The Love Story We Can't Stop Thinking About...And the Book That Goes Even Deeper

Ryan Murphy gave us the series. A forgotten magazine found in a Savvy Sleepers marketing stack (of papers). And Maureen Callahan's brilliant, incendiary book changed everything I thought I knew about the Kennedy women.

I want to tell you about a moment that stopped me completely.

Last weekend I was digging through a box of Savvy Sleepers marketing materials, the kind of deep-dive organizational spiral that starts with "I'll just look through this one box" and ends three hours later with you cross-legged on the floor surrounded by product samples, old print runs and things you'd completely forgotten existed. 

And there, tucked between satin swatches and product cards, was a magazine. US Weekly, Issue 29 — July 15, 2024. I had never read it. Just another piece of media that had somehow traveled into a box and waited, patiently, for the right moment. 

The right moment turned out to be the day after I finished watching the final episode of Ryan Murphy's Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette. 

Naturally, I took it straight to bed and started reading. Savvy Scrunchie in, satin pillowcase behind my head, magazine in hand.

Ryan Murphy's Love Story — An Absolute Must Watch

If you haven't watched it yet, Ryan Murphy captured a viewers this Spring with some of television's most gripping, most gorgeous, most emotionally devastating stories. His show has turned his lens on one of the great American love stories. 

Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy is a revelation. Naomi Watts as Jackie. The production is impeccable, and all that early-90s New York glamour, Calvin Klein chic, the weight of the Kennedy name, the impossible pressure of being so publicly, so relentlessly watched. 

The show hits on so many chapters in the couple's romance including the famous Washington Square Park fight, the relentless paparazzi, the Tribeca apartment siege, the wedding dress drama with Narciso Rodriguez. It's all there.

Murphy also takes the creative liberties we've come to expect from him so some timelines are compressed, some scenes are speculative, some intimate conversations are reconstructed for dramatic effect rather than documented fact. That's the nature of this kind of storytelling. What he captures is the complexity, the love that was real, even inside all that chaos.

And the finale? I won't spoil it if you haven't watched. But I will say this: the crash of July 16, 1999, includes the the plane, the Atlantic, and Martha's Vineyard. Knowing how the story ends doesn't prepare you for watching it end.

The Magazine I Found in a Box

They met in 1992, when Carolyn was working in sales at the Calvin Klein flagship store in Manhattan. That detail alone, the woman who would become one of the most photographed people on the planet was behind a counter, selling clothes, savvy, and completely herself.

They married in 1996 a secret ceremony on Cumberland Island, Georgia that somehow remained a secret on the hot, humid island for about five minutes before the whole world exploded. And then three years later, on July 16, 1999, it was over. The plane, the ocean, Martha's Vineyard. John was 38. Carolyn was 33. Her sister Lauren Bessette was also on board. All three of them, gone.

Twenty-five years later, and we're still reading about them, still streaming shows about them, still wanting to understand, not just the tragedy, but them.

But First — Read the Book. Seriously. Read the Book.

Here's where I have to tell you about something I haven't been able to put down. If the show lit the match, this book is the whole fire.

The full title Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed  is deliberately stark, and Callahan earns every word of it. But here's why I want you to read it: it's not a takedown piece. It's a restoration. It puts these women in their full, complicated, extraordinary humanity at the center of a story that has always centered the men around them instead.

The Carolyn chapters are something else entirely.

The Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy that emerges from Callahan's research is so much more than the woman the world photographed in black. She had built a real life and a real self before she was handed the impossible task of becoming a Kennedy wife under permanent public surveillance.

Callahan also looks unflinchingly at their relationship, its passion and its turbulence and the very public moments of friction, like the Washington Square Park altercation in 1996 that was photographed by paparazzi and became the image everyone references when they say the marriage was troubled.

And then there's Lauren. Carolyn's sister Lauren Bessette was on that flight, reportedly having been asked to join as a kind of bridge between a couple who were working hard to find their footing again. She was a Morgan Stanley executive. She was 34. She is so often a footnote to the headline, and Callahan refuses to let her be.

The Stories I Never Knew

This is the part that kept me reading with my mouth open. Kennedy history, I thought I knew. I did not know Kennedy history.

Before Carolyn, JFK Jr. dated actress Christina Haag — a relationship that lasted years and that has its own remarkable, largely untold story. Callahan's research surfaces something that reads almost like a preview of the turbulence to come: early in their relationship, John took Christina open-sea kayaking in conditions that were, to put it gently, not beginner-friendly. They nearly drowned. The seas were too strong, the conditions too dangerous, and he had pushed them into it anyway. It was a story that stayed private for years. And it's one of many moments where the book makes you realize: the Kennedy story we've been told is only the surface of it.

None of this makes the love story between John and Carolyn any less real. The US Weekly piece makes that case beautifully. The show makes it emotionally. And Callahan, in her own rigorous way, makes it too. Their love was real. It was also complicated, like every real love is complicated. What makes it different is that theirs played out with cameras at every window and an entire country watching.

There is just so much more to this story than any single telling can hold. That's why the book matters alongside the show. Watch the show and feel it. Read the book and understand it.

Watch It. Then Come Find Us.

Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette is streaming now on FX / Hulu. We are going to do a full fact vs. fiction deep dive on the blog everything Murphy got right, the places he took creative liberties, and the moments that hit hardest. Stay close.

And Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan is available wherever you buy books — online, your local bookshop, Audible if you want to listen while you lie on your satin pillow staring at the ceiling thinking about all of it. 

Until next time — sleep beautifully, dream boldly, and for the love of everything, read the book.

— Dale Janée