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

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.