American GOTHIC

John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy who met a perfectly tragic ending. CHRIS MURPHY explains why we're still obsessed with them—and introduces Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon, who bring the doomed pair back to life in Ryan Murphy's Love Story

CHRIS MURPHY

Every time you see a glamorous woman crossing a cobblestone street in a neutral yet impeccably tailored ensemble, YOU CAN THANK CAROLYN.

You already know how the story ends. On July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr.—the son of JFK and Jackie O—and his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, died when the small plane John was flying crashed somewhere off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. Carolyn's older sister, Lauren, was also on the plane and perished in the crash as well. It took five days for authorities to recover their bodies from the ocean floor.

That's the tragic conclusion Ryan Murphy's newest TV series inevitably hurtles toward—and also where it begins. Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette opens with the doomed couple's rather mundane final moments on the ground. Carolyn switches her nail color from a bold red to a blander shade; John hobbles out of his George magazine office wearing a cast on his left ankle due to a paragliding accident. They can't stop bickering once they arrive at the tarmac—their relationship seemingly on the brink as they prepare for what would be their last flight.

It's hard to overstate John and Carolyn's tangible influence on New York in the 1990s—how different their era was from today's fractured media landscape. From birth, John had been America's first son, the boy who saluted his father's coffin. Now that he was all grown up, the tabloids followed his every move. Sometimes they were complimentary—he was the fourth guy ever to be named People's Sexiest Man Alive. Other times, not so much. After John failed the New York State bar exam for the second time, the New York Daily News ran a stinging headline: "The Hunk Flunks...Again."

Thingsweren't any easier for Carolyn. A salesclerk plucked from a Calvin Klein store to work at the brand's New York HQ, Carolyn was thrust into the spotlight rather than born into it. As a publicist and, eventually, a public figure, Carolyn helped launch the career of Kate Moss and brought brands like Miu Miu and Issey Miyake into the mainstream, but she chafed against her celebrity. Nevertheless, her cultural impact far surpassed her career, which was cut short even before she died: She had abandoned it to become a full-time Kennedy wife. Every time you see a glamorous woman crossing a cobblestone street in a neutral yet impeccably tailored ensemble from Prada or Yamamoto—or one of those brands' clear descendants, like The Row or Khaite—you can thank Carolyn.

Murphy scoured the globe to find actors to convincingly portray John and his mysterious wife. After thousands of auditions, he and his creative team landed on relative unknowns Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon. The Canadian Kelly was plugging away behind a sales register in Toronto when, just like Carolyn's, his life changed in an instant: "I got scouted in an American Apparel on Queen Street East," he says. A week later he was walking the runway at Milan Fashion Week and later modeling for Brooks Brothers.

It's not hard to see why. Wearing vintage Armani slacks, a black Zegna button-down, and a Paul Smith leather jacket, Kelly is almost comically handsome. Acting initially came to him as a by-product of his day job modeling—but like many of his fellow travelers, success didn't happen overnight. He spent 13 years auditioning and moonlighting in community theater "because I had to do something," he says. But Kelly didn't book a major job till Love Story.

The same can't be said for Pidgeon, a waifish Michigan native who attended two prestigious drama schools back-to-back—Interlochen Arts Academy and Carnegie Mellon—and was cast in the Amazon Prime series The Wilds straight out of school. Then came the role that changed her life: Diana, the lead singer of a Fleetwood Mac-esque band in David Adjmi's Tony-winning play Stereophonic. "It was a huge challenge," she says. "[I] had to sing, had to scream, had to cry, and I had to do it over and over and over again." She got a Tony nomination for her trouble.

Pidgeon's task was equal and opposite to Kelly's: How do you convincingly portray a woman who's both iconic and an enigma? While there are hundreds of photographs of Carolyn, she never gave an official interview; search for clips of her speaking voice and you'll find less than 18 seconds recorded for public consumption. "In some ways, that'swhat's so intimidating about it," says Pidgeon. "It really required me to make a choice on how I wanted to represent her. "

John, meanwhile, had been in the public eye since birth, and there's endless information about him. To an actor, this could be seen as an advantage—especially for a Canadian trying to master the distinctive Kennedy lockjaw accent. "Junior narrates his father's book, so I listen to that every day before I go to work," Kelly says. "Everything's very well documented, so it was easy to just be a sponge and let the algorithm show me everything."

But the algorithm can be a fickle mistress. When the show posted a few initial test shots of Pidgeon in costume as Carolyn, the images went viral in a negative way, with armchair critics across the globe nitpicking its costumes and styling and even the shade of Pidgeon's newly dyed blonde hair. "It wasn't surprising to me that people had strong opinions," Pidgeon says of the drama. "These people are very beloved. There's a lot of familiarity with them. Through this process, she's become very important to me. So I guess it wasn't just a huge shock that people had feedback about it. " While Pidgeon took the criticism in stride, Murphy and company seemed to take it to heart—letting go of the show's original costume designer and hiring a new one, Rudy Mance, weeks after production on the series began in June. "People, myself included, feel protective of them and their image because what happened to them was so tragic," says Mance.

The scrutiny was unlike anything Pidgeon had faced in her career thus far. "I've never been working on something while knowing that there is a conversation being had about it," she says. "This process has been about figuring out how I navigate that. I've come to understand that I just have to focus on the story that we're telling." Ever the supportive scene partner, Kelly agrees: "I think it really shows how much people care," he says of the hoopla. "It shows that people are excited for it, which reignites my excitement for it—getting to go to work and breathe life into these characters. I think people are going to be really happy with what we've done, what we've created here. "

Derogatory discourse isn't the only noise they've had to shut out. The same year Pidgeon and Kelly shot Love Story, President Donald Trump tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr., John's cousin, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—giving the former lawyer a powerful platform to promote conspiracy theories about the supposed dangers of vaccines, fluoride, seed oils, and Tylenol, among other things. Jack Schlossberg, John's nephew, is on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum—and recently announced that he's running for Congress in New York—but has made his disdain for Murphy and the entire Love Story production well-known. In a since-deleted social media post, Schlossberg threatened to come to the Love Story set to give Murphy a piece of his mind. He later told The New York Times that he was "messing around. "

"They're a very big family. There's a lot of them," says Pidgeon when I ask about RFK Jr. and Schlossberg. "I don't know the first thing about what it's like to have a story, or stories—" She stops short, reconsiders. "We're not the first to examine the Kennedys in anyway. But it's really cool to know that we're doing a project that's based off a family that is so prevalent. " A nervous Kelly echoes his more seasoned costar: "I now have to piggyback," he says, after some cajoling. The Kennedys seem to do everything effortlessly—but you can almost see the sweat trickling down Kelly's neck.

Even the least superstitious among uswould be hard-pressed to deny that an abnormal amount of terrible things have happened to the Kennedy family. Joe Jr. died in combat. JFK and RFK were assassinated. John and Carolyn weren't even the first Kennedys to die tragically in a plane crash. Despite this—and despite the tragedies the family bears some responsibility for, like Chappaquiddick and Rosemary's lobotomy—the Kennedy family's legacy has stretched far beyond the thousand-odd days JFK served as the nation's youngest president. Love Story promises to explore that dynasty, diving deep into a dazzling and damned family by way of the Kennedys who may have shined the brightest and suffered the most.

The facts we do know are sometimes stranger than fiction. Fugees member Wyclef Jean performed at JFK Jr.'s funeral in 1999 because John was such a big fan. Carolyn was annoyed by Gwyneth Paltrow and was best friends with future Real Housewife Carole Radziwill, who was married to John's cousin Anthony Radziwill. We know that John and Carolyn were in love—the emotion's practically pouring out of the photos from their small wedding at the First African Baptist Church on Cumberland Island in Georgia, where Carolyn wore an instantly trendsetting $40,000 wedding dress designed by her friend, Calvin Klein alum Narciso Rodriguez. We also know that they fought: There's paparazzi footage of the couple screaming at and shoving each other in downtown Manhattan, painfully punctuated by John appearing to rip off Carolyn's engagement ring. All of this will play out in Love Story.

If they had lived, would John have gone into politics like his father, his cousin, and his nephew? Would Carolyn have started her own fashion brand? Would they have stayed together or divorced? Could John, a nascent media mogul, have run this very magazine? We'll never know.

The future's a mystery for Kelly and Pidgeon as well—but at least for now it looks bright. "My wife's here. She's pregnant. It's our first baby," says Kelly, his eyes gleaming. "The projected due date is Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy's birthday," he adds: January 7. John never had a chance to become a father—but Kelly still feels this experience brings him closer to America's fallen first son. "There are so many things that align with them and us and the show," he says of John and Carolyn. "It feels very meant to be."