Very Much a Lady by Shana Alexander

Author:Shana Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2000-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

By his sixty-ninth birthday, March 18, 1979, Herman Tarnower had succeeded in making every one of his dear friends and grateful patients willy-nilly accomplices to his own rococo private life, and they arranged for his birthday to be celebrated elaborately but serially. On Friday the sixteenth, the Comforts threw a big, black-tie party at their Briarcliff Manor estate for Herman and Lynne. On Saturday, Jean arrived in Purchase from Madeira. The Comforts’ party was not mentioned. On Sunday, Jean and Tarnower flew to Nassau for another birthday party, this one with the Loebs. They remained in the Bahamas for a week, returning the following Sunday. It was not until midmorning Monday that Jean Harris went to the downstairs guest-room closet. She opened the door and screamed. Every one of her garments had been slashed, ripped, and torn. Some had their sleeves pulled out, others were in shreds from collar to hem. She shouted for Suzanne to come and look, and turned away, feeling sick. Suzanne told Jean (and she would tell the jury the same thing at the trial) that no one but she and Henri had been in the house the entire week, but that yesterday Henri had been out working in the garden and had happened to look up in time to see Lynne Tryforos slip in through the front door. Then Suzanne pointed to a blue suede jacket hanging in the closet. It belonged to Mrs. Tryforos, she said, and it too had been slashed. Suzanne promised to report the vandalism to the doctor as soon as he returned from his office. Jean begged her just to throw away the destroyed clothing and say nothing.

“But I have to tell him, Madame!”

“Please! We have had a very happy holiday, and I don’t want it ended this way.” Jean said she was going back to school Wednesday and would leave a note on Tarnower’s pillow then. She did not want to destroy their last two days together with “worrying about these clothes.” Later she told her trial jury, “I didn’t discuss it with him at all.” Put the blame on Mame.

Three weeks later, Tarnower took Lynne Tryforos on a fishing holiday in the Florida Keys.

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