Before She Was Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, She Was One of Us
- Mar 25
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 27
The Boston years that built an icon
Boston, 1985.
A dirty-blonde girl saunters down Commonwealth Ave, collar turned up against the wind off the Charles, and a glimmer in her eye like she's already somewhere better. Her left shoulder slouches under the weight of her backpack, overflowing with unopened elementary education homework. On her right, BU’s star hockey player rests his hand over her shoulder, though she barely seems to notice. Her face rests in a quiet smirk, like the kind of assurance and allure that feels like a secret you're not in on.
Her name is Carolyn Bessette, and the world has absolutely no idea who she is…yet.
The Story We Know
If you haven’t already heard, Ryan Murphy's Love Story is dominating every conversation right now. The show retells the captivating yet tragic story of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Murphy perfectly showcases their enviable Tribeca loft, their meet-cute at Calvin Klein, and the unfortunate pressure of living your entire life in the public eye.
But somewhere between the cultural icon and the real person, Carolyn Bessette has become almost fictional, a finished portrait of effortless magnetism that the world can't stop studying. Murphy's show doesn't help. It finds her already polished and fully formed, skipping past everything that shaped her.
So let's go back to before the photographs, the myths, and the mystery. Back to where it all actually started.
Her Start in Rich Hall
Carolyn came to BU in 1984 to study elementary education, following in the footsteps of her mother, a schoolteacher from Greenwich, Connecticut. By most accounts, she wasn't laser-focused on her coursework. Her college self was social, magnetic, and far more interested in the city around her than whatever was in her textbooks. The media loves to run with this, filling in the gaps with monstrous stories of cocaine overdoses and boyfriend-stealing behavior. It was a pattern that would follow her for the rest of her life: take something ordinary about Carolyn and twist it into something ugly. The reality? She was a normal student who liked to go out.
What rarely gets mentioned is that Carolyn was largely funding herself after her mother cut her off for overspending. While in school, she took a marketing job at That's Entertainment, a Boston nightclub consortium, and without knowing it, was already doing what she would one day get paid very well to do in New York.
A Cover Girl Before Calvin Klein
On campus, Carolyn was simply the "it" girl. She dated the star hockey player John Cullen, who later went on to play in the NHL, and carried herself with the kind of quiet charm that people noticed without being able to explain. Her presence was felt enough that she landed the cover of the Girls of B.U. calendar in 1988, a campus project put together by two School of Management students who each pooled $4,000 to produce it.
The Job That Started It All
After graduating in 1988, Carolyn took a job as a salesperson at the Calvin Klein store at Chestnut Hill Mall. It wasn't a glamorous start, but it was the right one. A high-profile Calvin Klein travel sales coordinator walked into that store, saw something in her immediately, and offered her a role in New York City as a publicist and celebrity stylist for the brand. She said yes. That decision catapulted her to a life full of fashion, unwelcomed fame, and a short yet poignant future with JFK Jr.
Who’s Next?
Carolyn Bessette has morphed into something close to a mythological figure in popular culture. But she was also, once, just a girl at BU. A girl who was just figuring it out, prioritizing her social life, finding her footing slowly, and then all at once. Somewhere on this campus right now, there's probably another one, walking to class with an energy that's hard to define and a story that remains untold.
We just don't know her name…yet.
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