Ryan Murphy wants the Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy fashion fandom to know that he won’t disappoint them.
The television impresario faced fashionista backlash last week when he posted a first look of “American Love Story” stars Paul Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon in what appeared to be full wardrobe and makeup as John F. Kennedy Jr. and Bessette-Kennedy.
The Cut’s takedown of the images and videos blazed with the headline, “These Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy Costumes Don’t Fit the Bill.” The accompanying essay trashed the looks as appearing to be fast-fashion knockoffs of Bessette-Kennedy’s high designer style. “I feel like I’m looking at Mango and Zara,” The Cut’s fashion news writer Danya Issawi wrote in part. “There is no life, there is no story, there is no familiarity with these pieces.”
Like many others, Issawi criticized the jeans, jacket and shoes Pidgeon was wearing as well as her accompanying Birkin.
Murphy admits he was taken aback by the negative and sometimes what he feels were sometimes unnecessarily mean-spirited comments. “Carolyn Bessette is cleary a religious figure and it’s a religion of her own,” he told me Wednesday during a phone interview from set. “It’s very interesting that people become so inflammatory.”
But here’s the runway rub about the images – Kelly and Pidgeon were not wearing anything they’ll be donning on the show. Murphy insists their outfits were thrown together for lighting and color tests but he released the photos — which he captioned on Instagram as “stills from our LOVE STORY camera test” — because he wanted to get ahead of the paparazzi who he was warned would be flocking to the series’ New York City street sets. Filming began earlier this week and is expected to run through late October or early fall.
“There were comments like, ‘I hate that coat, Carolyn would never have worn that,’” Murphy says. “That was just a coat we threw on for color. People were writing, ‘How dare you use the No. 35 Birkin bag? She wore a 40!’ Yes, we have a 40 but we just threw on a bag from another costume department because that was the sound stage we were on.”
In fact, Murphy says he has enlisted a 10-person “style advisory board” to help reference and source Carolyn’s wardrobe. The names of the board members will be released at a later date when all their contracts are signed.
The production has actually bought some clothing that belonged to Bessette-Kennedy. A replica of the Narciso Rodriguez wedding dress she wore when she and JFK Jr. married in 1996 is being built from scratch.
Murphy lists off some of costume designer Lou Eyrich’s ever-increasing inventory: “We have multiple pairs of Manolo black heels and sandals from 1992 to 1999. We have the Manolo boots she wore in black and brown. We have her Prada tall boots. We have her Prada bags. We have the Birkin No. 40 that we have taken to a specialist to scruff it up so it looks identical to the one she would wear half-open on the subway.”
In September, months before “American Love Story” premieres on FX on Valentine’s Day, Murphy reveals he is going to release 20 short videos showing images of Bessette-Kennedy alongside Pidgeon in full character to illustrate Eyrich’s work and attention to detail.
Sadly, Murphy believes, scrutiny hurled at the show’s Carolyn is eerily similar in to how the media and public treated Bessette-Kennedy. “We’re writing a story about a person – an unknown person – who falls in love with the most famous man in the world and suddenly she can’t leave her house,” Ryan says. “She was constantly being photographed, being called a cunt by the paparazzi.”
Her every move and fashion choice was dissected ad nauseum. “They’re doing to our Carolyn, what they did to the real-life Carolyn,” Murphy says. “It’s not fair.”
Most surprising, Murphy said, was Vogue’s recent interview with Brad Johns, Bessette-Kennedy’s now-retired hairstylist responsible for her signature blonde locks. “Totally wrong, the opposite of what we were going for,” Johns told the magazine. “If you show that on TV and fashion people see it, they are going to think, why the fuck is she all ashed out with her hair only one color?”
Murphy isn’t happy with the fashion magazine. He says Vogue never reached out to him for comment. “The hairstylist couldn’t even tell the difference between real hair and a wig because he insisted it was Sarah’s real hair. It wasn’t. It was a wig,” Murphy says. “Why didn’t Vogue call us and ask, ‘Let’s talk about your decisions. What are your reference photos?’ It’s interesting because Vogue called several times with interest in covering the show, but one of the first things they write is this without even checking with our us?”
A rep for Vogue did not comment for this story.
A day after Murphy and I chat, JFK Jr.’s nephew Jack Schlossberg released a video on Instagram saying that the family is not consulting on the show. This follows a post earlier this month in which he implored Murphy to donate show profits to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
“I am going to donate,” Murphy says. “I also like Jack’s Instagram when he just lip syncs to ’90s girl groups stuff. I want more of that. But I think it would be really hard if your relatives are always in the media.”
Kennedy and Bessette died in a plane crash on July 16, 1999 when JFK Jr. was flying his wife, and her sister, Lauren, from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard for a family wedding.
In the end, Murphy says he takes full responsibility for deciding to release the camera test images. “If I ever do something like that again, I have to put a warning label on the top of the caption, explaining to people what the process is,” he says. “But I was trying to protect our actors from being absolutely swarmed by the paparazzi. But that’s on me. I made a mistake, and I’ve learned from it.”
