Behind the Lady Killer

SHANA Alexander's Very Much a lady is not the first book on the murder of Scarsdale's "Diet Doc" Herman Tarnower Moreover, because it follows extensive media coverage of the affair, it is disappointing that Alexander adds so little new. While the amount of journalistic detail she has amassed is impressive, her prose style often flounder and she colors her commentary with a maudlin sympathy for murderess Jean Harris, a woman who, in her words, "reminds me of me."

In the strongest section of the book, Alexander discusses how Harris's trial might have been handled differently to steer towards an acquittal or manslaughter charge, instead of a conviction for first degree murder. Here the author's sympathy for Harris has goaded her to a fascinating exposure of the twists of the American legal system. Her documentation of the mishandling of the case accumulates and convinces. One point is particularly striking. Harris's defense did not deem psychiatrists' testimony necessary but the psychiatrists who treated Harris before the trial believe that her refusal to plead insanity was in itself an element of her psychosis. Her psychotic depression, they believe, was of several years' standing.

As long as Alexander has an arsenal of information at her fingertips, her prose style is swift and pleasing. She handles a story well, and her melodramatic style suits this story in particular. Once Jean Harris begins to find her clothes slashed to pieces and splashed with Mercurochrome and begins to collect her rival's homemade "Super-Doc" badges and shred them into he backyard pool. Alexander is in her element.

The first chapters of the book, however, defeat her. She overwrites, trying to dramatize essentially unexciting background information. We find ourselves mired in such phrases as "that she could embrace his flaws was in the fabric of her passion." A best friend of Jean Harris's, elsewhere sympathetically portrayed, has this stereotype forced upon her. "Ever after, she used the same phrase...'Instant take!' she would exult, tossing back her handsome white-blond head and whinnying like the very expensive palomino pony she much resembles." Alexander's efforts to push this initial descriptive segment of the book to artistic heights falls flat.

She does score some good lines now to again. The description of Tarnower's Scarsdale home is especially poignant:

The house presented itself to the world in the grand manner, but once inside, the proportions were oddly foreshortened, like a stage set. Over the basic, by now slightly worn furnishings, done in hotel-suite neutrals, lay a mulch of giftware's...A great many of these items were monogrammed, embroidered, stitched and woven by the loving hands of women whose fingers the doctor had nonetheless managed to slip through.

But the strain of fleshing out her background information begins to show with such chatter as "As soon as she knew it was too late to call the hostess, her [Harris's] thoughts seemed to slip into a new gear, a sort of emotional overdrive, electraglide, pantransoverride. "Luckily the next lines give us a clue as to Harris's real state of mind: "She listened to the slap-slap of the windshield wipers and though about nothing whatsoever..."

PORTRAYING the familial background of her characters also forces Alexander to generalize in cliches, giving her some difficulty. Detail is her forte; generalizations do not always survive mass cliches. The author gives excellent treatment to Tarnower's complex anti-Semitism. Alexander grounds her conclusions in a wealth of quotations. But attributing Harris's tragic end to the emotional frustration of "ladies of a particular northern upper-class WASP variety" becomes a kind of shorthand which hinders us from understanding Jean Harris's personality.

The book suffers most from Alexander's sheer inability to make us feel a fine-tuned understanding of Jean-Harris likes to analyze herself in terms of popular psychology. (Alexander notes that Harris was much influenced by Gail Sheehy's Passages). "Defying Dad was the main reason I married Jim," she says. "Also, unlike Dad, he was very quiet." Alexander seems content to accept in large part Harris's self-analysis, and indeed never questions why Harris needed to indulge in this sort of speculation. It is ironic and sad that Alexander fails to analyze her subject in the depth crucial to a defense of Jean Harris. For she believes that Harris's defense in court failed for the same reason. "In his opening statement, Joel Aurnou [the defense attorney] had told the jury, "the answers to the elements that count in this case lie within the mind of Jean Harris.' He was quite right, but he never put on any witnesses to explain her mind, and she could not explain herself."