The Wedding That Changed Everything
How 'Love Story' recreated JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette's intimate island I dos.
But first: Daryl Hannah is not amused.
This morning, The New York Times published her scathing response to how she’s portrayed in Love Story, Ryan Murphy’s glossy new FX series about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. Daryl — who’s iconic in her own right as the statuesque star of Splash and Steel Magnolias — dated JFK Jr. for several years before he got serious with Carolyn. On the show, Dree Hemingway’s Daryl is desperately clingy and clueless, showing up at John’s apartment unannounced and crashing his mother’s wake, among other stunts. Someone clearly decided to throw her under the bus in order to make Carolyn look better by comparison.
“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,” she explains in her Times op-ed. “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.”
With justifiable anger, Daryl writes, “Popular culture has long elevated certain women by portraying others as rivals, obstacles or villains. Isn’t it textbook misogyny to tear down one woman in order to build up another?”
Yes, it is! And I can’t imagine that John and Carolyn would support this treatment of her. Last week, I published a Carolyn-centric fashion letter and reader kenz s suggested that I pick up Elizabeth Beller’s Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the bestselling biography on which Love Story is based. The author presents a fascinating portrait of Carolyn as a “super empath” with a feisty warmth, and shatters the shallow ice queen rap that the tabloids gave her way back when. As for Daryl, Beller paints a picture of a high-maintenance haute hippie from an Old Money family. She quotes John’s college friend saying: “It was a tough but interesting relationship. They were both a little spoiled. They were both used to getting their way. Daryl once commented to me that all of John’s friends felt sorry for his having to put up with a Hollywood actress. ‘But you know,’ she said, ‘he’s no day at the beach.’ ”
Meanwhile, Love Story embellishes the incompatibility of the John/Daryl relationship and totally makes stuff up, including the scene where John comes home to discover Daryl hosting an unsolicited cocaine party. She is made to look foolish and childlike. In reality, was she a fool for the nation’s most eligible bachelor? Perhaps. She was young at the time. And we should all be kinder when taking in accounts of women in their 20s and 30s — any age for that matter.
I must confess that I’m (still) really digging the show and how its evokes a bygone era with such style and unabashed nostalgia. Murphy, despite his apparent impulse to revise history and reduce Daryl to a pop-culture punchline, has put together an excellent team of craftspeople to resurrect 1990s New York City and beyond. (We’ll get to one such crew member in a minute.)
In this week’s episode, the action moves from Manhattan to the remote Southern isle where John married Carolyn in 1996. Their wedding was the United States equivalent of Prince William and Kate Middleton getting hitched. But unlike the British royals, they avoided a big blowout cathedral wedding and quietly exchanged vows in front of some 40 guests on Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia. An assistant tried to divert the press by buying plane tickets to Ireland in the couple’s name. They housed their inner circle at the Greyfield Inn, which was built in 1900 and had only one landline (in the main office). Beller writes that a “convoy of old Chevy pickup trucks” transported wedding witnesses — including Ted Kennedy, Carole Radziwill, wife of JFK Jr.’s cousin, and Jack Schlossberg, the groom’s 3-year-old nephew — to the one-room First African Baptist Church. According to Beller, “John said they had ‘turned Catholicism on its head’ in order for Father Charles O’Byrne, the Jesuit priest who had conducted Jackie’s funeral, to conduct the ceremony in a Baptist church.”
In the author’s telling, the nuptials got off to a late start because John “had misplaced his shirt” and Carolyn “forgot that she needed to put [her] dress on before attending to her hair and makeup, which meant redoing her hair and makeup after she had pulled the form-fitting work of art over her head.”
Carolyn’s gown was like no other. Designed by her close friend Narciso Rodriguez, who also attended the festivities (and disputes the story of her hair-and-makeup drama), the pearly slip dress exuded unfussy elegance and rejected ruffles and lace and all the frills expected of a bride, whether she’s a princess or plebe. Via Beller:
As Carolyn and John stepped down from the church, the wedding picture of the century was taken. Dennis Reggie captured Carolyn and John’s happiness as the groom lifts his bride’s hand to his lips, a gesture of unabashed adoration. Carolyn is clutching a bouquet of fresh lilies of the valley and smiling at him, perhaps even laughing.
That image caused a sensation. People liked how effortless Carolyn looked, how the garment didn’t wear the bride. Forget about turning Catholicism on its head! No one remembers the religion, or what John was wearing. All eyes were on Carolyn. She transformed bridal mood boards — not to mention the wedding industry as a whole — by demonstrating a modern, personalized, DIY spin on tradition. You don’t need to be swallowed in tulle. You don’t need a fancy setting. You don’t even need electricity. (Just add candles.)
I watched the latest Love Story installment and thought the crew did a bang-up job recreating events that happened 30 years prior. I wanted to know how they pulled it off, so I spoke with production designer Alex DiGerlando to get the scoop:
What kind of research did you do on The Wedding of Last Century?
It’s seared into the cultural imagination. Everyone remembers those one or two images that were released at the time: them at the altar in the candlelight and them walking out of the church, holding hands with the flash going off.
It probably was really surprising to a lot of people that [a] kind of American royalty would get married in this very small, modest church that had no electricity. And because they were running late, they had to use candlelight, which made it even more romantic.
Right around the time we were prepping for this episode, the CNN documentary [American Prince: JFK Jr.] came out and there was a treasure trove of photos that had previously not been available to the public where you saw the rehearsal dinner and the reception afterward. But up until that point, [we] really only had those two images of them at the church. That was just fortunate timing that we were able to fill in those gaps. We knew that they got married on Cumberland Island, Georgia. And one of the reasons they chose that [location] was because it was so secluded and so filled with natural beauty. It was a place that they could go to and be secretive and get their guests to — without the pressures of dodging paparazzi.
Well, first of all, we shot the whole thing in New York. We didn’t have the time or the money to go down to Georgia to shoot. And the church was so specific, and those photos were so iconic, that we wanted to be able to recreate them exactly. We scoured the area and found this horse farm in Rockland County. It had an area in the back that — even though it didn’t have the Southern vegetation — the layout of the vegetation was like [that of the church]. And we had to grade the land a little bit to have a flat space to [build upon]. But we built that church. There was a lot of photographs and information available online, so we were able to create a pretty exact replica. And then the Greyfield Inn: We found this estate in Long Island that had some of the right details that we could use for the exterior and the patio where the rehearsal dinner was. It had a grand lawn where we were able to set up a tent [for the reception]. … And then on the end of that great lawn was a beach. It checked all those boxes.
I have to say, the production really captured life pre-smartphone. If John wanted to reach Carolyn, he had to call her at home and hope she was there. Her apartment is adorable, by the way.
The real Carolyn lived at 166 Second Avenue. We based the interior apartment on some of the [units] in that building.
For the exterior, we couldn’t shoot the actual building because Second Avenue is too busy and period-incorrect, but right catty-corner across Second Avenue is Stuyvesant Street. And we found this really cool little townhouse building there, and that’s where we set her apartment.
You built the interior on a stage. What kind of vibe were you going for?
It’s a really cute little set. And Ryan’s vision for the show was this ‘90s minimalism that’s the blanket of the whole thing. … And he had a palette that he was interested in exploring — black, white, gray, and these sort of blush, tan, nude colors, camel colors — which is sort of pulled out of the Calvin Klein aesthetic and Carolyn’s wardrobe.
[In Beller’s book], her apartment’s described as very messy and cluttered and scattered. We tried to put that into the space without fighting with the minimalism. It was kind of a delicate balance to try to figure out how to tell that bit of character detail without distracting from the rest of the show. But we chose high-gloss, white-painted floors for her apartment with the blush-colored walls and the artwork. We avoided artwork on the walls in general.
I noticed that in the reproduction of Jackie’s Fifth Avenue apartment, you use similar blush-toned colors. Was that intentional?
I mean, it’s sort of sad really, but the two most important women in JFK Jr.’s life never met. I wanted some kind of visual, I guess, passing-of-the-baton between those two women to happen through their spaces — even though they never had a direct connection to one another. We used the blush color as the palette connecting the female characters that were central to his life.
We kept a very controlled palette, but where [Carolyn’s interiors have] very sparse textures, Jackie has lots of different fabrics.
Former Calvin Klein employees are loving the depiction of his black-and-white headquarters. Tell me how Love Story pulled off that feat.
I kind of dug deep and tried to pull every image that I could find, and I found a treasure trove of images that he and people who worked for him took of models testing out clothes in the space. The models and the clothes were the subjects of the photos, but in the background, we could piece together little details that we could pull from.
The show spans from 1992 to 1999. His interiors evolved over the course of that time. From the ‘70s through the ‘80s into maybe the early ‘90s, he was working with a designer named Joe D’Urso, who also designed his apartment. In 1995 or leading up to 1995, he hired John Pawson to design the Madison Avenue flagship store. He’s a British architectural designer. Ryan was very — as was I — moved by Pawson’s designs, and we decided to pick details of both the D’Urso era and the Pawson era. We kind of bridged two eras.
And in harkening back to the past, you had to swap iPhones for landlines. Speaking of: Without clutching highly addictive tiny computers, what did adults do with their hands? Maybe they held cigarettes.
I think it’s part of the reason why [the show is] capturing people’s imaginations. We live in a time where dating and falling in love is really dominated by this device that everyone carries around and distracts us from that. And this is a story that’s set in a time where courtship still worked in the traditional way, and I think that’s appealing to people. And it’s ultimately more cinematic because the characters are present among one another and not distracted by text messages popping up on the screen. Or swiping right and left. I don’t know. I think it’s a cool reminder that we don’t have to live through those things all the time.
END CREDITS
For more details on Carolyn’s revolutionary wedding dress, check out Fawnia Soo Hoo’s deep dive in W magazine.
Last month, I saw Sinners for the first time — at Oakland’s historic Grand Lake Theatre no less! And with the great Ryan Coogler and Delroy Lindo in attendance. Sinners is no mere vampire flick. It’s art. It’s entertainment. It’s the transcendent story of American music. And it’s gaining award-season momentum. Over at The Ankler, Katey Rich discusses Sinners’ “vibe shift.”
Ministry of Pop Culture reviews the Celebrity Newsletter. Wait, Pamela Anderson is on Substack???
Whomever designed this graphic.
Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful weekend! (I promise this won’t become a Love Story-themed newsletter.)
Warmly,
Erin
P.S. In addition to my upcoming rom-com class, I will soon teach a course on the immortal Marilyn Monroe at Roundtable by 92NY. Registration info here.
I started watching last weekend and I was hooked. But true, the way they portrayed Daryl Hannah, yikes! If you think about it, portraying her more like she was and not making her out to be the villain, would have added that much more tension to the show.
Thank you for the link!! Great interview and I was wondering how they shot the wedding sequences!