When she didn’t give him her number, I wanted to throw tomatoes at my TV screen. I experienced the same indignation soon after, when he asked to see her again after their first date, and she simply said “goodnight.” Then, to my fury, she pulled it off once more, when he leaned his face towards hers after a late-night walk, and she just smiled and walked away, an insouciant blonde disappearing into the New York City mist to the sound of Mazzy Star. Never before has a woman played it this cool—and subsequently made me seethe with envy.
I’m talking about Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, Ryan Murphy’s new series for FX/Hulu about the intoxicating relationship between two of America’s most beautiful—and famously doomed—people. The show opens with the couple boarding a small plane piloted by Kennedy, which many viewers will recognize as among their last moments—the plane crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 1999, killing them both, as well as Carolyn’s sister. He was 38; Bessette was 33.
Theirs was a romance wrapped up in tragedy. How much of this Murphy and series creator Connor Hines will include remains to be seen; the first three episodes of the nine-part series dropped last week, with new episodes releasing weekly through March. For now, the focus has been on the early flutters of love between two bright, extraordinarily attractive and well-dressed young things (played by Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon). On one side, there’s a beleaguered 30-something from the world’s most prolific political dynasty trying to shed his playboy image; on the other, a 20-something fashion girl hustling to get by in ’90s New York, one masterclass in sartorial minimalism at a time.
As the TV show tells it, they’re introduced at a party by Calvin Klein, whom Bessette worked for at the time. What follows is a slow-burn flirtation between a hopelessly besotted Kennedy and an utterly unbothered Bessette, whose nonchalance in the face of such hotness should be studied. “You could be a serial killer for all I know,” she deadpans to the son of JFK after he asks for her phone number. He asks to give her his, to which she replies: “I don’t want to get your hopes up.” He responds that he’s not above begging; she coolly retorts that he knows where she works. Oof.
Bessette’s seductive ennui strikes again in all of the duo’s subsequent encounters, keeping Kennedy firmly on the back foot—a position the viewer quickly understands he’s never been in before. What’s interesting about this relationship is that it subverts the obvious power dynamic at play. Kennedy may be the one with the world ready to cater to his every whim, but when it comes to the two of them, Bessette is the one in control—an edge the music supervisor seems to playfully nod towards when The Motels’ “Total Control” plays while she measures him for a suit.
From what we know about the couple, Murphy’s depiction, which is based on Elizabeth Beller’s Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, very much mirrors their real-life dynamic, with Bessette brushing off Kennedy’s initial pursuits. “She didn’t think he was serious,” their friend Gustavo Paredes told People in 2014. “He couldn’t believe she turned him down. It had never happened before.” Speaking in the 2019 ABC News special The Last Days of JFK Jr, Kennedy’s friend Brian Steel concurred: “He would say, ‘I called her, and she hasn’t called me back.’ And John did not like that.”