He only met John F Kennedy Jr for five minutes but, three decades later, the memory lingers on. “Oh my God, he had it all,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist, recalling their encounter at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington. “He had his mother’s poise and his father’s charisma; it was a perfect combination of the two. If there was anybody destined to be president, it was him.”
In the US, the Kennedys occupy territory somewhere between the British royal family and Greek tragedy, a tale of impossible glamour pierced by spectacles of public mourning. More than a quarter of a century after the single-engine plane piloted by John Kennedy Jr plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing him; his wife, Carolyn Bessette; and her sister, Lauren Bessette, Camelot is being mined for content once more.
Ryan Murphy’s new FX and Hulu series Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette, starring Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon, dramatises the couple’s volatile courtship, marriage and deaths. Adapted from a bestselling book by Elizabeth Beller, the show has drawn ire from the Kennedy family.
Jack Schlossberg, Kennedy’s nephew, said last year the show was profiting off his family “in a grotesque way” and accused Murphy of “making millions” off Kennedy’s legacy. Murphy retaliated on the podcast of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, saying it was an “odd choice to be mad about your relative that you really don’t remember”.
Schlossberg, now running for Congress in New York, shared memories of his uncle on social media. “My earliest memories are of John calling me Jackolatern and ‘the nudist,’ picking me up from school, his Pontiac convertible,” he wrote on Instagram. “I remember being the ring bearer at his wedding and the day he died. I remember Wyclef singing at his funeral.”
For everyone who knew the man behind the myth, the return of Kennedy to the screen is a complex, often painful reminder of a life at once more ordinary and more extraordinary than the tabloids, or now television, have managed to convey.
Steven Gillon, a historian and author who forged a close friendship with him during their days at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says: “I knew the real John. I don’t need to see the fake TV version of him. But I have nothing against the series.”
Gillon remembers Kennedy as a man who constantly wrestled with a bifurcated existence: “He told me that he was two people, that he was John, a typical though privileged member of his generation, but the role he played his whole life was that of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr, the son of a slain president. The great thing about John was that he was able to separate the two.”
Love Story tries to capture this duality. Kennedy is seen cycling around the Tribeca neighbourhood of Manhattan and feels drawn to Bessette precisely because she is not part of the political establishment. But the paparazzi are a constant reminder of his celebrity and there is a pervasive expectation that he will join the family business. Bessette observes: “The Kennedys are like the Beatles. I feel like Yoko.”
Paul Anthony Kelly as John F Kennedy Jr and Naomi Watts as Jackie Kennedy Onassis in FX’s Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. Photograph: Eric Liebowitz/FX
His princely role had begun on “John John’s” third birthday in 1963 when, standing to attention, Kennedy saluted his assassinated father’s coffin as it was carried to Arlington national cemetery. His mother, Jackie (played in Love Story by Naomi Watts), moved the family to New York and worked hard to keep Kennedy and his sister, Caroline (Grace Gummer), away from the public gaze.
After Brown, Kennedy studied law and joined the staff of the Manhattan prosecutor’s office. Described by People magazine in 1988 as “the sexiest man alive”, he dated Hollywood celebrities including Madonna, Julia Roberts and Sarah Jessica Parker.
Daryl Hannah, his girlfriend of five years, receives an unflattering portrait in Love Story as a needy, narcissistic Hollywood actor who compares the death of her pet dog to the death of Jackie Kennedy. The caricature is hard to square with Hannah the environmental activist now married to musician Neil Young. The journalist Emma Specter wrote in Vogue magazine: “Indeed, if I were Hannah, I’d consider suing.”
Kennedy quit the law and launched a political magazine called George with the subtitle “not politics as usual”, fuelling speculation of a run for New York governor and eventually the White House. Its first cover featured the supermodel Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington and within 18 months it achieved a circulation of 400,000.
RoseMarie Terenzio, who was executive assistant to Kennedy and a founding staff member of George, recalls fondly: “He was the same with everyone. You never went somewhere or were in a room with John and were like, wow, he’s different in this circumstance than he is in the office. He was always himself – approachable, down-to-earth, irritating. He was a big practical jokester and it was fun in the office.”
Bessette, who never gave an interview, remains a more enigmatic figure who was sometimes compared to Britain’s Princess Diana. She was born in 1966 in White Plains, New York, and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 1983, her high school yearbook crowned her the “Ultimate Beautiful Person” and at Boston University she featured in the 1988 college calendar.
She took a job as a sales assistant at Calvin Klein in Boston and steadily climbed the ranks. By the time she relocated to New York, she had become the brand’s chief publicist and a confidante of the designer himself.
Bessette dated the future ice hockey player John Cullen, Alessandro Benetton of the Italian fashion dynasty and the Calvin Klein underwear model Michael Bergin, later of Baywatch fame and now an estate agent in Los Angeles (Bergin did not respond to an email requesting comment on his portrayal in Love Story).
Terenzio, co-author with Liz McNeil of JFK Jr: An Intimate Oral Biography, recalls: “Photos don’t do her justice. She was gorgeous but in the way that was not like this perfect, pristine Upper East Side girl. She was way more bohemian and cool and so down to earth and warm and funny and loved to have fun.”
Accounts vary on how Kennedy and Bessette’s paths first crossed. According to Elizabeth Beller’s book Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, it was the spring of 1992 and Kennedy arranged a fitting in the VIP room at Calvin Klein. Bessette was chosen to handle the appointment. Kennedy emerged not only with several sharply cut suits but with Bessette’s phone number.
Love Story tells it differently, with Calvin Klein introducing Kennedy and Bessette to each other at a fundraising event in 1992. Kennedy is immediately smitten and asks for her number but she replies: “I don’t give my number out to strangers,” adding: “You know where I work. Try reception.” Kennedy then turns up at the Calvin Klein showroom seeking a new suit.
Bessette would be seen by some as icy and remote but Beller, whose book inspired the new TV drama, says via email that she was drawn to the story by the “discrepancy between what people who knew Carolyn said about her and how the media portrayed her.
“A happy couple doesn’t make headlines, so the tabloids created a narrative, using incendiary photographs taken by cornering her alone, getting too close and screaming epithets. I was happily surprised to learn that when the press wasn’t hounding her, she was fantastically witty, with quick repartee.”
The course of true love did not run smooth. Kennedy and Bessette dated on and off for a while but he did not completely break from Hannah until 1994. Then the relationship blossomed and, in the spring of 1995, Bessette moved into his loft apartment in Manhattan. The couple were constantly hunted by the paparazzi.
Beller says: “They had the usual ups and downs of most couples who in the early years face learning curves about work-life balance and where to live. For them, staying at the Tribeca loft without a doorman was like stepping on to a stage every day. His family certainly was not a burden, but the name came with a sense of duty and obligations that added to their already busy lives. Factoring in the tabloid media hounding their every move, everything becomes exponentially harder.”
Kennedy hoped that, once the couple married in 1996 – in a secret ceremony on Cumberland Island, Georgia, releasing just one photo – the media frenzy would calm. But it did not turn out that way.
Terenzio recalls: “He was under the impression that once he got married, it would sort of die down because he wasn’t the world’s most eligible bachelor any more. It was the exact opposite. The scrutiny became way more intense after they got married and everyone was surprised by that, including them.”
The pressures grew as Kennedy tried to cope with the impending death of his cousin, Anthony Radziwill, from cancer, and intensifying demands from George, which was struggling financially. Gillon, author of America’s Reluctant Prince, recalls a scene of strife one night at Kennedy and Bessette’s apartment:
“It was probably about 10 o’clock at night and she was wearing this oversized Columbia University sweatshirt. They had a little bar area in their kitchen and I’m on one side and he and Carolyn are on the other and he hands me this letter and I’m trying to read it. I said, John, they’re coming after you: they are going to blame the failure of George magazine on you.
“She flipped out, not on me but on him. She’s like, ‘John, you let everybody fuck you, John. Everybody fucks you and you’ve got to start fucking people back, John. I’m tired of this. I’m tired of everybody fucking you – you’re not fucking them back.’ They’re passing a cigarette back and forth.”
Kennedy and Gillon left the apartment and went into the cold, dimly lit street: “I walked out the door and turned right toward civilisation and he turned left. For some reason, I turned around and saw him. His hands were in his pockets, his head was bowed and he looked so dejected. I was thinking God, he’s such a nice, sweet guy. I felt so bad for him and little did I know it would be the last time I would see him.”
Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette in FX’s Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. Photograph: FX
Love Story begins at the end with a prologue showing Kennedy, 38, Bessette, 33, and her 34-year-old sister Lauren unhappily meeting at a small airport en route to a family wedding on Cape Cod. It was 16 July 1999. Kennedy had had a cast removed shortly before the flight due to a broken ankle sustained in a paragliding accident.
The Piper Saratoga plane plunged into the Atlantic after Kennedy became disoriented while flying through dense fog off Martha’s Vineyard. He, Bessette and her sister were killed on impact, according to postmortem findings released after their bodies were recovered from the sea on 21 July.
Terenzio was staying at the couple’s apartment that weekend because her own air conditioning had failed. As the hours of uncertainty turned into days, the reality set in: “In some ways it felt like the earth cracked open. It was earth-shattering to imagine that this could happen to them.”
For Americans who remembered the assassination of his father, it felt like history was repeating itself to strike down the crown prince. Terenzio adds wistfully: “He was the hope. There was always that hope that he would some day take up the family business, so to speak, and save the world. It was a profound unimaginable loss, and especially for his sister and his family and her family.”
Kennedy and Bessette were the loves of each other’s lives but no one can be sure if their topsy-turvy marriage would have endured. Terenzio comments: “It was tough but she was getting used to it. She knew he was going to run for office and was completely onboard. She would have loved campaigning. She had a very outgoing personality.
“They loved each other, were committed to each other and had a lot of similarities. They both had that authenticity. She was very much about the underdog and they had that in common. They were drawn to each because they both had very similar kind of personalities.”
Gillon adds: “The relationship was rocky but there also was this underlying attraction and love. I talked to the surgeon who removed John’s cast on the morning of the flight. When the doctor walked into the room, John and Carolyn were there on the table making out, like they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. That’s the challenge with trying to figure out where the relationship was going to go. There clearly was a lot of physical attraction and there was a genuine love.”