Kate Storey
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Noonan, right, with JFK Jr. in 1987. Courtesy of William Noonan On Friday, July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr. was on his way to celebrate one of his oldest friends’ fifth wedding anniversary. The plans for the weekend kept changing, but it was finally decided that John, his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren, flying in a single-engine Piper Saratoga piloted by John, would stop by Martha’s Vineyard to drop off Lauren before heading back to Hyannis Port to meet up with Noonan, his wife, and some other friends for a champagne toast. The next day, the couple would go to a family wedding at the Kennedy Compound.
The Noonans and their friends headed out on the boat without John and Carolyn when the couple’s arrival was delayed, but it was so hazy that night they couldn’t see the stars, and the lights on land looked like dimmed candlelight from the 1700s. Some time overnight, the plane went down. Noonan spent the next couple of days at John’s Hyannis Port house while the news cameras closed in and everyone waited for any information about the three missing people. It was the Coast Guard who told Noonan they were no longer on a search-and-rescue for John, Carolyn, and Lauren, it was a recovery mission.
“It wasn’t so bad that it was ‘JFK Jr.’ — it was John,” Noonan says. “It was my closest friend, and it was like my childhood evaporated.”
Earlier this month, I got a text from Noonan. We met in 2020, when I was writing my book, White House By the Sea, about the Kennedy family’s history in Hyannis Port. Noonan — like many Kennedy friends and neighbors on the Cape — rarely speaks to the press. The family has lived there for generations, and there’s an unspoken pact that, love them or hate them, you don’t talk about the neighbors. But Noonan, who is now 67, had been hearing all of the frenzy about Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, and he’d seen a couple of the episodes, and he wanted to talk about it.
When he called on Saturday from his home on the Cape, where he is now retired from a career in finance, he was all caught up on the show and had just seen the final episode. Noonan was one of the 60 guests at John and Carolyn’s Cumberland Island, Georgia, wedding — he was the one who videotaped the whole thing for the couple with a handheld camera. He was there for most of the major moments of the series — and overall, he thinks they got his friends right.
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“I was laughing. I was sad at times,” Noonan says. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I remember that.’”
Noonan’s earliest memories of John are of seeing him walking through Hyannis Port with his father with an ice cream cone after the president’s plane landed on summer weekends. John grew up in one of the three Kennedy Compound houses in Hyannis Port, surrounded by his aunts, uncles, and cousins. Noonan’s family had been going to the Port since the 1940s, and he was close with John’s cousin, Timothy Shriver. As teenagers and young adults, the three men were inseparable.
Courtesy of William Noonan “There are very few people on Earth who knew John as well as I did,” says Noonan, who wrote the 2006 book Forever Young: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy Jr. and says he was not consulted for the FX series. When he first heard news of the show, his thought was, “It’s going to be rubbish.” Noonan knew nothing about creator Ryan Murphy, but John was too unique a guy, he thought, there would just be no way to get him right. But from the first frame he saw, he decided his assumption had been wrong.
“They got her and him right. Those two actors that played them, I mean, I was really happy to see it because they looked so normal together. And when it was the two of them in the dialogue, it sounded just like them,” Noonan says. “Now, those two were on an island in this show. Anybody else that was portrayed [was] failed miserably, and I thought it was pretty cruel at times.”
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Noonan says he knew actress Daryl Hannah for the five years or so when she was in an off-and-on relationship with John. She was supposed to come to Noonan’s wedding in July of 1994, but John showed up without her. When Noonan got back from his honeymoon, he started getting phone calls — who was that mystery woman in the thong John was pictured with in the papers? Soon after, John introduced him to Carolyn.
In Love Story, the Hannah character is self-absorbed and high-maintenance, acting as something of a foil, leaving the viewer to root for Carolyn to end up with John. Hannah had never spoken about her relationship with John before the show. But shortly after it aired, she wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled, “How Can ‘Love Story’ Get Away With This?” “It’s appalling to me that I even have to defend myself against a television show,” she writes. “These are not creative embellishments of personality. They are assertions about conduct — and they are false.”
Noonan says he didn’t recognize the Hannah character in the series. “They portrayed her as this nitwit Hollywood blonde, bringing strangers back to John’s house, having cocaine parties,” Noonan says. “She wasn’t like that. Daryl Hannah was sharp as a tack. She didn’t drink alcohol. She hated cigarette smoke. If you lit up a cigarette, she’d leave. She’d say to you, go outside. I’ve been to Grateful Dead shows with Daryl Hannah, and there were all kinds of drugs going around us. And she never touched any of them.”
The character of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was all wrong, too. John and Carolyn’s early relationship overlapped with the former first lady’s cancer diagnosis and final years. In the show, Onassis, played by Naomi Watts, is wrapped up in her past life in the White House.
“The hardest thing was Mrs. Onassis,” says Noonan, who knew Onassis since he was a child and visited her with John in her Fifth Avenue apartment near the end of her life. “She stopped smoking after her half-sister Janet got cancer, and she didn’t drink. I mean, I saw her take a mouthful of wine maybe at dinner, but she didn’t drink. And she never looked back. They’ve got her dancing to ‘Camelot,’ and smoking a cigarette at the table, rolling around on the floor drunk. I couldn’t even watch it.”
Noonan has other squabbles, too — they got John’s Tribeca apartment decor wrong; it wasn’t Calvin Klein who introduced John and Carolyn; the couple never would’ve stayed at Ethel’s house on the Cape because they had their own place; there was no board to sign up for breakfast in Hyannis Port (“That whole chalkboard thing? Complete bullshit.”); the Ethel character was way too stiff and proper.
But the big things about John and Carolyn felt largely familiar. Especially the wedding. (Noonan’s video footage from the wedding was later turned into the documentary JFK Jr. & Carolyn’s Wedding: The Lost Tapes.) “I mean, it was surreal,” he says. “The thing about that weird setting [Cumberland Island] was you could feel the love in the air. It was as heavy as the humidity.”
And the low points after the wedding rang true, too. The show portrays the torture the press attention caused for Carolyn and how it brought her relationship with her husband to a breaking point.
“She hung around the house all day and she talked on the phone and smoked cigarettes,” Noonan remembers. “She did tell me one time that they were photographing her walking up the street and they were walking backwards and they knocked over a woman and her baby. And the baby went down and the photographers were like, ‘F you. Shut up, get out of the way. We’re here for the photographs.’ I don’t know if you’ve ever been around the paparazzi, but you feel like you’re being hunted. You feel like you’re being pursued. … I don’t think the press ever liked her. And I think they made her life miserable. And I think that getting her paranoid and isolated and alienated from John was what they wanted.”
In the final episodes of the series, the John and Carolyn characters are constantly fighting, living apart, and trying to work through their issues with a therapist. That was all true, Noonan says. The couple was also coping with John’s cousin Anthony Radziwill’s cancer diagnosis. They were going back and forth to Martha’s Vineyard as often as they could to spend time with him.
“The last three things John said to me were, ‘Look, you and I have to talk about what we’re going to do about Anthony,’ because Anthony was dying. And ‘I’m going to put George [magazine] online,’ which I didn’t understand at the time, which would have been brilliant. And the third thing was, he’s like, ‘I’m going to do this Senate run here [in New York],’ and he’s got to go up against Hillary [Clinton].”
Carolyn and John on Thanksgiving 1997 Courtesy of William Noonan Enough time has passed that watching the final episode — the plane crash and its aftermath — wasn’t difficult for Noonan. Overall, he’s happy the show has people talking about his friend again, and that a whole new generation is getting to know who he was. Though John’s nephew Jack Schlossberg has called the series a “grotesque display” that profits off of his family, Noonan doesn’t see it that way.
