Ryan Murphy’s work ethic is something formidable. In the past few months he’s already delivered All’s Fair (the campy lawyer drama starring Kim Kardashian) and The Beauty (shlocky horror about an STD that makes you hot and liable to explode). Now he’s the producer of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, the first of an anthology spun off from the American Horror and American Crime series, streaming on Disney+.
For Brits who might need some context: John Jr. and Carolyn were essentially America’s Charles and Diana. The only living son of assassinated US President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy (later Onassis), he was considered the country’s most eligible bachelor until he met and married Carolyn Bessette. She was the original Cool Girl, a Calvin Klein shop girl who rose through the ranks of the fashion house and became an icon of Nineties minimalist chic.
The media followed their courtship with a fevered intensity, fuelled by the couple’s penchant for having public — and sometimes physical — fights. They managed to pull off a top-secret island wedding in 1996 without press intrusion, but the constant scrutiny and inhuman pressure to be ‘Mrs JFK Jr’ forced Bessette to quit her career and tanked her mental health. Whether she could have survived the Kennedys became a moot point after she died in a plane crash near Martha’s Vineyard in 1999, along with her sister Lauren and John Jr, who was piloting the light aircraft.
It’s deliberately on the nose, then, to have called the first episode Pilot. Love Story opens close to the terrible end, with Carolyn (Sarah Pidgeon) fretting over a red manicure (not demure enough) as the paps stake out the salon. They’re late to the airstrip, and unnerved to discover her husband has dispensed with his crutches (he flew on a broken ankle) and with an instructor. Carolyn and John Jr (Paul Anthony Kelly) squabble as Lauren (Sydney Lemmon) plays peacemaker, and they ultimately kiss and make up on the runway before flying into the sunset. It’s a bold move, like opening a Diana biopic with her as she’s driven into the Pont de L’Alma tunnel.
Then the action flashes back to 1992, right before the couple met. Carolyn is enjoying carefree single life, buying copies of Vogue on the way to the Calvin Klein offices. John Jr is biking around New York, dismayed to find his face all over the newspapers under the headline ‘The Hunk Flunks Again’. A real front page, commemorating his second failure to pass the bar. Love Story is peppered with these real-life moments.
Which will be a relief for many viewers. Bessette obsessives were understandably outraged at early test shots of Pigeon in unstructured, cheap-looking knockoffs with a bad blonde wig and — horror of horrors — an understuffed Birkin. The Love Story team clearly took note, and the result is impressive. Pidgeon has the perfect toffee-blond chunky highlights perfected by Bessette’s colourist, Brad Johns, and it’s often left artfully unbrushed for some careful hairography.
The costumes pretty much nail it, aided and abetted by whatever filter they’ve used to get that pre-millennium vibe. Everyone smokes indoors. New York looks great. Props demonstrate a serious attention to detail, from the black paper clips preferred by Calvin Klein (Alessandro Nivola) to the silver stripes on the era’s Diet Coke cans. The sets do a lot of subtle grounding work, too, whether it’s the old-fashioned East Coast style of Jackie Kennedy’s home (Naomi Watts, doing a marvellous job muttering about Camelot in a brown wig blow-dried within an inch of its life) or the modern monochrome of the fashionable world Bessette is more comfortable inhabiting.
The trouble with Love Story is that it’s too in love with its subjects — and doesn’t trust its audience to pick up on the underlying themes without beating them over the head with them repeatedly. The Kennedy tribe spends every scene together as a family openly discussing their complicated family dynamic, lamenting what they mean to the nation and how hard it is to be scrutinised so closely. It badly wants to be The Crown, but pulls punches when it comes to the obvious, human flaws of its main characters. John Jr and Carolyn are gorgeous and magnetic, but some spiky edges have been sanded off.
This fictional John Jr. is simply a lovable himbo, bumbling around being hot, often shirtless, and unable to break things off with his irritating actor girlfriend, Daryl Hannah (Dree Hemingway with a great fringe and grating tone), even though Jackie detests her and he can’t really stand her antics either. But the real John Jr was a man arrogant and reckless enough to fly his wife and sister-in-law in a plane he wasn’t qualified to pilot, without an instructor present and with a broken foot. The only ‘Kennedy Curse’ at play there was the hubris of privilege.
Bessette’s character is more well-rounded, with her slovenly apartment, calculated method of climbing the greasy career pole and a tactical mean streak when it comes to dating men. But her talent for taste is presented as a kind of magical gift; she can just squint at a celebrity or a model headshot and channel divine inspiration to suggest Annette Bening wear a menswear suit jacket for a premiere, or select Kate Moss from the discard pile to front a now-iconic campaign. The suggestion that she feels a measure of guilt over her part in rocketing an 18-year-old Mossy to fame with the 1993 CK Obsession campaign is intriguing, given her own revulsion at being sucked into the celebrity industrial complex.
Weirdly, for a Ryan Murphy project, Love Story is almost too understated and respectful. The energy isn’t quite unhinged enough; the energy between the romantic leads is more syrupy than volatile. Pidgeon clearly has the chops to flit from sweet to rage-fuelled in a microsecond. Let her be messy! Let her husband be more than a sweet doofus!
We know the plane is only going to crash, and the beautiful young things are doomed. But they didn’t know that, so all the foreshadowing and dead-wife-in-white-sheets moments feel out of place. Turning their tragedy into art is already a somewhat tasteless act of voyeurism, so don’t guilt the audience into pre-emptively feeling bad for wanting to drink up every moment. The public was obsessed with these two because they were imperfectly perfect people, but Love Story tries too hard to be perfect. Unlike Kennedy Jr when it comes to flight plans, they could have taken more risks.
Love Story is on Disney+ now
