I Worked for JFK Jr. I Thought I Would Sob. I Laughed.

So now I have to admit that I’m watching it. This is a touchy subject for those who actually knew John and Carolyn. Do you purposely and deliberately not watch, assuming Love Story — Ryan Murphy’s latest extravaganza dramatizing their relationship and tragic death — will be dreck that they’d both have hated? In solidarity with John’s beloved nephew Jack Schlossberg, who was the ring-bearer at his secret wedding, and who, months before a trailer was even released, accused Murphy of profiting off his uncle “in a grotesque way”? Yikes. Shouldn’t we all be virtue-signaling and (grandly) announce that we will not be watching it?

Well, no. I worked for John at George. He started a magazine, for chrissake. And one of the reasons he was an excellent editor (yes, he was) was because John had the No. 1 quality of a great editor: an insatiable curiosity. Journalists are curious. He also, in a very Tina Brown kind of way, wouldn’t miss something that was so clearly part of the zeitgeist. Everyone’s talking about this. It was the same reason he invited his staff to a dinner party (with big-screen TV)  at the Racquet Club the night Monica Lewinsky blabbed all to Barbara Walters — even though he was visibly uncomfortable, squirming through the whole thing, just the idea of this thing, a 21-year-old intern talking about flashing her thong and then fellating the President of the United States in the oval office. Ick. But of course he watched. And I think he’d have hate-watched Love Story.

So, I gathered my tissue boxes, and I did cry — before it started. That choked-upness that comes at any John trigger, and there are so many. JFK airport can do it to me. But the lead-up to this series has been a nonstop bombardment.  Then it started. And first, I was pissed. The opening of the pilot, obnoxiously named “Pilot” (get it?), is focused on their normal-for-them lives before they get to the airport. John is at the office, talking to staff, handwriting a personal note. Yeah, he would do that. Then, Murphy recycles that old debunked trope, first promulgated by Ed Klein in Vanity Fair (as John used to say, “He had one lunch with my mother and has been dining out on it ever since”), that they were late taking off because Carolyn kept getting her toenail polish changed, to the perfect shade of lavender. In Love Story, it’s her fingernail polish and it’s red, though Carolyn never wore nail polish on her fingers, and certainly not red (red was for lipstick). But that shit doesn’t bother me in a fictionalized miniseries. What does bother me is the implication that her vanity caused the crash. As Klein’s source has explained numerous times, she left the salon before 5:00. The plane took off at 8:15. Jeesh. Let it go.

It was the Jackie depiction that had me howling. Naomi Watts did such a spectacular job playing Babe Paley in Murphy’s previous miniseries (that I mostly loved) Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, that I expected big things from her Jackie. I did not expect a cartoon character that was too off-the-charts to even be considered camp, from her first scene, where she is at her dining-room table in her Park Avenue apartment, imperiously ringing a dinner bell to summon the help. But the hilariously bad Jackie scene comes in Episode 3. You know that great portrait of President Kennedy that hangs in the White House, the pensive one where he is glancing down, the one Jackie actually did approve? Well, Murphy has it in her apartment. And one night, all alone in a dark room (where’s Maurice, you damn fool?!), and knowing she is dying, she puts Camelot on the record player (well, it was 1994), lifts up the painting in her fragile state, and dances with it to Camelot. Are you fucking kidding me, Ryan Murphy? Of all the zillions of Jackie stories in circulation for 70 years, some of them true, this is what you pull out of your ass?

And what’s his beef with Daryl Hannah, who comes across as a certifiable ditz? Clingy, dim, goofy, stoned. Was/Is she that much of a flake? I never met the woman, but I can’t imagine that John, who was preternaturally attracted to smart strong women, could have lasted five minutes, let alone five years, with Murphy’s Hannah. It’s all so comical that even when John accidentally gets her dog killed (which, apparently, is true), I didn’t cry.

And whoever cast Rose Marie Terenzio, John’s effortlessly hip executive assistant, as a fat and dowdy bore, should be taken out in an alley and beaten up.

In fact, the actors that offended me the least were the main characters. Let’s be real. This had to be the bitch of all casting assignments. Starting with Carolyn, who never gave a single interview in all the years she was with John. Sarah Pidgeon had little more than mythology to work with. I don’t pretend to have known Carolyn well. I knew her the way you know a boss’ wife — being seated next to her at dinner parties, sneaking out for a smoke together, that kind of stuff. She was, as Pigeon portrays her, smart as a whip and funny. And in that sense — plus the indescribable aura of Carolyn, that thing she had where you just knew, of course John would be head over heels for her — Pigeon nails it. She also had that elusive mix of confidence and empathy that made both men and women love her. Pigeon nails that too.

About Paul Anthony Kelly. Does he look like John? No one looks like John. (Or Carolyn.) So cut him a break there. But don’t actors have to prepare for their roles? Shouldn’t someone have sent him to the gym for a few months to get rid of those flabby abs? On John Kennedy? Horrors! Or at least not shoot him the way you’d shoot John Kennedy, naked to the waist in a locker room or Central Park. (Nice package, though.)

What Kelly does get right, and it’s no small thing, is John’s mannerisms, the way he walked, the way he locked up his bike. Or forgot to lock up his bike. That was real. And the lateness. That was real, too. He also, in most scenes, though not all, captures his voice. John had a distinctive way of speaking, the cadence, the intonation. When he sounded like him, I got chills. And he got the banter, the rhythm, which we also should credit the screenwriters for. John was a gifted conversationist. He could return the volley with anyone. And he often did so with humor and self-deprecation. Kelly gets that, too. One quibble: Kelly has said in interviews that he tried to get the lisp down. What lisp? This was news to me. Was there something about his intonation that you might call a faintly discernable stammer? Ok. But lisp? Nah. John Kennedy did not lisp, for chrissake. And in any event, it is way overplayed.

Here’s where I did choke up. The spot-on depiction of the ‘90s in New York. The Odeon! Which John loved. Pay phones. Business lunches at Michael’s. Book parties with gift bags. That soundtrack. And especially the publishing world of the ‘90s, when magazines were on fire and George was the new bright shiny object. How I miss those days. And I’m sure I will ugly-cry eventually. We haven’t gotten to the crash.

Would John have liked Love Story? No. But I think he would have been happy about the depiction of his wife, at least as far as the first four episodes, as a smart and intoxicating creature. His mother? He’d have hated it. But laughed. When these things arise — documentaries, anniversary specials, the whole John Jr. oeuvre — I always ask, Is this good for his legacy? (That’s my virtue-signaling.) And they usually are. I like that, I like when 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds know who he was.

Love Story would not have come as a surprise to John. He got it. Though he might have wondered what took so long.