Julia Reed
It all began,inevitably,with a bang— with the sound of a series of .32-caliber shots fired in a secluded, wooded estate in Purchase, New York. The house belonged to Herman Tarnower, the celebrated “Scarsdale Diet” doctor who made the ultimately fatal decision to spurn a lover, Jean Harris, the pill-addicted headmistress of the elite Madeira School for girls outside of Washington, D.C. On the evening of Monday, March 10, 1980, Harris testified, she drove to Tarnower’s home to kill herself, but snapped after seeing another woman’s lingerie in the doctor’s dressing room. In the ensuing clash, Harris shot Tarnower—accidentally, she would claim—four times.
The next morning, Mel Elfin, the Washington bureau chief of Newsweekmagazine, heard the news and went into action. Groggily, Julia Reed—then a sophomore at Georgetown University and a part-time bureau library assistant and receptionist—picked up the phone in her dorm room to find Elfin on the line. She’d gotten the post at Newsweek while she was a student at Madeira and knew Harris. “Get out to Madeira now,” Elfin barked. “Start filing. We need a story.”
“Why on earth?” Julia asked. (In her retelling of the story, there was no profanity, but experience suggests otherwise.)
“You idiot,” he replied, “your headmistress just shot the diet doctor.”
Let’s let Julia pick up the narrative: “Looking back, I realize I had none of the usual reactions,” she once wrote in a column for . “Instead, I threw on clothes, jumped in the
