Spiegel Stuff: Archive Extra: Jackie and JFK’s Courtship; Serena’s Love Match; The Tumultuous Liz Taylor

Friday, February 14, 2020

Archive Extra: Jackie and JFK’s Courtship; Serena’s Love Match; The Tumultuous Liz Taylor

Plus, a Royal Romance
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Sure, Valentine's Day might be the most commercial of holidays, but who doesn't love love? From the early days of Jackie and JFK's courtship to the tumultuous marriage(s) of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton to Rupert Murdoch's sudden split from Wendi Deng, these are some of the greatest love stories to appear in the pages of Vanity Fair—happy ending not guaranteed. And as our Valentine to you, dear readers, we've unlocked them from the V.F. Archive.

Young Love

He was the ambitious young congressman from Massachusetts in need of an elegant, aristocratic wife. She was the beautiful, troubled debutante on the rebound, pushed by her family to marry into wealth. In a startlingly intimate excerpt from his book on Jack and Jackie Kennedy, Edward Klein finds that, against all odds, it was the start of a great love affair.

Serena's Love Match

In January 2017, on the eve of the Australian Open, Serena Williams handed her fiancé, Alexis Ohanian, a paper bag containing six positive pregnancy tests. It was just the latest surprise in an unlikely pairing: the world's greatest tennis player and the geek cofounder of Reddit. From their first date—a magic six hours in Paris—to their plans for the baby's arrival, Buzz Bissinger had the full love story.

A Love Too Big to Last

From scandalous beginning to tormented end, theirs was the most epic love story in Hollywood history: a blaze of headlines, booze, jewels, brawls, and private jets. Marrying and divorcing twice, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton rocked the culture and each other's lives with a passion that reverberated long after Burton's 1984 death. In an excerpt from their 2010 book, Furious Love, Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger draw on Taylor's never-before-seen letters from Burton to reveal the poignant, complex truth behind the legend of "Liz and Dick."

Clare's Conquests

Beautiful, talented, and breathtakingly ambitious, divorcée Clare Boothe Brokaw climbed swiftly from writing captions at Vogue to become the managing editor of Condé Nast's literary jewel, Vanity Fair, and author of the biting comedy The Women. In a 1997 biography, Sylvia Jukes Morris reveals the extraordinary force of the woman who in 1934 captivated the grandly idiosyncratic, long-married Henry Luce, founder and editor in chief of Time, Fortune, and, later, Life, beginning one of the most remarkable romances of the 20th century.

Seduced and Abandoned

The 14-year marriage of Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng ended abruptly in 2013, after the News Corp. chairman came to believe his third wife had been romantically involved with a former head of state and with a prominent Silicon Valley executive. Talking to friends of the couple's, Mark Seal reports on the shifting power dynamics in the Murdoch household as Deng's ambitions changed, and tackles the question being debated: Who blindsided whom?

To Love and Love Not

With America about to celebrate the 100th birthday of its larger-than-life literary son Ernest Hemingway in 1999, Alane Salierno Mason discovered in an old steamer trunk a cache of letters and telegrams from the writer to her adoptive grandmother, a celebrated, well-married beauty named Jane Kendall Mason. They gave new insights into a liaison that blossomed amid the decadent delights of 1930s Havana, enraged and enchanted Hemingway, haunted his work, and destroyed his relationship with his editor Arnold Gingrich, the founder of Esquire, who eventually became the fourth husband of the dashing, complicated, and tragic "Mrs. M."

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