Who Was Carolyn Bessette Kennedy?
our insatiable fascination with thin, white, and blonde
Ryan Murphy’s new show ‘Love Story’ about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette premieres this week and I thought it might be a good time to resuscitate a feature I wrote on Bessette for Town & Country a decade ago. It remains one of my favorite pieces and I think it holds up. I’ve included it at the end of this newsletter.
Bessette is everywhere these days, and it’s amusing to remember that when I pitched this piece the main concern my editor had was whether enough people outside of a certain late nineties strata of New York City would be familiar with her. It ended up being a misplaced concern, as I recall being told the piece achieved what were then record traffic numbers for the site.
I was intimately familiar Bessette. As I write about in the piece, when I first arrived in New York, not long after their marriage, she was a figure of enormous fascination. It’s hard to overstate how radical her appearance was at the time. Though the fact none of her outfits, or even her hair, would seem out of place on the streets of Manhattan twenty-five years later perhaps speaks best to her strange talent for accessing something deeply essential about style versus trend. To me, new to the city, starry-eyed and hungry for all things New York, she represented, to paraphrase Fitzgerald, some sort of wild promise of all the mystery the then pre-internet city had on offer. No doubt some of this was due to the fact she never spoke in public — she was a template upon which one could lay all their ideas and, as I’ve written before, identities of their own choosing.
She was also blonde, thin and wealthy. Characteristics we remain fascinated by, as evidenced by the relentless coverage Belle Burden’s divorce memoir Strangers has been receiving this month. Burden is the granddaughter of Babe Paley (one of Capote’s “swans”) and grew up in the rarefied world of Upper East Side Society and wealth. The world Bessette married into.
The NYT’s coverage of Burden reached such a pitch the other week I jokingly pondered on my instagram stories whether they were getting a cut of sales. I’m still hearing from people about this! Book coverage is limited (even more so now after the Washington Post shut down its Books section), and for one book to get this much ink says more about our cultural value systems than the actual book (which might be very good! I have not read).
Hot on the heels of this, I came across this…is stunning the word? Dystopian? Alarming? Enraging? Horrifying? Saddening? post by a popular substack writer detailing all the “self care” she’d invested in in January.
I found myself so appalled that after reading it I, a person who has dutifully being washing, moisturizing and applying sunblock to their face since the age of 10 (the first two because I was a serious competitive swimmer in the eighties when chlorine levels were basically illegal; the latter because my mother was a stickler and it stuck) was highly tempted to throw every skincare item in my cabinet out and go full hag, crone, witch…whatever your word of choice is for a powerful, dangerous woman who shows her age. Though increasingly I find aging faces to be the most beautiful.
Smarter people than I have had smarter things to say about this post: sale gaze! But even with all the terrible news of this last two weeks I wonder if that post won’t be the best way to convey to future historians the true nightmare element of our times. In which we erase any individuality from our faces, and increasingly modify and manufacture our bodies. As Kate Wagner wrote: “that a whole industry has developed around the lie that entropy can be reversed is one of the great delusions of contemporary fascism which maps itself onto the body in languages of hygiene, optimization and superiority.”
Bessette, herself, underwent a severe, self-inflicted transformation to make herself palatable to the public as John Jr.s wife. I don’t know if the television series will convey this, but she arrived in New York as a brunette of reasonably normal proportions and a casual style that reflected the early nineties grunge era. As their relationship became more serious, and her profile rose, she became increasingly thin, her hair blonde and then blonder until it was almost white, her eyebrows nearly disappearing altogether (many of us are still paying the price for following her down this particular path). During her short marriage, she contorted and disappeared herself in all manner of ways in order to become more easily and voraciously consumed by us. Her ending is tragic, not least because I’d be so curious to see how she moved into age, and whether her brilliance for image making (her own, and others) would have found other, less punishing, outlets.
My 2016 feature below.