When JFK Jr. Died

The other night a friend and I started arguing over dinner about JFK Jr.

I’m not kidding. It got a little heated.

It began when I wondered aloud if he, the original indulged Nepo Baby, was so careless he couldn’t even recognize real danger.

Maybe he was just a risk-taker, my friend shot back. From a family of risk takers. A little too confident, she conceded. She lived in the same building in Tribeca as John and knew him as a neighbor.

But careless? No. She thought that was much too judgmental.

That’s the grip Love Story, the current wildly popular streaming series about the relationship between JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette has on many of us. We’re all talking about it, even arguing over dinner why John and Carolyn behaved the way they did.

Even though I started watching a couple of episodes in, I got really caught up just like millions of others. In the last weeks, the show’s audience has grown and grown. It is Ryan Murphy’s, FX’s and Hulu’s most popular series ever.

I think Paul Anthony Kelly who plays John has the hair and is good enough, while Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn, also with great hair, is especially effective. She’s a young, striking Meryl Streep. Streep’s real daughter Grace Gummer plays the constantly exasperated with her brother Caroline Kennedy who doesn’t like Bessette much either.

My friend and I remember Bessette’s classy late 90’s black dress-white shirt- red lipstick style. That’s a major part of what makes the show so appealing. Heck, both of us way back then only wore black dresses, too. The dresses hanging in my closet right now are still black, though I rarely have the need to wear a dress anymore.

I met John a couple of times when he was the editor of George Magazine. We shook hands at Magazine Publisher Association events where the “sexiest man alive” drew all the attention. Once in 1996 we put Jackie on the cover of the Ladies’ Home Journal publishing a book excerpt about her. It was after she had died. At a luncheon, I remember the Journal’s publisher held up a copy of the magazine and John from across a crowded room gave it a thumb’s up. I guess he knew how hard it was getting to be to sell at the newsstand in those days. A memory of Jackie was more appealing than any current interview.

John was 38 when he died though he still often behaved like a risk-taking teenager. As noted more than once in the first episodes of this series he was not even careful enough to lock up his expensive Peugeot racer or his banana yellow Cignal which he used to peddle around Manhattan. They were inevitably stolen.

Oh, well, my friend, countered: In those days in our neighborhood they would have stolen the wheels even if the bikes were locked.

Though he was a Boomer, John seemed more like a Gen X-er, a Millennial or, maybe even like many young men today who are very, very slow to launch. He wasn’t sure what he really wanted to do. He failed the bar exam twice before he passed. There was that New York Post’s mean but memorable “The Hunk Flunks” headline. Then he started George at the time when even established magazines were beginning to falter. Not the best idea.

I’m sure Jackie worried about him. I have two sons. My friend defending John, has a son. I know how mothers worry about adult sons. Will they find the right job? The right woman? Will they even just find themselves? Sometimes it never ends.

I remember the hot July Saturday morning after the night John, Carolyn and her sister Lauren Bessette didn’t land. The first news report, the shock and sadness. The talk about the Kennedy Curse. Soon after, journalist Christopher Andersen started working on a book The Day John Died. I published an excerpt in LHJ exactly a year after the fatal crash.

According to Andersen, John did a lot wrong that night. He had a broken ankle. Six weeks before on Memorial Weekend risk-taking John had been flying a powered parachute that collided with a tree. He had the cast off the day of the flight, was still in pain and wearing a boot. He was flying a new plane, a Piper Sarasota and was unfamiliar with its complexities. A flight instructor was supposed to be on board as co-pilot but had cancelled. John could have easily found another. And he was flying by visual flight rules. He didn’t yet have instrument rating.

He wanted to take off by 7:15 in the light but traffic leaving Manhattan on a summer Friday afternoon was very heavy. John and Lauren and Carolyn, too, were all late arriving at the New Jersey airport. They finally left after 8:30. The weather was supposed to be good but very quickly John was flying into a haze, so thick that the moon, stars and lights along the coast were no longer visible.

Andersen wrote, “Had he fully appreciated his new plane’s capabilities he could have put the Sarasota on autopilot which would have guided him straight to his destination. Incredibly all John had to do was push two buttons.” Instead, John probably made every mistake a rookie pilot can make. He got disoriented, unable to see the horizon probably thinking down was up and so when he tried to regain altitude, he put the plane into what aviators call “a graveyard spin,” hurtling into the sea.

Terrifying. Terrible.

I wanted to explain this to my friend. “He was so careless he…,” I began.

But she didn’t want to listen.

“Stop,” she replied. “He was a nice guy. He took risks. It was an accident.”

“But––”

“Please, please, stop–––”

My friend and I almost never argue. She’s a very good friend. And so, the other night we decided to just skip dessert and pay the check.

Besides maybe we were both right.

I still tell my sons to “be careful.” Especially when my older son is taking a long drive or my younger son is going for a long run at sunset. “Please, just be careful.” My sons are both very middle-aged, set in their ways and all I want for them now is the gift of years.

Exactly what John and Carolyn, with all their glamour, didn’t have. And that’s what makes their story and the series ending which we’ll be watching Thursday night so very sad.

Have you been watching, too? What do you think?