The ‘royal’ couple who predated Harry and Meghan
He was the most eligible bachelor in the world — famous from birth and encrusted on the public consciousness ever since his appearance at the very public funeral of a fallen parent.
She was an out-of-left-field choice of bride, promptly turned into a chameleon of history, a target of jealousy by some, and a photo-ready icon by the media.
The right couple at the right time, their courtship would rivet, their union funnelled into a Midas marriage.
2018?
Nah, think back to 1996 when one John F. Kennedy Jr. — a Mr. Right who was also Mr. Rich and Famous — took Carolyn Bessette as his wife, with her WASPy mystique and Hall-of-Fame hair.
In the same way as today’s rise of a new royal duo has taken a stranglehold on pop culture — with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle receiving the mantle of Couple of the Moment, and Meghan, in particular, thrust into a stratosphere that had eluded her when she was a mere actress on the cable drama Suits — the stateside arc of JFK Jr. and Carolyn can be seen as something of an original run.
In their soap-ready union, a new dynasty was born — though a doomed one, to be sure.
“The media played the marriage as a Cinderella story” at the start, as Kennedy biographer Edward Klein has written, “casting Carolyn as the commoner who had found true love with Prince Charming … The man who could have had any woman in the world had chosen as his bride one who was not rich or famous or noble by family background.”
Immediately made a plaything of the paparazzi, and embraced by the fashion who’s-who, Women’s Wear Daily crowned her “a modern style icon, heir to Jackie O, her deceased mother-inlaw,” while the likes of Ralph Lauren were so besotted by the blond, minimalist new Kennedy that he famously instructed his aides at the time, “Every time you design something, or create something, think of Carolyn Bessette.”
All of which can’t help but echo now, when brands crow about the “Meghan Effect,” but also because, in the snakesand-ladders of celebrity culture, the meaning of Carolyn isn’t lost on Meghan herself.
“Everything goals” is how Harry’s fiancée described her favourite wedding gown: a wildly influential slip silk dress designed by Narciso Rodriguez for Carolyn Bessette. (Could it be a clue to what she’ll wear to her own nuptials?)
Growing up in the U.S. at an age when Carolyn was “it” — and when she undoubtedly would have been affected by her tragic death in a plane crash, along with her husband, in 1999 — Meghan has taken further inspiration from the American royal of another sort, as close clothes-watchers note.
There was her look, for instance, during her first official outing, postengagement announcement, fiancé in town, in Nottingham — a long tan skirt/ black high-neck knit/leather boots number identical to an outfit that Carolyn once rocked.
But it’s not the only thing shared across the expanse of time. See: a metaawareness about their own respective image-making.
In the same way, Meghan, pre-Harry, was an actress and already a habitué of red carpets, and Carolyn, pre-JFK Jr., was a stylist for celebrities — both, in their respective ways, flaunting a skill set that already involved an innate understanding of visual cues. “She would guide them through the collection, tell them what looked good on them, and advise them on how to put it all together,” once shared Paul Wilmot, the erstwhile VP for public relations for Calvin Klein, where Carolyn toiled.
Establishing herself as “the perfect saleswoman for important clients like the television correspondent Diane Sawyer, the socialite Blaine Trump and the actress Annette Bening,” Wilmot went on, “she sold millions of dollars of clothes over a period of time.”
Having known Meghan while she lived in Toronto, shooting Suits, I’m reminded about first hearing of her when she started her now-defunct lifestyle blog, The Tig.
She was already thinking about branding, in the same so many enterprising people in showbiz do these days, making an effort to let fans in on her adventures in food, travel and style.
In other words: Both Carolyn and Meghan were students of celebrity long before being completely subsumed by it.
And while both are obviously singular products of their time — Meghan’s biracial provenance obviously gives her story an extra oomph in the context of the British royals, and she seems more “woke” at first gleam — there are other similarities.
Like Meghan, Carolyn was a product of a broken home, but also like her, she had learned the codes of blending in. Indeed, what people sometimes construed as a trust-fund vibe in Carolyn was a misreading of the more subtle nuances of America’s class structure.
It’s also interesting how the narratives were spun around both starry couplings, Meghan-Harry and CarolynJohn-John. Carolyn, tough as a bandit and swearing like a sailor, was someone JFK Jr. couldn’t tell what to do and was said to be a primary attraction for him.
Famously, she waited weeks to give him an answer when he proposed — reminiscent today of one of the recurring themes around Meghan, that “she is definitely the one wearing the trousers in their relationship,” as a royal insider has quipped to People.
Like Meghan, Carolyn possessed another quality that attracted John, People’s 1988 “Sexiest Man Alive,” who hated to be thought of as square.
“She is the hippest person I ever met,” Jean-Louis Ginibre, the Paris-based publisher behind JFK Jr.’s short-lived magazine George, once said. “She is totally au courant. Very bright ... she can focus on one person for 10 to 20 minutes and be totally involved with this person.”
How is Meghan getting along with her sister-in-law-to-be, Kate? Oh, and how’s she being absorbed by the royal clan at large? This drumbeat of conjecture today tracks, too, with the travails of Carolyn, everything about her then decoded, like when she had dinner with her husband’s aunt, Lee Radziwill.
Friends reported that she sought counsel on being “a Kennedy” from her sister-in-law, Caroline, while others reported a chillier relationship between the two.
And, well, history certainly threads in ever-interesting ways when you stop to consider that both Harry and JFK Jr. were figures similarly thrust onto history as lads: the latter famously saluting his father’s presidential coffin; the other, a ginger-haired prince seen walking in dire silence with his brother and his dad as they paid last rites for a mother who had been dubbed “the people’s princess.”
Frozen in their twin tableaux of grief, Harry, like John-John, in the ’90s, enjoyed the role of lovable rogue in varying ways, all the while never quite losing the root-ability factor with the public. Both homed in on a special status ascribed to them as younger siblings with less stakes and responsibilities.
Where Meghan is concerned, the May 19 bride has, alas, much to cautionarytale from the fate of Carolyn.
Hounded by the media, while faced with the pressure of going from a normal existence one moment to something akin to being a sort of prisoner the next, she — as writer Ann Gerhardt once observed — eventually “became studiedly boring. While blond and as coolly alluring as ever, she popped up seldom, spoke in public even less and always, when making an entrance, allowed her husband to grip her hand tightly.”
Carolyn was much seen, in other words, but rarely heard. Something that is inevitably going to happen (nay, already has!) to a woman who chooses to join “The Firm,” as the British monarchy is known.
Already, Meghan’s voice has been circumvented, if you consider her command-performance exit from social media, on which she had once kept a lively presence.
It is here where the example of Carolyn further echoes: Because she had quit her job, and effectively had nothing to do all day but hang out in their Tribeca loft where there was no back door, “Carolyn had a choice between being stuck at home and running the press gauntlet,” and, increasingly, she chose the former. Carolyn once stayed inside for two weeks, various reports crawled. She wound up spending so many of her last days effectively “bemoaning her fate as the wife of America’s most famous man,” as gossipist Liz Smith once put it.
At this point, Meghan seems to be of a different fibre — at ease with the public and coming into her role with a lot more life experience that Carolyn had. But who can foresee what life can be under this amount of scrutiny?
Ultimately, though, it’s the photos that rarely lie, and even now, the images of the young Kennedys summon up a cauldron of sexual attraction.
The magnetism between Harry and Meghan seems fairly undeniable, too, as a writer for Tatler recently tutted: “Just look at his body language.
Gone is the larky, ‘Jack the Lad, Prince Hal on a night out with Falstaff,’ rattling-good-fun royal. Instead, there’s a touchingly cow-eyed devotion in evidence, all mooning love and a willingness to hand his heart and soul over to the one he loves.”