Carolyn Bessette Was Living the Dream. Then She Met John.

Ms. MacNicol is the author of the memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself” and the host of the podcast “Wilder: A Reckoning With Laura Ingalls Wilder.”

There is a three-minute scene in the first episode of Ryan Murphy’s FX show “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette” that I can’t get out of my head. In it, we first meet Ms. Bessette in her downtown apartment, pre-John. It’s 1992. Her clock radio alarm goes off. Primal Scream’s “Loaded” begins to play. She rolls out of bed, plucks some clothes from a pile and walks to the subway, hair tousled, Parliament cigarette in hand. She emerges in midtown, takes in the front pages of the tabloids and then uses cash at a newsstand to buy another pack of cigarettes and a copy of Vogue. She’s joined by a friend, and they both begin to recount their previous night at a popular club. Blissfully, nobody holds a phone.

In the history of great romances, life in New York City before smartphones and the World Wide Web must count as one of the most coveted.

This, of course, is not the love story the title alludes to.

Both the show and Elizabeth Beller’s 2024 biography “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy,” by which it is inspired, have framed Ms. Bessette’s life, and her marriage to Mr. Kennedy, as another chapter in the Camelot fairy tale. (Even as the show has taken enormous liberties with the portrayal of people from John F. Kennedy Jr.’s dating life before his wedding vows). But watching it, you sense that the real fairy tale is actually Ms. Bessette’s life in New York City in the years before that Georgia island wedding in a Narciso Rodriguez slip dress that upended the wedding dress industry, and landed her on front pages around the world.

Ms. Bessette’s extraordinary rise from shopgirl in a Calvin Klein boutique in a suburban Boston mall to the highest reaches of the same fashion house during the brand’s era of greatest cultural influence was a breathtakingly American success story of hustle and self-invention — though the press barely gave credence to any of that at the time. Instead, she was picked apart as though she were a show horse, and lumped with women accused of cunningly using their jobs as social entree, and playing by “The Rules” — a 1995 self-help dating best seller — to snare a man.

The show, by contrast, gets it. We are delivered a tantalizing version of Ms. Bessette’s single life in New York City. Here she is chain-smoking, sleeping with an aspiring model, hanging out at clubs, free from social media and accountability — all while fueling her rocketing career.

On their first onscreen date, Carolyn tells John that during her hiring interview at Calvin Klein in New York City she was clear she didn’t “have a Plan B or a trust fund to fall back on.” In real life and on the show, she quickly navigated her way up the ranks at Calvin Klein, impressing Mr. Klein himself with her style choices, and maneuvering around managers. She was a part of the team that talked the boss into casting the model Kate Moss, a decision that turned Mr. Klein’s then precarious business finances around (and thrust Ms. Moss into notoriety). When she met John, she held far more downtown cool than he ever could.

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