Inside John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s Secret Life on Cape Cod

Fact Vs. Fiction Inside John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s Secret Life on Cape Cod Love Story depicts the couple’s first trip to Hyannis Port. Here's what their time there was really like By Kate Storey Kate Storey Contact Kate Storey on X Contact Kate Storey by Email View all posts by Kate Storey March 3, 2026 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 Bill...