“Star-crossed”: Love Story’s doomed Shakespearean romance

For a certain audience, the new FX series Love Story probably brings to mind Taylor Swift’s song of the same name. Other folks of a certain age (mine) might confuse it with the film adaptation of Erich Segal’s 1970 novel Love Story starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. But viewers of every age might be surprised by the number of Shakespearean elements in the nine-episode miniseries that fictionalizes the doomed relationship between John F. Kennedy, Jr. and his wife Carolyn Bessette. And they’re not all from Romeo and Juliet.

Our fascination with the Kennedys, America’s unofficial “royal family,” rivals Shakespeare’s fascination with the Plantagenets, the generations of English kings he chronicled in eight history plays covering over a hundred years and filled with arranged marriages, familial and political rebellions, shifting alliances, and competing dynasties. Love Story is the most recent filmed treatment of members of the Kennedy clan but it won’t be the last; as Sam Shaw, executive producer of the forthcoming Netflix miniseries Kennedy, explains, “The story of the Kennedys is the closest we have to American mythology—somewhere between Shakespeare and The Bold and the Beautiful.”

As conceived by Love Story’s creator Connor Hines, the character of John F. Kennedy, Jr. lives in the shadow of a President father he barely remembers and, like Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part One, is unwilling to accept the mantle of destiny and expectation that’s been passed down to him. Paul Anthony Kelly also plays him as simply unable: a lost, naive, immature, and reckless boy-king surrounded by bros and cousins, not unlike Shakespeare’s Richard II. Even John’s signature achievement, the creation of George magazine, which advertised itself as “Not Just Politics As Usual,” struggled to find a readership in part because John was unwilling to trade on his own personal celebrity. “You’re a f***ing tragedy,” John’s business partner tells him in one of the show’s heavier-handed allusions to Shakespeare.

The public fascination with the Kennedy family is both the reason Love Story exists and the central dramatic tension between its two lovers. Though John enjoys being in the public eye, he fails to understand what such attention has cost his sister Caroline and will cost his wife Carolyn. “John’s never lost his anonymity,” Carolyn tells her sister Lauren. “He never had any.” As Shakespeare’s Henry IV tells Prince Hal that he “hast lost thy princely privilege / With vile participation,” Caroline tells John, “I had to make a lot of choices to maintain a semblance of privacy” and warns him that Carolyn’s “relationship with the press won’t change until yours does.” As Carolyn’s isolation and feeling of entrapment increases, you keep hoping John’s Hal will transform into Henry V, “disguise his fair nature with hard-favored rage,” and break up the siege of paparazzi camped outside their downtown loft.

Sarah Pidgeon is the reason Love Story works as well as it does, playing Carolyn with a surprising and welcome amount of grit and depth. The casting across the board, in fact, is stellar, and it’s fascinating to see, for example, political royalty Caroline Kennedy (daughter of John) played by acting royalty Grace Gummer (daughter of Meryl Streep). Similarly, the casting of such second- and third-generation actors as Sydney Lemmon (granddaughter of Jack), Dree Hemingway (daughter of Mariel and great-granddaughter of novelist Ernest), and Talia Balsam (daughter of actors Martin and Joyce Van Patten) makes you realize how many of Shakespeare’s plays about political dynasties are actually about those we might affectionately call nowadays “nepo babies.”

Love Story contains other Shakespearean touches. During their early courtship, there’s an amusing “War of the Roses” montage where Carolyn refuses the daily bouquets John sends her. Carolyn’s job working with Calvin Klein allows for many scenes of the lovers donning clothes like battle armor (and has revived interest in 90s fashion generally and Carolyn’s style particularly). Family matriarchs—first Jackie Kennedy Onassis, then Ethel Kennedy—hold court like Shakespearean kings. Reflecting on the tremendous losses her family has suffered, Ethel says to Carolyn, “I’ve been blessed with a lot to lose” in a moment that resembles John of Gaunt’s great speech in Richard II about “the envy of less happier lands, / This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

In literary terms, tragedy is inevitable and Love Story makes the case—true or not—that it was inevitable for John and Carolyn, too. “Every story needs a protagonist and an antagonist,” Carolyn’s sister Lauren warns her. “John is the living embodiment of a protagonist, which means that you only have one role that you can play.” Their deaths in the plane that John was flying to Martha’s Vineyard invariably conjure the fate of Shakespeare’s “star-crossed” lovers Romeo and Juliet, but here there is also the inescapable sense that John and Carolyn achieved a peace in death they would never receive in life.

At the actual memorial service for Kennedy and the Bessette sisters, Caroline Kennedy read 11 lines from Prospero’s speech at the end of The Tempest, beginning with “Our revels now are ended” and ending with “and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” Though Love Story doesn’t recreate this moment, it does show Carolyn’s mother Ann reading “Death is Nothing at All” by Henry Scott Holland at the memorial service, followed by lines added by scriptwriter Hines from another poem that accompanies images of John and Carolyn in happier times. “‘Do not stand by my grave and cry,’” Ann recites. “‘I am not there. I did not die,’” which are the concluding lines of a poem called, appropriately enough, “Immortality.” One benefit of turning real people into fictional characters is that “thanks to Love Story,” as Lisa DePaolo, a former George colleague of John’s, says, “an entire new generation knows who John and Carolyn were.” As Shakespeare understood, the power of art and dramatic storytelling allows long-gone mortals to live.