If only Ryan Murphy had retained the compelling elements, “Love Story” could have easily continued for another season or two. Unfortunately, the current sanitized version seems to be hastening toward its conclusion.
The second-to-last episode, which aired on Thursday night, attempted to channel the intensity of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” While Murphy may not reach those artistic heights, the decision to confine characters Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette within their Tribeca loft, embroiled in conflict throughout the episode, was an attempt to lend depth to two characters portrayed as vain, shallow, and self-absorbed.
Unfortunately, this attempt did not succeed. More importantly, the episode missed several critical and well-documented details.
Not that Murphy could ever reach such artistic heights, but the decision to isolate Paul Anthony Kelly’s JFK Jr and Sarah Pidgeon’s Carolyn Bessette in their Tribeca loft, fighting throughout the entire episode, tried to give these two vain, shallow, self-obsessed characters some gravitas.
Alas, it failed.
More crucially, this latest episode left out the following salient details, all well-reported:
* Carolyn’s rampant cocaine use
* John cheating on Carolyn with multiple women
* Carolyn cheating on John, mere months after their wedding, with her old boyfriend Michael Bergin
The latest episode of Love Story left out salient details about JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette’s relationship
John was once reportedly heard his office, overheard by his staff, on the phone with Carolyn, shouting at her to ‘get the f**k out of my life!’
* John’s daily marijuana use
* Carolyn obsessively calling and bullying John’s business partner, Michael Berman
* Carolyn clumsily meddling in John’s relationships with other longtime friends and staffers, attempting to rid them from his life and annex him all for herself
* John’s own clumsy attempts to save his failing political magazine, George, even as he obstinately refused to cover the biggest political story of the decade, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal
* Executives at Hachette, which published George, sending a letter to John in which they made their outright displeasure of his stewardship very clear, and Carolyn’s brutal verbal abuse of John – in front of a friend – in the aftermath
* John in his office, overheard by his staff, on the phone with Carolyn, shouting at her to ‘get the f**k out of my life!’
* John’s lifelong habit of cheating on his girlfriends – despite gushing media reports to the contrary – often with very famous women, including Madonna
* John’s wholly preventable accident, in the weeks before he killed himself, his wife and her sister, flying a contraption his friends called ‘The Flying Lawnmower’, crashing so hard he broke his ankle, requiring surgery and pain pills
* John’s major depression and denial over the imminent death, from cancer, of his cousin and best friend Anthony Radziwill
* Carolyn’s refusal to have sex with John for months, which he admitted to multiple friends – and her divulging, on at least one occasion, very embarrassing details of what had been their sex life (specifics remain unclear, but impotence is the most humiliating rumor a woman could spread)
The show doesn’t document Carolyn cheating on John, mere months after their wedding, with her old boyfriend Michael Bergin (pictured with her)
* John’s death wish, evident from his teenage years and often involving risking the lives of his girlfriends
I’m probably forgetting a few things, but regardless – these are major details to omit, don’t you think?
Such is the danger of attempting to sanitize the outsized flaws of real people.
You can bet that Murphy, his showrunner Connor Hines, the cast, crew and the execs at FX, Hulu and Disney are kicking themselves over this whitewashing.
If only they had gone for the truth, for the real mess these two were individually and together, they could have had a multi-season series to rival The Crown.
What a misfire.
Love Story has been a record-breaking ratings smash, with well over 25 million viewing hours to date. It’s one of the few shows to not just land in the culture but dominate and define it.
Its reach extends from fashion and beauty to publishing to social media to the late couple’s favored New York City hotspots, now overrun by Love Story fanatics.
How tantalizing to imagine a dramatization of real events, such as Carolyn’s abuse of John’s business partner Berman, all relayed by historian Steve Gillon in his well-sourced 2019 book America’s Reluctant Prince – prank calls to Berman, in essence, that she made multiple times per day and sometimes in the middle of the night.
On one call, Gillon writes, Carolyn screamed at Berman to, ‘Stay the f**k out of my life… You should leave! John would be so much more successful if you weren’t there! John can’t stand you!’
This psychotic behavior, by the way, was on display well before the wedding – and John knew about it, because Berman told him.
Carolyn Bessette’s substance abuse is well documented. Kennedy also had a drug habit
John’s response?
‘Carolyn doesn’t want you calling our house.’
After John asked Gillon, who was also a friend, to come by the Tribeca loft he shared with Carolyn and read that upsetting letter from Hachette, Carolyn erupted right there.
John, by the way, also had to be pressured into covering the other major news story of the late 90s: The death of Princess Diana, depicted in Love Story as the moment Carolyn lost her tenuous grip on reality (that part is true).
John didn’t want to cover it at all, in his magazine about newsmakers.
‘I don’t see any reason why we have to do it,’ he told his editors – editors who pushed him to at least publish a photo essay. Yet he couldn’t understand why Hachette execs thought he was a failure as an editor-in-chief.
Where’s that scene in Love Story?
Where’s the scene of John sharing that devastating letter from his bosses at Hachette with Gillon, and Carolyn exploding with a fusillade of rage?
‘Everybody f**ks you, John, and you just take it!’ she exclaimed. ‘You let everybody f**k you, John. When are you going to grow some balls and start fighting back? You need to start f**king people back, John.’
Now that’s dialogue!
With one episode left to go, it seems clear that Murphy and Love Story are going to romanticize John’s final flight, which he had no business piloting, as the stuff of Greek mythology.
Here’s a fact about that night no one ever mentions, even though it’s included in the National Transportation Safety Board’s official investigation report: JFK Jr almost crashed into a packed American Airlines flight just moments before, nearly killing more than 100 people on board.
But hey – he was just a great guy who meant well, and he and Carolyn were a love story for the ages.
Maybe if the media told the truth about these two from the beginning, that so-called Love Story would have just ended in divorce instead of death.
