Key Points
Maria Shriver reveals whether she’s watched any of the Kennedy family portrayals in the media, including Ryan Murphy’s controversial hit series Love Story.
Her comments came during a conversation with her siblings in support of their father Sargent Shriver’s posthumous memoir, titled We Called It a War: Lessons Learned from the Fight to End Poverty.
The Shrivers, who are Kennedys through Sargent’s marriage to Eunice Kennedy, say they are focused on continuing to “honor their legacy, keep it alive.”
Maria Shriver is used to having her famous extended family’s lives being depicted in media, but she admits she’s not terribly interested in checking out the titles for herself.
“If you tried to keep up with the amount of movies and TV shows and books on our larger family, that’s all your life would be about,” she quipped in a recent interview with PEOPLE. “And if we went down that road, it’d be a full time job.”
The former first lady of California revealed her stance on watching family portrayals in media during a sitdown between her siblings — Bobby, Tim, and Mark Shriver — and PEOPLE in support of their father Sargent Shriver’s posthumous memoir, titled We Called It a War: Lessons Learned from the Fight to End Poverty, which was released Tuesday.
While there have been a lot of films and television shows about the Kennedys, the most recent Ryan Murphy–produced hit FX series Love Story drew particular attention for its seemingly endless controversy. The limited series chronicles the romance between Shriver’s cousin John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette before the couple died in a plane crash in 1999. John had been piloting the small single-engine plane from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.
Paul Anthony Kelly as John F. Kennedy Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette on ‘Love Story’
Credit: FX
Jack Schlossberg, John’s nephew, was a vocal critic of the series, which he said was “profiting off” the marriage and deaths of his uncle and Bessette “in a grotesque way” last year.
“Well, if you want to know someone who’s never met anyone in my family, knows nothing about us, talk to Ryan Murphy,” Schlossberg later added during an interview with CBS Sunday Morning‘s Mo Rocca in March. “I would just want people who do watch the show to watch it with one letter in mind, and that’s a capital F for fiction. The guy knows nothing about what he’s talking about, and he’s making a ton of money on a grotesque display of someone else’s life.”
He continued, “I would hope that Mr. Murphy would donate some of the millions of dollars of profits that he’s making to some of the causes that John championed throughout his life. Maybe he would donate some of that money to the JFK library to help keep President Kennedy’s memory alive, but he’s not. He’s making money. This is not a documentary. And I’ll leave it at that.”
When Rocca asked if there was something about this particular show that bothered Schlossberg, since the Kennedys have been depicted countless times on TV, in movies, and in books, he reasoned that there’s “a lot of misinformation now and iconography being used about the Kennedy family, my family, at a time when we really can’t afford to confuse people.
“Partly because of [Health and Human Services Secretary] Robert Kennedy Jr., but also partly because Donald Trump has used JFK as sort of a human punching bag, both by renaming the Kennedy Center after himself, by doing a false reinvestigation into the assassination, and dismantling all the programs that he fought for,” he added. “We really need to take every breath that we have to try to make things better. So, if Ryan Murphy really cares so much about the Kennedy family, my uncle John, maybe he would try to do something about getting Trump out of power.”
Shriver attends the premiere of ‘Avatar: Fire And Ash’ in December
Credit: Kevin Winter/WireImage
While the Shriver siblings can’t deny that things among their family are “a work in progress” when it comes to political disagreements, including glaring rifts with their cousin RFK Jr., they emphasize that they are more interested in spending their energy modeling their parents’ legacy of service.
“We’ve all worked really hard to work together to support both of our parents and their vision, and continue to honor their legacy, keep it alive,” Maria told PEOPLE. “We all work with each other. We go to visit Mark’s school. We work at Save the Children. I work at Special Olympics — Bobby’s on the board, he raises a lot of the money. And if we went down that [other] road, it’d be a full-time job.”
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“Daddy really understood that there was a larger narrative out there,” Tim added. “But his job was to kick ass and make a difference. And that relentless focus on making the difference in whatever way he could, whether it produced a child who has a head start, that was what mattered. The question is, did you make a difference?”
Maria echoed her brother’s sentiment, adding, “I think it’s a really good lesson. It’s noisy out there. And you can get pulled in a hundred different directions by a hundred different people and then end up in a mess yourself. Or you can stay focused. It’s a message I say to my kids.”
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