Ryan Murphy’s Love Story has ignited full-blown John F. Kennedy Jr.–Carolyn Bessette Kennedy mania.
Women are replicating CBK’s minimalist style, “JFK Jr.-core” has become a thing and everyone who worked at Calvin Klein or posed for George magazine in the ’90s suddenly has a story to tell. In online comments sections, strangers argue over whether the couple would still be together had they not died in the 1999 plane crash, along with Bessette’s sister Lauren.
Yet even as the fictionalized Hulu/FX series fuels trends, nostalgia and ratings (25 million hours streamed so far), a growing backlash is taking hold.
Daryl Hannah, the Kill Bill and Splash actor who dated Kennedy on and off for five years before he married Bessette, broke her silence Friday, writing in a New York Times op-ed that she’s “appalled” by how she’s been portrayed on the show.
Hannah and JFK Jr. dated off and on for five years before he married Bessette.
(Brooks Kraft LLC/Sygma via Getty Images)
Criticism of how Hannah is depicted in Love Story has been building for weeks. Across Reddit threads and fashion forums, viewers have argued that Hannah — played by Dree Hemingway — has been reduced to a caricature: a “whiny, coke-obsessed prima donna,” according to Vogue. The phrase “done dirty” has popped up over and over.
Meanwhile, JFK Jr.’s nephew, Jack Schlossberg, gave the show “a capital F, for fiction,” in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning.
‘Not even remotely accurate’
Hannah, who has rarely spoken about that period of her life, accuses the production of spreading “lies” about her and distorting her relationship with Kennedy in her op-ed titled “How Can Love Story Get Away With This?”
The actress, now married to musician Neil Young, wrote that she is portrayed as “irritating, self-absorbed, whiny and inappropriate.” She called the depiction “not even a remotely accurate representation of my life, my conduct or my relationship with John.”
She disputed specific untruths about herself in the series.
“I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fueled parties,” Hannah wrote. “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.”
Dree Hemingway plays Hannah in the series.
(Eric Liebowitz/FX)
She said that “real names are not fictional tools. They belong to real lives.”
Hannah added that the portrayal feels deliberate, pointing to a producer’s comment describing her as “an adversary” within the story. She said a real person should not be a “narrative device.”
She also suggested a gendered dynamic at play.
“Popular culture has long elevated certain women by portraying others as rivals, obstacles or villains,” she wrote. “Isn’t it textbook misogyny to tear down one woman in order to build up another?”
Hannah warned that “most (if not all) of those claiming to have any intimate knowledge of our personal lives are self-serving sensationalists trading in gossip, innuendo and speculation.”
Murphy has not yet publicly responded to Hannah’s op-ed.
Family, friends push back
Hannah is not alone in objecting to the dramatization.
Schlossberg — the grandson of President John F. Kennedy and son of Caroline Kennedy — criticized the series, and Murphy, before it even premiered.
Jack Schlossberg, Kennedy’s nephew, gives the show an “F.”
(Edna Leshowitz/Getty Images)
When first-look images were released in June, Schlossberg called the project “grotesque” and said the family had not been consulted. That led to a back-and-forth with Murphy.
Earlier this week, Schlossberg — who is running for Congress in New York — renewed his criticism.
“If you want to know someone who’s never met anyone in my family, knows nothing about us, talk to Ryan Murphy,” he said. “The guy knows nothing about what he’s talking about, and he’s making a ton of money on a grotesque display of someone else’s life.”
He urged Murphy to “donate some of the millions of dollars of profits that he’s making to maybe some of the causes that John championed throughout his life — justice, maybe he would donate some of that money to the JFK Library to help keep President Kennedy’s memory alive. But he’s not, he’s making money.”
Sasha Chermayeff, a longtime friend of Kennedy’s, echoed that sentiment.
“The way I look at it, [Love Story] is just being made by a group of people that never met them, didn’t know them, and are just making it up as they go along,” the artist told Page Six.
Bessette’s sister, Lisa Bessette — who has never publicly spoken about the deaths of her sisters or brother-in-law — was recently approached about the series. Tracked down at her Michigan home by the Daily Mail, she said that while she had heard mention of the show, she didn’t know if it was airing. And either way, “I’m not going to talk to a reporter about this. I never have.”
When real life gets the soap opera treatment
The backlash reflects a broader dilemma about dramatizing real lives.
“One of the great dramaturgical advantages of the genre is that creators can play fast and loose with the available facts,” Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture and a trustee professor at Newhouse School of Public Communication, tells Yahoo. “Unlike history and journalism, biopics can make stuff up.”
That formula can get people to tune in — and they have in record-breaking numbers for a limited series. Murphy has successfully applied that fact-and-fiction approach to subjects like O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers.
But Kennedy and Bessette hold a different place in pop culture than those crime dramatizations do. He was “American royalty,” remembered for saluting his assassinated father’s coffin as a child, and she was a private citizen, as Kennedy reminded reporters on their stoop when they returned home after their secret wedding. They were young, glamorous and died tragically.
Plus, many of the people depicted in the series are still alive. Making Hannah a villain or misrepresenting Caroline Kennedy, who is portrayed as cold and unkind when that’s not her reputation — not to mention the fact that she just buried her daughter — can feel personal.
“The same elements that have made Love Story a hit (signature Ryan Murphy lather, recognizable and iconic brand-name subjects, delicious speculative detail not available in the public record) are also the elements that can make it upsetting, especially to those whose names are in the list of characters,” Thompson says.
Reverence — and the risk of getting it wrong
Schlossberg has said that he thinks “admiration for my Uncle John is a good thing.” He hopes people “take seriously what he stood for in his life, all that he achieved in it.”
In some ways, Love Story has done that — introducing Kennedy and Bessette Kennedy to a new generation. For older audiences, the couple is given dimension that wasn’t possible in the ’90s, when coverage of their lives unfolded in magazine layouts and newspaper spreads.
Bessette and Kennedy died in a plane crash in 1999.
(zz/Stephen Trupp/STAR MAX/IPx)
The series revisits Kennedy’s ambitions with George, his political-pop culture magazine that was arguably ahead of its time.
For Bessette — a woman who granted no interviews and left behind only fleeting soundbites — the dramatization shows her not just as a fashion icon, but also as an ambitious professional who rose through the ranks at Calvin Klein.
But the allure of it all turns uneasy when fiction supplies details never confirmed (drug use, private arguments, suggested betrayals) — and when those who died cannot defend themselves, and those still living say it’s wrong.
