Andrew Blum
Andrew Blum

If you’re like a lot of people, you have been obsessed with “Love Story,” the FX series that has been airing for the past eight weeks about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.

I have been watching it and it brought up lots of memories of the 1990s. But it also put a question in my head: why didn’t Kennedy use crisis PR to deal with the paparazzi, the news media and the tabloids?

As a celebrity-turned-journalist we know he used PR for George, the glossy political magazine which he unveiled at that now famous press conference with the picture of Cindy Crawford posing as George Washington on the cover of the first issue.

Additionally, several important people in his life knew the PR world – Bessette was a fashion publicist for Calvin Klein, his George co-founder Michael Berman had a PR background, and RoseMarie Terenzio, his personal assistant and George chief of staff, handled PR for JFK Jr.

But why no was there no crisis PR to help JFK Jr. and Bessette, who were hounded by the paparazzi after their 1996 wedding?

“Love Story” is mostly based on the 2024 biography "Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy" by Elizabeth Beller. The series appears to have taken some artistic license as its facts and truth have been criticized, especially Jack Schlossberg, JFK Jr.’s nephew, and actress Darryl Hannah, who had a relationship with JFK Jr. before he met and married Bessette.

As with a lot of TV shows and movies based on real events and real people, it hard to know what really went on behind the scenes with someone’s life versus what is portrayed on screen.

One thing that seems to ring true is that JFK Jr. wanted to do things himself – without a crew of support people hanging around him. This apparently was the case when it came to paparazzi, which Bessette hated, while JFK Jr. had adapted to being in the public eye since he was a little boy. (JFK Jr. even liked the New York Post, whose “The Hunk Flunks” headline took a jab at him failing the bar exam.)

The paparazzi and media hounding was bad after their wedding, but it only seemed to be worse for Bessette after Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris in 1997 as she and her boyfriend were chased by French paparazzi.

According to another book, JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography, while many celebrities were going on TV to discuss the paparazzi and the risks they posed, JFK Jr. found it "disingenuous." Instead, the book said, "John felt that the more scrum you had around you—security guards, a publicist, a manager—that created some of that momentum of being pursued." (That 2024 book was written by Terenzio and Liz McNeil.)

So why didn't JFK Jr. use crisis PR? When I pose that question here, I don’t mean it to only apply to stories in the media about he and Bessette – I also mean in dealing with the paparazzi.

I know the paparazzi – and photographers in general – can be a handful for anyone. They can be intrusive and relentless to get the photo. When I was a print and wire service reporter, I found TV crews and photographers to be somewhat of a nuisance but when I got into PR, I had a newfound respect and need for TV cameras.

In pushing back with the media on negative stories and relentless coverage, there are ways to deal with it. I have had to go over reporters’ heads to talk to their editors, and I once had to call a TV reporter on his cell phone to get him and his crew off the lawn of the home of a client facing non-stop crisis media coverage. In a crisis, I have had to spin reporters endlessly to the nth degree.

I have also seen news photographers swarm a criminal defendant on their way into court to the point he was unable to get out of his car. Not much to do there except say let him out of the car.

The paps are a different story all together. But they still have editors and producers who they work for or sell their pictures to. Who to call? A crisis PR consultant.

While JFK Jr. no doubt tried his best to deal with the paps himself on behalf of Bessette, a crisis PR effort might have helped more with that pushback.

But apparently, he didn’t want that.

Terenzio, who oversaw Kennedy’s PR and philanthropic causes, wrote a 2015 piece in The Hollywood Reporter discussing how JFK Jr. wanted to handle gossip and the media.

“John was careful about what he said. He thought before he spoke, but at the end of the day, I don’t think he would’ve had the stomach to be apologizing every five minutes for something that was taken out of context,” Terenzio wrote. “When it came to media stories or anything that was blowing up, the more crazy things would get, the calmer he would get. He wasn’t going to justify himself or address every rumor and every story, and I think people do that now, to an extreme.”

Clearly, JKF Jr. liked things on his own terms – he opted not to live in a doorman building so there was less defense against the paps outside his apartment, and he took flying lessons, a pursuit which ultimately led to his death and that of Bessette and her sister in that plane crash on July 16, 1999.

I can’t say how much a crisis PR approach would have ultimately helped but it couldn’t have hurt.

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Andrew Blum of AJB Communications is a PR consultant and media trainer who has directed proactive and crisis PR for a wide range of clients and issues, including a Sandy Hook parent, John Edwards, Jack Abramoff, Richard Scrushy, and former NY governor George Pataki. He has also directed PR for more than 50 authors, and for professional and financial services firms, NGOs, startups and PR agencies. Email: [email protected] or Twitter: @ajbcomms