More than 25 years after their deaths, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette are once again getting their close up — and so is Manhattan.
The couple’s tumultuous and ultimately tragic relationship is the subject of the new Ryan Murphy series “American Love Story,” premiering Thursday on FX.
The show filmed all over New York City last summer, stirring up déjà vu as it recreated the stylish duo’s iconic looks and moments.
We saw Kennedy (played by Paul Kelly) cycling in a suit and backwards hat and shirtless in Central Park, and his bride (played by Sarah Pidgeon) emerging from the subway in baggy jeans and flip-flops just like it was 1997 all over again.
Not to mention some of the pair’s most dramatic public moments, like their infamous 1996 blow-up in Washington Square Park, when Bessette shoved her beau and he tried to take the engagement ring off her finger.
Still, it’s almost impossible to explain how chronicled their lives were. There were even paparazzi peering into the windows when Kennedy took — and failed — the bar exam twice. (He finally passed on his third try.)
That was unusual back then, when relative anonymity was a perk of city living for most celebs. Long before everyone carried phones in their pockets and turned oversharing into a commodity.
But there was always a voracious appetite for the prince of Camelot.
The image of him as a 3-year-old saluting his father’s casket turned him into America’s son. Being dubbed Sexiest Man Alive in 1998 cemented him as America’s hunk.
The series depicts the couple complaining about the ever-present paparazzi. But, Kennedy’s friend reveals, even as Bessette felt hounded, her husband not-so-secretly loved the camera.
“If he wasn’t in the papers for a short period of time, I guarantee you, no matter what the weather he’d be outside playing football with his shirt off,” Steven Gillon, Kennedy’s pal and the author of “America’s Reluctant Prince,” told The Post. “He liked the attention.”
It was also a rite of passage to spot Kennedy on the streets of NYC.
In “JFK Jr: an Intimate Oral Biography” by Rosemarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil, hairstylist Frederic Fekkai recalled that people were “glued” to the windows when his famous client came into the salon. And though he didn’t appear in the 1992 “Seinfeld” episode “The Contest,” “John John” played a central role as a lovestruck Elaine Benes encountered him at the gym.
Mike Pearl, the legendary Post reporter who covered Manhattan Criminal Court back then, told me how he met Kennedy in 1989 when the scion started working at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office as an Assistant DA.
Pearl recalled being at Forlini’s, the now-closed classic downtown restaurant, while Kennedy “was at the table with a few assistant DAs, and they called me over. The first thing I did was I apologized to him. He said what for and I said, ‘Nothing yet. But I am going to be a pest.’”
Kennedy took it in stride.
After all, the George Magazine founder was an exhibitionist — cycling around the city and jogging shirtless.
“He was uninhibited in the way he explored the city,” said Gillon. “He didn’t want the media attention to change the way he lived his life.”
Just like us: Kennedy even left his key behind a radiator in his Tribeca lobby when he’d go for a run.
In 1994, the lothario — who had dated a string of beauties, including Daryl Hannah and Madonna — began a serious relationship with Bessette, a publicist at Calvin Klein.
The Greenwich, Conn., native didn’t have a famous pedigree. But she was strikingly beautiful and had an effortless minimalist style that enchanted the fashion establishment.
Author Edward Klein wrote in “The Kennedy Curse” how Vogue editor Anna Wintour wanted to make Bessette a cover girl while Ralph Lauren tried to hire her as his personal muse.
The couple tied the knot in a private ceremony on Georgia’s tiny Cumberland Island in 1996, with Bessette wearing a silk white slip dress designed by her friend Narciso Rodriguez. The gown put Rodriguez on the map and solidified Bessette as not only tastemaker, but a career maker — a proto influencer.
But Bessette was unprepared for the intensity of Kennedy’s spotlight. Gillon said one of his friend’s “failings” was that he didn’t understand just how difficult the transition would be for his wife.
“[Before Bessette,] the paparazzi kept a healthy distance, but it seemed to take a dark turn after he married Carolyn,” said Gillon.
The couple lived on North Moore Street in Tribeca which, at the time, was a quiet enclave for artists and a handful of celebrities. Their presence gave the then-desolate neighborhood a seal of understated coolness.
It also gave the paparazzi more leeway.
Gillon said he never understood why his friend didn’t have a doorman and a private back entrance.
Shutterbugs rented an apartment across the street. One tried to even slip down Kennedy and Bessette’s chimney, according to Gillon. And they were terribly hostile to Bessette, goading her for a reaction.
When the two died in a 1999 plane crash that also claimed the life of Bessette’s sister, Lauren, a reckless Kennedy was behind the controls. (The NTSB determined the probable cause was pilot failure.)
It was reported that he had recently moved into the Stanhope Hotel on the Upper East Side, not far from his childhood home, when he and Bessette couldn’t agree about having a family in the spotlight’s glare.
As “American Love Story” reminds us, we’re left with the promise of what could have been. And a trove of photographs to fill in some blanks.
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