How Love Story Recreated John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s Wedding, Down to the Last Cigarette
The room watched JFK Jr. and Carolyn’s Wedding: The Lost Tapes to get a feel for the order of operations. Listening to attendees share memories from the occasion, we were struck by the joy and reverence and warmth that friends and family of the couple still felt about that weekend more than 20 years later.
We wanted the drama of the wedding episode to mimic the conflict surrounding any wedding, which is to say the drama of logistics. Who’s sitting where? Which friends made the cut for the guest list? Who’s wearing what? Unlike every other episode of the show, this is the one where John and Carolyn are in total lockstep, working as a team to achieve a shared goal. It’s them against the world. It’s the height of their romance, when everything seems possible.
The plan was to illustrate this with two moments set to iconic ’90s songs.
Moment one: Their dance to the Pulp song “Common People” at the top of the episode. But there was a snag: When it came time to clear the music rights, Pulp initially turned us down. We thought about other songs, but none really worked as well as the wonderfully ironic “Common People,” the lyrics of which describe the polar opposite of John and Carolyn: A working-class boy falling for a posh girl whose “dad was loaded.” As filming approached, our music supervisor, the uncommonly brilliant Jen Malone, wrote Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker a love letter about Pulp’s importance to her. We all crossed our fingers. At the last minute, Jen pulled it off: The song was cleared. I loved how director Gillian Robespierre filmed Paul Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon dancing: They look goofy and sexy and sleepy and stoned. It made their relationship seem so lived in, like one of Carolyn’s well-loved Prada coats.
Moment two: the skinny-dipping scene on the beach. We wanted it to feel like these two were the only people on Earth, because in that moment, for each other, they were. Given the tabloid frenzy that awaited them at home, we loved the vulnerability and freedom of John and Carolyn skinny-dipping out in the open. Someone could have seen them, but maybe for the last time in their lives, no one was looking. Initially, the idea was that they’d run into the ocean at night, and the vignette would be scored to “Nightswimming” by REM. The (far more producible) version that ended up in the show is more of a dawn swim. Apparently, it is not inexpensive to illuminate an entire body of water in the dead of night. Who knew? (Everyone in production.)
Eric Liebowitz/FX.
