The so-called “Kennedy Curse” was brought to life for a new generation on Thursday night, when Ryan Murphy’s controversial Love Story series depicted the plane crash deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette.
The Hulu series dramatizes the romantic relationship and almost three-year marriage between Kennedy (played by Paul Anthony Kelly) and Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon)—much to the chagrin of their real-life family members—and ends with their tragic deaths on July 16, 1999.
Kennedy piloted the small plane from New Jersey, which was destined for a family wedding in Martha’s Vineyard with his wife and her sister on board, before it crashed into the Atlantic. The story is part of a tragic pattern of events for the Kennedy family, leading to the urban legend about a bloodline curse.
Ethel Kennedy, the wife of Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968, is depicted in the series by Jessica Harper. In the finale, Harper’s Ethel tells Kennedy’s surviving sister, Caroline, about how she dealt with the deaths of her own parents, who also died in a plane crash.
The moment calls back to the family’s long history of tragic deaths, which has dragged on even through this past December, when John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, environmental journalist and author Tatiana Schlossberg, died at the age of 35 from a rare mutation of acute myeloid leukemia.
Schlossberg’s death rang back to some of the earliest tragedies, which seemed to originate in 1944, when Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane crash in World War II at just 29 years old. Four years later, tragedy struck again when Joseph’s sister, Kathleen Kennedy, also died in a plane crash at the age of 28.
Death hung over John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy a little over a decade later, as the couple lost two infant children—one in 1956 and another in 1963.
Those events preceded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, who was shot to death in Dallas while riding in a presidential motorcade at the age of 46. His brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was also assassinated five years later at the age of 42, while running for the Democratic nomination for president.
The following year, their brother, Sen. Ted Kennedy, was involved in a car accident that killed Mary Kopechne, who was 28 at the time. More accidental deaths would follow. Robert and Ethel lost their son, David Kennedy, to a drug overdose in 1984, and another son, Michael Kennedy, to a ski accident in 1997. They were 28 and 39, respectively.
JFK Jr., his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren were killed two years later. In 2012, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s estranged wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, took her own life at 52. And seven years later, RFK Sr.’s granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill was found deceased in her apartment from a drug overdose.
The string of premature deaths continued into the 2020s, when 40-year-old Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean and her eight-year-old son died in a drowning accident.
Four years later, Schlossberg was diagnosed with the cancer that would take her life the following year, just months after birthing her second child. She was the middle child of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg.
Knowledge of the long string of tragedies makes the reactions to JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s deaths at the end of Love Story even more devastating.
Caroline, played by Grace Gummer, had already lost both parents, as her mother, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, died from cancer in 1994, following the 1963 assassination of their father.
“Please don’t do this to me. I can’t do it again,” a sobbing Caroline tells husband Edwin Schlossberg (Ben Shenkman) in the finale, as she tries to stave off the compounding grief upon learning that her brother has died in the 1999 plane crash.
The character later offers a haunting reflection on her brother’s life that could also apply to many of the young Kennedys lost across generations.
“He spent his life bound to that little boy, desperate to free himself from a tragedy he couldn’t even remember,” Caroline says. “All he wanted was to simply be. All he’ll be remembered for is what he could have become.”
