Who Gets to Claim the Kennedys?
This article contains mild spoilers through Season 1, Episode 6 of Love Story.
If every love story is a ghost story, as David Foster Wallace wrote, those who tell the tales might consider how many of love’s ghosts are still alive. Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, FX’s semi-fictionalized retelling of the relationship between the American prince and his somewhat reluctant princess, has been a hit with audiences. Since its premiere last month, the show—a fusion of drama and camp, taking pains and liberties with the lives of the people it portrays—has become the most-watched limited series in FX’s streaming history.
Love Story has proved less popular, however, with several of the people who found themselves effectively cast, without their consent, in the production. On Friday, the actor and activist Daryl Hannah—who had a long-term relationship with the Kennedy-family scion before his marriage to Bessette—published an opinion essay in The New York Times that indicted her portrayal in the show. The Daryl Hannah of the series, ditzy and needy and serving as a human complication to the love story on offer, is, Hannah asserted, a lie. The character’s arc is “not even a remotely accurate representation of my life, my conduct or my relationship with John,” she wrote. Her essay came with a plaintive title: “How Can Love Story Get Away With This?”
The show gets away with it, of course, for the same reason many similar ones do: because exploitation can be so entertaining—and so profitable. Semi-fictions sell. Love Story is the latest entry in a franchise, overseen by the producer Ryan Murphy, that includes American Crime Story, American Sports Story, and Monster—many of which offer their own opaquely fictionalized renderings of scandalous American moments. Hannah’s criticisms echo statements made in response to the franchise’s treatment of the predations of Jeffrey Dahmer, the trial of O. J. Simpson, and the impeachment of Bill Clinton. They echo criticisms from Jack Schlossberg, John’s 33-year-old nephew and a current candidate for Congress, who called the Murphy-ized version of his uncle inaccurate and “grotesque.” The perverse irony is that many such protests, however valid they may be, double as publicity for the very shows they are criticizing.
True crime, as a genre, rationalizes its exploitations—people’s tragedies and traumas, recast for popular consumption—by couching the sensationalism in considerations of justice. Its stories typically have victims and perpetrators, their plots turning on basic questions of whether mysteries will be solved and culprits held to account. They are, in that way, intensely moralistic. The productions of the Murphyverse translate the approach on a grander scale, taking famous true-crime stories of the past and recasting them for contemporary sensibilities: The Monica Lewinsky who was semi-fictionalized in Impeachment was a protagonist rather than a punch line. (Lewinsky, in this case, was one of the series’ producers.) The grim spectacles of the O. J. Simpson trial were presented, retrospectively, as moral failures.
These reframings have offered their own kind of rationalization: They might exploit real people’s stories—they might reduce real people to the soft predations of semi-fiction—but they do so, or claim to do so, in the service of a broader sense of fairness. They are correcting the record. They are righting wrongs. If, in the process, they invoke the ire of the semi-fictionalized, this is a small sacrifice in the scheme of things. Even justice, it seems, can bring collateral damage.
Love Story, though a self-conscious departure from the other shows of the Murphyverse, employs a similar logic. This is true love, served up through the tropes of crime. This love story has heroes and villains. It asks questions, retrospectively, about justice. And, as if to forestall the accusations of exploitation that have plagued earlier shows, Love Story goes out of its way to empathize with its lovers. It offers appropriation as a gift rather than as an insult: The show takes two people who are, today, best remembered for their tragic ending (the plane crash that killed John and Carolyn at the ages of 38 and 33, respectively, consigning them to perpetual youth) and resurrects them as full and real. It takes the basic objection of those who have been true-crimed into pieces of entertainment—I am more than my tragedy—and remakes it, on behalf of its subjects, into a premise. It turns real people into characters who are compelling and convincing. They are well written. They are, as played by Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon, well acted.
As John and Carolyn fall in love, the show seems to fall in love with them too. The John of the show, “America’s son” and its most eligible bachelor, has inherited not only his parents’ chiseled jawlines but also their sense of duty, breezy charisma, and telegenic idealism. He is, in today’s terms, a consummate nepo baby; in the show’s telling, though, this is less his blessing than his curse. Princes, traditionally, have at least had a measure of job security. But John, as American “royalty”—as a dynast in a democracy—struggles to make a name for himself. He is constantly caught between his desire to fulfill his birthright and to apologize for it.
Carolyn, for her part, is caught between her desire for the prince and her desire not to be a princess. A fashion publicist—her personal style, in life, helped solidify ’90s minimalism as a timeless trend—Carolyn is a Cinderella whose glass slippers took the form of slinky slip dresses. And she is a cool girl, the show suggests, who is remarkably warm. Early on, we see her sneaking smoke breaks in the Calvin Klein offices (and occasionally gossiping with her close friend, the then-up-and-coming designer Narciso Rodriguez); enjoying dark clubs and cheap beer; and informing the besotted friend she is sleeping with of her preference to keep things “cool and casual.” The Carolyn of the show takes the cliché—“I’m not like other girls”—and makes it literal: She is one of the few women in America, Love Story suggests, who does not care about John’s last name.
This is hagiography fit for an age that prefers its heroes to be relatable. Love Story, by turns, elevates its lovers, pities them, humanizes them. Above all, it sympathizes with them.
But a compelling fiction is fiction all the same. Love is not absolution. These versions of Carolyn and John are characters, in the end, that claim to represent real people. And their audiences are subject to the paradox that plagues so many series in the Murphyverse: The more engaging each show is as a piece of entertainment, the more questionable it becomes as a piece of pseudofiction. When you’re turning real people into characters—when, for legal reasons, you preface each episode with a disclaimer informing viewers that the people they are about to watch are real and unreal—you can expect to hear complaints from those who have been fictionalized.
And you can expect audiences to question what they are watching—even, and perhaps especially, when they are enjoying the show. The same uncertainties that plague Murphy’s works of true crime apply just as readily to this story of true love: At what point do viewers become voyeurs?
Love Story is unsure. It makes some concessions to its protagonists’ privacy. During sex scenes, its cameras follow the pair at close range—before, with pronounced discretion, pulling away. When the two are in public, the show offers canny bits of cinematography: images shot from a distance, turning surveillance into an aesthetic. The fluttering of camera shutters becomes a soundtrack. Yet the series reserves its strongest moralism for members of the paparazzi, whom it portrays as vultures and stalkers and faceless villains. The photographers and their cameras, scene by scene, threaten to turn Carolyn and John’s American love story into a horror story. But Love Story offers its condemnations without seeming to wonder whether a work of semi-fiction—a full-scale imagining of two people’s lives—is a paparazzo by other means.
When John F. Kennedy won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, the writer Norman Mailer predicted the cultural impact of his political rise: “America’s politics,” Mailer declared, “would now be also America’s favorite movie, America’s first soap opera, America’s best-seller.” He was right. He was right because democracies have their dynasties, too: people elevated by our tendency to confuse accidents of birth with acts of fate. Love Story airs and streams in a moment when the Kennedy name has lost much of the cultural currency it once had. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the slain president’s nephew and John Jr.’s cousin, has made a name for himself by turning conspiracy theories into national policy. Camelot, always a fantasy, looks ever more like delusion. The show’s version of Jacqueline Kennedy, talking to John Jr. shortly before her death, warns her son that “the public’s always holding a flower in one hand and a stone in the other. Don’t forget that.” Love Story, trying to keep the old romance alive, manages to hold both.