How John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kept Their Wedding Secret 

As the summer of 1996 wound down, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette started telling their closest circle the big news.

They invited their friends Billy and Kathleen Noonan over to their Hyannis Port home to have a toast using the old glassware John’s parents had been given on a family trip to Ireland. As soon as Billy saw the family crest-inscribed cups, he knew John and Carolyn were about to make a big announcement. He knew they were getting married.

John and Billy eventually went up to the house’s widow’s walk — the small balcony where sailors’ wives used to wait, looking out to the Nantucket Sound. John had spent his whole life coming to this house, which backed up to the home where his father had spent his summers as a kid. This little balcony was always a place where his family members could get away from it all — Jackie liked to go up there to sunbathe, and John sometimes went up there with buddies to smoke weed.

“Do you think she’s the right one?” John asked Billy, who I spoke with for my book, White House by the Sea, about the Kennedy family’s lives in Hyannis Port. Billy told John he did, and they went back downstairs to join the women. 

John and Carolyn told the Noonans that all the details about the wedding would have to be kept completely under wraps. Guests wouldn’t even know where it was being held until the very last moment. The media’s interest in the couple was at a fever pitch that summer, and leaked details would surely mean paparazzi lurking outside of their venue.  

“To pull it off we just have to elude every single journalist in the country,” the Carolyn character (played by Sarah Pidgeon) says to John (Paul Anthony Kelly) in the sixth episode of Love Story: John F. Kennedy & Carolyn Bessette. 

“I want like 40 guests total,” Carolyn says. 

“So, we’ll have 40 guests total,” John responds. 

And they did. Forty of their closest family and friends got the call the weekend before the wedding with the location of the ceremony. It would be on Cumberland Island, just off the coast of Georgia. They chose Cumberland Island because John had a friend who ran a bed and breakfast there — and because it was incredibly remote. 

As far as most of the staff of George — the political magazine John founded — knew, their boss and Carolyn were heading out on a vacation to Ireland in September. 

The couple couldn’t risk sending their event programs to be printed at a copier shop in case a nosy shop worker snuck a photo of the nuptial details to a reporter. So, Carolyn and RoseMarie Terenzio, John’s assistant, snuck into the office late one night to print up the programs. 

On Cumberland Island the couple asked those preparing for the event to sign confidentiality agreements, according to a People magazine article which ran shortly after the wedding. Most guests flew into Florida then took a ferry over to the island, which was accessible only by boat.

It worked — the whispered invites, the ceremony details held like state secrets. Somehow, after a summer of the most intense media attention of their relationship, the couple actually pulled it off. They were married on Sept. 21, 1996, without the media finding out. Without one single paparazzo present. The morning after the wedding, a press release was faxed to the Associated Press. 

As word hit newspapers and magazines across the country, John arranged for his assistant Terenzio to share the news with his George colleagues. When they arrived for work Monday, there were cigars left on the desks of the men and Champagne on the desks of the women, with notes that read, “I just wanted to let you know while you were toiling away, I went and got myself married. I had to be a bit sneaky for reasons that are now obvious. I wanted you all to enjoy these small tokens of gratitude and fellowship.”