Kerry admits she doesn’t watch shows about the Kennedy family, but says one scene in ‘Love Story’ isn’t accurate

NEED TO KNOW

• Kerry Kennedy tells PEOPLE she did not watch Love Story, the hit Ryan Murphy show about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette
• Still, she says the series did not accurately depict her mother, Ethel Kennedy
• Kerry says she tends not to watch shows about her famous family because she says they don’t nail the details

Kerry Kennedy admits she didn’t watch Ryan Murphy’s Love Story, but she knows the hit show got one key detail of her mother’s personality wrong.

Kerry, one of Ethel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy’s 11 children, tells PEOPLE for a story in this week’s issue that the scene in which Carolyn Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon) misses breakfast at the family’s storied Hyannis Port compound because she didn’t sign up in time is complete fiction.

“Oh, there’s no sign-up,” Kerry, 67, says. “In my mother’s entire life, there is no way on earth she would ever deny somebody a meal.”

“I mean, it’s just so completely inconceivable,” Kerry says. “She’s all about, ‘Come in, come in. Let me get you some food. You’ve already eaten? Let me get you some cake. You’ve already had cake? Here’s some chocolate and some nuts.’ ”

In the Episode 5 scene, Carolyn comes downstairs and asks Ethel for a cup of coffee, only to find that she’s missed her opportunity. The matriarch, portrayed by Jessica Harper, icily tells her that she needed to fill out the breakfast sign-up sheet if she wanted anything that morning.

“She definitely did not have a sign-up and she was very easygoing about this, actually,” Kerry says. “I just was reading a book by somebody who worked in the Justice Department for my father, and they were saying how daddy would call mummy and say, ‘Well, we’ve got 10 people over here, and could we come over for lunch?’ And she’d say yes.”

But her generosity was only exceeded by her flexibility, her daughter points out.

“And he’d call back and say, ‘Actually there are 20.’ ‘Actually, I think there’s 30. There’ll be 30 of us for lunch.’ You know?” she says. “That was just like the easy, breezy way that she ran with it, and she did that with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Always room, always food, lots of it. No objection.”

Kerry, who details her mother’s life in her new book Ethel Kennedy: The Extraordinary Life and Bold Legacy, tells PEOPLE she doesn’t often watch shows like Love Story that recreate the Kennedy family history.

“I don’t like watching TV shows about our family because they always irritate me,” she says. “They don’t get the people right, they don’t get the accents right.”

Still, she adds, “That said, my understanding of that show is that in the end, it made people like our family, and so I think it’s probably a good thing in the long run to have it, but it’s not something I’m going to particularly watch.”

Instead of associating her mother with the woman shown in Murphy’s series, Kerry wants people to know Ethel as a tenacious, determined mother and activist who didn’t let life’s obstacles get in her way.

Ethel was three months pregnant with her youngest child, Rory, when her husband, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was shot on June 5, 1968, and died the next day. His death came just five years after his brother President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In the aftermath of the tragedies, Ethel remained strong.

“Turning suffering into strength,” Kerry writes in her new book, “became her healing.”

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“She had a lot to live for,” Kerry says. “She had 11 children who needed her to be there and be present. She was going to be there for those kids. She never described herself as a victim at all.” 

Ethel will hit shelves on Oct. 13 and is available now for preorder, wherever books are sold.

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