When she didn’t give him her number, I wanted to throw tomatoes at my TV screen. I experienced the same indignation soon after, when he asked to see her again after their first date, and she simply said “goodnight.” Then, to my fury, she pulled it off once more, when he leaned his face towards hers after a late-night walk, and she just smiled and walked away, an insouciant blonde disappearing into the New York City mist to the sound of Mazzy Star. Never before has a woman played it this cool—and subsequently made me seethe with envy.
I’m talking about Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, Ryan Murphy’s new series for FX/Hulu about the intoxicating relationship between two of America’s most beautiful—and famously doomed—people. The show opens with the couple boarding a small plane piloted by Kennedy, which many viewers will recognise as among their last moments—the plane crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 1999, killing them both, as well as Carolyn’s sister. He was 38; Bessette was 33.
Theirs was a romance wrapped up in tragedy. How much of this Murphy and series creator Connor Hines will include remains to be seen; the first three episodes of the nine-part series dropped last week, with new episodes releasing weekly through March. For now, the focus has been on the early flutters of love between two bright, extraordinarily attractive and well-dressed young things (played by Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon). On one side, there’s a beleaguered 30-something from the world’s most prolific political dynasty trying to shed his playboy image; on the other, a 20-something fashion girl hustling to get by in ’90s New York, one masterclass in sartorial minimalism at a time.
As the TV show tells it, they’re introduced at a party by Calvin Klein, whom Bessette worked for at the time. What follows is a slow-burn flirtation between a hopelessly besotted Kennedy and an utterly unbothered Bessette, whose nonchalance in the face of such hotness should be studied. “You could be a serial killer for all I know,” she deadpans to the son of JFK after he asks for her phone number. He asks to give her his, to which she replies: “I don’t want to get your hopes up.” He responds that he’s not above begging; she coolly retorts that he knows where she works.
Bessette’s seductive ennui strikes again in all of the duo’s subsequent encounters, keeping Kennedy firmly on the back foot—a position the viewer quickly understands he’s never been in before. What’s interesting about this relationship is that it subverts the obvious power dynamic at play. Kennedy may be the one with the world ready to cater to his every whim, but when it comes to the two of them, Bessette is the one in control—an edge the music supervisor seems to playfully nod towards when The Motels’ ‘Total Control’ plays while she measures him for a suit.
From what we know about the couple, Murphy’s depiction, which is based on Elizabeth Beller’s Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, very much mirrors their real-life dynamic, with Bessette brushing off Kennedy’s initial pursuits. “She didn’t think he was serious,” their friend Gustavo Paredes told People in 2014. “He couldn’t believe she turned him down. It had never happened before.” Speaking in the 2019 ABC News special The Last Days of JFK Jr, Kennedy’s friend Brian Steel concurred: “He would say, ‘I called her, and she hasn’t called me back.’ And John did not like that.”
All of this might seem like it’s pulled from the “treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen” playbook, one often presented to straight women from a young age to prevent them from conforming to any of the desperate, needy, Havisham-adjacent caricatures we’ve been conditioned to fear. Normally, seeing it play out on screen would annoy me, particularly in 2026. The cool girl is a familiar, and somewhat tired, pop culture trope, one that was notoriously upheld by early aughts rom-coms (ahem, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) before being artfully dismantled by Gillian Flynn in her 2012 novel, Gone Girl.
Traditionally, cool girls succeed by suppressing their feelings and adopting inherently detached traits as a way to “win” a man. It’s an ideology that feeds internalised misogyny, pitting women against one another by placing the sangfroid ones at the top and leaving us emotional, sensitive, and vulnerable ones at the bottom—I put myself in the latter camp because I’m so embarrassingly bad at playing it cool that I can’t pretend otherwise. Unlike me, the cool girls don’t chase men, nor do they wilfully hand out their phone numbers. Rather, they exist solely as objects to be pursued, and therefore retain all of their agency. Must be nice.
Murphy’s depiction of Bessette taps into this in that she behaves in a way society has always rewarded. She is, in many ways, a classic cool girl, with a penchant for masculine tailoring to boot. But here, somehow, it feels empowering rather than contrived: like this is just how she actually is, it’s not for show. Admittedly, it was a little aggravating at first, but on reflection, this is a character we could all learn a thing or two from. Because in the face of someone with as much status as Kennedy, being a cool girl is less about mimicking male behaviour through a sexist cinematic lens than it is about holding her own. She knows that she’s someone worth chasing—and that keeps him on his toes.
Indeed, out of the two of them—as they’re depicted in Love Story, but also from what we’ve read about the pair—it’s clear that Bessette is the one with the stronger sense of herself, something Kennedy points out in the show. Maybe she represents a different kind of cool girl, one that is about owning her sexuality, asserting herself, and refusing to be dimmed by male power. Kennedy might be a Kennedy, but he still has to work hard to get Bessette’s attention. And so he should—he and the rest of them.
This article was originally published on Vogue.com.
