Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s bestie trashed “Love Story,” claiming the actors who played his pal and her husband, John F. Kennedy Jr., were no match for the couple’s stunning good looks.
“When you look at Carolyn in real life, she’s incredibly beautiful. She looked very different in the series. It’s weird,” fashion designer Gordon Henderson told The Post.
“They were closer with John, but … those two were really good looking people, said Henderson, 69.
And he was looking for the remote after just 30 minutes, fuming that Hollywood “always gets it wrong” when trying to mimic his late friends — who were played in the series by actors Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly.
“I just thought it was not done well. I only watched one half of the first episode and said, ‘It’s not going to be good,’” he said.
“I really don’t like to watch stories about John and Carolyn because they always got it wrong.”
Henderson, who worked at Calvin Klein in the ’80s after graduation from the Parsons School of Design, was portrayed in the FX and Hulu series by actor Omari K. Chancellor.
But he never saw himself immortalized — since he didn’t get through the first episode.
In the show, Bessette and Henderson work at Calvin Klein at the same time, which never happened.
“I didn’t know her then,” he said.
A native of Berkeley, Calif., Henderson first met Bessette through her on-and-off boyfriend Will Regan, who owned the Manhattan nightclub Rex.
They became dear friends, and Bessette could frequently be found at his West Village apartment on 11th and West Fourth Street.
“One of my memories of Carolyn is on my bed, with a big sweater of mine on. When I went to her apartment on Sixth Avenue, I said, ‘This is where all my sweaters are! Jesus Christ. Can I take them back?’”
She found sanctuary in his bedroom — and would even invite her friends there.
“She would sit there and just talk to them. And I said to her one time, ‘Why do you have your friends come over to my bedroom?’ and she’s like, ‘Cause it’s my favorite place.’”
They were so close that JFK Jr. asked Henderson, who by then had launched his own label, to design his wedding suit.
“He could have gone to any designer … The reason he asked me is because they wanted to keep the wedding secret,” he explained.
The groom made sure to honor his father’s favorite color with his ensemble.
“That’s why everything was navy blue. That was very important to him,” he said.
Henderson also made the keepsake — navy blue charmeuse boxer shorts — for his best man, his cousin Anthony Radziwill, and groomsmen, which had their initials on one side and JFK’s on the other.
Kennedy and Bessette’s wedding guest list included only 50 of their closest family and friends — and Henderson snagged an invite.
“It was beautiful. The thing that was really nice is that everyone kept it a secret,” he said.
For the celebration, guests first flew to Jacksonville, Fla., and from there took a boat to Cumberland Island, GA, where the rehearsal dinner, ceremony and reception took place.
In the series, Bessette arrived late to the wedding, which was factual.
“She was always late,” Henderson said.
After Henderson dressed the men, he went to check on the bride.
“She said, ‘Can you help me put the dress on?’ I said, ‘Now, this is going to be really hard to do because you should have done this before you put your makeup on and got your hair done,’” he recalled.
“So we went in the bathroom, closed the door, and I had to shimmy this f–king dress all the way down.”
The reception was under a tent, “and there were five tables with 10 people at each one. And the food was really good,” he said.
The last time he saw Bessette was the day before her death in 1999.
He recalled the heartwrenching time he spent waiting to learn her fate after the plane she was on with her husband and sister went missing.
“We basically had to sit there and wait for four days,” he said.
Henderson doesn’t have many mementos left from his friendship with Bessette — and said he never got back the sweaters she had borrowed.
“I think John’s sister took some of them,” he said. “Because she thought they were his.”
