Word: headmistress
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Three years after Jean Harris fired four bullets into Herman Tarnower, the case of the headmistress and the diet doctor still has the power to engage our imagination. The public's appetite for details of the murder trial had been whetted by the social standing of the protagonists, as Diana Trilling pointed out in her brilliant 1981 study, Mrs. Harris. But the abiding fascination of the case resides in the story of the high-minded, stylish lady who descended to the depths of self-abasement and violence...
...vapid. One cannot stir a tempest in a thimble. Davies' Rose is a teacher in a Midlands elementary school who is busily donning her New Woman persona on the threshold of middle age. She insists, perhaps understandably, on being called Ms. Strong, instead of Mrs. Fidgett. This flusters Headmistress Smale (Beverly May) and the older staff, as do her theories of education, which smack of the bankrupt experiments of the '60s. She has no use for learning by rote. She wants children to play teachers, to make up their own work assignments, and for every one to "have...
...television, in films, even in real life. But the trial of Jean Harris, 57, accused of murdering Scarsdale Diet Doctor Herman Tarnower, 69, assumed the proportions of a national melodrama. During the three-month trial, as her precious privacy and guarded respectability were stripped away, the pitiably proud former headmistress of Virginia's Madeira School for girls became the centerpiece of a passionate drama-the old battle of the sexes, fraught with newer, feminist tonalities. In the end, the outcome seemed almost predetermined: the jury found Harris guilty of second-degree murder, of shooting Dr. Tarnower with the intent...
Jean Struven Harris behind bars is a study in incongruities. She once ran her own kingdom, the Madeira School, where heed was paid and homage given to the headmistress. She once presided over gourmet luncheons, toast and tea, with women who would come and go, talking of Michelangelo. But white gloves and perfect diction are not exactly called for in an American prison. She no longer manages an institution. It manages...
...tables and plants. Each floor has a recreation room with a television set, and if Harris becomes a star prisoner, she may some day watch TV and cook in her own cellblock. There is a school on the premises, though many of the courses may not interest a former headmistress: remedial English, auto repair, IBM keypunching, hairdressing. Bedford Hills is not an oppressively grim place to serve a sentence, but, as one guard says, "the hard thing is to be inside. You can make a prison almost a paradise, but if you can't leave, it remains a prison...