Last year, Jack Schlossberg — around whose late uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. Love Story revolves — called out executive producer Ryan Murphy for “making millions off” Kennedy’s memory “in a grotesque way.” Given how much Schlossberg loves the limelight, it’s hard not to feel like he’s exaggerating his fury for attention. But: given how Kennedy, his wife Carolyn Bessette (the other half of the titular Love Story), and Bessette’s sister Lauren died, I will temporarily take Schlossberg’s side and say the episode title “Pilot” is in RATHER POOR TASTE. (Yes, I know that the first episode of a TV show is often titled “Pilot,” and why, but Murphy’s shows often break with this tradition; this time it feels winky. And tacky.)
Most of us know how this (love) story ends, so we might as well start there: July 16, 1999. Carolyn (Sarah Pidgeon) is getting a classic red manicure, trying to ignore the paparazzi clamoring for her outside. Abruptly, she tells the manicurist she needs a different color: “This won’t work for where I’m going.” A nude shade will be safe.
At the offices of George magazine, John (Paul Anthony Kelly) changes from his suit into shades of khaki and hobbles out to meet his sister-in-law, an ortho boot on his left foot.
With Carolyn is stuck in Manhattan’s summer Friday traffic, the conversation between John and his sister-in-law Lauren (Sydney Lemmon) in their car lets us know relations between him and Carolyn are strained, Carolyn having been reluctant to join John for what we in the future know is the Martha’s Vineyard wedding of John’s cousin Rory Kennedy, Robert’s daughter.
The three meet up at a private airstrip, where John and Carolyn complain about each other’s lateness — current in her case, chronic in his. No one seems concerned that John’s flight instructor Jay can’t make it. When Carolyn crouches to dig through her bag, John kneels in front of her to apologize; he loves her and appreciates her being there. Carolyn kisses him; she loves him too. Then John is cleared for takeoff to a destination they’ll never reach. What a waste to die with nude-painted nails.
7 Years Earlier: Carolyn wakes up in her cluttered bedroom in a very nice Manhattan neighborhood. Primal Scream’s “Loaded” — the first of this episode’s many impeccable needle drops — plays as she chooses an effortlessly chic all-black outfit, grabbing her keys and cigs on her way out. At her usual newsstand, multiple publications have cover stories on JFK Jr.’s latest failure to pass the New York bar exam. Carolyn meets a colleague named Grace (Viveca Chow), gossiping about rolling around a ball pit with Mickey Rourke long before Jenna Maroney was even a glint in Tina Fey’s eye. Grace and Carolyn’s boss, Calvin Klein (Alessandro Nivola), joins them in the elevator, and Carolyn has to shush Grace, admonishing her when they get off that he could hear her. “I thought the rule about not talking in the elevator was more of a myth,” says Grace, adding in a whisper, “like his sexuality.”
While Grace and Carolyn toil at Calvin Klein, John tortures himself with a Daily News story about his bar exam failure on his way to work out with his cousin Anthony Radziwill (Erich Bergen). In the locker room afterward, John bitches that the headlines make it so he can’t show his face anywhere in the city. “But you’ll show your dick to everyone at the gym,” Anthony cracks. “Apparently THIS is all I’m good for,” John pouts. (Hey man, that’s not nothing.) The D.A.’s office has a three-strike policy for assistants, John says; if he fails again, he’ll be fired.
Back in the Calvin Klein showroom, Annette Bening (Megan Channell) isn’t sure about the dress Calvin’s pulled for her to wear to the Bugsy premiere. (Several months late on that.)
Carolyn’s manager Tanya (Sophie von Haselberg) urges Annette to try it with a shawl, but when Annette asks what Carolyn thinks, Carolyn says that when a dress is right, you know it: “The confidence should wash over you.” When Calvin joins them, Carolyn dares to nix a second choice Calvin pulls and brings out a men’s suit jacket. Annette loves it. Calvin asks for accessories, and when Tanya hops to, he says he was talking to Carolyn, who had better get that promotion to PR she wants or Tanya’s going to make her life hell.
After touch football in Central Park, for which John drafts one of the paparazzi shooting him, he heads for dinner: his mother Jackie (Naomi Watts) is hosting, with John’s sister Caroline Schlossberg (Grace Gummer) and her husband Edwin (Ben Shenkman) already seated. Yet another family wedding — cousin Teddy Jr.’s — raises the question of John’s date, Jackie still denigrating his most recent ex Daryl Hannah for making him experiment with a vegetarian diet, a choice Jackie regards as more dangerous than the cigarette she lights at the table while Caroline and Edwin are still eating. “I worked too hard to watch you be sucked into this pervasive narrative of entitlement and recklessness that’s plagued every other member of this family,” Jackie gasps, storming off.
That would be a full day for most people I know, BUT THERE’S MORE: Carolyn gets out of a cab at a fundraiser for the Amazon rainforest just as John arrives in a town car. While Peter Gabriel and Sinéad O’Connor’s “Blood Of Eden” plays (a year before its release), John watches over the heads of the reporters surrounding him as Carolyn sneaks in a side door. Having already been shut down at the office when she’d asked Tanya for a ticket, Carolyn assumes she’s in trouble when Calvin spots her; in fact, he wants to introduce her, as his “VIP Whisperer,” to John.
Carolyn proves that when she advised Grace this morning to play hard-to-get, it’s because she knows it works: she declines John’s offer of a drink, tries to excuse herself to permit others time with him, refuses to give him her number, and politely passes on taking his. If he wants to find her, she says, he knows where she works.
In the meantime, Carolyn runs into Michael Bergin (Noah Fearnley) at a club. He’s an aspiring model who doesn’t appreciate how Carolyn toys with him, but isn’t above going home with her, either. He also happens to look exactly like John!
That’s probably a wrap on Michael, since John soon visits the showroom to let Carolyn (sexily) take his measurements for a suit, and to ask her to dinner. She’s leaving the restaurant that night when he bikes up 20 minutes late begging her not to go, and over an Indian dinner, Carolyn learns about John’s backpacking trip through the country; that he once dreamed of acting before Jackie’s overprotectiveness convinced him it would never work; and that he can’t really remember a time when he realized he was the son of a president, because his memories and stories he’s heard have mixed together. John learns about Carolyn’s upbringing in Greenwich, CT; that she isn’t close to her father; and that she was recruited to the showroom from a Calvin Klein mall store when an executive saw her soothe a hysterical shopper, getting hired in her initial interview by saying she had no trust fund to fall back on. (It’s all relative, but her stepfather is a doctor in one of America’s richest suburbs.)
Afterward, John sees his bike has been stolen — just because he left it unlocked! — so he’ll have to walk Carolyn home. He declines her offer of a cigarette since he’s already had one today, limiting his use as “a discipline thing.” Carolyn snarks that he has discipline about tobacco but not other people’s time. “I said I was sorry,” he reminds her. “You said it like you were expecting forgiveness, not asking for it,” she replies. She’s not too irritated to spurn his goodnight kiss…
…but when he asks if he may see her again, she just glides inside, leaving him and his wallet chain to trudge off.
The next night, Daryl (Dree Hemingway) is waiting for John in his apartment with Sophie B. Hawkins’s “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” playing on the stereo. He was right: she shouldn’t have gone back to California!
Daryl’s barefoot vulnerability and Hawkins’s undeniable soul track evidently join forces to seduce John, because when Jackie and Caroline are en route to Teddy Jr.’s wedding, Jackie checks with the driver that John booked his own car. Learning that John and “Miss Hannah” did, Jackie orders him to turn the car around: she’s not making small talk with them like this “nonsense” shouldn’t have ended years ago.
While Carolyn recommends the unknown Kate Moss for Calvin’s next ad campaign, John is in the park making peace with his mother. Jackie knows in a way John can’t what it’s like to marry into this family. If he thinks someone who’s in the public eye will be better prepared to withstand the press onslaught, he’s wrong: no kind of fame can prepare her, and she’ll resent giving up the name she’s made for herself to take his. He doesn’t want someone to share in his power. He wants someone to help him wield it. His wife can’t feel beholden to him for choosing her; she must be someone who loves him despite his family connections. “I don’t know who that person is,” Jackie concludes, “but I know who it isn’t.”
At work, Carolyn returns to her desk to find the New York Post, trumpeting from the front page that John is “BACK WITH DARYL!”
We don’t see who left it, but let’s assume Tanya’s treating herself to an extra glass of wine at happy hour tonight.
Love Notes: Episode 1 (“Pilot”)
- As Calvin gets into the elevator, Grace is telling Carolyn the positive reactions she got at the club wearing Carolyn’s signature scent, Egyptian Musk. You too can smell like Bessette for a remarkably affordable price!
- If I had to guess, I’d say this is the look the styling scene is referencing, particularly since David Geffen, whom Calvin mentions when he enters, is in the shot. Yet another connection to John and Carolyn: this shot was taken by Ron Gallela, a paparazzo so relentless in photographing Jackie Kennedy that he was fined $10,000 and ordered to stay away from her and her family.
- Michael Bergin REALLY looked like JFK Jr.
- The day after John’s dinner with Carolyn, Anthony asks, “Does she know about the bike?” John says no, so: maybe sacrificing bikes was a known move? Also, John was mugged in Central Park in the spring of 1974, losing both his bike and his tennis racket — it could have started him thinking of bikes as something he shouldn’t count on keeping long. R.I.P. John F. Kennedy Jr.; you would have loved Citi Bikes.
- Building a Love Story playlist? Enjoy the episode’s other needle drops:
Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.