Notable Pairings

Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera

Kahlo's fierce self-possession and Rivera's expansive energy created a pairing that was turbulent in personal life and mutually generative in artistic terms. Each amplified qualities the other lacked.

Florence Nightingale & Mary Seacole

Nightingale's systematic reform of medical care through institutional means and Seacole's direct personal presence at the front represent two expressions of care whose different methods addressed different aspects of the same crisis.

F. Scott Fitzgerald & Zelda Fitzgerald

Scott's literary ambition and Zelda's reckless aliveness were mutually generative and mutually destructive. He drew on her letters and diaries for his fiction; she found the arrangement intolerable. The Jazz Age they personified consumed both of them, and the question of which of them was the writer never got a clean answer.

Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville-West

Woolf's literary experimentation and fierce intellectual self-possession, together with Vita's passionate energy and aristocratic confidence, produced a relationship that Woolf transformed into Orlando. She wrote a five-hundred-year novel as a love letter and dedicated it to a woman who once described herself as fundamentally physical. Each made the other more completely herself.

Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers

Astaire's obsessive technical perfectionism and Rogers's warm expressiveness and physical joy in movement created the definitive Hollywood dance partnership. He gave her precision; she gave his precision emotional life. The observation that she did everything he did backwards and in heels is accurate but does not fully capture what the exchange meant.

Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton

Taylor's passionate aliveness and Burton's literary intelligence and bardic self-conception produced a pairing that was operatic in scale. They married twice, appeared in eleven films together, and conducted their relationship as though it were itself a performance requiring a large audience. He called her the ocean and the tide, and meant it as something beyond a compliment.

Elton John & Bernie Taupin

Elton's theatrical energy and emotional immediacy, combined with Bernie's lyrical depth, produced one of popular music's longest songwriting partnerships. The words and the music are written separately, in different rooms, on different continents, across a collaboration spanning fifty years. The combination produced something neither element would have become on its own.

Ben Cohen & Jerry Greenfield

Cohen's conviction that business should serve social ends and Greenfield's genuine joy in the product itself produced a company whose identity was inseparable from its founders. The activism and the ice cream were not separate projects. They took a five-dollar correspondence course in ice cream making and started scooping out of a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont.

W.S. Gilbert & Arthur Sullivan

Gilbert's satirical wit and willingness to lampoon the Royal Navy, Parliament, and every English institution worth lampooning, combined with Sullivan's melodic energy and theatrical delight, produced the Savoy Operas. Gilbert supplied the jokes; Sullivan made them singable. They despised each other for the last decade of the partnership and kept writing anyway because the work was better than either of them alone.

Cleopatra VII & Mark Antony

Cleopatra's commanding presence and political intelligence, combined with Antony's impulsive military boldness, produced an alliance that was both a strategic calculation and, by all contemporary accounts, a genuine passion. She was the last of the Ptolemaic pharaohs; he was Caesar's heir. Octavian defeated them both and wrote most of the history we have about them.

David Bowie & Iman

Bowie's complete self-invention across four decades and Iman's commanding presence and construction of her own business empire produced a marriage that both described as the stabilizing center of otherwise constantly expanding creative and professional lives. He called her the great love of his life in the way that people say it when they mean it has surprised them.