Love Story Captures the Strangeness of Being a Kennedy

Love Story explores the corrosive effects of celebrity.

I grew up in a house full of magazines. We always had lots of subscriptions—to Time, Entertainment Weekly, and Rolling Stone—and we loved to buy single issues, too. The first two-story Barnes & Noble opened in Pittsburgh at some time in the mid-1990s, with its horizonless rows of magazine stands. Most of what I learned about music (CMJ magazine, with the CD insert) and literature (The Paris Review, The New Criterion) as an adolescent, I learned in those shelves. If you’d asked me what I wanted to do by the time I was going off to college, I would have told you I wanted to start a magazine.

Part of that was the influence of Dave Eggers, whose rise as a literary star—and as a literary magazine impresario—came at precisely that time. But part of it, to be honest, was the influence of JFK Jr. I know for certain that we had a subscription to George magazine. Founded in 1995 by Kennedy and Michael Berman, George billed itself as a revolution in political journalism. Brandishing the tagline, “Not just politics as usual,” George was a slick, sexy magazine that combined wonky analysis with pop cultural savvy. The magazine accomplished this mostly by way of aesthetics: provocative interview pairings, candy-colored pop visuals, punchy, vaguely horny headlines like, “Latin Heat!: Salma Hayek and the New Latino Power Brokers Are Making America Sizzle,” or, “Mary Bono: The Republicans Find a Sex Symbol.” The cover of its inaugural issue featured Cindy Crawford dressed as the magazine’s namesake George Washington, with an anachronistically exposed midriff. A later issue luridly featured Drew Barrymore dressed as Marilyn Monroe above a headline that read, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” No matter what other mission statements or theses undergirded the magazine, ultimately, it was all about the Kennedys.

JFK Jr. used the power of his name to try to build a new American institution with youthful verve and irreverence. As a child, it struck me as a cool idea. But that’s mostly all it ever became. Beset by behind-the-scenes drama and lacking a clear vision beyond its elevator pitch, George flashed brightly and faded. In retrospect, its insight that politics weren’t just compatible with pop culture, they were pop culture seems prophetic. Before he died in 1999, Kennedy was planning to have the magazine host a series of online interviews with presidential candidates for the 2000 election. Maybe George was on the verge of finding renewed life, and a proper home, within the wild west of the internet. Or maybe Kennedy had just gotten distracted by a different, glossy new thing.

George was all I knew of JFK Jr. back then. So perhaps I am the ideal viewer for FX’s new Ryan........

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