Love Story Captures the Strangeness of Being a Kennedy

I grew up in a house full of magazines. We always had lots of subscriptions—to Time, Entertainment Weekly, and Rolling Stone—and we loved to buy single issues, too. The first two-story Barnes & Noble opened in Pittsburgh at some time in the mid-1990s, with its horizonless rows of magazine stands. Most of what I learned about music (CMJ magazine, with the CD insert) and literature (The Paris Review, The New Criterion) as an adolescent, I learned in those shelves. If you’d asked me what I wanted to do by the time I was going off to college, I would have told you I wanted to start a magazine.

Part of that was the influence of Dave Eggers, whose rise as a literary star—and as a literary magazine impresario—came at precisely that time. But part of it, to be honest, was the influence of JFK Jr. I know for certain that we had a subscription to George magazine. Founded in 1995 by Kennedy and Michael Berman, George billed itself as a revolution in political journalism. Brandishing the tagline, “Not just politics as usual,” George was a slick, sexy magazine that combined wonky analysis with pop cultural savvy. The magazine accomplished this mostly by way of aesthetics: provocative interview pairings, candy-colored pop visuals, punchy, vaguely horny headlines like, “Latin Heat!: Salma Hayek and the New Latino Power Brokers Are Making America Sizzle,” or, “Mary Bono: The Republicans Find a Sex Symbol.” The cover of its inaugural issue featured Cindy Crawford dressed as the magazine’s namesake George Washington, with an anachronistically exposed midriff. A later issue luridly featured Drew Barrymore dressed as Marilyn Monroe above a headline that read, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” No matter what other mission statements or theses undergirded the magazine, ultimately, it was all about the Kennedys.

JFK Jr. used the power of his name to try to build a new American institution with youthful verve and irreverence. As a child, it struck me as a cool idea. But that’s mostly all it ever became. Beset by behind-the-scenes drama and lacking a clear vision beyond its elevator pitch, George flashed brightly and faded. In retrospect, its insight that politics weren’t just compatible with pop culture, they were pop culture seems prophetic. Before he died in 1999, Kennedy was planning to have the magazine host a series of online interviews with presidential candidates for the 2000 election. Maybe George was on the verge of finding renewed life, and a proper home, within the wild west of the internet. Or maybe Kennedy had just gotten distracted by a different, glossy new thing.

George was all I knew of JFK Jr. back then. So perhaps I am the ideal viewer for FX’s new Ryan Murphy–produced miniseries, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette. Besides the inner workings of George itself, nearly every detail of the story of JFK Jr. and his up-and-down relationship with Bessette detailed in this magnetic show came as a surprise to me, up until the moment they famously perished in a plane crash. Mining the crevasses of a relationship that was elaborately illustrated in People and Page Six, Love Story is a show about the costs of celebrity, the crushing weight of social expectation, and a romance that thrived in intimate privacy but could never survive in the light of paparazzi flashbulbs. These are all well-worn plots and clichés of the kind of prestige tabloid melodrama from which this show emerges. But, somehow, Love Story is not just TV as usual.

One of Love Story’s most important observations is that John F. Kennedy Jr. (Paul Anthony Kelly) was kind of a handsome dumb guy. Many viewers, and certainly surviving Kennedy family members, might find this show’s familiar touch with its subjects blasphemous or, at the very least, disrespectful. Long scenes of Kennedy’s and Bessette’s private lives are imagined or cobbled from various gossipy accounts, Naomi Watts delivers what may well be a legally actionable camp performance as Jackie O., but worst of all, the show refuses to paint a portrait of JFK Jr. as a potential future Great Man cut down in his prime. In Love Story, Kennedy is full of the energy, ambition, and charm that seem to run in his family line, but precious little of the talent or intellect or inspiration. He can work a room with an almost supernatural agility, but he doesn’t know what to do with this generational charisma. JFK Jr. is not a promising young man here so much as a young man to whom much was promised.

This depiction of Kennedy finds its opposite in the equally charming, equally energetic character of Carolyn Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon). We meet Bessette as a low-level saleswoman working at Calvin Klein headquarters in Manhattan. In that environment, Bessette is everything Kennedy is not. Initially hovering on the margins of the glitzy world of New York fashion, she quickly distinguishes herself as a style savant. The show credits her with a truly Forrest Gump–like résumé of achievements, from discovering Kate Moss to dressing Demi Moore in her signature oversize blazer to giving Calvin Klein (Alessandro Nivola) the idea to dress women in men’s oxford shirts. I half-expected her to be credited with the invention of boxer briefs. The show sees her as a kind of self-made It Girl, a genius of effortlessness.

And so, the soulfully vacuous American legend and the vivacious, brilliant American ingenue meet and fall in love. The show takes its time with their courtship. The two don’t even hook up for the first time until the end of the third episode. And this is an ingenious way of pacing the story. As the Kennedy family’s judgments of them and the press’s judgments of the Kennedy family stress their relationship to the breaking point in the later episodes, the story inevitably veers toward cliché. In that hothouse environment, both Carolyn and John become caricatures of themselves. That isn’t a critique of the show so much as a description of the story the show tells. Fame prevented John from ever developing a personality of his own, and it works hard to scrape from Carolyn the one she’d built for herself.

This descent into self-annihilation only works because of the time Love Story devotes to this love story before and as it becomes public. The show’s writing staff—led by creator Connor Hines but featuring outstanding veterans like D.V. DeVincentis and Kim Rosenstock—is best at writing intimate conversations and epic arguments for its two leads. Their first date in a multicolored, twinkle-lit hole-in-the-wall; their secret flirtations refracted by bar mirrors at a Calvin Klein party; their knockdown, drag-out fight in Tompkins Square Park in full view of gossip page cameras—by the time their romance becomes clinically depressed, we have episodes of memories of what their chemistry once felt like, who they were alone and together before.

Unlike other recent TV love stories—the tale of two closeted gay professional hockey players, for instance—this tale isn’t just about the couple. Like many series in this genre of biographical drama, Love Story is filled with stunning small performances from supporting actors. Nivola’s turn as Calvin Klein made me wish on a few occasions that the series were actually about him instead. Nivola plays the moment when Klein realizes that his protégé has commissioned her wedding dress from Narciso Rodriguez instead of him with such understated dismay that I actually teared up. Grace Gummer manages to turn Caroline Kennedy into both the press-phobic prophet and judgmental villain of the whole show; Erich Bergen portrays Kennedy cousin Tony Radziwiłł as an oasis of kindness in a desert of country club cruelty; and Constance Zimmer, as Bessette’s skeptical mother, delivers a heartbreaking monologue at her daughter’s wedding that ought to secure her an invite to next year’s Emmy Awards.

But Kennedy and Bessette, and thus Kelly and Pidgeon, are the star system around whom these other characters orbit. Pidgeon is staggering here: She has to show us the life drain slowly out of Bessette, but she can only do that because of the twitchy, elegant life she gives to the character in the first place. And then there’s Kelly, who plays Kennedy as a sort of doofus romantic, bursting at the seams with feeling, with desire, with want—unable to make any of it real. The show never condescends to him, but neither does it mask the often inadvertent cruelty of his affections. His JFK Jr. is a nice dude with some nice dreams, but he knows that every time he begins a new relationship, it’s an act of mutually assured destruction.

While Love Story is the creation of Hines, it’s also very much an installment in Ryan Murphy’s expanding suite of biographical anthology series. And, from its ostentatiously gliding cinematography to its unfathomably deep music budget, this is absolutely a Ryan Murphy joint. Taken together, Murphy’s three American Crime Story series—focusing on O.J. Simpson, Gianni Versace, and Bill Clinton, respectively—along with the related but less-assured American Sports Story and Feud spin-offs constitute one of American television’s greatest sustained examinations of celebrity and fame. But what’s great about them is neither that they amp up the glamour nor that they humanize these inaccessible beings. For Murphy and his many writers, the moral of the story isn’t “stars, they’re just like us.” Quite the opposite.

In these series, and now in Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, the takeaway is precisely that stars aren’t like us. Perhaps they once were, but often, like JFK Jr., they are beings wholly formed within the crucible of public life. A recurring theme of Love Story is that, while John is kind and loving toward Carolyn, he’s simply incapable of actually empathizing with her struggle to retain a sense of herself amid the slings and arrows of celebrity. JFK Jr. was born into fame, and it is his native environment, inhospitable though it may be. John knows this about himself, but that self-knowledge never turns into anything beyond guilt and shame. “I’m always trying to understand what parts are real and what parts aren’t,” he confides to Carolyn. He is a man damned to be able to see himself only through culture’s construction of him.

He is, then, a kind of pure Fame Monster, not a civilian ruined by its spell, but an alien creature born from the ruin. As many of these series show us, the notoriety and the “it” factor that makes celebrities shine also irradiates their souls in ways that cannot be repaired. They are different—not better, not superior, but meaningfully separate in ways that both nature and nurture are equally responsible for. They are not relatable, no matter how closely we examine them. In fact, the closer we look, the stranger they become. They are a species of humanity deformed and transfigured by exposure to the media. And that, in and of itself, is an American love story.