MY hairdresser, Marchelle, saw it coming. "Number one, she's too thin. Number two, she's too moody. Number three, it should have been me," she proclaimed after the wedding, as she held Newsweek magazine's cover steady so that I could see Carolyn Bessette Kennedy smiling at me in the mirror. Not much of a smile, it's true. Neither of us, I thought, looked particularly good.

Yes, Marchelle saw it coming months before last week's Star tabloid announced "JFK Jr and Bride Talking BUST UP as Secret Vacation Turns into a DISASTER". It is true that Marchelle is a New Age psychic - she will give you polarity therapy if you ask for a perm - but she was not alone in predicting this drama.

Even as the wedding of the decade earned rave reviews for its elegance and class, and as the dawn of Camelot 2 was declared last September, experts in the celebrity-matchmaking game had doubts. John F. Kennedy Jr is marrying whom exactly?

"A woman with her own sense of mystery," Jackie Onassis confidante Letitia Balrige ventured, but the accompanying People magazine photograph from 1991 showed a bare-legged Bessette pouting on hay bales, looking about as mysterious as a garage pin-up. That was youthful bad taste, commentators explained, as were those other modelling shots in biker gear and big hair that - well, my dear, somebody has to say it - "made Carolyn look like something out of a Van Halen video".

All that changed when Bessette moved to New York City and embraced the austere, hollow checked Calvin Klein look as a badge of maturity. Was it maturity though, or a tactical makeover? Newsweek magazine speculated about the newly-tinted blonde's talent for self-invention, commenting that "as a publicist, Carolyn was her own best client".

Not that the American public has anything against self-invention. Its aristocracy is, after all, founded on the principle. But the brand detected in Carolyn Bessette Kennedy has been increasingly judged by ordinary lumpy people to be a teeny bit pretentious. And while pretentiousness is de rigueur in artistic circles where they know what de rigueur means, in the celebrity stakes it is a definite turn-off.

Just ask them down in the Half Moon Saloon, a dingy poolroom, near Bozeman, Montana, where John and Carolyn allegedly spent New Year's Eve with the locals. "Him I liked, her I couldn't stand," a female truck driver told the Star. " ... I said to him `Hey, you need a haircut, Mister'. He laughed and said `What I need is a beer for me and my wife' ... but his missus, she said, `Really, John, is that necessary?'

Shooting pool, buying pitchers of Bud for the good ol' boys, that's how Half Mooners like their celebrities to behave, and John in stained khaki pants did not disappoint them. When a woman who takes size six in clothes asks if any of that is "really necessary," however, trigger fingers start to itch.

"She damned near broke her neck when she slipped on the ice in the parking lot," a beautician called Betty laughed, recalling Carolyn's inappropriate "boots with four inch heels. .. tight black sweater and very tight black flared pants". It was a valuable reminder to hang on to that old Van Halen biker gear. It is bound to come in handy in Montana.

THANKS to the publicity surrounding the turbulent romance from its earliest days, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy has found herself in just the kind of company she obviously cannot bear. On the covers of the National Enquiry, the Globe, the Star and other supermarket tabloids, she is squashed in beside alien abductees, Elvis reincarnations, bloated soap-opera stars and grimy children being rescued from well shafts.

"Please, I can't see," she snapped at photographers who temporarily blinded her with their flash bulbs recently on Park Avenue, and the next morning gossip columnists saw her irritation as proof that the strain of having journalists literally pawing through her garbage was beginning to show on the new "Princess Carolyn". Comparisons were inevitably made with Jackie Onassis who, Time magazine observed, mastered the trick of metaphysicatty absenting herself from the frame - a way of ghost dancing with both gawkers and the jackals of the press". Even this most famous widow's tears were private, while Carolyn's have been broadcast nationwide, most recently when John Jr brawled with a photographer who shadowed the couple on a recent walk with their dog in Manhattan.

Don't be fooled by that lapse. say longtime "friends" of Ms Bessette, who have contributed hugely to the backlash rumour mill - "she is tough ... and had always dated for success," with boyfriends Alessandro Benetton and Calvin Klein underwear model Michael Bergin in her background. During the infamous tiff in Central Park last February, captured on amateur video tape, Ms Bessette certainly appeared tough, reducing John Jr to tears with her insults.

Mr Kennedy's colleagues and friends have dismissed stories of the couple's separation as "ridiculous ... and farcical". Meanwhile it is rumoured that Ms Bessette Kennedy is demanding a revision of her pre-nuptial agreement to increase her divorce settlement after three years of marriage to $9 million from the originally agreed $1 million.

I can only reveal that my hairdresser Marchelle confirms the $9 million dollars part - but she has a vested interest, however imaginary, in John Jr's future. And perhaps that explains the swift backlash against Camelot's newest princess. Perhaps Marchelles across America need to believe that if Carolyn Bessette Kennedy left the picture, they would stand a chance with John Jr when he next dropped into their local poolroom.

Or maybe they simply cannot forgive him for not marrying Princess Di.