The Jean Harris Story: Stendhal’s Daughter Adrift in Scarsdale

The Jean Harris Story: Stendhal’s Daughter Adrift in Scarsdale

The Jean Harris trial has mesmerized Americans. It has received an unprecedented amount of publicity. Diana Trilling, Shana Alexander, and Lally Weymouth, daughter of Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, have been commissioned to write books on the subject; in a Columbia University elevator was scrawled FREE JEAN HARRIS. Immediately after the trial Ellen Burstyn starred in a TV drama, The People vs. Jean Harris. Jennifer Jones has contracted to do a movie on the subject. Why has this case aroused so much furor? An ordinary despondent, rejected middle-aged woman goes to the home of her lover, who has replaced her with a younger woman—she makes a distraught attempt to kill herself—the only question to be so...