Jean Harris Tells New Prison Tales

As Jean Harris gets up and starts to walk away, her foot catches a leg of the chair and she stumbles backward, gracefully almost, as if in slow motion, grazing her head against a window sill as she falls to the floor.

She sits there, her face a cross between dazed and annoyed, and it’s a minute before people begin converging--her publicist, a reporter, a corrections officer, another inmate--to help.

She had been waiting to give an interview about her new book, her second since she metamorphosed from school headmistress to prison author. She is serving time in a maximum-security prison here, convicted of the second-degree murder of Dr. Herman Tarnower, creator of the Scarsdale Diet and Harris’ lover for 14 years.

Chatter and Children

The visitors room rings with chatter. Imagine a large school cafeteria, sunlit from an expanse of windows on one side, lined with vending machines, and filled with tables and chairs and benches arranged in little groupings.

In the courtyard, children of inmates (one of Bedford Hills’ most innovative features is its children’s program) frolic and scream and splash in a wading pool. At the far end of the room is a bright yellow banner with cheerful orange lettering: JOY IS UNBREAKABLE.

A guard sits at a raised station with a microphone and a buzzer that releases the lock on the barred low-rise gate that lets visitors pass.

Harris was already annoyed that the small private rooms on the edge of the visitors room were temporarily unavailable. When a reporter relates how her saline solution for contact lenses was temporarily (and apologetically) confiscated as potential contraband medicine, Harris shakes her head.

“They’re very paranoid,” she says.

And now as a guard comes over and suggests that Harris get checked at the hospital, she refuses with irritation. Moments later she lashes out at the prison bureaucracy that now rules her life, saying a visit to the doctor would mean hours of wasted time.

At the end of this week, Jean Struven Harris, former headmistress of the Madeira School in McLean, Va., will have spent 7 1/2 years in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, which, if not for the high fences topped with razor-sharp concertina wire, looks like some undistinguished brick school complex nestled in a clearing in a woodsy part of Westchester County.

“Really?” Harris says upon hearing this observation. “The only time I’ve ever seen it, it was a prison and to me it looks like a prison.”

Significant Week

This week is important, not just because “They Always Call Us Ladies,” her new book about women in prison, is out, but because it is the halfway mark of the minimum time of her sentence--15 years to life. She intends to write to New York Gov. Mario Cuomo requesting clemency, knowing that prisoners usually are not considered until they have served at least half of their minimum time.

Harris’ request for emergency clemency a couple of years ago after she had two heart attacks was denied. Today, she says she feels pretty good and carries nitroglycerin to treat her angina.

She looks well these days--slender, her hair simply but immaculately coifed. Her pink button-down shirt is crisp and she’s made up softly with blush and lipstick.

If Cuomo does grant clemency--which he has done for only 24 prisoners in five years--it would not automatically free her. But she would immediately become a candidate for parole. Otherwise, she will not be eligible until she has served 15 years.

At 65, Harris is nearly two generations older than most inmates at Bedford Hills, whose average age, she says, is 26. Only 27 of about 800 women in Bedford Hills have been locked up longer than she has, she says.

“I’m one of the most dangerous women in the state of New York,” she deadpans.

She is dryly witty, observant, sometimes testy. She speaks in a strong, no-nonsense tone.

The day she entered prison, she thought she would not survive.

“I didn’t think I’d last two weeks. I don’t know how I’ve lasted. I just think God is good. That’s the only possible explanation. I thought I would lose my mind.”

In her 1986 book, “Stranger in Two Worlds,” which is about herself, her complicated, ill-fated relationship with Tarnower and her first few years in prison, she describes herself as an “earnest but wimpy character . . . trying to do all the things that were expected, or that I thought were expected.” She rejects that description today.

“I think I’m stronger because I’ve been tested. It’s my mother saying, ‘A clay pot is a clay pot as long as it just sits in the sun.’ It’s got to go through the white heat of the furnace, and I think this is the white heat of the furnace.”

But some things haven’t changed. She still says this:

“I didn’t murder Dr. Tarnower. I know I was responsible for his death. There’s a big difference. Murder is a deliberate effort to kill somebody.”

She has always maintained that she planned to kill herself, not him, when on March 10, 1980, she made the 5-hour drive from Virginia to Tarnower’s plush Westchester County home, a .32-caliber revolver beside her. Tarnower was found in his bedroom, shot four times, once in the upper back.

Harris is still a compelling figure. She pursued a 14-year relationship with a man described variously as generous, charming, fascinating, austere, self-centered, difficult--someone who had never married and told women he probably would not, a man who had other relationships during his years with Harris.

It was a relationship in which she trapped herself, a long, tortured affair that, despite its violent end, aroused the sympathies of many women.

“That’s why a lot of letters have been written to me,” she says now, “because they say, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ ”

Thoughts of Him Fading

She no longer thinks about Tarnower every day, as she wrote she did in her first book.

“You can’t let yourself be strangled by something like that.”

But she does feel regret: “You can’t be responsible for somebody’s death whom you loved and not feel regret--of course, I feel regret. I’m terribly sorry he died. He loved life more than anybody I ever knew in my life, which was probably one of the great charms of him.”

She puts an end to this topic. “I’m just not going to . . . sit here and weep for you,” she says with irritation before tears begin welling in her eyes.

Her visitors are her two sons (David, 37, is a banker, and Jim, 35, is a bond salesman), her siblings, her friends (none of whom have forsaken her, she says), and former students and their families. She gets “stacks of Christmas cards” and mail from friends and sympathetic strangers.

There is no boyfriend in her life.

“Just one man in my life and that was quite enough, probably too much,” she says, referring not to the man she married and divorced long ago but to Tarnower. “I’m sure it was too much.”

She says she has never been physically afraid. By and large, she says, she gets along just fine at Bedford Hills. She has learned the prison etiquette of minding your own business, not asking too many questions, not looking for an argument.

In “They Always Call Us Ladies,” she writes about female relationships, saying that she believes some of the inmates are lesbians and some are simply women turning for love and affection to the only people available--other women.

“They miss sex,” she says, “and they turn to one another. . . . I think it’s kind of sad. But maybe it isn’t sad if that’s what you want and that’s what you find in here.”

At the beginning, she says, the corrections officers watched her closely.

“I got charge sheets (demerits) for just about breathing.” The inmates watched her too, well aware of who she was.

“In fact, the first time I got the job of scrubbing the floors . . . a couple of them sat and watched me and said, ‘I bet that’s the first time you ever did that, Mrs. Harris,’ ” she says, chuckling.

“I said, ‘Oh, lady, you’d have to get up very early in the morning to wash more floors than I’ve washed.’ Their picture of me was so unreal.”

But in general, Harris says, almost everyone--including inmates and guards--has been decent to her. Inmates sometimes come to her for advice on how to get their own stories published.

She wakes at 6 a.m. and spends most of the day in her cell--furnished with a lumpy mattress and bookshelves of her own improvising. She eats in the cell--inmates can bring in much of their own food and even cook in a small kitchen on her floor.

She reads voraciously and listens to her AM radio. She writes in longhand and often keeps the light on most of the night, not just to read but to ward off the scurrying cockroaches.

She laments that there are few incentives built into the prison system to encourage women--who are otherwise languishing in their cells, obsessively painting their fingernails and playing pinochle--to work and study.

She supports the concept of merit time that gives a prisoner credit toward time served if it is spent in some particularly productive way.

She has spent much of her time working in the Bedford Hills program to help care for inmates’ children and foster regular and productive contact with their mothers. She has also worked in the program that helps mothers learn how to take care of their children.

The grim picture of prison she paints in her book is a portrait of not just forgotten women but of a forgotten underclass--creating a vicious cycle where neglected, uneducated children turn into value-deprived, unproductive men and women who end up in prison, who give birth to children as neglected as they were.

Add to this a large number of mentally ill women and you have not just a bleak environment but one filled long into the night with endless, usually obscene, often meaningless noise--women singing a song over and over, yelling for something constantly--that, Harris writes, jangles everyone’s nerves.

But the biggest cross is the absolute authority.

“The hardest thing for me is having to do unreasonable things that I don’t want to do--that don’t make any sense to me, and are being told by people I don’t have that much use for,” she says.

Still in the Courts

Litigation is still pending over who should get the profits from her first book. New York’s so-called “Son of Sam” law states that an author cannot profit from writing about his or her crimes.

Harris’ lawyer contends that the book doesn’t fall under that law since it is about her life and, furthermore, that the part dealing with the crime is based on public records, such as court transcripts.

In any case, Harris has said she would not keep any of the money; she has earmarked it for a fund for the children of Bedford Hills inmates.

“To me,” she says, “the children of Bedford are their mothers as well as the children. I look at young kids in here--teen-agers--and I think, ‘Boy, I can picture you in riding jodhpurs down at Madeira and there’s no way you’d have come to prison if you’d lived that kind of a life.’ ”

Whither the Money?

She won’t reveal how much of an advance she got for her new book, the profits of which she will get to keep.

“I wasn’t paid until Albany had decided this book had nothing to do with the Son of Sam law.”

With the money, she will “hopefully support myself if I live long enough to get out of here. It isn’t that much money but it will help me get started.”

Raise the specter of her remaining time in prison and she says: “If you ask me what am I going to do for the next 7 1/2 years, I haven’t any idea. Probably try to survive.”

And what will she do when she gets out?

“Buy a couple of dogs and take a long walk.”