‘Love Story’ Is a Hit. JFK Jr.’s ‘George’ Staff Refuse to Watch
Former columnist Ann Coulter is a fan. One former boss couldn’t quite press play. Others are weighing what to sell on eBay
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Jack Schlossberg is mad about it. So is Daryl Hannah. But what does the former staff of George magazine think about the just-finished mega-hit FX series Love Story, following John Kennedy Jr.’s romance with Carolyn Bessette, the Calvin Klein PR executive who became his wife?
Everybody, it seems, has a take on the glamorous couple, but ask the George alums for their thoughts on the show and many will demur, explaining that they’d like to keep the memory of their former boss preserved in their own minds, or that they just don’t want to comment — or, in many cases, that they haven’t even watched the series, which aired its final, heartbreaking installment on March 26 (the most-watched episode of FX’s most-watched limited series ever).
There’s a kind of omerta about John and Carolyn.
Ryan Murphy’s series focuses on the couple’s life together in a nine-episode arc that has sparked a wild international frenzy of interest about them and all things ’90s — a time before smartphones, when the World Trade Center was still standing and glossies were gigantic.
George, Kennedy’s iconoclastic pop culture-meets-politics magazine, launched in September 1995, the heart of this golden age, when covers like Demi Moore’s bold turn on Vanity Fair, pregnant and nude, became news events, reported on by television networks and Entertainment Tonight. Magazine executives were icons of the decade: Anna Wintour at Vogue, Tina Brown and then Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair. On one end of the gender wars stood Gloria Steinem’s Ms.; on the other, Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan. Magazines and newspapers set the cultural power agenda across New York and well beyond the reaches of the looming internet.
Kennedy, already a native of the circles that orbited around these publications, began pitching his own up and down Manhattan in the early ’90s. He had conceived of George in conversation with his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who described it as Mad magazine for politics, according to the book Fairytale Interrupted, penned by RoseMarie Terenzio, Kennedy’s former executive assistant.
No one was willing to gamble on Kennedy’s vision until he connected with David Pecker, the mustachioed CEO of Hachette Filipacchi, who immediately saw how the magazine could open doors — for himself and the company. Pecker committed around $30 million to the title, even though it was initially viewed as an unserious venture with no obvious niche.
George’s first issue — famously fronted by Cindy Crawford costumed as George Washington — carried more than 100 pages of ads and an interview conducted by Kennedy, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, with former Alabama Governor George Wallace. At a launch event at Manhattan’s Federal Hall — where Washington took the oath of office in 1789 — Kennedy acknowledged that his name would help George break through, but told the press, “This magazine is going to stand or fall on whether or not it’s a good magazine.”
The magazine, with a cover price of $2.95, picked up nearly 500,000 readers after just a few issues — a remarkable clip. Newsstand sales outpaced single-copy sales of both Time and Newsweek. Not everyone was impressed. The Los Angeles Times called it a “magazine of politics lite.”
Love Story shows Kennedy and his co-founders pitching the title at Michael’s restaurant, the famed media industry hang-out (seated in the coveted power table in the front window, no less), and Kennedy wrestling (at one point, literally) with his partner, Michael Berman, both under stress from different directions to make the project a success. While it faced financial headwinds almost from the get-go, George also became a launching pad: intern Sasha Issenberg is now a managing editor of Politico. Ned Martel went on to work in Hollywood as a producer alongside Ryan Murphy, Josh Young later wrote five New York Times best-selling books. And Gary Ginsberg, senior editor and legal counsel at George, became a top consigliere to Rupert Murdoch and Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes.
Kennedy’s death on July 16, 1999 — in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard that also killed Carolyn and her sister, Lauren Bessette — united the George staff forever in grief. For some, Love Story has reignited the trauma of the moment when their 38-year-old boss and friend was suddenly, tragically gone.
I reached out to as many former George staffers and executives as I could find, to speak with those who had watched at least some of the series, and to make sense of what was being said about Kennedy, the magazine and the scar they still carry.
‘It’s Still Painful for All of Us’
Richard Bradley, the George executive editor who wrote American Son: A Portrait of John Kennedy Jr., has watched only the first episode of Love Story, which begins with a scene from the couple’s final day. We see Bessette in a nail salon changing her mind about her polish color, then a quick marital spat at Essex County Airport — before the action flashes back to the story of how she and Kennedy were introduced by Calvin Klein at a party.
Bradley’s office was next to Kennedy’s on the 41st floor of the Hachette building at 1633 Broadway — the former Regardie’s magazine editor got hired after he wrote Kennedy a letter about joining George. “It just threw me more than expected,” he says of the series, adding that he couldn’t watch more episodes by himself. He adds, “I need to watch with my wife to convey the trauma I’m going through. It’s still painful for all of us who worked at George.” Lisa Dallos, who worked as the magazine’s PR director, also hasn’t watched. “Someday I will, when I’m in the right mindset,” she tells me.
The team at the magazine was uniquely close, Bradley says, because of how Kennedy made everyone feel: “It wasn’t a typical business relationship. We all cared for him a lot, and we were very conscious of the fact he lived a life under enormous pressure and scrutiny. He often seemed to care much more about our well-being than his own, and you couldn’t help being moved by that.”
Ann Coulter, the conservative political commentator who was a regular George contributor, recalls Kennedy’s leadership similarly. “He put together a really good office, and anyone will tell you a lot are still friends and have gone on to have terrific careers and are really sorry it didn’t continue,” she recalls. “He made politics fun.” Terenzio wrote in Fairytale Interrupted that JFK Jr.’s sister, Caroline Kennedy, visited the George offices several times and likewise found it entertaining.
But unlike many of her former colleagues, Coulter actually watched Love Story — and came away surprised.
She found the series mostly accurate.
But others who were close to Kennedy — including one former top executive scheduled to meet him the day he died and would later attend the funeral— have a far more complicated reaction to what the show gets right… and what it gets very wrong.
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