Romantic or toxic? Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy's biographer weighs in on the couple's real love story

More than 25 years after their deaths, Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr. remains frozen in cultural memory: beautiful, glamorous, doomed.

But as a new generation discovers them, and as Ryan Murphy’s "Love Story" reimagines their romance, the old question resurfaces: was theirs an epic love story or a troubled marriage unraveling behind the scenes?

"Love Story" leans into the electricity. Carolyn is portrayed as magnetic and emotionally attuned — deeply caring and empathetic, yet grounded in a strong sense of self. She gives John a hard time before agreeing to date him, not out of calculation, but because she refuses to be swept up by his last name. Their chemistry crackles in part because she isn’t dazzled by the Kennedy mystique; she meets him as an equal.

Conflict surfaces quickly, too: an anonymous letter attacking Carolyn’s character drives a wedge between them, highlighting the outside forces that would repeatedly intrude on their relationship. The show's fifth episode depicts their infamous fight in a Manhattan park covered extensively by tabloids.

But beyond dramatization lies a more layered truth.

Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Kelly Anthony in "Love Story."

Elizabeth Beller, author of "Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy," spent years speaking to those who knew the couple best. What she found complicates the “troubled marriage” narrative that tabloids cemented in the late ’90s.

“I think it’s two people who loved each other very much and had a lot on their plates,” Beller tells TODAY.com. “Young marriages need time, and they had so many pressures on them, and then you add the public eye and a constant paparazzi. It just creates a pressure cooker.”

That pressure cooker often translated, publicly, into stories of fights and strain. But Beller pushes back on the idea that conflict equals collapse.

“I land on, they really loved each other, but there were realities that made things very difficult,” she explains. “I don’t know any couple … if you don’t fight, you’re not living in the same house. So even if they fought and there was turmoil, that does not mean there was not a deep love.”

Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr. (Lawrence Schwartzwald)

Friends of the couple told Beller that Kennedy and Bessette shared not just devotion, but joy.

“They really laughed a lot together,” she says. “And I think, you know, that’s a great way to fall in love.”

Much of the darker mythology surrounding their marriage, Beller argues, grew from Bessette's refusal to perform for the press.

“It was very clear she didn’t want to be in the public eye,” Beller says. “That shows that her value system was different than being about celebrity and fame. She was interested in John for who John was. She was interested in their life for what they could do, how they could be of service.”

When Bessette wouldn’t provide a narrative, one was created for her. “There was sort of a narrative built when she didn’t want to give them one,” Beller says. “And I think it was misrepresentative of her.”

Their marriage, by many accounts, was defined less by dysfunction than by intensity — two ambitious, strong-willed people navigating extraordinary scrutiny.

When attention grew too strong, Bessette had to give up her job at Calvin Klein, losing not just a career but a daily support system. Kennedy was running George magazine and contemplating a future in politics. The glare was constant; the stakes, unusually high.

We’ll never know what their relationship might have become with time and privacy.

“The sad part is we didn’t get a chance to find out,” Beller says. The couple died, along with Bessette's sister Lauren Bessette, in a plane crash in 1999.

What remains is not simply a fairy tale or a cautionary tale, but a portrait of two people who loved each other deeply, argued like real couples do, laughed often and carried, perhaps unfairly, the weight of a nation’s projections.