There is a three-minute scene in the first episode of Ryan Murphy’s FX show “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette” that I can’t get out of my head. In it, we first meet Ms. Bessette in her downtown apartment, pre-John. It’s 1992. Her clock radio alarm goes off. Primal Scream’s “Loaded” begins to play. She rolls out of bed, plucks some clothes from a pile and walks to the subway, hair tousled, Parliament cigarette in hand. She emerges in midtown, takes in the front pages of the tabloids and then uses cash at a newsstand to buy another pack of cigarettes and a copy of Vogue. She’s joined by a friend, and they both begin to recount their previous night at a popular club. Blissfully, nobody holds a phone.
In the history of great romances, life in New York City before smartphones and the World Wide Web must count as one of the most coveted.
This, of course, is not the love story the title alludes to.
Both the show and Elizabeth Beller’s 2024 biography “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy,” by which it is inspired, have framed Ms. Bessette’s life, and her marriage to Mr. Kennedy, as another chapter in the Camelot fairy tale. (Even as the show has taken enormous liberties with the portrayal of people from John F. Kennedy Jr.’s dating life before his wedding vows). But watching it, you sense that the real fairy tale is actually Ms. Bessette’s life in New York City in the years before that Georgia island wedding in a Narciso Rodriguez slip dress that upended the wedding dress industry, and landed her on front pages around the world.
Ms. Bessette’s extraordinary rise from shopgirl in a Calvin Klein boutique in a suburban Boston mall to the highest reaches of the same fashion house during the brand’s era of greatest cultural influence was a breathtakingly American success story of hustle and self-invention — though the press barely gave credence to any of that at the time. Instead, she was picked apart as though she were a show horse, and lumped with women accused of cunningly using their jobs as social entree, and playing by “The Rules” — a 1995 self-help dating best seller — to snare a man.
The show, by contrast, gets it. We are delivered a tantalizing version of Ms. Bessette’s single life in New York City. Here she is chain-smoking, sleeping with an aspiring model, hanging out at clubs, free from social media and accountability — all while fueling her rocketing career.
On their first onscreen date, Carolyn tells John that during her hiring interview at Calvin Klein in New York City she was clear she didn’t “have a Plan B or a trust fund to fall back on.” In real life and on the show, she quickly navigated her way up the ranks at Calvin Klein, impressing Mr. Klein himself with her style choices, and maneuvering around managers. She was a part of the team that talked the boss into casting the model Kate Moss, a decision that turned Mr. Klein’s then precarious business finances around (and thrust Ms. Moss into notoriety). When she met John, she held far more downtown cool than he ever could.
This is a paean to a lost meritocratic New York, a time of social mobility and sexual freedom wedged between the AIDS cocktail, plummeting crime rates and 9/11, when the city was still almost accessible to young ambitious suburbanites like Ms. Bessette — around the time I first arrived in the city.
It was a town where serendipity was possible. One was not required to account for every activity, every minute. Botox was years from the scene. We got the news from the newsstand, not in a 24-hour forced information drip. It was an analog life in which it was still possible to be anonymous. Yes, paparazzi existed, as Ms. Bessette discovered, but before then, she went through her life young, hip and unobserved.
That’s the dream that the show highlights so well. This is the fairy tale the show has us all craving.
Nostalgia is easy, and often lazy, but Carolyn’s pre-marriage life, as depicted onscreen, has become a portal for Gen Z-ers and young millennials to glimpse the magic of 1990s New York. Those of us who were there are overwhelmed with a desire to return. At a party, recently, one woman in her 40s from L.A. told me, unprompted, that she would pay $10 million to go back to that time and place.
Carolyn Bessette (without the Kennedy name drowning her) with her uncombed, blond tresses, and chic, easily mimicked (though rarely as successfully) minimalist outfits, her exciting social life, is an alluring avatar for the era.
What’s especially appealing about this slice of time is that so much of it is familiar on the surface. We imagine that things were better then, if only because we are so exhausted by all the technological trappings of today — from online dating to marauding TikTokers destroying our favorite restaurants to the nonstop news.
“Sex and the City,” which premiered in June 1998, gave us a very glossed-up version of this New York and a language for Ms. Bessette’s single life. That’s no surprise — Candace Bushnell was navigating the city around the same time. In her New York Observer column, she once wrote a piece about her own dalliance with Michael Bergin, the same onetime Calvin Klein underwear model Ms. Bessette dated.
It was of course not all rosy. The city was rife with racial tensions and violence. And the suggestion that people felt optimistic about the future is misplaced. Just as A.I. has many of us anticipating a coming tech apocalypse, the city, and the world, at that time were gripped with a very real fear of Y2K.
In the sixth episode — “The Wedding” — Ms. Bessette’s onscreen mother, Ann, played by Constance Zimmer, gives voice to a concern for her daughter that hindsight later confirmed: Wasn’t marrying into the Kennedy clan going to make her lose herself entirely?
In real life, once Ms. Bessette Kennedy and her husband returned from their honeymoon in Turkey, she essentially vanished — almost literally. She never spoke to the press. She became increasingly blond; even her eyebrows disappeared. Her clothes became armorlike. Married to America’s prince, she became the princess trapped in the tower — in this case, a floor-through Tribeca penthouse loft. On the rare occasion when she was seen on the street, she looked terrified, overwhelmed by the onslaught of cameramen. She was often photographed looking down, rarely smiling. I can’t help but wonder if she craved the freedom she had once had the same way we do more than a quarter century later.
Ms. Bessette Kennedy’s life, like so many others in the Kennedy family, would end tragically, when the plane piloted by John and flying her and her sister, Lauren, crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. This era of New York would end tragically when planes were flown into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
But once upon a time it was pretty great. The city afforded an often fantastical real life; and in our unreal age, realness seems to be the love story we are all wanting for ourselves.
Glynnis MacNicol is the author of the memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself” and the host of the podcast “Wilder: A Reckoning With Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
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