If Ryan Murphy‘s Love Story told the truth about Carolyn Bessette, no one would want to emulate her.
Of course, dramatic license has been taken. But you know it’s bad when an actual celebrity comes out swinging, in the pages of the New York Times no less, as Daryl Hannah has.
Hannah, 65, famously dated John F Kennedy Jr right before Carolyn Bessette — in fact, John was likely cheating on Hannah with Bessette.
Now retired from movie stardom and living a relatively quiet life with her husband, the musician Neil Young, Hannah no longer attends red carpet events, gives interviews or otherwise participates in celebrity culture.
So we know she’s furious. Livid.
‘The character ‘Daryl Hannah’ portrayed in the series is not even a remotely accurate representation of my life, my conduct or my relationship with John,’ Hannah writes. ‘The actions and behaviors attributed to me are untrue. I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fueled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone’s private memorial. I have never planted any story in the press. I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s. It’s appalling to me that I even have to defend myself against a television show. These are not creative embellishments of personality. They are assertions about conduct – and they are false.’
So strident is Hannah’s defense of herself that one wonders if she’ll sue for defamation.
I, for one, think she should — in no small part because Love Story’s writers seem to have made the calculation that in order to make Bessette look great, so clearly the perfect wife for John Jr, that they had to destroy Hannah’s character.
Here’s the truth about Carolyn Bessette: She was the one with the cocaine problem. She was the one who pretended to have zero interest in marriage while plotting to work her way into JFK Jr’s circle, meet and marry him.
John F. Kennedy Jr. and his Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy leave a party in New York in 1996
Carolyn Bessette substance abuse is well documented. Kennedy also had a drug habit
And Carolyn Bessette was violent. She physically abused at least one boyfriend before JFK Jr, but this mini-series — still #1 on Hulu, six weeks in — depicts Bessette as near-perfect.
This is sick. It’s dangerous. Projects such as this, based on a hagiographic biography of Bessette, only further not just the myth of the Kennedys but a grave, fundamental misunderstanding of who these people were and what their place in history should be.
And so we saw, just this week, an online auction of Bessette’s clothes in which one of her Prada coats — camel, cloth — sold for $192,000.
If the truth about her were more widely told, more commonly known and accepted, no woman in her right mind would idolize her.
In his now out-of-print memoir, Carolyn’s ex-boyfriend, Calvin Klein model Michael Bergin, writes that Bessette had two abortions, both babies his, and confessed that she ‘lost’ a third pregnancy while dating JFK Jr.
She was selfish. She went after her close friends’ boyfriends. She told a CK colleague who worshipped her to dump an otherwise great boyfriend because he didn’t make enough money. Her mantra was ‘date them, train them, dump them.’
Bessette would invite one man she dated before JFK Jr — a working actor whose brother went on to television fame — to dinner with her friends, where she would proceed to mock him, to his face, for being so besotted with her.
In his now out-of-print memoir, Carolyn’s ex-boyfriend, Calvin Klein model Michael Bergin (pictured with her), writes that Bessette had two abortions, both babies his
So when Bessette’s friends and former colleagues saw the photos and videos of her and JFK Jr brawling in a New York City park in 1996 — of Carolyn jumping on John from behind, screaming in his face, trying to yank their dog away — they said to themselves, as one told me: ‘That’s the real Carolyn.’
Not that Murphy’s Love Story treats the fight with the gravity — the alarm, frankly — it deserves.
The show goes so far as to romanticize this most public display of physical abuse: Bessette abusing John and John abusing Bessette, in real life ripping the engagement ring off her finger so violently that a stone fell out and shoving her away, by her face, with the palm of his hand.
In Murphy’s retelling, the fight was simply about Bessette’s reluctance to accept John’s marriage proposal — a crucible they had to endure to get to real love. True love. Marriage.
It’s such toxic messaging, especially to young women. And it’s thoroughly untrue.
Daryl Hannah, 65, famously dated John F Kennedy Jr (pictured together in 1993) right before Carolyn Bessette — in fact, John was likely cheating on Hannah with Bessette
In real life, Bessette was enraged about John ‘flirting’ — likely much more — with at least one other woman.
That’s the other thing about JFK Jr — contrary to the myth peddled by friends and family, he was chronically unfaithful to his girlfriends, incapable of being alone, and in the sadistic habit of bullying them into potentially fatal stunts.
None of that is in Love Story, and what a shame. It would have made for much more compelling viewing. Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction.
As for the September wedding on Georgia’s Cumberland Island, it’s depicted by Murphy as the stuff of fairytales, a tiny affair on a near-private island, in a historic chapel, by candlelight.
In reality, the guests wound up sweating profusely through their clothes in the sweltering heat while bitten by chiggers — microscopic bugs that cause welts and bleeding — while the bride threw a fit over her wedding gown, the groom having neglected to notice that said chapel had no air-conditioning and that the windows were painted shut.
Murphy also has his lovers swimming naked, in the ocean, as the sky and water go grey — a harbinger of their violent, premature, wholly avoidable deaths fetishized into something romantic.
As Hannah wrote in the Times: ‘Many people believe what they see on TV and do not distinguish between dramatization and documented fact — and the impact is not abstract. In a digital era, entertainment often becomes collective memory.’
And a deeply disturbed, violent, unhappy woman with a drug problem becomes a fashion icon for the ages.
How sick is that?