John F. Kennedy Jr.’s friends knew something was up when they saw a limousine pull up to his gray, shingled Cape Cod cottage.
John grew up in that house — his family spent nearly every summer in Hyannis Port in the home his parents bought for $45,948 in 1957. The place was one of three houses making up the so-called Kennedy Compound, along with John F. Kennedy Jr.’s grandparents’ house on the Nantucket Sound — the Big House, as the family called it — and the house his aunt Ethel once shared with her husband, the late Robert F. Kennedy. The three properties, which total about five acres, are connected by their lawns. And from before John even was born, there were Kennedy kids running back and forth between them barefoot.
But as famous as his family was, as famous as those houses were, limousines were a rare sight in Hyannis Port. John liked to drive around in his little orange Karmann Ghia convertible, which he named Orange, with the music as loud as it went. You’d hear the Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin before you saw him coming. And the other Kennedys usually drove beat-up, old cars around the Cape.
It turned out, the limousine was shuttling John’s new girlfriend, Carolyn Bessette, who was coming in 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 growing up there, Billy Noonan, who was living in Boston at the time, and Billy’s wife Kathleen to come to the Cape. He wanted them to meet Carolyn.
Over dinner in the living room, John and Carolyn talked about how they met and their first visits to the Cape. It dawned on Billy: That’s who’d been in the limousine he’d seen when he’d been in town to visit. The Noonans were taken with Carolyn right away. And Carolyn told them how much she loved visiting Hyannis Port. She liked it much more than the Kennedy family home in Florida.
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“I like coming to this house,” Carolyn said, according to Billy, who I spoke with for my book, White House By the Sea, which tells the story of the family’s many generations on the Cape. “I went down to Palm Beach with John, and the place was creepy. There were too many ghosts down there.”
In the fifth episode of Ryan Murphy’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, the John and Carolyn characters visit Hyannis Port for the first time together. They have dinner with the extended Kennedy family, with John’s intimidating aunt Ethel serving as mistress of ceremonies at the head of the table. While there was some truth to that scene — dinners in Hyannis Port did involve grilling about politics and world events, a tradition that started with family patriarch and John’s grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy — John and Carolyn’s first trips to the Cape were far different than portrayed onscreen.
A scene from Love Story depicting the family dinners that often took place at the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port estate, where Ethel Kennedy (foreground) would grill everyone on politics.
FX
In my research for my book, I was told by John’s closest friends and family members about the time he spent in Hyannis Port from his very early years up through his relationship with Carolyn. John and Carolyn spent a lot of time at his mother’s estate on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, not too far from Hyannis Port. Jackie had bought that property for herself after her husband’s assassination. And it was in Martha’s Vineyard — not Hyannis Port, as portrayed in Love Story — where John proposed. But his parents’ Hyannis Port cottage — far more modest than the grand estate pictured in the show, with just two stories and no water views — was always home base for John and Carolyn. (Though the house was left to both John and Caroline, it was John who used it more often. Caroline and her family preferred to spend their time on the Vineyard.) And it was Hyannis Port where John and Carolyn started to think about their future together.
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“I definitely want kids,” John told his friend Sasha Chermayeff one weekend at the Cape when she’d brought her young children to visit. “Look at Bobby,” he said about his cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with whom he was close. “He’s got five!”
Carolyn, who was in her early thirties, wasn’t ready for kids at that point — she was still adjusting to life in the spotlight and knew how much more suffocating the public attention would be if she and John had children. But they started to think about making that house their home base away from the chaos of the city. In the late 1990s, Carolyn began work on a big 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 home, which looks the most like the one featured in Love Story, with its large, flat lawn, perfect for touch football and sprawling water views.
After John and Carolyn’s small, private wedding in 1996, they got to work making the Hyannis Port home more comfortable for their visits. They loved to host dinner parties there, inviting their New York friends up for weekends (while not the biggest house on the compound, it still offered a comfortable nine bedrooms).
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“Do you think Mummy would like the wallpaper?” Carolyn called to ask Billy Noonan about a shamrock patterned wallpaper for Jackie’s old bedroom. She planned to have the floors sanded and updated, too. As their lives in New York became more and more chaotic with the frenzy of press that surrounded their every move, they clung to their hope for a more normal future on the Cape.
In July of 1999, when the couple were headed to the Cape for John’s cousin’s wedding at the Big House, they had plans to meet with the same interior designer who’d worked with Jackie when she’d updated the house early in her marriage, more than three decades before. They planned to see Noonan and some other friends that weekend, too. But on their way there, the plane John was piloting, with Carolyn and her sister, Lauren, as passengers, went down before they made it.
