In no variation of this world was Carolyn Bessette not going to be met with a bizarre combination of reverence and resentment. She had dared to be the woman John F. Kennedy Jr.
—one of the most eligible bachelors on the planet, the closest thing America had to a crown prince— fell in love with and eventually married . And, in a way, she would never be forgiven for taking him off the market. No matter that Carolyn and John did not live happily ever after , instead dying in a plane crash on July 16, 1999 , that also killed her sister Lauren Bessette .
Their story has since been impossible to tell from any angle without an ominous tinge shading even their happiest moments. In death, Carolyn didn't exactly become an afterthought in the wake of all the rabid attention—explained away as public interest—that was paid to her during the seven years she was linked to the only son of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy .
But her personhood was gobbled up by history, dragged under the weight of the overwhelming tragedy of it all. Not willing to lose Carolyn to time as the 25th anniversary of her death at 33 approached, or to let her be filed away as merely a style icon, Elizabeth Beller sought to reclaim the woman who existed outside of John's aura in her 2024 book Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy . The biographical basics about the 5-foot-10 Boston University graduate—even before she was tasked in the spring of 1992 with overseein.
