If the star-crossed Kennedy–Bessette romance wasn’t enough to hold viewers’ attention, Love Story‘s second season could target an even more scandal-filled love affair.
Love Story creator Connor Hines said the new season might focus on the A-list couple widely credited with beginning celebrity gossip media: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard “Dick” Burton.
“Maybe Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They have the right intensity,” Hines replied when asked if he was interested in taking on a new couple for the Ryan Murphy executive-produced FX series in a new interview with Vanity Fair.
Taylor, the iconic actress who was a mainstay of celebrity gossip tabloids for her eight marriages to seven men, her multi-million-dollar acclaimed career, and her explosive off-screen affairs, would be rife with content for the Ryan Murphy-produced Love Story series.
Whereas JFK Jr. and Bessette’s marriage lasted just eight years before their tragic deaths, “Liz and Dick,” as they were referred to by the media, fueled gossip rags for more than a decade.
Liz and Dick met on the set of Cleopatra, the film that would make Taylor the first actor to ever receive a guaranteed $1 million contract.
The couple played Cleopatra and Mark Antony in the blockbuster film, but it was their off-screen affair that attracted audiences. Taylor, who was 29 at the time, was already on her fourth husband when she met Burton, who was 36 and also married.
After first being photographed together by paparazzi on their yacht in Italy during the film’s two-and-a-half-year shoot, the couple was condemned by the Vatican for “erotic vagrancy” and later sued by Fox Studios for $50 million—more than $500 million in today’s dollars—for tanking the film’s box office with their off-screen dramatics.
The couple made eleven films together in their first marriage, which lasted 10 years before they divorced in 1974. They remarried a year later, though their second marriage lasted only as long as their first divorce.
By 1976, Taylor’s acting career—which had earned her two Oscars from five nominations and an honorary Oscar for her humanitarian work—had dried up.
Whereas JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette shied away from the public eye, Taylor often embraced it.
She had her final wedding at friend Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and her anniversary party at Madison Square Garden was broadcast by CBS. Taylor was also already the subject of a Lindsay Lohan-led made-for-TV film, Liz & Dick, in 2012, one year after her death.
Ultimately, however, Taylor’s life was marred by intense public scrutiny.
“I don’t like fame. I don’t like the sense of belonging to the public,” Taylor said in the documentary, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes.
“I gave up a long time ago... If you try and explain, then you lose yourself along the way,” she responded when asked if she cared about negative coverage.
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette airs its final episode on March 26 on Hulu. A second season of the potential franchise has yet to be officially announced.
