Schlossberg was not by any means alone in shading the Murphy show while it was in production. C.B.K., as she is called, is the love object of a posthumous legion of admirers. They are more than admirers, though. They are custodians of the myth. Bessette refused the profile at Vogue or Harper’s; the custodians do not have a lot of material to work with. But they’ve done plenty of work anyway, and what makes Beller’s book seem belated—gratuitous—is the already well-established, loosely connected school of bloggers, mimics, and lay analysts of Bessette’s public footprint, namely her minimalist nineties style. Their Bessette is a creature of photography. Even in the famous paparazzi shots of Bessette and J.F.K., Jr., squabbling in Washington Square Park, they see an opportunity for aesthetic analysis. The scan of the proportion of the camel-colored pencil skirt, the break on the bootleg jean, the wear on the spazzolato bag—these have all become points for divining the intelligence and savvy of Bessette. Most anachronistically, some recruit Bessette as an avatar for so-called quiet luxury and clean-girl aesthetics, recent trends that are expressions not of individual personality but of discernment and discipline turned menacingly inward. And so the custodians became irate when photographs emerged of the actor Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Bessette in Murphy’s show, looking all wrong on set. The chief affront was the hair: too yellow, far from C.B.K.’s ice-blond. The critiques were heard, Murphy told Newsom; Pidgeon, a brunette then wearing a wig, was ultimately forced to bleach. “Bessette is loved as a mute,” a friend summarized to me over drinks, the other night.
The show had its première party in New York City in early February. The Times’ Styles section did its glossy treatment of the night, which struck a familiar tone. The wish in a certain class of creative professionals today is to resuscitate the shift in the atmosphere of the nineties, that clash of the louche and the classed, the first gentrifications of downtown—impossible in the fully corporatized Manhattan of today. This cohort has too much money, too many brand sponsorships—this cohort has Instagram. Pidgeon and her John, the actor Paul Anthony Kelly, dressed respectively in the slip and in the suit, were styled to look like dolls of the real couple. The party was held at the Pool, the seafood den in midtown, where prop copies of George, the pop-culture-meets-politics magazine started by J.F.K., Jr., were fanned out on glass tables. George is currently extant in a horrific form; the trademark having been bought by a conspiracy-theorist lawyer some years ago. But that, and the degradation it represents, was allowed no oxygen in that chrome room.
Eight of the nine episodes of “Love Story” were made available for review. How Murphy and Connor Hines, the creator, handle the tragedy of the plane crash, an accident sometimes narrativized as more than the result of thick fog but the culmination of an inherited arrogance, remains to be seen. They will have to strain for good taste there. Otherwise, the tone of the show is pure cosmopolitan sympathy. So much of “Love Story” is forgettable, because the Wikipedia-page-like narrowness on the doomed romance excises all that contemporary drama—President Bill Clinton invoking J.F.K. as a forefather, Ted Kennedy, the brother of J.F.K. and R.F.K., recovering from the scandal of Chappaquiddick and the humiliation of a failed Presidential run to become the “lion” of the Senate—that makes the Kennedy story, one of a relationship to a greater culture, so compelling. One can’t subsist on the restaging of fights in the park alone! Ultimately, it is Pidgeon’s Bessette that stays with you, because she feels like an invention, an injection of an idea and a rejection of the sphinx one. Hines and Pidgeon give the woman a choreography, the dramatic toss of the hair, the hips gone concave, the Marlboro rasp in her voice. When we lose her verve, in later episodes, we feel more viscerally the first tragedy, which was how her marriage wrecked her life.
The show, a sort of elegy for Gen X, opens with a flash-forward to July 16, 1999, the final hours of Carolyn and John. On the tarmac, the lovers crouch, pressing their foreheads together, as if knowledgeable about their impending end. The early episodes are mostly devoted to filling out Bessette’s downtown existence, her professional and social world at Calvin Klein, where she is a star in the universe of the designer, who is played with spice by Alessandro Nivola. The show is a self-conscious fashion story; it gives off that defensive and wounded self-importance of some fashion people, their craft relegated on some psychological level to service work, in comparison to the arts or politics. You don’t need to understand that a siege was under way then, that Klein and Donna Karan and other provocative Americans were poised to go “uptown” to bring sex and skin to Madison Avenue, overtaking the old-money élites. Carolyn is a working girl with a budget. Before she meets John, she has a boy toy, Michael Bergin (who in real life wrote a dishy book about their “situationship,” to use the modern parlance). She is a picture of East Village resourcefulness. She lives in a world of images, of fashion, which certainly comes with its own set of politics.
