Note: This story contains spoilers for episode one of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. Carolyn Bessette.
“You’re going to thank me for this,” says Calvin Klein, as he ushers Carolyn Bessette toward John F. Kennedy Jr. They make their way across a candlelit room, passing tuxedoed gala guests sipping Champagne and models posing on platforms. The soon-to-be-lovers lock eyes, and the world around them seems to stop.
This is how one of the world’s most famous couples first met—at least in the television version.
In the first episode of Ryan Murphy’s new series Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, Klein introduces them: “John, this is Carolyn Bessette. She’s our V.I.P. whisperer at the company.” After some banter, Kennedy asks Bessette for her phone number, but she doesn’t give it to him. She says, “You know where I work. Try reception,” and walks away.
In real life, the story of how the couple first met is a little different. In spring 1992, Bessette was working at Calvin Klein as a salesperson—and indeed, she was a “V.I.P. whisperer.”
According to Elizabeth Beller’s Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the book on which Murphy’s series is based, it was Bessette’s talent in the latter department—her ability to remain unfazed in the presence of fame—that led to her meeting Kennedy, when she was 26, and he was 31. At the time, Kennedy was an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, and he had an appointment for a fitting in Calvin Klein’s V.I.P. room.
Klein and his then-wife, Kelly, along with his assistant MJ Bettenhausen, decided that Bessette should be the one to show Kennedy pieces from the men’s collection, because she was “the most effervescent person on the sales floor,” writes Beller.
Kennedy reportedly left that fitting with a few suits, and Bessette’s phone number. (This is likely the inspiration for another scene in the pilot, where Kennedy comes to the Calvin Klein office to get fitted for a suit). He called her just a few days later and invited her to join his group at a gala dinner. At the dinner, he was sitting with another woman whom she thought was his date (and perhaps was), so she turned down his invitation to the after-party. At the time, Kennedy was dating the actor Daryl Hannah on and off.
In May, the two met again at a fundraiser (which is likely the inspiration for their meet-cute in the show): the Don’t Bungle the Jungle II fundraiser at Amazon Village on Pier 25 to benefit “the indigenous peoples of the world’s rainforests,” according to a program.
Artist Kenny Scharf was the chairman of the event, and designers including Issey Miyake, Jean Paul Gaultier, Isaac Mizrahi, Thierry Mugler, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Anna Sui, Gianni Versace, and more donated jungle-inspired designs to be purchased in a silent auction fashion show narrated by Fran Lebowitz, followed by an after-party with a performance by Queen Latifah.
At the fundraiser, Bessette and Kennedy were seen enthralled in deep conversation. That summer, they started dating, going to dinners across the city, dancing, and taking walks together. He brought her to Sea Song, the summer house on Long Island he rented with his cousin, Anthony Radziwill.
They broke up just a week after the trip to Long Island, Beller writes in the book. Kennedy had received an anonymous letter claiming that Bessette was a “user, a partier, that she was out for fame and fortune” and that she “dated guys around town.” And they wouldn’t reunite for another two years, in 1994.
Thus began a relationship that would captivate the public and the press, stirring a storm of extreme media attention and obsession, as the couple’s ups and downs were relentlessly chronicled by the tabloids.
Love Story, the first three episodes of which premiere today on FX and Hulu, follows the couple’s lives in the mid-1990s, before they and Bessette-Kennedy’s sister, Lauren Bessette, tragically died in a plane crash on July 16, 1999. The show starts, heart-wrenchingly, where we all know their story ends. How will it tell the rest?
