The much-anticipated series about Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr. is still months away from its Valentine’s Day premiere.
But the production crew and trucks for Ryan Murphy’s “American Love Story” has been camped out in front of Kleinfeld, the emporium for wedding dresses on West 20th Street, in recent days. The plan is to shoot a scene of Sarah Pidgeon as the former Calvin Klein publicist and Paul Anthony Kelly as the George magazine founder en route to a charity event in a limousine. When the pair are stopped at a red traffic light and glance at a wedding dress in Kleinfeld’s windows, Bessette Kennedy’s character is said to make a comment about them getting married one day.
Although Bessette never shopped at Kleinfeld, the wedding dress that catches the character’s eye is “very similar” to the designer slipdress that Bessette chose, according to Jennette Kruszka, Kleinfeld’s director of marketing, public relations and events. For her September 1996 wedding, Bessette wore a bias-cut ivory silk dress with a billowing neckline that was designed by her friend Narciso Rodriguez.
You May Also Like
“American Love Story,” the yet-to-debut FX series fictionalizes the starry couple’s courtship, marriage and tragic deaths in 1999. But the show faced a landslide of criticism on social media after test shots of the leads surfaced last summer. It features Naomi Watts as Jacqueline Kennedy and Grace Gummer as the former First Daughter Caroline Kennedy. But CBK devotees took issue with the quality of Pidgeon’s clothes, the size of her Hermès Birkin bag and her hair color. Even Kennedy’s former colorist Brad Johns weighed in, saying, “…there must be some kind of glitch with the costume people or the hair people, because it’s not right — it’s all white and burnt,” according to a media report.
Earlier in the year, Kennedy’s nephew Jack Schlossberg sounded off on social media that the family had not been consulted about the project.
The flames were so stoked that Murphy addressed the criticism publicly. Given that, there’s no telling what the super-fans might make of the characters musing about marriage at a traffic light. IRL the couple’s road to marriage was said to be taken with more measured steps, according to one source, who said that Bessette agreed to move in with Kennedy after he made it clear that marriage was his intention and their relationship was moving in the right direction.
The silver-screen version of the provenance of the wedding dress could potentially irk a few too. Bessette befriended Rodriguez when they worked together at Calvin Klein. There is no portrayal of Rodriguez in the series, but Alessandro Nivola acts as Calvin Klein, Leila George plays Kelly Klein and Omari K. Chancellor portrays Gordon Henderson, another designer, who also worked at Calvin Klein at one point. Culture vultures who are in search of more nostalgia from that era have the option of Henry Carroll’s new book “The 1990s: A Visual History of the Decade.”
