Exploring Taylor Swift’s Kennedy Obsession: The Inspiration Behind "Starlight"
"Starlight" and a story I can't get out of my head. (the title also a tribute to an MTV show I miss)
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One of my many historical obsessions is what exactly drives the fascination around the Kennedys. Is it their looks? Their tragic life events? The ongoing cultural fascination with rich-white-people culture? The answer is probably all of the above. I am part of the problem. This call is coming from inside the house. I have read many a Kennedy bio, even the salacious “fueled by salt and declassified FBI docs” ones. It comes up often in my convos with friends, trying to unpack exactly why we continue to care about a family through many generations. I am not a fan of these people, but it’s kind of like checking in on people you went to school with who seem to have failed up through the years. I keep asking, why? How? Why do I care? Do I want to know that Conor Kennedy fought voluntarily in Ukraine? Do I want to know that Patrick Schwarzenegger is hard launching a granola bar with his mom Maria that claims to both fund Alzheimer’s research and somehow help prevent it? (I have not deep-dived enough on this.) No, I have shame, I have scruples, I have self-respect. And yet, I am about to tell you a story about something I think about at least monthly and have fully done a PowerPoint on before.
I wasn’t going to do this, and then I saw a volunteer for the Robert Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign in the wild this weekend when I was trying to know peace and eat ice cream with treasured friends. I took this as a sign from the universe that I needed to speak back to crazy (DO NOT VOTE FOR THIS MAN - please see this excellent series of episodes of Maintenance Phase about the idiocy of his extremely non-researched beliefs). I need to exclude him from this narrative (if you will), and instead turn it back to something I do care about.
It’s time to talk about the time Taylor Swift dated Conor Kennedy and wrote a song about it.
The year was 2012, and Taylor Swift was in the midst of prepping Red. The Kennedy family was presumably preparing for an as-yet-unfilmed Vineyard Vines campaign.
It’s hard to remember this far back, but in 2011, Taylor Swift was profiled in The New Yorker talking about her relatable pop culture faves, which included the Kennedys. Describing watching TV on her computer while on tour, she casually mentioned that she watched “History Channel documentaries,” noting, “I’m just so obsessed with the whole history of JFK and RFK.” In the same piece, she humble-bragged about having recently completed the 900-page epic The Kennedy Women. (In the same piece she says she watched Teen Mom and CSI “on which she has guest-starred” and I will need to circle back to this factoid someday.)
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of workshopping a good friend’s research project on which he’s writing a book. We were talking about the memory of the subject he’s studying vs. the actual history of the thing itself, and I noted the ways that memory can function as a kind of generative fan fiction for some people. The truth of an event in a person’s life doesn’t matter so much as the stories it lets us tell about ourselves or about the way we wish things were, for example. Kennedy history falls into this category.
Now, what do you do when you’re Taylor Swift, young, buzzed on History Channel docs and doorstop books about a family you lowkey want to join?
Before we explore her answer to that question, it’s important to note the Taylor Swift/Kennedy gaze was looking in both directions. Rory Kennedy, daughter of Ethel, saw these pull quotes and reached out to get concert tickets for her daughters. At the show, she slipped Taylor her mom’s number when she heard Taylor was such a fan. Soon, Taylor was attending the Sundance premiere of Rory’s documentary about Ethel and meeting the matriarch for lunch. By February, she’d be telling Vogue:
“The only time in my life I have ever been starstruck was meeting Caroline and Ethel Kennedy. I got to spend the afternoon with Ethel a couple of weeks ago. She is one of my favorites because you look back at the pictures of her and Bobby and they always look like they are having the most fun out of everybody. You know, eleven kids, all these exotic animals on their property. I’ve read a lot about them.”
Eleven kids? Exotic animals? Lea Michele is crying somewhere as someone reads this to her. Taylor got a lot from these books, and from this photograph of Bobby and Ethel:
They look like they’re having fun here and I can see what she saw. However, knowing Bobby Kennedy was also a man who once aspired to be a priest, idolized Senator McCarthy while working for him, and was kind of an all-around narc dissipates the crush a bit for me.
Ethel invited Taylor to her house for the 4th of July, a day that is obviously catnip to her (especially in this period), and for the Kennedys who give Old Navy family who have never stepped foot in one. At the 4th of July, Taylor arrived to play in the waves with Patrick Schwarzenegger and Conor Kennedy (son of Robert Jr.). Ever wonder what’s for breakfast at the Kennedy compound? That weekend Ethel served Palm Beach crab stack with poached eggs, Irish potato cakes, blueberry-orange bread (we know this because this visit was obsessively reported over in celeb gossip columns and retroactively in some of the salt and FBI-fueled Kennedy books.
As a thank you, Taylor performed a new song she’d written called “Starlight.” This song is Kennedy fan fiction in which Taylor imagines herself into the footsteps of a young Ethel Kennedy. She wrote without fear or research. As the scholars on genius.com annotated, the lyrics cite a yacht club party they snuck into after meeting in the summer 1945, (they met in the winter in Quebec when he was dating her sister) and none of that may be factually true, but maybe it “felt” true. Like Darren Criss recently saying he identifies as “culturally queer,” it doesn’t really mean anything, but it sounds nice!
I would have loved to be at the compound when Taylor played this at Ethel and confronted her with a fanfiction version of her relationship with her own husband. Imagine the confidence of youth, singing these words at the subject:
I met Bobby on the boardwalk, summer of '45
Picked me up, late one night out the window
We were 17 and crazy, running wild, wild
Can't remember what song it was playing when we walked in
The night we snuck into a yacht club party
Pretending to be a duchess and a prince
After this performance, Taylor started dating Conor Kennedy (then 18), when she was 22. Interesting to think she wrote this song celebrating young love after dating a slew of older men (Jake Gyllenhaal, John Mayer). In this period, Conor was mourning the recent death of his mother by suicide after years of mental health struggles. In his grief, he took her on dates that felt vulnerable and sad, like a visit to his mother’s grave.
That August, the other Kennedys were doing their best to make this burgeoning relationship about them. Hosting a mental health forum at the compound, Patrick Kennedy remembered later, “I couldn't resist pointing out to the group, during a brief lull in the dialogue, that the girl in the bathing suit walking down the path to the docks was Taylor Swift, who was then dating my nephew and probably already composing the song about their breakup.” This man is really great at using his privilege to encourage conversations of important topics (hosting a mental health forum) while continuing to say the quiet part out loud about himself (“I am a creep.”) This is a pattern in Kennedy behavior.
When asked what her favorite Taylor Swift song was, Caroline Kennedy responded “Romeo,” which, though not a song by Taylor Swift, is a love story of a kind for aunts trying to be supportive without really knowing what’s going on.
Controversially, just a month and a half after attending the fourth of July at the compound where she met her now boyfriend, Taylor bought a house adjacent to the compound. Commitment through real estate is something I thought I’d only see on House Hunters, but just like on that show/landmark litmus test of our times, Taylor would go searching for a house when what she really needed to do was break up.
That same month, Taylor and Conor crashed a Kennedy wedding. He did not RSVP (unknown to Taylor) so they were not exactly greeted as heroes when they waltzed into the Fairmont Copley Plaza. As one source reported, a Kennedy cousin approached Conor and said “Dude, you better check yourself. Aunt Vicki (the mother of the bride) is pissed. I think she’s gonna drag Taylor Swift out of here by her ponytail.”
By September, Conor was back at prep school and they broke up.
Was he nervous because she spent millions on a home near his family’s famous compound just a month or so after meeting him? Possibly. Taylor would later sell the home for a profit of a million dollars, and never confirm or deny she bought it in the first place. By April 2013, she tried to make light of it by “joking” in a Vanity Fair profile, "People say that about me, that I apparently buy houses near every boy I like — that's a thing that I apparently do," . . ."If I like you I will apparently buy up the real estate market just to freak you out so you leave me." I am sure it’s terrifying to have your life under a microscope, especially your relationships. However, I do have to wonder where her team was when she floated buying a mansion near the Kennedys. Is this rich people fan behavior? Is this just sound investing? I have no idea.
Regardless, despite the breakup the Kennedys and Taylor Swift have continued their mutual admiration society.
Even in December 2012, just months after their breakup, Taylor attended the Ripple of Hope gala organized by Kerry Kennedy to celebrate those who work for social change. Receiving an honor, Taylor shared some lessons she’d learned from Ethel. Specifically, she recalled swimming and boating with the Kennedys at the compound and initially being afraid to “drag” or be dragged on a rope behind a boat. In response “Ethel said “if you don’t do this, . . .you’ll run the risk of being boring. Now, get in the water!”
My version of this story would have been called “Ripple of Fear.” (And yes, Taylor performed “Starlight” at the ceremony.)
Even while her love for Conor didn’t last, we still have “Starlight” and that is truly something.
If this was fan fiction of a historical kind for Taylor Swift, I have to wonder what work it did for her then, and what work it may still do for her now. She performed it as one of the surprise songs on her recent Eras tour, and I have to question if singing it now feels different than when she first sang it at the compound. Maybe at 22, the Kennedys represented an epic family saga filled with tragedy and romance. In her thirties, it might just feel like a tragic poet’s department.
Kerry Kennedy still loves it. She shared it on April 11th to mark Ethel’s 96th birthday and, presumably make sure no one forgot that there was once a time when Taylor loved the Kennedys.
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I know this post is supposed to be about Taylor and the Kennedys and history... but for me it is all about the Glee references, particularly this line: "Lea Michele is crying somewhere as someone reads this to her." Yes, somewhere she is squeezing her face like a lemon to look like a person who has genuine emotions. LOLOL
How did I not know about the depth of this lore???!?! I am disappointed in my 2012 self.
I think the allure of the Kennedy Aesthetic was huge for Taylor, but there’s also something to be said about their staying power as public figures. She was worried during the Red Era about who would want her when she was Nothing New. Did she maybe see in Ethel a glimpse of who she would want to be as a public figure matriarch? Maybe a bit of a stretch here, and I would bet she didn’t want 11 kids and a philandering husband….but the blueprint of a coastal compound full of attractive, smart and fun family…Were the Kennedys her inspiration for her Holiday House 4th of July parties???!?
I’m also a gal who has unashamedly enjoyed learning about the family history of those I’ve dated, which could be considered as mildly creepy….I was delighted to find very progressive Letters to the Editor my husband’s grandmother (a Quaker) wrote to The Friends Journal in the 60’s.