FX’s “Love Story” — the Ryan Murphy-produced show that revisits the lives of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy — concludes this week with the episode that won’t be easy to watch, even if everyone knew it was coming.
The nine-episode series began by teeing up the fate that met the couple, who were killed along with Bessette Kennedy’s sister Lauren in a plane crash in July 1999. The tragedy was a seminal moment for some the same way the death of Princess Diana was just two years earlier for others. Bessette Kennedy’s reaction to the former royal’s death in a paparazzi-caused car crash was even fictionalized in last week’s penultimate episode of the show, which has renewed interest in the fashions of the time and in the couple’s life and death.
Some of the journalists who covered America’s answer to a royal couple don’t need a slick limited series to remember the summer weekend when Kennedy’s plane was reported missing after taking off in New Jersey. What followed was a multi-day stakeout both on the mainland in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts near the famed Kennedy compound, and on Martha’s Vineyard, which had been their destination, as the search for the plane continued.
“Plane crashes are always kind of a hard thing to cover, but in this case, it was just over the top,” Steve Heaslip, who covered the story for the Cape Cod Times, said in a phone conversation with CNN.
The amount of media, police and general onlookers drawn to the scene was unprecedented, Heaslip said, but he also noted that it was “completely expected,” given who was involved.
“Love Story” retraces the history of Kennedy, son of President John F. Kennedy, as he carves a place for himself at the helm of George magazine, at the nexus of celebrity and politics, while also navigating his dating life. Moving on from attention-getting romances with actresses like Daryl Hannah, he eventually meets, and courts, Bessette Kennedy, then a PR assistant at Calvin Klein, in the series. The show depicts the planning and execution of their storied wedding on a remote island off of Georgia in 1996, and spends ample time showing the intense media scrutiny they faced both before, and especially after, their nuptials.
Last week’s episode displayed the cracks in their union as they grapple with their evolution in the public eye, and the series has shown Kennedy going to an airfield to practice flying, a hobby he took up in the years leading up to his death. The pair were on their way to Kennedy’s cousin Rory’s wedding when his plane crashed off of Martha’s Vineyard on the evening of Friday, July 16, 1999, killing all three passengers on board instantly — roughly two months shy of the couple’s third wedding anniversary.
“I just remember the whole thing as being very just — personally but also covering it — it was really sad,” said Heaslip, who had photographed JFK Jr. a number of times prior. The young man once dubbed “America’s most eligible bachelor” would often come to Hyannis to visit his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Like Heaslip, Bernadette Tuazon, currently CNN’s director of photography, spent several days in the area trying to gather information. At the time, she was a photo editor for the Associated Press and had just returned home to New Jersey from another assignment when she got the call saying she needed to get to Martha’s Vineyard.
“At that point, they were assuming that the worst had happened,” Tuazon recalled. “I just remember steadying myself, and I knew what I had to do: I had to get myself out, not even do laundry, just take whatever I have, then go back out.”
In an era before smartphones, newsgathering had its challenges. Speculation and rumors ran rampant and the dissemination of official information was slow.
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