| From Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, the first rule of the A-list relationship is clear: It always involves more than two people.  Photo illustration by Lincoln Agnew; Source photographs from Getty Like the high five or the chocolate-chip cookie, the invention of the celebrity super couple is more recent than you might think. It dates back only to the early nineteen-sixties, when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton fell very publicly in love on the set of the otherwise misbegotten epic “Cleopatra.” “There had been famous and adulterous couples before, but not in wide-screen, and not with the glut and the glare that came to be so pronounced in the case of Burton and Taylor,” Andrew O’Hagan writes, in an engrossing essay in this week’s issue. The frenzy in the press, the public titillation and moralizing and side-taking—the tacky grandeur of the whole thing—set the template for all the star couples that would follow. At the center of these stories, O’Hagan argues, is the central part played by the public, as voyeurs and cheerleaders of further drama to come. “Celebrity marriage is an internal-combustion engine,” he writes, “and audiences love nothing more than to watch it stall out or send the car off a cliff.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
