Exclusive Interview
‘Love Story’: How JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette’s Infamous Park Fight Was Brought to TV
What To Know
- Episode 5 of FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette dramatizes the couple’s infamous 1996 Battery Park fight, which was widely publicized.
- The episode explores the emotional complexities behind the fight, including issues around John’s proposal, Carolyn’s insistence on a private life, and more.
- Executive producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson explained how they adapted such a publicized moment.
One of the lowest points in John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s relationship was captured for the entire world to see and judge. In Episode 5 of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, the series tackles the couple’s shocking fight in Battery Park, which took place 30 years ago on February 25, 1996.
Photos of John and Carolyn yelling and grabbing at each other, with their dog still on his leash nearby, were splashed all across the tabloids. The FX series goes beyond what we’ve seen in the photos and gets up close and personal with John and Carolyn, played by Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon, as the tension between them reaches a breaking point. (Warning: Spoilers ahead!)
“There are two instances that happened that jacked up her fame level,” executive producer Brad Simpson told Swooon. “The first was this fight in the park because it was a really early version of a viral video. This was a time where people were taking camera pictures of you, but you weren’t going to get videotaped. And so it really was one of the early versions of a viral video, and it got dissected and splashed on covers of newspapers and tabloids across America. It was a couple having this sort of intense fight you might have, but suddenly everyone in the world is watching, and it was a fight that went on for a long time, and we had all this footage. We knew there were specific pieces. There’s him yelling at her so angry, and then there’s her tackling him, and there’s her trying to take the ring back, him trying to take the ring off of her, and then there’s a point where they’re like, sitting down and looking miserable, and then at a point where they’re crying and moving around the city.”
Eric Liebowitz / FX
The writer for Episode 5, Kim Rosenstock, had the challenge of deciphering what John and Carolyn were fighting about. “We knew that she had turned down his proposal, and we knew that she was wearing the ring, but they weren’t really engaged,” Simpson said. “We knew that was part of it, and we knew about things that have been boiling up. And Kim, I thought, wrote an amazing fight that feels like a real couple fight, and she had to imagine how they come back together.”
Simpson noted that Pidgeon and Kelly’s acting sounded so real that “we got reported to the police while shooting in Tompkins Square Park, pretending to be Battery Park at the time. We saw on the Citizens app that people were calling in, ‘There’s a big fight in the park. These people are tackling each other.'”
Later, the dog playing JFK Jr. and Carolyn’s pup, Friday, got “so freaked out by their intensity that it was like a real fight that we had to take him off set because he was getting freaked out about how real the fight was. We studied every frame. We had it with us from where they had their jackets on because we knew it’d be dissected, and that was one of the big things that made her incredibly famous.”
Fellow executive producer Nina Jacobson admitted that chronicling this fight in the series with care and giving Carolyn a voice was essential because she was “so scrutinized and obsessively scrutinized, and yet, very few people ever really heard her speak and really got to hear her version of this story. She felt like she had more attention than she deserved to begin with and didn’t feel like she needed to step into that spotlight any more than she had already been thrust into it.”
In the episode, Carolyn and John fight after he denies proposing to her (even though he did, and she initially said no for the moment) in a quippy remark at his George magazine launch. She’s furious that he brought up their private life to the press at the first opportunity it was convenient for him.
“None of this would have happened if you’d accepted my proposal like a normal person,” he yells. Their argument escalates, and he grabs her hand to take the ring off her finger. When he walks away, Carolyn tackles him to try to stop him.
John says Carolyn is “lucky” because she’s “crazy” and “complicated,” but he still loves her. Carolyn says John is a “spoiled brat” who is obsessed with his image. Later, outside the park, John and Carolyn are trying to figure out a way forward. “Why can’t we just love each other?” John cries. The tensions between them are still raw, and they split open again when he refers to Friday as “my dog” instead of “our dog.”
FX
Eventually, they find their way back to solid ground. Carolyn has a few more questions for John, including the big one: “Do you think you might want to be president one day?” He says no. “I don’t want to be a great man. I just want to be a good man, good partner, to you,” he tells Carolyn.
Carolyn confesses that she’s never thought about getting married or being a wife before now. “I don’t think marriage is necessary, but I’m down to do it with you,” she says to John, before realizing the magnitude of her words. Carolyn’s eyes well up with tears, and she officially says yes to marrying John.
Jacobson pointed out that it was crucial to “really understand things from her point of view, take the research, take what we know and understand about her as a character and as a human being, and then try to imagine what she would say, and try to give voice to somebody whose voice you don’t know that well.”
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, Thursdays, FX and Hulu
