WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. -- A letter Jean Harris wrote to 'Scarsdale Diet' author Herman Tarnower on the day Tarnower was killed showed her jealous and resentful of the doctor and his other lover, Lynne Tryforos.
In the letter, read at her murder trial Wednesday, Mrs. Harris said her 14-year affair with the 69-year-old cardiologist was 'masochistic love.'
She complained about having to endure his repeated recriminations, putting up with his other lovers and having to stand by as her clothes were slashed, her ring sold and her name removed from his will.
The letter was guarded by Mrs. Harris lawyers since it was retrieved from the post office in Scarsdale two days after Tarnower was killed. A series of legal battles failed and the state Court of Appeals said in December the prosecution could have access to it.
'I would far rather be saved the trial of living without you than have the option of living with you money,' Mrs. Harris wrote cryptically, referring to 'your phone call telling me you preferred the company of a vicious, adulterous psychotic.'
Mrs. Harris called the blonde Mrs. Tryforos, 38, Tarnower's medical assistant and her rival for his love, a 'slut.'
She vowed to attend a dinner honoring the physician, for which he had chosen Mrs. Tryforos as date.
'I'll be there,' Mrs. Harris said. 'Indeed, I don't care if she pops out of a cake with her tits frosted with chocolate.
'Tasteless behavior is all that Lynne knows.'
Mrs. Harris, then headmistress of the exclusive Madeira School for girls in McLean, Va., said of her declining relationship with the doctor: 'It would have been heartbreaking for me to have to see less and less of you -- even if it had been a 'decent' woman who took my place.'
She said she had been 'awake 36 hours straight,' when she wrote the 10-page letter on March 8 and 9. She mailed it to Tarnower at 8:30 a.m. March 10, the day he was killed.
'Lynne has changed your style,' she wrote.
'All I ever asked for was to be with you -- and when I left to know when we would see each other again so there was something in life to look forward to. Now you are taking that away from me and I am unable to cope.'
She added: 'I can hear you saying, 'Look Jean, it's your problem.''
Mrs. Harris expressed anger that her name was removed from Tarnower's will and replaced with that of Ms. Tryforos, saying she 'received a copy of your will with my name vigorously scratched out and Lynn's name in your handwriting in three places, leaving her a quarter of a million dollars and her children $25,000 apiece -- and the boys and me nothing.'
Referring to Tarnower's accusation that she stole two books from his home, Mrs. Harris said, 'Now that a thieving slut has the run of your home, you accuse me of stealing money and books. The very thing your whore does, you now have the cruelty to accuse me of.'
She said she twice took money from Tarnower's wallet, once to repair a nightgown she believed Ms. Tryforos had stained, the other time to replace a yellow dress that had been covered with excrement. I decided, and rightly so, that this was your expense, not mine.'
Mrs. Harris said Tarnower sold an engagement ring, given to her for 'forever' in 1967, to get money for Mrs. Tryforos when her divorce from Nicholas Tryforos, a florist, became final.
'That you sold it the summer your adulterous slut finally got her divorce and needed money is the kind of sick, cynical act that left me cold and bitter and sick,' she said.
Mrs. Harris said Tarnower told her after the ring was sold, 'If you are going to make a fuss about it you can't come here anymore.'
'I have indeed grown poor loving you while a self-serving ignorant slut has grown very rich,' Mrs. Harris wrote.
'Why, if her family is so fine, Lynn decided to sell her kids to the highest bidder?' The remark, atypical of Mrs. Harris' other remarks because of its poor syntax, was not further explained.
Referring to her clothes being slashed in 1978, she wrote, 'There was only one person who could have done it ... instead you ignored it and went happily off to Florida with the perpetrator.'
Mrs. Harris was subdued on the witness stand as the letter was read.
She described Mrs. Tryforos as a 'psychotic whore' who stained one of the dresses she kept at the doctor's house and smeared excrement on another.
It was 'smeared and vile with feces. I told you once it was something 'brown and sticky.' It was quite simply, Herman Tarnower, human ....!
'You keep me in control by threatening me with banishment. An easy threat which you know I couldn't live with so I stay home alone while you make love to someone who has almost totally destroyed me. I have been publicly humiliated again and again,' she said.
Mrs. Harris hinted about a war of anonymous phone calls between herself and Mrs. Tryforos, beginning in 1977.
Denying she had called her rival at Tarnower's office to harass her, she said, 'That mysterious caller. I had never called Lynne at the office to harass her.'
'You refused to let me come that month (November 1977) because (of what) that lying slut told you. Her voice is vomitous to me.'
After the harassment charge, Mrs. Harris said she called Mrs. Tryforos 'every night at one, two, three o'clock in the morning. It was her children who would answer the phone with the TV playing. Not once, not once did Lynne answer the phone. Where does mumsie spend her nights.
'With that kind of training, Electra (one of Mrs. Tryforos' two daughters) is going to be ready to earn her own color television any day now,' Mrs. Harris wrote bitterly.
Mrs. Harris said she thought of borrowing $5,000 to have a facelift so that Tarnower would love her the way he had in their early days, but feared she might emerge 'uglier' than she thought she was.
She referred to herself as 'old baggage,' saying, 'I wish 14 years of making love had made more of a mark.'
The letter ended: 'I give you my word if you just aren't cruel I won't make you wretched. I never did until you were cruel -- and then I just wasn't ready for it.'
It was unsigned.
