Not long before the release of the eagerly anticipated Disney+ series Love Story, one of its stars gave a revealing interview to the entertainment industry bible Variety.
Over the course of nine episodes, Love Story explores the tumultuous romance between John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette – a relationship that began while Kennedy was still dating Hollywood actress Daryl Hannah, then a global star thanks to her role in the classic rom-com Splash.
Hannah, now 65, is played by 38-year-old actress Dree Hemingway (great-granddaughter of writer Ernest Hemingway) who revealed to Variety that once filming had wrapped she wrote to Hannah to say what an honour it had been to portray her, and how she had ‘fallen in love with her as a human being’.
‘This whole project was made with so much love, and it is a love story that isn’t supposed to be factual,’ she added.
So far, so Hollywood, you might think.
Such saccharine tributes are hardly unusual – even if those who had already viewed the series, in which Hannah is depicted as a whiny, air-headed, clingy, cocaine-snorting nightmare, might have struggled to square that with Hemingway’s insistence on a ‘loving’ portrayal. What happened next, however, was entirely atypical.
For while Hannah did not respond personally to Hemingway’s message, it turns out she had a great deal to say publicly – largely centred on her view of quite how ‘factual’ Love Story had turned out to be.
In a blistering editorial for the New York Times last Friday, she condemned what she called her ‘irritating, self-absorbed, whiny and inappropriate’ characterisation in the series, decrying it as ‘not even a remotely accurate representation of my life, my conduct or my relationship with John’.
Love Story, a new Disney+ series, explores the tumultuous relationship between John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette. The couple pictured in May 1999
The relationship began while Kennedy was still dating Hollywood actress Daryl Hannah, now 65, who is depicted in the series as a whiny, air-headed, clingy, cocaine-snorting nightmare
The ‘appalling’ portrayal had led to ‘real-life consequences’, she added, not least hate mail from viewers who believed what they had seen on screen. ‘In the weeks since the series aired, I have received many hostile and even threatening messages from viewers who seem to believe the portrayal is factual,’ she wrote.
In Hollywood terms, this was the verbal equivalent of throwing a grenade – and Hannah wasn’t the only one willing to pull the pin.
Her intervention quickly drew support from actresses including Jamie Lee Curtis and Rosanna Arquette, the latter calling the portrayal ‘b******t’.
So affronted are some Kennedy family members, meanwhile, that they have abandoned their usual discretion to enter the fray, with JFK Jr’s cousin Douglas Kennedy – son of Robert F Kennedy and his wife, Ethel – telling the Daily Mail this week that he too believed the show was a ‘misrepresentation’.
‘It seems like they have made this storyline up. It’s really awful,’ he said. ‘Everybody around when Daryl Hannah was around loved her. She was fun, she was funny and she made everybody’s lives better.
‘It’s terrible to portray her as anything but a kind and caring person who, as far as I knew, everybody loved. Nobody has ever said anything other than terrific things about Daryl Hannah.’
Douglas, 58, added: ‘The confident, self-possessed tone of that piece in the New York Times is exactly why John loved her. To portray her as anything but that is an injustice and awful.’
It is certainly an unexpected fallout from a series broadcast in a year that would have marked the 30th wedding anniversary of John and Carolyn, who first met in 1992 and married in 1996, reigniting interest in their intense, but ultimately doomed, love affair.
Alongside Carolyn’s sister Lauren, 34, the couple, then respectively 38 and 33, died instantly when a light aircraft piloted by John crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, on July 16, 1999, bringing to a tragic end an affair that had captivated America.
Love Story follows the trajectory of the Kennedy-Bessette relationship from the moment the couple first met through American fashion designer Calvin Klein, for whom Carolyn was a trusted publicist.
JFK Jr and Daryl Hannah arrive at a wedding in 1993. The pair had known each other since their teens
Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr and Dree Hemingway as Ms Hannah, who has slammed the show as ‘not even a remotely accurate representation of my life’
In contrast to the effortlessly cool Carolyn – so poised in the TV show that she seems barely to care whether the man once dubbed the ‘world’s sexiest’ by People magazine is interested in her or not – Hannah, with whom John is still involved when he first encounters Carolyn, is portrayed as needy, not terribly bright and increasingly desperate.
The viewer first meets Hannah when John returns to the Manhattan loft they share to find the actress has flown in unexpectedly from Los Angeles.
‘Missed you,’ she simpers.
In another scene she coyly asks for some ‘candy’ on a film set when offered tea or coffee, while her dialogue grows no more dignified as the episodes go on.
‘All I want is for you to need me as much as I need you,’ she later tells him, gazing imploringly from beneath her fringe.
At a cringe-inducing dinner at the home of JFK’s mother Jacqueline – by then twice widowed following the death of her second husband, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis – Hannah is depicted as so gauche she can barely make conversation.
Meanwhile Jackie, played by Naomi Watts, can so little bear Hannah’s company that she opts to have dinner taken to her bedroom.
Nor is that the worst of it.
In the series Hannah is shown hosting a cocaine-fuelled party, gatecrashing a family memorial for Jackie after her May 1994 death, despite the couple having split, and behaving in ways she insists bear no resemblance to reality – including crassly comparing John’s grief at the loss of his mother to her own at the death of her pet dog Hank.
‘I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fuelled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone’s private memorial,’ she wrote, referencing other standout moments in the drama. The heirloom reference relates to a scene in which it appears she is about to snort cocaine off a silver platter that John angrily snatches from her.
‘These are not creative embellishments of personality. They are assertions about conduct – and they are false,’ she wrote.
It is a strikingly forceful intervention, particularly for an actress who in recent years has chosen a quiet life far from Hollywood, living on a Colorado ranch with singer Neil Young, her husband of eight years, and a menagerie of animals.
While she still takes occasional roles, her professional activities in the past decade or so have focused significantly less on mainstream acting and more on directing, producing, environmental activism and supporting animal charities.
Kennedy and Ms Hannah in 1994. Their relationship ended the same year and the actress has since rarely spoken publicly about it
Dree Hemingway (great-granddaughter of writer Ernest Hemingway) wrote to Hannah to say what an honour it had been to portray her, and how she had ‘fallen in love with her’
I n the 80s, however, Hannah was one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, with roles in Blade Runner (1982) and Splash (1984) cementing her status. Quite when her relationship with JFK Jnr began is unclear, although they had known each other since their teens, as their families had shared business connections and, on one occasion, had both holidayed on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin.
For much of the decade Hannah was stepping out with musician Jackson Browne but when, in 1988, she and John Jr were spotted ‘smooching’ on the steps of a New York brownstone townhouse, the rumour mill went into overdrive.
Yet since the end of the relationship in 1994 – when John officially started dating Carolyn – the actress has rarely spoken publicly about it, turning down lucrative offers for tell-all interviews and refusing to write a memoir despite repeated approaches from publishers.
On the rare occasions she has broken her silence, it has usually been to correct what she considers false versions of events.
In 2004, for example, she told radio host Howard Stern that rumours Jackie Kennedy had disapproved of her were untrue. ‘It’s just not true,’ she told him. ‘I had a great relationship with her, really, but I won’t go into some of the more personal details.’
More recently she pushed back against claims in a 2019 biography of JFK Jr by his friend Steve Gillon that the couple had ultimately split after their dog Hank was killed in an accident in Central Park for which John was said to have felt responsible, having accidentally let him slip the leash.
‘These nutty stories proliferate and persist nevertheless,’ she wrote. ‘Apparently I’ve ended relationships over dog funerals, urns and required all kinds of odd and lavish things on their behalf.’
Now comes her most forceful intervention yet – one backed by friends, colleagues and, as we have seen, members of the Kennedy circle. The actress Rosanna Arquette, a great friend of Hannah’s, said: ‘Her love with John F Kennedy Jr was real and some of the happiest times John F Kennedy Jr had – just ask his family. But no one did.’
Jamie Lee Curtis showed her support more succinctly, sharing Hannah’s New York Times essay on social media accompanied by the single word: ‘IMPORTANT.’
Even contemporaries who have not yet watched the series appear inclined to take her side. Hamilton South, a close friend and confidant of both John and Carolyn, told the Daily Mail this week that he didn’t plan to watch the series but felt compelled to point out that many of those depicted were no longer here to defend themselves.
‘I did read Daryl’s piece in The New York Times,’ he said. ‘It was excellent and it hit the nail on the head. What a shame everyone else in the show is dead and can’t be here to correct the record alongside Daryl Hannah.’
That, of course, includes JFK Jr himself who, Douglas Kennedy insisted this week, would have been deeply upset by the way his former girlfriend has been depicted. ‘John really cared for her and I think would be very upset at this,’ he told the Daily Mail.
No doubt this will make bittersweet reading for Love Story’s creator, Connor Hines, who has tried to make a virtue of the fact he did not consult the Kennedy family when making the series, believing it was ‘more healthy and effective to have some distance from the subject matter’.
Meanwhile, while acknowledging that Daryl Hannah functions as an antagonist in the story, describing her as a necessary narrative ‘adversary’ to John and Carolyn’s storyline, series producer Nina Jacobson insisted it was done thoughtfully. ‘We always try to come from a place of compassion,’ she said in an interview.
One imagines this is cold comfort for Hannah whose unusually public defence has led some to wonder whether legal action could follow, among them the well-known New York-based critic Peter Travers, who wrote ‘she could win a defamation case based on how much this show hates her’.
Others, however, have questioned the wisdom of her speaking out, among them publicist Mitchell Jackson. He told the Daily Mail that while Hannah’s motives were understandable, speaking out so forcefully risked drawing more attention to the very portrayal she disliked. ‘If the goal was to minimise discussion of her relationship with JFK Jr, she’s done the opposite,’ he said.
‘People are making money off her story. Maybe she should write her own book and make some money as well.’
Veteran PR Norah Lawlor, who knew JFK Jr personally, believes the situation was almost inevitable. ‘When two publicly known figures are in a relationship, there is always the risk that someone else will one day create a narrative for public consumption,’ she said. ‘The choice then becomes whether you try to shape the story or hold your peace and live with how others define you.’
This time of course, Daryl Hannah has chosen to speak out – though in doing so, she may have ensured the story she dislikes will be talked about more than ever.
Indeed, as Dree Hemingway admitted in that Variety interview: ‘Not everyone is going to be happy. But it’s good that people are talking. I guess that’s all we could really want.’
Read the full article here
