Only Ryan Murphy could take the violent, wholly preventable death of three people and turn it into a sick, romantic fantasy.
What he and showrunner Connor Hines have done with ‘Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette’ isn’t just stupid — it’s misogynistic and dangerous.
The final episode, which aired Thursday night, is a love letter to death, murder and suffering.
We open with a pure fiction: Carolyn relaying, in couples therapy with John, that she has a recurring nightmare in which she’s in the back of that convertible in Dallas, dressed in Jackie’s pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat, and that she recoils as she’s suddenly drenched in her husband’s blood.
Subtle. And a sacrilege to Jackie and all she survived.
In case that tastelessness went over most heads, Murphy and Hines get even more disgusting by having the therapist tell John and Carolyn that they’re ‘white knuckling this marriage into a downward spiral.’
John piloted that plane into what’s called a ‘graveyard spiral’ — because once you’re in it, there’s no getting out.
Yet Love Story depicts their final flight as downright romantic, as if we all should aspire to take to the skies with a suicidal, homicidal maniac who didn’t know how to use the instruments in his own plane, who cut off all communication with air traffic control, who was allegedly seen drinking on the tarmac (on top of his pain pills), had just had the boot on his broken ankle removed the day before, who refused warnings not to fly from more experienced pilots that night, and who rejected a flight instructor’s offer to fly along as back-up.
Oh — and who almost slammed into a packed American Airlines jetliner moments before crashing into the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Yet Murphy and Hines have Carolyn perched contentedly in the rear of a plane she doubted her husband could handle, reading Brian Friel’s play Lovers: Winners and Losers (again, subtle), before climbing into the cockpit to sit next to John.
Never happened.
Next, we have Carolyn cooing to John over what would have been a roaring engine and propellers, kissing his hand and calmly telling him to ‘Breathe, John’ as all of his instruments begin lighting up and signaling that something is very wrong.
Carolyn’s sister Lauren looks on from the back, satisfied that the lovers have reconciled, then closes her eyes gently as John and Carolyn calmly await their imminent death – as if it’s a gentle, expected one, not a savage death spiral with G forces that would have made their bodies feel as if they were breaking apart.
Which John Jr’s did, by the way.
But in Love Story, John and Carolyn’s love was so epic, so unfathomable, that the only place left for them to go was the great beyond — death as their ultimate rebirth.
And if Lauren Bessette, only 34 years old, had to be sacrificed on this altar – so be it.
Love Story is beyond twisted. Murphy and Hines depict this plane experiencing the equivalent of mild turbulence before just drifting off into the hazy, dark night.
Here’s what really happened: JFK Jr — again, contrary to an actual scene in the finale — never checked the weather that night.
He lost control of his aircraft, a Piper Saratoga, within minutes of choosing to fly out over the ocean, rather than hug the illuminated coast of the Eastern Seaboard.
The plane then entered its graveyard spiral, dropping 1,100 feet in just 14 seconds, falling over 4,700 feet per minute.
The G forces would have pushed all of them back into their seats with tremendous pressure. They all would have known they were going to die.
But in Murphy’s retelling: Die young, leave a beautiful corpse.
Perhaps Murphy and Hines never heard the interview with the retired Navy diver discussing the recovery of the bodies.
In two podcast appearances last year, this diver confirmed a long-standing rumor up on the Cape: That at least one of the bodies had been severed at the torso.
‘JFK Jr’s body was cut in half,’ he said. ‘We searched for the legs. The legs were never recovered.’
It has also long been rumored that Lauren Bessette’s body was sucked out of the plane entirely, never to be found.
As for Carolyn, this diver says he alerted his superior upon finding a piece of scalp with long, blonde hair attached.
His superior’s response?
‘No, you didn’t.’
The diver took that as his order to release it and let it float away, which he did.
And that’s what little we do know about the cover-up orchestrated by the Kennedy machine, led by then-Senator Ted Kennedy, into concealing the condition of the bodies, making sure that the autopsy reports disappeared, that photos of the remains were never logged anywhere (if taken at all), thereby not just preserving the JFK Jr myth but removing evidence that would have bolstered the wrongful death lawsuit Carolyn and Lauren’s mother, Ann Freeman, brought against JFK Jr’s estate.
Ultimately, the Kennedys settled with her for a reported $15 million dollars.
Ann has reportedly regretted allowing Carolyn and Lauren to be cremated with John, their ashes scattered at sea, rather than having them buried near her — so she could have a place to visit with them and mourn.
But within hours of their deaths, it was Caroline Kennedy’s husband, Edwin Schlossberg — who, according to RFK Jr’s diaries — ‘bullied, bullied, bullied the shattered, grieving, mother.’
A love story for the ages, in only the sickest of minds.
