One of the most unnerving moments in the history of Hollywood sci-fi is surely when Harrison Ford‘s robot-hunting cop is attacked by Daryl Hannah‘s psychotic blonde android in the 1982 movie Blade Runner.
After almost popping his head off between her perfect but super-powered thighs, she then nearly rips out his nostrils with her fingers before the leotard-clad ‘replicant’ somersaults towards him to deliver the coup de grace. Only when he unloads his gun into her body does her chilling screech subside into a whine.
Now, 44 years later, she’s whining again – only this time the man she’s squeezing the life out of is John F Kennedy Jr.
One cannot help but think that executive producer Ryan Murphy and his writer Connor Hines watched that scene before creating the script for Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette.
Because whatever injustices they’ve done to the star-crossed lovers at the center of the ultra-stylized FX series, they certainly get off far more lightly than poor Hannah, who was JFK Jr’s on-and-off girlfriend for five years before Bessette entered his orbit.
Surely the showrunners felt they needed a dramatic foil to highlight Bessette’s virtues and inevitably chose Hannah, somewhat unflatteringly casting Dree Hemingway (great-great-granddaughter of Ernest and daughter of fellow actress Mariel Hemingway) to play her.
Murphy is hardly known for subtlety, and every character is cartoonish, but nobody is lampooned quite so mercilessly as Hannah. Whiny, air-headed and coke-obsessed – she is the stereotypical Hollywood star.
And she is everything that Bessette – at least in Love Story’s reading – is not.
Daryl Hannah and JFK Jr (pictured together in 1993) dated for more than five years before their split in 1994
Murphy is hardly known for subtlety, and every character is cartoonish, but nobody is lampooned quite so mercilessly as Hannah, played by Dree Hemingway (pictured)
Bessette, who met Kennedy at a New York party in 1992 when he was still going out with Hannah, is cool, sassy, sharp, and doesn’t seem to care less if she gets the man who People magazine dubbed ‘the world’s sexiest man.’ She is so New York.
Hannah is so Hollywood – clueless (Kennedy family members give up trying to have an intellectual conversation with her over dinner), needy and vapid. Fatally for her chances of winning the battle of the blondes to bag Kennedy, she is pathetically desperate to keep him.
Murphy’s Hannah first appears when JFK Jr returns home from an evening being taunted by Bessette (and clearly loving it) to find the actress has come back from Los Angeles to be with him.
‘Missed you,’ she simpers in her first line of the series. In her next scene, while visiting a production set, she’s asked if she would like a tea or coffee. ‘I’d love some candy actually,’ she says, as if she’s ten.
She and JFK Jr later have an argument when he finds her standing on her head at a party she’s thrown in his apartment. ‘All I want is for you to need me as much as I need you,’ she later tells him, staring out imploringly from under her fringe.
She’s doomed.
The actress, now 65 and an environmental activist who has been married to rock star Neil Young since 2018, has yet to comment on the series, although plenty of others have complained on her behalf.
Why does Love Story have to be so hateful to Hannah, critics have asked, when there’s little evidence to support such a stance? Indeed, some of JFK Jr’s friends say she is the woman he should have actually married.
Even when the drama series addresses how John Jr ‘killed’ Hannah’s dog in the drama – as he did in real life – by allowing it to dash off and get run over while he signed an autograph, she is blamed as she’d just suddenly decided to go back to LA and dumped the hound on him.
Whiny, air-headed and coke-obsessed – in Murphy’s version of events, Hannah is the stereotypical Hollywood star
While some of John Jr’s friends hoped he’d marry Hannah, Love Story’s portrayal as their relationship as turbulent wasn’t a complete invention
At least, Hannah’s inclusion in Love Story provides a useful reminder that there was a time when the entire world didn’t seem obsessed with the unfeasibly glamorous love affair of ‘John-John’ and Carolyn. And that was a time, sadly, when it was obsessed with the equally engrossing relationship between the president’s son and the Hollywood star.
Just as the enormous pressure of dating arguably the world’s most eligible bachelor reportedly got to Bessette – turning her, it’s been said, into a paranoid, cocaine-snorting ice queen – so it got to her predecessor in that role.
Even being a Hollywood actress, whose previous boyfriend had been rock star Jackson Browne, didn’t prepare Hannah for the outside world’s endless fixation with her relationship with JFK Jr and, in particular, with whether they were about to get married.
‘It’s getting really annoying. I get asked about it all the time,’ she complained to Entertainment Weekly in 1993. ‘This morning, I call up my plumber, and even he asks me. Oh, brother, I’m just trying to get my pipes fixed. Why can’t people talk about something else?’
Hannah first met John, who was the same age, in the early 1980s while their respective families were both on vacation in Saint Martin in the Caribbean. At the time, she was establishing herself as an up-and-coming star with movies such as Blade Runner, Splash (1984) and crime drama The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) with Mickey Rourke.
She began dating Jackson Browne in 1983, and they didn’t part ways until 1992. Well before then, however, she reconnected with JFK Jr after seeing him again at the 1988 wedding of his aunt, Lee Radziwill, to director Herb Ross, who had worked with Hannah on the comedy drama Steel Magnolias.
Just a month later, it was reported that John was ‘comforting’ Hannah through a ‘bumpy time’ with Browne. When she finally left the musician for good four years later, Kennedy flew off to LA to do some more comforting and bring her back to New York. It was subsequently alleged that Browne assaulted the actress but he won a defamation lawsuit disputing the claims.
After Hannah and Kennedy were filmed by a TV camera crew ‘smooching’ on the steps of a New York brownstone, the rumor mill went into overdrive, encouraged by their undoubted penchant for making out in public. By December 1988 – just three months after they met again at the wedding – the media was already reporting that they were either engaged or about to be engaged.
She began dating Jackson Browne (pictured together) in 1983, and they didn’t part ways until 1992
By December 1988 – just three months after JFK Jr and Hannah met again at the wedding – the media was already reporting that they were either engaged or about to be engaged
Even being a Hollywood actress didn’t prepare Hannah for the outside world’s endless fixation with her relationship with JFK Jr
Sources said he loved her playful side although their relationship was stormy. ‘It felt somewhat young and a little bit maybe naive or immature compared to his relationship with Carolyn,’ Amelia Barlow, daughter of Grateful Dead musician Perry Barlow, one of John’s best friends, told People. ‘There was a little bit more, like, fire — and fight.’
It was clear, however, that John was juggling her with other women – in particular the actress Christina Haag, his girlfriend since 1985. A classmate from Brown, they had started seeing each other when they were cast together in an off-Broadway play – perhaps because of his own thespian ambitions, John, said insiders, preferred actresses.
Haag later revealed in a 2011 book, Come to the Edge: A Memoir, about her five-year relationship with John, how she repeatedly confronted him over the ‘other women’ and would always be reassured she was worrying over nothing.
‘When I asked him, he was evasive,’ she wrote of one such discussion about Hannah. ‘We’re just friends. She doesn’t even live here. And anyway, she has a boyfriend,’ he told her, Haag wrote.
And it wasn’t just Hannah. From 1989, John was also simultaneously seeing Julie Baker, a model (who looked not unlike his mother Jackie).
Then there was Madonna, who also had a fling with him in the late 1980s. Friends have said that the pop star – who was still married to actor Sean Penn at the time – ‘came on’ to the Kennedy, who was flattered. John was Madonna’s date at a party she threw at her brother Christopher’s loft on September 30, 1989.
According to Billy Noonan, John’s best friend for 25 years, JFK Jr told him how he once arranged to meet Madonna in a hotel suite then had to rush off to meet Haag. When he arrived late, smelling of Madonna’s scent, she quizzed him about the unusual perfume.
Without missing a beat, he told Haag that he’d been trying out scents in a department store to give to her as a gift, but he’d created too much of a stir by being in the store so he gave up on the idea.
‘He grimaced when I asked if she really believed him,’ wrote Noonan in his own book about his famous friend.
There were undoubtedly plenty more women, one-night stands by all accounts. Noonan recalled: ‘He would call my apartment in Boston during the workday and leave a message. Telling me to check out the cover of a certain magazine, John would proclaim, “I banged her last night. Just thought you might like to know.”‘
Noonan continued: ‘I would run down to the newsstand in my lobby and check out the babe on the cover, call him up, and get the details of how it happened.’
Just as the enormous pressure of dating arguably the world’s most eligible bachelor reportedly got to Bessette – turning her, it’s been said, into a paranoid, cocaine-snorting ice queen – so it got to her predecessor in that role
Sources said JFK Jr loved her playful side although their relationship was stormy
Haag (right) later revealed in her memoir about her five-year relationship with John, how she repeatedly confronted him over the ‘other women’ and would always be reassured she was worrying over nothing
Where did this leave Daryl Hannah? While some of John Jr’s friends hoped he’d marry her, Love Story’s portrayal as their relationship as turbulent wasn’t a complete invention.
Back when they were together, as the Washington Post remarked at the time, it was unusual for them to be sighted in public ‘neither kissing nor fighting.’
They had radically different backgrounds – Hannah was born in Chicago where her father ran a tugboat company, although after her parents divorced, her mother married wealthy businessman and film producer Jerrold Wexler. As a super-shy child, she struggled so severely with autism that doctors recommended she be institutionalized and medicated.
However, she and John had things in common. They were both outdoorsy and loved to go camping, hiking, scuba-diving and helicopter skiing. She was also used to the media’s attention.
JFK had previously never had a girlfriend who was as famous as him, making them irresistible to the media. They certainly made for a charming couple and were photographed wherever they were spotted – cycling around Central Park, eating pancakes in a breakfast joint in Chicago or just waiting for a flight at the TWA terminal at New York’s JFK airport.
They actually moved in together, sharing a Manhattan apartment although she was often away in LA filming.
A New York neighbor recalled to People how she saw them one morning – John shirtless and Daryl in a short nightgown – on their rooftop dancing together.
‘They were doing this little love play,’ she said. ‘He was tickling her, and she’d run away. Then he’d catch her, and they’d dance around. Even if you didn’t know who they were, you’d be entranced.’
Everyone, of course, knew who they were. The neighbor may have been won over by this display but Kennedy continued to be pursued by rumors about other romantic interests. There was talk of Sharon Stone (with whom John reportedly did have a brief fling on Martha’s Vineyard in 1995) and actress Martha Plimpton.
But by the spring of 1993, the focus was back on Hannah and the wedding rumors resurfaced with a vengeance after claims she’d been spotted buying an antique satin-and-lace wedding dress in Pasadena, California.
Interviewed in Vogue that summer about the John F Kennedy Profile in Courage Awards, the conversation inevitably diverged on to his future with Hannah. Did he want to share anything about his marriage plans?
‘I think you’ll know before I do,’ Kennedy replied. The following month, a new rumor claimed the couple had secretly taken out a marriage license in California, giving them ‘a 90-day window of wedding opportunity.’
In August, they were spotted enjoying a quiet scuba-diving vacation on the Pacific island of Palau. Some speculated that it was their honeymoon although, in September, the press was full of confident expectations they were getting married that month at the home of his aunt Lee Radziwill in East Hampton, Long Island.
‘You should be able to hear your own wedding vows and not the noise from some dive-bomber helicopter hired by the National Enquirer,’ said East Hampton’s town supervisor Tony Bullock, chiding the saturation media coverage.
But it was another false alarm. Rumors that the Kennedys – especially Jackie – didn’t want him to marry Hannah were stoked by claims that the clan was a little low on funds (reportedly down to $300 million) and had issued an edict telling younger members to marry people with serious money. Given that he ended up with the relatively penniless Carolyn Bessette, this seems unlikely.
By the spring of 1993, the focus was back on Hannah and the wedding rumors resurfaced with a vengeance after claims she’d been spotted buying an antique satin-and-lace wedding dress in Pasadena, California
Bessette, who met Kennedy at a New York party in 1992 when he was still going out with Hannah, is cool, sassy, sharp, and doesn’t seem to care less if she gets the man who People magazine dubbed ‘the world’s sexiest man.’ She is so New York
Hannah is now married to Neil Young (pictured in 2018 together)
By the end of the year, a new book on JFK Jr – this time by biographer Wendy Leigh, a former Mail on Sunday journalist – had a different take that, in hindsight, appeared closer to the truth.
It had long been claimed that Jackie didn’t get on with Daryl’s mother, Sue Wexler, and didn’t want her son to marry the actress.
Leigh insisted Jackie Kennedy didn’t interfere (as alleged in Love Story) in the romantic affairs of her son and that she didn’t disapprove of John’s affair with Hannah because, unlike other contenders, the star didn’t need to use him for money or fame. (Hannah herself played down any friction with the former First Lady although she also played down the marriage speculation.)
Leigh also said she didn’t believe John and Daryl would wed, as she didn’t think Kennedy was quite yet ready to settle down.
All of which, of course, came to pass. Jackie Kennedy died in May the following year. Her son and Hannah were later seen roller-skating past the church where her funeral would be held.
Hannah joined him at the funeral but when wedding rumors resurfaced – this time to be in Chicago – insiders said Kennedy was determined not to marry anyone until a ‘decent interval’ after his mother’s death.
By then, however, Carolyn Bessette’s name had entered the JFK Jr fray. And by the end of 1994, the media was confidently recording that John and Daryl were ‘on the outs.’
As it turned out, while John wed Carolyn in 1996, Hannah waited another 22 years before getting married, aged 58. After enduring so many years of feverish speculation about the ‘big day’ – even from her plumber – one can hardly blame her if she took her time.