The Double Play

When Travis Kelce joined Taylor Swift on stage at Wembley stadium last year — in full white-tie rig, no less — the resultant roar could be heard across most of north-west London’s postal districts. It was a consummation, of sorts: the Kansas City Chiefs’ tight end and the world’s most pored- over pop star had teaser-trailed their affair with winks, nudges and mutual hospitality-suite cameos, but, as Swift feigned amazement and Kelce applied himself to a bit of stage business involving a fan and a make-up brush, here was the IRL thing playing out in real time. “We just witnessed Travis and Taylor’s coming out as the ultimate power couple,” gasped a correspondent for America’s ABC News. “Make no mistake,” thundered rival network TMZ, trying — and failing — to push the portmanteau ‘Traylor’ into common parlance: “Apart, they’re hot, but together, they are molten.” 

Ouch! That’s the common line when it comes to the newly minted star pairing; what was simmering singularly has come to a double boil, what was solo-bright has turned duo-incandescent. Perhaps people hear an echo of Ecclesiastes 4: 9-12 — “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other” — or even Swift’s own collaboration with Boys Like Girls in Two Is Better Than One (“You came into my life and I thought, hey/You know this could be something”). But there’s definitely a feeling that the augmented whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts (“You complete me,” as Dr. Evil purred in the direction of Mini-Me). Certainly, Swift and Kelce have already seen a return on their toil — Instagram followers climbing in the millions, jersey sales up 400 per cent — and have even incurred the modern power couple’s badge of honour, some political snark, in this instance from the MAGA pack, with the former presidential candidate and Trump cabinet pick Vivek Ramaswamy calling them “an artificially culturally propped-up couple”. 

It’s not love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found when I saw it in your hands. 

Haters gonna hate, etc, even if Ramaswamy’s scrambled syntax highlights the limits of star wattage — no amount of endorsements for ‘joy’ on Kelce and Swift’s part could prevent a Trump return to the White House. But then, as Michelle Obama, half of America’s most popular political power couple in recent times, said, “When they go low, we go high”. For power couples, passion and ambition are the twin peaks. In fact, the two appear inseparable, and that combustible cocktail is exemplified in the couple that, pre-Kelce and Swift, set the template for the pop star-sporting hero merger: Victoria and David Beckham. 

‘Posh and Becks’ got together in 1997, and quickly became a national infatuation. “My daughter was so obsessed with them,” Anna Wintour says in a Netflix documentary series about the pair, “that I felt the world must be.” They seemed to magnify each other’s innate gaucheries (“I just fancied her,” says Beckham in the documentary; “I just fancied him,” is the response), getting married while seated on gold thrones and cutting a cake that featured naked studies of themselves in fondant, à la Jeff Koons and Cicciolina (a short-lived art power couple). But they also seemed to unlock a steely drive in each other (“It was about what me and Victoria wanted, and we wanted America,” says Beckham stonily in the series), and they quickly morphed into Brand Beckham, selling everything from deodorant and whisky to watches, sneakers and, of course, £1,500 gowns — the kind of endorsements that offer more tangible rewards than political ones, with the added bonus, for the recipient, of having some of their ineffable stardust rub off on you. But not too much: when it comes to power couples, we don’t want half-hearted stabs at we’re-just-like-you normality. We want, as we get in the Beckham doc, personally monogrammed beekeeping overalls. 

The history of the power couple can be traced back to the First Couple. On their own, Adam and Eve were simply mooning about their own personal Love Island, but once they’d met-cute they proved themselves too hot even for paradise to contain them. Their modern equivalents in audacity include Jay-Z and Beyoncé, who shut down the Louvre and faced down the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo to film a video for their track Apeshit, and Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who broke the internet so many times during their nabobs-of-clickbait reign (principally with the aid of what one onlooker called “Kim’s magnificently sculpted butt”) that it’s now basically held together with paper clips and twine. 

Power couples have repeatedly blown the lone-genius theory of creative inspiration out of the water. In the art world, look no further than Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. “It’s not love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found when I saw it in your hands,” wrote Kahlo to Rivera at the start of their tumultuous 25- year relationship, and the intensity was dialled up from there.

Kahlo met Rivera, a titan of Mexican art, at a party hosted by the photographer Tina Modotti in 1928. The two became each other’s muses, confidantes and artistic and political allies, with Rivera calling Kahlo “the great fact of my life”. They married in 1929, in the teeth of Kahlo’s parents’ disapproval — who pointed up the pair’s physical disparity by calling them “the elephant and the dove” — and would divorce in 1939 only to remarry the following year, remaining together until Kahlo’s death in 1954 through thick (the studies they produced of each other, including Kahlo’s Diego on My Mind from 1943, in which his portrait is imprinted on her forehead like a glowering third eye, and Rivera’s Frida Kahlo from 1939, in which her hieratic stare embodies Rivera’s assessment that Kahlo possessed “a merciless yet sensitive power of observation”) and thin (mutual philandering, including, but not limited to, Leon Trotsky and Isamu Noguchi on her side, and Dolores Del Río and Kahlo’s sister Cristina on his). 

Tenacious devotion also informs the conjoined entity that is Gilbert and George, who ditched the surnames (Prousch and Passmore, respectively) and personalities (Prousch, born in the Dolomites; Passmore, born in Devon) on meeting at St. Martin’s School of Art in 1967 to become “living sculptures”, whether miming to Underneath the Arches in goldface or walking in sync to the same café, for the same breakfast, in complementary tweed suits, brogues and floral ties, for the past half-century. They’ve put themselves, and their bodily functions (see, for example, 1994’s Naked Shit Pictures) at the centre of their elaborate photo pieces. A clue as to why might come from this quote from Gilbert, or possibly George: “One man naked is a male study; more than one, well, that’s quite serious — two men naked are more naked than one.” 

The fashion world has also had its share of power couples. Think of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, marrying deconstructed weaves and Situationist provocation to kickstart the punk movement from their King’s Road store, Sex. Or the king and queen of slouchy cool, François and Betty Catroux, interiors guru and model respectively, whose swinging insouciance — they met at an art opening in Paris in 1967 — came to embody what François also christened his modernist-melange aesthetic: “l’art de vivre”. “They bring an inimitable style and energy to any room they happen to occupy,” wrote David Netto in a profile for The Wall Street Journal, and their gravitational force pulled in everyone from Cole Porter and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild to Yves Saint Laurent, who was so smitten with Betty — “I feel like she is some kind of long-lost twin,” he said, as he made her his muse — that they practically became a power throuple. 

But it’s Hollywood that has produced the power couples par excellence, the world-bestriding ones from which all the others take their cue. And we’re not talking contemporary — Brangelina was cheekbone-squared fun while it lasted, though it soon collapsed into lawyered-up recrimination that took all the zest out of their jointly owned (and custody-contested) Provençal rosé, while Bennifer (judged ‘the flat-pack Brangelina’ by unkind critics), despite their seemingly endless courtship-splitship-marriageship- divorceship-courtship go-round, was irredeemably holed below the waterline with the release of 2003’s less-than-rom, hunt-the-com Gigli, a joint vanity catastrophe of Hindenburg proportions (though, to be fair, they signalled as much with what came to be the movie’s most deathless line, delivered by a libidinous J-Lo to a startled Affleck: “It’s turkey time. Gobble-gobble”). 

No, we’re talking old school. Lauren Bacall was 26 years Humphrey Bogart’s junior when they met on the set of To Have and Have Not in 1943, and he was inconveniently married, but the spark — sultry allure meets deadpan insolence — was ignited, not least by Bacall’s delivery of the legendary, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” line (compare, and very much contrast, to J-Lo’s poultry-related come-on). By the time they made their fourth and last film together, 1948’s Key Largo, “she’d become integral to Bogie’s stardom, thereby clinching her own”, wrote William J. Mann in Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair. If reality soon bit — “He was not the prince on the white horse that I imagined,” Bacall later said, not least because he required that she step back from that stardom in order to raise their children — she nevertheless nursed him through his final illness in 1957, and later wrote: “No one has written a romance better than we lived.” 

The same might be said for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, whose three-decade affair was no less intense for being entirely secret (Tracy being a very guilt-ridden Catholic, and very married). “I fear I may be too tall for you, Mr. Tracy,” Hepburn declared when the director Joe Mankiewicz introduced them on the set of Woman of the Year in 1941. “Don’t worry,” said Mankiewicz, “he’ll cut you down to size.” They soon got each other’s measure, trading breezy bon mots and lingering looks in eight subsequent films, including 1949’s Adam’s Rib and 1952’s Pat and Mike to such effect that, in 2004, the Royal Society of Chemistry voted them the couple with the most on-screen... well, you can guess. “At lunchtime they’d just meet and sit on a bench on the lot,” Gene Kelly once recalled of Tracy and Hepburn. “They’d hold hands and talk, and everybody left them alone in their little private world.” 

Tracy and Hepburn would hold hands and talk, and everybody left them alone in their little private world. 

How unlike the home life of the ultimate power couple, whose amour fou was lived very much to excess, and very much in public. “I love Richard Burton with every fibre of my soul,” Elizabeth Taylor announced to the press in 1974, on the occasion of their first divorce. “Taylor’s and Burton’s is a Pop Art story,” the British writer Roger Lewis muses in Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, his recent book on the pair. “Their abundance and violent greed belong with comic books and bubble gum machines — with Roy Lichtenstein’s enlarged comic strips of lovers kissing.” Here are grand-opera levels of passion and ambition non pareil, from the yachts (the 290-tonne Kalizma, decked out with Chippendale cabinets, Wilton carpetry, and numerous Monets, Van Goghs and Picassos) and the entourages (which included a secretary-cum-mixologist, a facial technician who covered Burton’s “deep pockmarks” with his “plasterer’s trowel”, and numerous suitcase wranglers and luggage haulers to co-ordinate the 75 or so valises that Taylor was habitually accompanied by) to, of course, the formidable rocks (“I had only recently given Elizabeth a £127,000 diamond ring simply because it was a Tuesday,” wrote Burton in one of his journals). The pair had met in decadence on the ludicrously overstuffed set of 1963’s Cleopatra, with its palm trees shipped from Hollywood to Pinewood and its $120,000-a-day costs overrunning as Taylor dallied in a huge corner suite at the Dorchester to which her cats and dogs laid waste (as Cleopatra sighs in the movie, “There are never enough hours in the days of a queen”). In Erotic Vagrancy, Lewis wonders if Burton and Taylor ever made “a full, thorough exit from the world of that film”. Would we have wanted them to? Taylor and Burton blazed a Halley’s Comet-like trail to the very limits of power-couple-dom, and Taylor, for one, wasn’t going to let even mortality get in their way: when asked, four years after the death of Burton, if she wished she’d been reunited with the man she’d already married twice, she replied: “I’m sure we will be.” Travis and Taylor, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, David and Victoria: you’ve got a lot to learn. 

Read the full story in Issue 98, available now.

Photo Credits: Getty Images