outside as well as inside. But to compromise either of those two deadly qualities doesn`t tempt me at all-and so one pays the price,” she wrote of the incident to Alexander, signing it ”Love, Just Like Anyone Else.”
Alexander, a journalist and author who has residences on the East and West Coasts, recalled in a recent interview that she first saw Harris on television the night she was arrested.
Alexander was sitting in front of the TV doing needlepoint, ”when I heard a voice come on to say the headmistress of Madeira School in Virginia had shot and killed a doctor I had known briefly,” she says.
Harris maintained in her defense that she had driven to Tarnower`s estate in Purchase, N.Y., the night of the murder because she wanted him to kill her. She was his mistress for some 15 years and their relationship was ending. Harris said she wanted to commit suicide after bidding him a last farewell.
What happened is unclear. But after a struggle, Tarnower lay dead, shot from the .32 revolver Harris had brought to his estate.
The prosecution contended that Harris killed Tarnower in a jealous rage, to make sure she would not be replaced as his mistress.
”You don`t think of school headmistresses as shooting lovers, and she looked very much like me,” says Alexander. ”She had on my shoes, and she looked as though she had gone to my hairdresser. Her lawyer was waving his cigar at the press and saying, `Listen, fellas, you don`t understand my client. She`s very much a lady.` Maybe they don`t understand her, buddy, but I do,” Alexander said to herself. ”I wanted to write her story (which was published in her 1983 book, ”Very Much A Lady”) and I thought I knew what it`s about.”
She contacted Harris`s lawyer, Joel Aurnou, ”and he said, as all lawyers do, `Write me a letter.`
”We met at a preliminary court hearing, and she saw me, as she described in the book, and I smiled at her,” continues Alexander.
”There was trust and affection between us right away. She was a mess, although I didn`t talk to her until (after the conviction).”
”Her defense was a suicide attempt that turned into a tragic accident when she and Tarnower struggled over the gun. I believed it, but the jury didn`t,” says Alexander, who keeps in frequent touch with Harris by telephone. ”Letters are interspersed by conversation and personal visits,”
she says.
It wasn`t until Harris was in prison that Alexander was able to interview her. ”Since most prisoners (there) are young and have children, they have to have a liberal visiting policy,” says Alexander. The two women would spend hours together, she says, sometimes from ”9:30 (a.m.) to the final call” of the day.
”She was a mess when she was on trial,” says Alexander. She was addicted to Desoxyn, an amphetamine that Tarnower had prescribed for her for more than nine years.
Though Tarnower was a cardiologist, Alexander says he probably prescribed the drug in response to Harris complaining to him, ”Oh, Hy, I`m so exhausted all the time.”
The drug was restricted in Virginia, where Harris was working, so Tarnower had his secretary (who was also his girlfriend) mail her bottles of the pills.
”One day the mails were late and the bottle didn`t get there,” says Alexander, and ”Harris found herself spiraling down into instant withdrawal after 9 1/2 years on the drug. She made the decision that suicide was her only solution. She`d had the gun for many years on the top of her closet.”
Asked how Harris has changed in prison, Alexander replies curtly, ”She`s a normal woman-that`s the way she`s changed,” meaning she`s no longer under the effects of Desoxyn.
”She`s also aged very much and her hair has gone white. She has circles under her eyes. She`s frail in her heart but she`s very strong in character and purpose,” she says.
”The third way she`s changed, she used to know how to educate the daughters of the rich. Now she knows more than anybody in the country how to educate the children of women in prison.”
Working with Sister Elaine Roulet, founder and head of the Children`s Center where inmates` children can visit with their mothers in a pleasant environment, she takes part in the program for training young mothers who give birth while incarcerated and are able to keep the babies with them for the first year.
(Because of the so-called ”Son of Sam” law designed to prevent convicted felons from profiting financially from publicity surrounding their crimes, Harris was unable to collect money from her first book, which covered the trial. Proceeds from her writings since, including ”Marking Time,” are earmarked for the Children of Bedford program, according to Alexander.)
”She`s trying to intervene in a long lineage of deprivation and ignorance and poverty,” says Alexander. ”The only way you can intervene is to break the cycle and teach the women self-esteem. They don`t think they`re important to anybody but she tries to teach them they`re important to their babies. ”
When it`s mentioned that Harris` life in prison sounds like something out of Feodor Dostoevsky, Alexander agrees and adds, ”out of Lewis Carroll`s
`Through the Looking Glass,` as well.
”I think her maintenance of her sanity, her wit, and compassion and her intelligence under the circumstances which she has to live has been mind-boggling,” says Alexander. ”Survival has made her stronger. Somebody
(Ernest Hemingway) said, we are stronger at the broken places.”
Harris is not eligible for parole, and there is little hope of her sentence being commuted.
”Not while (Gov.) Mario Cuomo is in office; he has no inclination to let her out,” says Alexander. ”The only way she can get out is through clemency; one person holds the key and he`s not about to turn it. Cuomo turned her down three times.”
Alexander and Harris agree that no one functions fully in prison.
”Little that is good is nourished here,” Harris writes. ”What grows here is hypocrisy, obscenity, illness, illegality, ignorance, confusion, waste, hopelessness.
”Life in prison is a garland of dross, cultivated by those who never check to see what their crop is. Ten years in a garden of dross! So as the poet said, you plant your own garden and cultivate your own soul. Maybe that`s what life is.”
