We at The Free Press have been consumed by Taylor Swift wedding rumors for weeks. Is it happening at Madison Square Garden next weekend? Is it a decoy? Is Travis Kelce’s entire team really booked at the Marriott Marquis? But there’s one question we keep coming back to: How does the most famous woman in the world actually pull off a secret wedding? We asked RoseMarie Terenzio, the woman who helped JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette pull off their famously secret ceremony 30 years ago this fall. —The Editors
When you’ve helped plan the most secret celebrity wedding in history, you watch the Taylor Swift circus a little differently. First the wedding was in Rhode Island—until it wasn’t. Now it’s rumored to be in Madison Square Garden on July 3: The permits are filed, Travis’s teammates are said to be booked at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani has publicly welcomed the wedding in the same breath as the Fourth of July and the FIFA World Cup.
I don’t know where Taylor and Travis are getting married, but I do know what a decoy looks like. I was John F. Kennedy Jr.’s chief of staff for five years, and 30 years ago I helped him and Carolyn Bessette get married on a remote Georgia island while some press outlets were chasing a flight to Ireland for a party that didn’t exist.
It all began on the Monday after Fourth of July weekend in 1995. Carolyn called me: John had proposed. I was thrilled for them, but even in that first conversation, Carolyn was clear-eyed about what came next. Being JFK Jr.’s girlfriend was one thing—being his wife was something else entirely. She knew she was about to face a different level of public life, obligation, and scrutiny. She just wanted a little more time before the world knew too.
So we got to planning. I had lots of conversations with Carolyn and John about where and how the wedding would happen. In the beginning, it wasn’t about keeping it top secret at all costs, but the more we planned, the more John and Carolyn wanted to protect it. They had good reason to.
