Thursday night, Ryan Murphy’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette premieres on FX. I plan to watch it, at least for a few episodes. I can’t believe we’re now living in a time where we need “1990s nostalgia” but here we are. For Americans, JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette are sort of like what Princess Diana is to the British media. Meaning, people are always going to be interested in them, and there’s extensive lore about them which can still be mined decades after their deaths. As such, People Magazine put John and Carolyn on this week’s cover. Sure. I am one of those people who will always read a new article about them. Some highlights from People’s cover story:
John & Carolyn didn’t have a “team”: A striking mix of ’90s glamour and downtown cool, they became one of the most famous couples in the world—and yet they had no bodyguards, no publicists and definitely no stylists.
What John & Carolyn were really like: Impossibly handsome, with impeccable manners, he had an ease and sense of humor about his unique place in the world. When he was named PEOPLE’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1988, the title — and jokes — stuck. “He didn’t mind the attention for the most part,” his best friend, Robbie Littell, said in JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography. His only concern, said Littell: “Unfortunately they’ll pick another one someday.” He met his match in Bessette, who moved to Manhattan to work in PR at Calvin Klein after graduating in 1988 with a degree in elementary education. “She loved kids and wanted to be a teacher, but she hated getting up early,” said a friend in 2017. Still, ready for adventure, she was. George Carr, whose brother Zack Carr was Klein’s creative director, recalls, “People were saying, ‘Have you heard of this new girl at Calvin?’ She entered the fashion world like Venus coming up out of the ocean. Calvin saw it immediately. Everyone was talking about her.”
How they met: John, by then an assistant district attorney at the Manhattan D.A.’s office, took notice when he came to Klein’s showroom in 1991 to buy suits. Though he was still in an on-and-off relationship with actress Daryl Hannah, he asked for Carolyn’s number. “She was an intoxicating combination of beauty, brains and gumption that just enthralled him in a way that no other woman had before,” says a close friend of John’s. “She challenged him. She provoked him, entertained him and captivated him. He was a guy who could not stand boredom, and to be around her was not to be bored.”
Carolyn played this perfectly: After the New York Daily News ran a photo of John and Daryl at a movie premiere in 1994, Carolyn briefly cut off contact with John. He sent her a giant bouquet of flowers and left messages. But, says RoseMarie Terenzio, John’s executive assistant at George, the political magazine he cofounded, “she wasn’t waiting around for his call.” Carolyn reached out after his mother Jackie’s death in 1994, and they fell deeply in love. Fiercely protective, she weeded out a few friends she thought were using John. She was also a free spirit who loved hamburgers at Odeon in Tribeca (with sautéed spinach on the side instead of fries), drank vodka and white wine and adored smoking. (As for John, he smoked one cigarette per day.)
How Carolyn was judged: But the public never saw her private warmth, and the press took her to task for a perceived chilliness. “They were beating up on her without having any idea who she was,” said John’s close friend John Perry Barlow. “If somebody was gonna steal our prince, they wanted her to be some kind of entirely unblemished princess.”
Carolyn’s struggles: But over time she struggled under the scrutiny, and the paparazzi who followed her every move led her to become more reclusive. “John didn’t grasp how hard the sudden change was for her,” says Gillon, author America’s Reluctant Prince, a 2019 biography of John. “He never provided her with the emotional support she needed.”
Their last year: John wanted to start a family, but Carolyn refused, fearful of raising kids in Manhattan amid the media circus. In the summer of 1999 the two began looking at homes outside the city. By then, says Gillon, “based on the people I spoke to who were close to John, she no longer wanted to be intimate with him, and she was falling apart. Every pillar of his life was crumbling, from his relationship with Carolyn to George, which was losing money, to the impending death of his cousin Anthony Radziwill. John was writing the eulogy.” The marriage was, according to a friend, at a “make-or-break moment.” John spent the night of July 15 at a hotel and saw his former girlfriend Julie Baker, to whom he remained close, in his final days.
It strikes me that Carolyn was the proto-Cool Girl in every sense – naturally beautiful, photogenic, fashionable, elusive, mysterious yet down-to-earth, feminine but still tomboyish, etc. Also, it’s shocking to realize that they really didn’t have “people” helping them. Like, no publicist, no stylist, nothing like that. Sure, it was the ‘90s and minimalism was king in all ways, but it would shock modern celebrities just how DIY it all was for John and Carolyn. Anyway, I’m actually looking forward to this show? God help me.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, FX/Love Story.
