JFK Jr. Secretly Marries
It was just ten years ago today, on September 21, 1996. A small group of people gathered on an island off the Georgia coast to celebrate a wedding. They had arrived there stealthily, with many of the members traveling under cover of night, over the course of several days. That was because the groom, aged 35, was a former assistant district attorney, the publisher of George magazine, and the son of a President—John F. Kennedy, Jr.
He was marrying Carolyn Bessette, a beautiful, fashionable 30-year-old who had recently left a public-relations job at Calvin Klein. Cumberland Island, accessible only by boat, is known for its natural beauty and its wild horses. If it had been a different couple, the wedding would probably have been notable only for its remote location.
Kennedy shared many qualities with his late father. Both men were charming, successful, well educated, ambitious, and, of course, unusually handsome. One thing the younger John Kennedy seems not to have shared with the President, however, was a taste in wedding plans. His parents had been married in Newport, Rhode Island, before a crowd of more than 700 and with a reception for over a thousand. The guest list at John Kennedy, Jr.’s wedding had fewer than 50 names. To keep the gathering small and out of sight of the press, even some notable Kennedy relatives—like Congressman Joe Kennedy and his mother, Ethel, the groom’s aunt—were not invited. Only the most intimate friends and relatives joined the husband- and wife-to-be on the 18-mile-long isle. John’s sister, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, was present; her daughters, Rose and Tatiana, were the flower girls, and her son, Jack, was the ring bearer. Senator Edward Kennedy, John’s uncle and the patriarch of the family, was also there.
In the months leading up to the event, rumors had swirled around John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette. The media had given him special attention since long before his relationship with her. Tabloids called him the sexiest man alive and America’s most eligible bachelor. His relationship with the actress Daryl Hannah had fed society pages with material. And the scrutiny of the gossip columnists and paparazzi had not eased up with the beginning of his relationship with Bessette. Rumors of an engagement cropped up regularly. During the summer before their marriage, so did rumors of a breakup. In one incident, the two were videotaped having an intense fight in Central Park, where Bessette stormed off and left a crestfallen Kennedy sitting on the curb. Later some wondered whether her absence from the 1996 Democratic convention indicated that the couple had parted. The rumors turned out to be false, but their prominence was a sign of the scrutiny under which the two were living—and under which they would be forced to live their entire remaining life.
Given all the attention, it is remarkable that they succeeded in carrying out their undercover wedding. News of it started to leak only when a Georgia probate judge admitted that he had issued the two a marriage license, and it was finally confirmed when Edward Kennedy’s son, Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy, mentioned at a fundraiser that his “cousin John did tie the knot yesterday.” Returning to New York after their honeymoon, John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy eventually held a lavish party at 888 Park Avenue for many of their friends who hadn’t been able to attend the wedding. Even as they reentered the public eye, though, they continued to seek privacy. As soon as he arrived back in New York City, Kennedy addressed a crowd of reporters outside his Tribeca apartment, asking them to be considerate of the “big change” in his and Bessette’s lives and give them “all the privacy and room” possible.
The media and their public declined to cooperate. This was not only because the couple was attractive and wealthy, or because they mingled with celebrities like Julia Roberts and George Clooney. Perhaps more important, many saw Kennedy as the “heir to Camelot,” the best representative of an earlier, more hopeful and romantic time. Some felt that the young man who wore his father’s watch at his wedding was destined to live out the life that President Kennedy had been denied. Political forecasters anticipated the day when John Jr. would leave behind his publishing career and seek public office.
For her part, Carolyn Bessette had won the approval of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis before the latter’s death in May 1994. After her marriage to John, Carolyn found herself compared more and more to the woman who would have been her mother-in-law. And as people hoped for great things from the pair, many assumed it was only a matter of time before the couple would produce another Kennedy heir.
Was all that really possible? We will now never know, for what we do know is that the marriage that began on that September afternoon in 1996 was not fated to last. John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, flying in a Piper Saratoga plane along with Carolyn’s sister Lauren, perished in a crash off of Martha’s Vineyard one evening in the summer of 1999. All three were buried at sea by the United States Navy in a ceremony specially authorized by the Secretary of Defense. In a stirring eulogy, Senator Kennedy described the sadness felt across the nation at the passing of his nephew: “He and his bride have gone to be with his mother and father, where there will never be an end to love. . . . Like his father, he had every gift but length of years.”
In the days after the plane crash, newspapers interviewed numerous Americans about their reactions to the accident. One person, quoted in The New York Times, expressed the grief of many, saying: “I feel like he’s the family of everybody.” Though their marriage was tragically brief, in just under three years Kennedy and Bessette had indeed both become beloved members of what Senator Edward Kennedy himself called “the American family.”