‘The Myth of Me’ : Aftermath: Jean Harris rejects the labels thrust upon her after the Scarsdale Diet Doctor murder in 1980, saying she’s just ‘a tired old lady.’ But she has energy to speak out for other women still in prison.

From her cabin high above the Connecticut River, Jean Harris can see two mountain ranges, three white church steeples, one tiny village and two covered bridges.

What she cannot see is her past. And that, of course, is why she has come here.

After serving 12 years in a maximum-security prison for the 1980 murder of Scarsdale Diet Dr. Herman Tarnower, Harris’ failing health and model work with prisoners’ children finally won her release in January. By April, she was an official citizen of New Hampshire--the state with the motto “Live Free or Die.”

For a woman who fully expected to die in prison for killing “the only man I ever loved,” living free is precious indeed and Harris is doing it very well.

From her prison cell, the view outside was spoiled by coils of barbed wire. Here, the nearest barbed wire is the few strands used to pen in some milk cows down the road.

In prison, she routinely endured strip searches and scrubbed showers for the privilege of a few minutes of bathing alone. Here, she showers when and for as long as she wishes.

In this place that “feels awfully close to heaven,” Harris says she is finally losing the hell that was her past.

On a lazy summer morning, the only thing rushing is the river far below as Harris, 69, her voice small and girlish, calls out from behind the screen door. “Hello, hello. I see you’ve found me.”

Except for her sons, Jimmy, 40, and David, 42, who bought this cabin for her years before she was free to live in it, Harris has entertained very few guests here. And that is intentional. Her family and an oversized golden retriever puppy are company enough, she says, for a person who lived in close quarters with 620 other people for more than a decade.

“I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be alone,” sighs Harris, who had been sentenced to 15 years to life.

For years, her favorite fantasy of freedom was exactly this. The mountains, the quiet and taking a walk with a dog--” never with a leash.”

Is she bored? “Impossible!”

Is she lonely? “Not yet.”

Is anything missing? “Yes, 12 years of my life.”

*

Jean Harris is slight and delicate and today, very sad looking, especially around the eyes.

The woman who was once called “America’s favorite convict” and likened by some romantics to Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina insists she is now “just a tired old lady.”

While those who benefit from her tireless efforts for prison reform say her energy remains boundless, there is no question that prison and the tragedy that landed her there have aged her.

“I honestly believed I would die in prison,” says Harris. And she nearly did. She suffered three heart attacks. But even worse for her health, she says, were the three clemency rejections by Gov. Mario Cuomo, who maintained she was no different from other women who kill.

Then last Dec. 29, as Harris lay on a stretcher being readied for heart bypass surgery, Cuomo granted her fourth request. “I woke up at 3 a.m. and made the decision at 4 a.m.,” the governor told the Associated Press. At noon, Harris, weeping with joy and surprise, was wheeled into the operating room.

Cuomo said he agonized greatly over his decision to commute her sentence. Harris, always the lady, notes that she agonized as well.

Although tens of thousands of people had worked for her early release and one of her sons even set up a table on a Manhattan street corner to collect signatures on petitions to free her, it was apparently Harris’ state of health that finally convinced Cuomo.

There is no history of heart disease in her family, says Harris. And her doctors maintain it was the “distress of confinement” that provoked her heart attacks.

But Harris’ heart had caused her problems before. And it was broken many times before she ever went to prison.

*

Born into an upper-middle-class Ohio family, Jean Struven was a bright and beautiful girl who went to Smith College with Barbara Bush (whom she admires very much) and Nancy Reagan (whom she does not). She graduated magna cum laude and married soon after “because that’s what girls did.”

In 1965, after a quarrel over her failure to get the boys to brush their teeth before bed, Harris announced to her husband: “Jim, it’s 10:30 and starting right now I’m not your wife anymore.”

She was 42 and she was starting a new life. That new life included not only a new career as an educator and later headmistress of the exclusive Madeira School for girls in McLean, Va., it also was the beginning of a romance with New York cardiologist Herman (Hy) Tarnower, then 56.

The doctor was a wonderful dancer, a witty conversationalist, fabulously wealthy and, according to Harris, “a great lover of life.”

He also was a great lover of women. And not necessarily one at a time. According to diaries kept by the servants who lived in his Westchester County mansion, it was not unusual for him to alternate women as overnight guests. After more than a decade with Harris, Tarnower took up with his medical assistant, Lynne Tryforos, and while Harris spent her school vacation rewriting his best-selling diet book, he was squiring Tryforos--20 years Harris’ junior--to dinner parties.

It was everywoman’s nightmare. And Jean Harris snapped.

When she went to Tarnower’s home the night of March 10, 1980, she testified it was to say goodby and then shoot herself near a patch of daffodils next to the pond on his estate. But by midnight, Tarnower--not Harris--was dead.

Even though Tarnower had been prescribing hefty doses of amphetamines to Harris for more than nine years and though she had run out of the mood-altering drug days before the shooting, her mental state was not taken into consideration when she pleaded not guilty, according to court papers.

Despite assurances from supporters that “no woman will ever convict you,” a jury of eight women and four men found her guilty of second-degree murder on Feb. 28, 1981. Harris said the shooting was accidental, but jurors found her version at odds with the evidence, particularly the multiple bullet wounds in Tarnower’s body, including one in the back.

Still, some felt that justice had not been served. The judge and even some members of the jury soon joined efforts to free Harris. “Although I sentenced her, I really had no choice,” explains former Westchester County Court Judge Russell R. Leggett, who retired soon after “because nothing could ever again compare with that trial.”

Harris, always the gentlewoman, later wrote Leggett “a very proper thank-you note” for his belated support, he said.

“Never did I consider her a threat to society. The only person she was a threat to was dead,” says Leggett, who has returned to private practice in White Plains, N.Y. “This was a single event provoked by emotions that were enormous. She just looked at the mirror and her whole life was crashing, her kids were gone, and she had suddenly been abandoned and for the worst of all reasons--a younger woman.”

*

As a cause celebre , Jean Harris says she is not ungrateful. But as she watched “the myth of me” unfold during her last few years in prison, she became increasingly uncomfortable.

“There are many, many women who should never have spent a day in prison,” says Harris. “And I really wonder how in their hearts people can believe that nobody in prison was nice except nice Mrs. Harris--who wasn’t nice at all when she went to prison--who, in fact, was the absolute bitch of the world when she went to prison.”

But shortly after she arrived at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, Harris found ways “to make myself useful.” Much has been made of her work on behalf of the prison’s Children’s Center, and she has funneled all profits from her books to the Children of Bedford foundation, which helps the center and its children.

“I think I’ve helped a little bit with that effort, but it is its founder, Sister Elaine Roulet, who is the moral essence of the Children’s Center and that prison,” says Harris, who says she can no longer call herself religious. “My faith is in my own strength.”

She has little patience with those who suggest “that the tragedy of Hy’s death” is part of some cosmic plan to bring her love and her talents to the needy prison babies. “That’s garbage. You do what you must to survive. And that’s what I chose to do. That doesn’t make sending me to prison any less of a waste.”

When Harris leaves her remote home and gentle life here, it is to spread the word about the work of Sister Elaine and help people see that there are other “nice women” in prison. She goes where she is invited, to Congressional committees, bar associations, religious groups (although one rabbi canceled, she says, for fear her “murderous past would defile the temple”).

Weary of her personal spotlight, Harris uses it these days to earn a living as a contributing editor of Lear’s magazine--her first essay in the August edition is on clothes in and out of prison--and to spread the message about women in prison. “Their lives--and worse, their children’s lives--are being wasted by a system that is not doing enough to help break the cycle of crimes by and against women.”

While court-appointed psychologists over the years have called Harris an “emotionally abused,” even “sadistically maltreated,” woman, Harris herself shrugs off such labels. But that has not prevented her from also becoming a symbol for the prison movement to free battered women who killed their abusers.

“I know many women identify with me on that basis, but I don’t feel it’s accurate,” says Harris, adding that there are other labels that fit better. “That phrase ‘wealthy socialite’ always seems to appear in front of my name, but the truth is that I was a single mother, who lived on a schoolteacher’s salary--and nobody, not Hy, not anybody, ever paid my bills for me. That life, I do know.”

She still receives dozens of letters from all over the country from women who want her to know they, at least, understand.

“The way I was raised, the way I lived, I could never have imagined picking up a pen and writing a letter to someone I’d never met, a stranger I’d just read about in the newspaper,” says Harris. “But one day, I’ll get a letter written on scrap of paper that begins, ‘I’m just a little nobody. I live in a trailer in Florida . . . ‘ And then I’ll receive a lovely little card with a Cartier imprint.”

Nearly all carry the same message: “There but for the grace of God go I . . . “

Or as Barbara Walters told Harris, “You did become the symbol of the woman wronged.”

“No,” Harris corrected, “I think I’m the woman who let herself be wronged.”

*

Today, Harris says she tells any woman who will listen: “Look here, it’s up to you to make yourself happy. Forget the notion that if you are a good girl someone will come along and make you happy.”

She is tired of those who would dwell on the eternally arresting plot of her life as the woman scorned.

“I don’t dwell on it. I barely even think about it anymore,” she says, although that is not always easy.

Will there ever be another man in her life?

“Good heavens, no! Whatever for?”