John’s friends realized something was wrong when they saw a limousine pull up to his gray, clapboard Cape Cod cottage.
John had grown up in this house – his family spent almost every summer in Hyannis Port, in the house his parents bought in 1957 for $45,948. The property was one of three houses that made up the so-called Kennedy Compound: next to John F. Kennedy Jr.’s grandparents’ house on Nantucket Sound – which the family called just the Big House – and the house that his aunt Ethel had once shared with her husband, the future Robert F. Kennedy. The three properties, together about two hectares in size, are connected by their lawns. And before John was even born, Kennedy children were running back and forth between them barefoot.
But as famous as his family was, as famous as these houses were, limousines were a rarity in Hyannis Port. John loved driving around in his little orange Karmann Ghia convertible, which he named Orange, with the music at full volume. You heard Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin before you saw him. And the other Kennedys mostly drove around the Cape in old, battered cars.
The secret visits
It turned out: The limousine had brought John’s new girlfriend Carolyn Bessette from the airport. John and Carolyn made several secret trips to the Hyannis Port house before he was ready to tell his friends about her. Then one fall he invited his best friend from that time, Billy Noonan, who was living in Boston at the time, and Billy’s wife, Kathleen, to the Cape. He wanted them to meet Carolyn.
Over dinner in the living room, John and Carolyn talked about how they met and what their first visits to the Cape had been like. It dawned on Billy: This must have been the woman sitting in the limousine he had seen on one of his visits to the city. The Noonans were immediately taken with Carolyn. And Carolyn told them how much she loved the visits to Hyannis Port. She liked it much better than the Kennedy family home in Florida.
“I love coming to this house,” Carolyn said, according to Billy, with whom I spoke for my book “White House By the Sea,” a book about the family’s many-generational history on the Cape. “I was in Palm Beach with John and the place was scary. There were too many ghosts.”
Series image vs. reality
In the fifth episode of Ryan Murphy’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, characters John and Carolyn visit Hyannis Port together for the first time. They have dinner with the wider Kennedy family, with John’s intimidating Aunt Ethel acting as master of ceremonies at the head of the table. There was some truth to this scene – dinners at Hyannis Port actually included interrogations about politics and world affairs, a tradition that had started with family patriarch and John’s grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy – but John and Carolyn’s first visits to the Cape looked far different than what was portrayed on screen.
In my research for my book, I learned from John’s closest friends and family about how he spent his time in Hyannis Port – from his earliest years to his relationship with Carolyn. John and Carolyn spent a lot of time at his mother’s property on Martha’s Vineyard, not far from Hyannis Port. Jackie bought this property for herself after her husband was murdered. And it was on Martha’s Vineyard – not Hyannis Port, as portrayed in “Love Story” – where John proposed to her.
But his parents’ Hyannis Port Cottage – far more modest than the mansion featured in the series, only two stories and with no water views – has always been John and Carolyn’s home base. (Although the house belonged to both John and Caroline, John used it more often. Caroline and her family preferred to spend their time on the Vineyard.) And it was at Hyannis Port where John and Carolyn began to think about their future together.
“I definitely want kids,” John told his girlfriend Sasha Chermayeff one weekend on the Cape when she brought her young children with her. “Look at Bobby,” he said of his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with whom he was close friends. “He has five!”
Plans for the future
Carolyn, who was in her early thirties, wasn’t ready for children at that point – she was still adjusting to life in the spotlight and knew how much more oppressive the publicity would be if she and John had children. But they started thinking about making this house their base away from the chaos of the city. In the late 1990s, Carolyn began a major renovation project on the property.
At the time, Ethel lived next door. Senator Ted Kennedy lived with his mother – and John’s grandmother – Rose, in the largest house, which most closely resembles the one featured in “Love Story,” with its large, flat lawn, perfect for touch football, and expansive water views.
After John and Carolyn’s small, private wedding in 1996, they set about making the Hyannis Port home more comfortable for their visits. They loved hosting dinners there and inviting their New York friends over on weekends (the house wasn’t the largest on the compound, but it had nine comfortable bedrooms).
“Do you think Mummy would like the wallpaper?” Carolyn called Billy Noonan and asked about shamrock wallpaper for Jackie’s old bedroom. She also planned to have the floors sanded and replaced. As their lives in New York became increasingly chaotic, with mobs of press following their every move, they clung to their hope for a more normal future on the Cape.
The last weekend
In July 1999, while the couple was on their way to the Cape for John’s cousin’s wedding at the Big House, they made plans to meet with the same interior designer who had worked with Jackie when she renovated the house at the start of their marriage – more than three decades earlier. They also planned to meet Noonan and some other friends that weekend. But on the way there, the plane John was piloting and carrying Carolyn and her sister Lauren as passengers crashed before reaching its destination.
