Carolyn Bessette Kennedy's Marriage Was NEVER The Love Story America Believed

In March 1996, a thirty year old woman walked away from a low six figure job she had spent seven years climbing toward. She was the director of show production at Calvin Klein, which meant that when the collections went out, she decided how America saw them. She quit because a videotape had made it impossible to walk into the building. The tape ran about ninety seconds — an argument in a New York park, filmed without her knowledge in February. The National Enquirer bought it first. A bidding war followed, and the Enquirer's own editor told Newsweek the price was in the hundred thousand dollar range. A CBS tabloid program called Day and Date won the rights and, rather than air it once, broadcast the footage across five consecutive nights beginning Monday, March eleventh. Five nights. One argument, sliced into episodes. Six months later she married the man in the video on an island in Georgia with no paved roads and no telephone lines, in a church lit by candles because the building had no electricity, in front of about forty people who had not been told the date until four days earlier — and who were handed Indian Head nickels to produce at security, because a guest list can be photographed and a coin in a pocket cannot. America has spent thirty years arguing about whether Carolyn Bessette Kennedy was happy, and it has always been the wrong argument. The right one is arithmetic: a photographer's ninety seconds ended a seven year career, the market that produced them paid a hundred thousand dollars, and not one cent of it reached her. She is one of the most commercially valuable American women of the last half century — documentaries, books, unseen wedding footage sold as an event, a drama series, a video of assorted facts about her with over a million views. The only period in her adult life when she was actually paid for the value she generated was the seven years she spent at Calvin Klein, before any of us knew her name.