The Untold Journey, by Natalie Robins (chapter 18)

The

UNTOLD

JOURNEY The Life of Diana g n i l l i r T

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because it was “more than the general problem of biological technology.”

She was not ready to parse medical morality. (The ethical questions the case raised continued to be debated for many years.)

Diana was slightly embarrassed about leaving her novel behind, and she wrote John Gross that she had merely “broken it off ” to do another book. This book, she wrote him, was going to be titled A Respectable Murder (the title would change two more times—Love, Here Is My Heart, from a First World War song with the refrain “Something to kiss or kill”—to the final, Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor). Diana enthusiastically wrote Gross that the book would be about “our famous author of the Scarsdale diet [who] was recently shot by his longtime mistress, head of the exclusive Madeira School for Girls in Virginia. . . . The upcoming trial commands great interest here and so I’m afraid does the prospect of my writing about it.”

Diana had found a story—a story that stirred her: Jean Harris, a proper headmistress of a fancy southern private school, discovers that Herman Tarnower, her longtime famous doctor lover, author of the bestseller The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, has a new and much younger love. Harris confronts him about it on the evening of March 10, 1980, and ends up killing him with a .32 caliber revolver she said she meant to use on herself; only the gun went off accidentally as her lover grabbed for it. The riveting story could evolve into a full-length book—unlike her novel, which was full-length but with no narrative to speak of.

Diana’s years of editing her own essays, reviews, and collections of both her and others’ letters and/or writings, and of editing Lionel—more than just editing him—were about to be over. She was free now as she had never been before to become what she always had wanted to become. All the energy behind her frustrations, angers, resentments, boredoms—even haughtinesses—would at long last find an appropriate outlet. She would later tell Patricia Bosworth, “Finally, in the long run, my emphasis on the moral aspect of life may well be the result of the pull in the opposite direction. Otherwise, why did I write as frequently as I did about people who were adversaries to our society?”

Even with the aid of analysis, it would take Diana until the middle of her seventies to attempt what she wished she had undertaken decades

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earlier. As Peter Pouncey, a former Columbia dean and former president of Amherst College, remarked, “You could see hunger in the poor woman to get her own place,” and with Lionel alive “she could only get half a place.”

On May 4, 1980, the Washington Post Book World announced that Harcourt Brace Jovanovich had signed Diana on April 17 to write a book about a murder that had captured headlines across America. “Everyone is interested in crime stories, but they’re usually located on the edge of life as we’re familiar with it,” Diana wrote in a note to herself, “whereas the Harris case exploded in the center of the respectable middle class.”

Diana was pleased the announcement came soon after the contract was signed because, as she told Bill Jovanovich, “I’m scared someone will steal my title.” (She meant A Respectable Murder.) Two other writers would also write about the murder: Lally Weymouth, an editor and journalist (Summit Books) and Shana Alexander, also a journalist and the first woman to write a column for Life magazine (Little, Brown). Diana, whose book would be published first, would tell a reporter that she “ was not doing a reportorial book at all. I want to write about the society in which this took place. . . . Facts aren’t truth. They approximate truth.”

She told another reporter that she was “free-associating” about the case.

Diana received a substantial advance, $67,500, from HBJ. (Bill Jovanovich, in a spirit of hubris, told Time magazine she received a solid $125,000.) The industrialist and philanthropist Norton Simon and his second wife, actor Jennifer Jones, bought the dramatic rights for $1 million, with $50,000 on signing, and after six months, there was to be $100,000 more, with further heft y payments in the months to come.

Diana almost couldn’t believe her good fortune. It had come late in life, but it had come—and, moreover, her book would soon be a major Hollywood film starring Jennifer Jones as Jean Harris. Diana worried she might need Jean Harris’s agreement, and she was also worried that the Simon-Jones team would not like her book after reading it in its entirety (they had only seen sections of it). In any case, several months later Jones decided she didn’t want the role after all, and her husband dropped the option (although Diana did get to keep the $50,000 she received on signing).

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Hamish Hamilton Limited bought the book for publication in England. (“I have long admired your husband’s writing,” the editor told her in the second sentence of his introductory letter.) The Book of The Month Club bought syndication rights, as did the Quality Paperback Book Club. Penguin Books bought the soft-cover rights. Second serial rights were sold to New Woman magazine and US Magazine. On her own Diana had contacted The New York Times Magazine to offer first serial rights, and she said it was “settled” almost immediately. Her two excerpts were rejected, however, because, as she wrote in a letter,” The book as written is indeed different from the book I first planned to write.” She insisted on a $2,000 kill fee, which she received.

Despite the promise of success with Mrs. Harris, Diana managed to find some faults with HBJ early in the publishing process. Although Penguin Books ultimately published the paperback edition, she had thought she had an agreement with Bantam Books, and she accused HBJ of undermining this arrangement behind her back. “I can’t begin to understand how this could have been done to me,” she wailed, and then insisted she be “apprised of everything of which I am by contract supposed to be informed.” She felt abused, just as, she later told a reporter, Jean Harris had been; “she needed to be abused,” Diana exclaimed. “Now we can all understand that can’t we? Haven’t we all some touch of this somewhere in us? I think we do.” Later, more than one of her readers would be struck by the thought that the book was Diana’s unconscious fantasy of murdering Lionel, a fantasy that Jean Harris had had the nerve and anger to make real.

In fact, Diana said that from the very beginning of her interest and early research into the case, she “came to the shooting of Dr. Tarnower with a bias in Mrs. Harris’s favor, which meant prejudice against the man who was now dead; indeed, I could put it that before I had ever heard of Mrs. Harris, I was prepared to be on the other side from the Scarsdale doctor’s.” Thus, at first it was “a respectable murder” in her mind. (Lawyers changed her mind quickly about that notion being expressed in a book title.) But in another note to herself, Diana wrote, “I keep thinking of these two—Jean Harris and Dr. Herman Tarnower, and they seem so extraordinarily well-matched: both ugly, mean-tem-

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pered, selfish, dutiful, compulsive people.” Still another note stated, “Mrs. Harris is the first public victim of women’s liberation. It gave her the foundation for her self-pity which in turn gave her the foundation for vengeance against the mistreatment from Tarnower. It also promised her freedom from punishment.”

Before the trial began, on November 21, 1980, Diana had written a draft of the book in complete sympathy with Jean Harris. During the trial—Diana hired an assistant to attend the trial with her and take extensive notes—she completely changed her mind and tore up what she had already written. She told The New York Times that “until the Harris book, I had worked off in another world, venturing out only to check a fact in the library, but now I know how difficult it is to report on what’s happening in the real world.”

Many things changed Diana’s mind, she noted, even acknowledging that facts can hold the truth. First on her list was that Jean Harris had brought fift y rounds of ammunition with her in the car, and had brought ten rounds into Tarnower’s house, and also that upon her arrival she had the presence of mind to ask one of his two live-in housekeepers what guests had been at dinner that night. Diana was also struck by the fact—which she learned in the courtroom—that Harris “had stopped to look at her mouth in the mirror” before facing Tarnower (“with his dry strivings and worldly salvations,” as Diana wrote of him), who was in the bedroom they had so often shared. Diana, who disliked just about everything about the diet doctor (a face “more reptilian than foxy”) was struck over and over again by Jean Harris’s tone of superiority and emotional detachment. Tarnower, Diana wrote, was “cruelly self-engrossed.”

After a trial that lasted sixty-four days, on February 24, 1981, Jean Harris was found guilty of second-degree murder, that is, according to the first two of five New York State statutes: “(1) with the intent to cause the death of another person, he or she causes the death of such person or a third person; (2) under circumstances demonstrating a ‘depraved indifference to human life,’ the defendant ‘recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person, and thereby causes the death of another person.’ ” She was sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years (and a maximum of life) in prison. Diana said that Jean

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Harris bore a murderous rage but not premeditation and that she did not consciously lie about wanting to kill her lover—it was just that this truth was locked away in her subconscious.

Diana put all her strength and intelligence into the writing of a book that would become a best seller. Kip Fadiman told her the book was surely a classic, and he praised the use of her “own” voice “and what it reveals of the magnificent use you are making of your own life of thought and experience.” He had in mind such determined paragraphs as “The role of witness on her own behalf suits Jean Harris the way ecstasy suited St. Theresa. I’ve never seen aggression so thoroughly transformed into moral superiority: it combines an eagerness to speak, eagerness to shine and contemptuous anger at the process which has ensnared her. She’s so queenly in her scorn, you’d think the law was trampling on the royal preserves. Does it not enter this woman’s mind that we are all of us here in this court because Dr. Tarnower is dead and that she’s on trial for his murder?”

Norman Mailer wrote Diana that he “loved your instinctive analysis of the situation” and thought “no one could have done it better.” Jacques Barzun told Diana that she has written “one of the great trial accounts of our time.” Diana heard that the book was going to be nominated for a Pulitzer, but she later told Brom Anderson that someone at The Wall Street Journal undermined her chances for winning. “The public doesn’t know what goes on in book reviewing,” she said. The WSJ ’s review was exceptionally brutal, but Michael Sovern, president of Columbia, later wrote her that she was “among the [Pulitzer] jury’s nominees [for General Nonfiction], a rare distinction. I offer my warm congratulations on your achievement” (meaning the nomination).

In an unusual marketing move, Penguin had used two different jackets. As Publishers Weekly reported, “a purple-beige and white cover is aimed at those who view the murder case in terms of social history and commentary; a grey-silver one is for those interested in the case’s more sensational aspects.” A sales manager commented, “There are Trilling fans who want to read her observations on anything, and then there are those who are dying to know about the case but have no idea who Diana Trilling is.”

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Diana wrote in a note to herself that she didn’t know what Lionel’s reaction to the book would have been and that she found herself continuing to dwell on his “discouraging behavior” in response to her play Snitkin, written with Bettina Sinclair so long ago. It was a hurt she somehow could not let go of—especially that he had thrown his very favorite pipe out the window in disgust over the play. And with every negative review she received for Mrs. Harris, she couldn’t help but see Lionel’s “ungenerousness reflected now in the intellectual culture’s reaction.” Dorothy Rabinowitz, of The Wall Street Journal, had said Mrs. Harris “echoes the sensibility of the ‘Me Decade’ ” and that Diana’s “assumptions about the middle class are extraordinarily coarse.” Calling Diana “tone deaf” and the book “tedious,” the reviewer decided that Diana’s conclusions were invented “to accord with a programmed sociological vision.”

The Rabinowitz review would not be the most savage one—that distinction would belong to the assessment in Commentary. Diana said that it ran “the most vulgar and ugly review of any book other than Norman’s [Podhoretz] own Making It. She went on to say that the review “was a made to order [negative] review.” The reviewer, Joseph Adelson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, said Diana lacked spirit in a book that was full of “cultural arrogance,” that she was “too self-absorbed” and that “she has little use for anyone. There is scarcely a kind word for another human being to be found in this book.”

She was accused of doing no investigation: “what Mrs. Trilling does not know, she imagines or invents. The book is finally vulgar, without generosity of spirit, and pretentious.”

Diana said that Partisan Review never reviewed it because William Phillips was “really afraid that a popular subject can’t be treated” in his magazine. She later learned that the scholar Peter Shaw (he wrote a biography of John Adams, among other books) had written a review for the magazine dissecting the trial more than the book, but had asked that it be returned to him unpublished. His final paragraph had summed up the book as follows: “And yet in the final analysis the dynamic of this book has to do with ideas—chiefly those of contemporary feminism. Its literary contribution is to the wide ranging cultural essay—a form at least as much in need of rejuvenation as the novel.”

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The National Public Radio’s All Things Considered called Diana arrogant for titling her book Mrs. Harris and damned her for daring to “catch the literary tone . . . of Mrs. Dalloway, and even Madame Bovary.”

Later, the commentator said that if you “push aside arrogance, which Mrs. Trilling has accumulated after many decades of practice . . . she has plenty to say,” even though the book seemed rushed into print to beat the competition. New York magazine called Diana “Lady Di” and faulted her for “accepting a great deal of money to do something that she had never done before, and should not have attempted.” The reviewer, George V. Higgins, the popular crime novelist, went on to say that since the book was just a report on Diana’s reactions to the trial, the book’s title should have been “Mrs. Trilling, because all she knows about is Diana, and Diana isn’t very interesting.”

Even the Columbia magazine had mean things to say, beginning with a first paragraph stating that it would be embarrassing for anyone to be seen in public with a copy of the book. Michael Sovern was pained by the review and told Diana he found her book “to be simply splendid.”

The Nation’s reviewer, Elizabeth Pochoda, expressed admiration for Diana’s “mellow wisdom,” but there ended her easygoing praise. Pochoda decided that Diana was not only attacking the diet doctor for his style and taste but for his Jewishness. Pochoda wrote, “One senses her [Diana’s] disapproval of his having become the wrong sort of Jew with the right sort of money, doctor’s money. The Trillings, both Diana and her late husband, Lionel, have set rigorously Jamesian standards for Jewishness in our time.” It is an “affront” to Diana, the review concludes, “that Herman Tarnower . . . fails so publicly to be a Matthew Arnold.”

Anatole Broyard, one of The New York Times daily book reviewers, mentioned Diana favorably in one of the occasional personal essays he wrote for The Sunday Book Review, and she wrote him a fan letter, despite revealing to him that she “used to hate it when authors wrote to thank me for something I’d said about a book—it made the situation too personal and interested, like a bribe after the fact, and I’d almost feel guilty.” She had met Broyard socially a few times and felt free to gossip with him, asking him, “Do you remember when we met last summer and I was worried about [Christopher] Lehmann-Haupt [the

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other daily book reviewer] reviewing my book? Thus do we misread our fates: his review and the one in Time were the best I got.”

R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time that Mrs. Harris not only has “resonance—the rich tone that even a tabloid subject causes when drawn across a perceptive and deeply cultured intelligence” but that “in the court of literature, Trilling’s Jean Harris is a great portrait of an American aberration.”

The New York Times’s Christopher Lehmann-Haupt understood the book’s structure and force, and why Diana tackled a subject “off her usual line,” as she had put it. He told his readers that with “sharp analysis” she conveyed “precisely the atmospheric details of the trial,” and what impressed him the most was her “multi-shaded treatment of the case” and the degree to which she made it seem significant to American culture. Lehmann-Haupt concluded that the book moved seamlessly “from psychology to sociology and back again.”

The New York Times Book Review had not been as laudatory, and Diana, ever conspiratorial, wrote a friend that it was because “the top ownership of the Times . . . were Tarnower’s closest friends.”

In England, Diana’s friend Rebecca West, in a somewhat rambling review focusing on the meaning of “taste,” nonetheless, called the book “heartening” and “brilliant.” Anita Brookner noted in The London Review of Books that Diana seemed “the only enlightened witness” at the trial, yet Brookner bemoaned the fact that Diana “enshrines her observations in a genre which has been turned to sensational advantage by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. . . . As a specimen of that genre it is superb, but it has to be said that it is an unsatisfactory, even a morally dubious genre.”

Diana indeed had succeeded in making her book read like a novel, despite the reviews that disputed this idea. Some people now considered her a “crime writer,” a distinction she could not accept, although she told an interviewer that “it’s up to you if you want to give me this label . . . although it’s cases I am notably concerned with.”

She told another person who wrote her that she agreed that Jean Harris “had star quality” and the story contained “all the ingredient[s] of a suspense story in the movies” but that her book “never even attempted

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properly to explain this phenomenon—star quality.” Diana went on to recommend that her correspondent read her essay on Marilyn Monroe, which had been published in Redbook in 1962. “It bears on Mrs. Harris,” Diana wrote her correspondent, “if only in my statement that when I heard of Marilyn Monroe’s death and how lonely she had been, I desperately wished that I had been able to offer her friendship.”

Travel to and from the trial had exhausted Diana, even though Bill Jovanovich lent her his car, which her assistant drove from Manhattan to Westchester every day. (During the trial the car was stolen, and although it must have been insured, Diana insisted on sending Jovanovich a check for $3,500 to cover “the theft of the car.”)

In an interview in The New York Times Diana said that many people asked her “how is it that I have to have had my husband die to do this much work—they don’t ask in that rude way, but that indeed is what they are asking—and the answer is quite simple. I am of a generation and of a temperament in which my work was secondary to my home.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t very serious about my work.” But once again, she doesn’t say quite yet—she dare not say—that Lionel’s work was her work throughout his life. There simply was no time for her own.

“Growing old is hard,” Diana told Martin Amis in an interview about Mrs. Harris that appeared in The Observer. She continued: “Growing old alone is harder. You become more sensitive with your friends. You wonder if you are being asked out because of pity. There is an increased dependence on routine. I won’t leave the bed unmade in the morning. . . . I won’t stand by the refrigerator and eat a boiled egg. I want to, but I don’t.” In speaking of Lionel, she told Amis in a dramatic flourish: “I feel the usual things. . . . I wish now I had worshipped him a bit more.”