FX’s scripted series about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette features many star-studded mentions and familiar faces, so why is Real Housewives of New York City‘s Carole Radziwill notably absent from Love Story?
For context, Carole, 62, was previously married to Anthony Radziwill, who was the late JFK Jr.’s cousin and Jacqueline Kennedy‘s nephew. Anthony, who exchanged vows with Carole in 1994, died in 1999 and has been featured on the Ryan Murphy project.
Carole, however, was not brought up on the show so far — despite her late husband serving as the best man at JFK Jr. and Bessette’s 1996 nuptials. Carole’s mother-in-law, Lee Radziwill, however, got her own shout-out in a scene when JFK Jr. (Paul Anthony Kelly) and Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon) were making a list for their wedding and discussing possible guests — with Lee not making the cut.
“People’s lives are full and rich. There’s tons of people in them, and you have to make decisions,” executive producer Brad Simpson told TV Insider on Monday, March 16. “And a decision we made was to really focus on creating Lauren, her sister, as a character because she was often an afterthought in all of this. And so we thought it was important that, when Carolyn needed a confidant, it be her sister because they were very close.”
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He added: “There were tons of people in their lives that we weren’t able to include, including some of John’s closest friends, but we decided to make Lauren her closest confidant, and then Anthony his closest confidant, right? You know, we’re trying to pack a lot into 43 minutes.”
After meeting in 1992, Bessette and JFK Jr. were on and off for years before getting married. Their relationship was thrust into the spotlight and they faced many public highs and lows before they both died in a plane crash in 1999.
“We had Elizabeth Beller’s book for reference, but we did face challenges [capturing certain moments]. They died so young, but we had enough information from people around them to know what the problems were in their marriage, what the tensions were, what the highs were, what the lows were,” Simpson exclusively told Us Weekly during a joint interview with Nina Jacobson last month. “People don’t have an idea of what her voice was like because we only have a tiny clip of her voice, but they have a very distinct idea of what her image was like. So we had to get the walk down and the look and the allure. But Sarah could really interpret and go with it. John, we have a lot of recordings of him, and we have a lot more on him.”
Simpson and Jacobson expressed hope that viewers saw the care that went into telling Bessette and JFK Jr.’s story.
“We loved these characters. We fell in love with them, and it is essential that the audience loved them too. So we knew that we came to it from a very honest and earnest place — and that the show was never meant to dunk on either one of them in any way,” Jacobson explained. “We knew from the beginning that we were coming in with love and respect for these characters and that we wanted the audience to share that with us.”
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Since the show is centered around public figures, Simpson and Jacobson revealed who — if anyone — reached out after seeing their portrayal, adding, “We haven’t [heard from anyone] yet, and we hope that people appreciate their portrayals. Every actor approached [their role] with love.”
The writing team chose not to consult with the subjects portrayed on the show.
“You reach out to one person, and then it becomes, ‘Why are you not reaching out to every person?’ We love these characters. We did deep, deep research. It’s based on not just the Elizabeth Beller book but many other artifacts from that time and many other histories,” Simpson explained to Us. “We came from a place of love, but if you foreground one person’s personal story and their version of the truth, then you have to foreground everybody’s, and often they’re in conflict. On all our shows we tried to be true to what we think the characters were and show you what it was like to walk in their footsteps.”
New episodes of Love Story air Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on FX and stream on Hulu the next day.
