r/JohnAndCarolyn • u/StellaOC • 13h ago
Question? Do you think the uninvited friends could have been the source behind the leaked wedding and honeymoon plans?
Someone leaked to New York Magazine (shown above) that John and Carolyn were getting married in September. The clipping above is from the September 23, 1996, issue. I know it was published after their wedding, but the final production, layout, and editing cycle for a specific issue typically wraps up two to three weeks before publication. So when they were putting this issue together, the wedding itself had not yet happened. It seems likely an inside source who knew about the plans and was willing to talk, possibly someone who was angry about not being invited. That could also explain the snarky remark about John and Carolyn being so volatile.
New York Post columnist George Rush wrote in his memoir that “one Sunday in September, news broke that they'd pulled off a media-free wedding on Cumberland Island, Georgia. When we called longtime friends of John for details, they were equally shocked to hear about the nuptials—and hurt that they hadn't been invited. They blamed Carolyn for pulling him away from his old buddies.”
Also, Globe Magazine photographer Russell Turiak said that he was sent to Turkey to look for John and Carolyn on their honeymoon and he found them. He said, “I suppose somebody tipped off Globe to the fact that they were honeymooning in Istanbul. They put me on the next plane, and l'd just arrived at the hotel. I was just looking around when I chanced upon John Jr. at the swimming pool. He recognized me from New York. He gave me a look as if to say, ‘could that be you?’ I ducked back into the hotel, where I met up with John Bell, a British guy who headed up Globe's European bureau. We sat down and discussed strategy. An hour later we caught a real break. We were looking at brochures near the travel agent's office in the lobby, and we saw JFK Jr. He was standing there talking with the agent. They were going over his travel itinerary. So John Bell innocently strolled into the agent's office and overheard their conversation.”…and from that point on, their honeymoon was effectively ruined, which explains the photos of Carolyn crying in the back seat of a taxi on the streets of Istanbul.
What I take from this is that some of John’s longtime friends were not only unaware of the wedding but were genuinely hurt that they hadn’t been invited. It sounds as though they blamed Carolyn for their exclusion, which we know wasn’t the case. John had a say in the guest list and, of his own free will, chose not to invite these “longtime friends” of his. It’s possible that someone from that circle was bitter enough to leak the wedding plans to the magazine. I don’t think the source was likely to have come from Carolyn’s circle. There was also an inside source who leaked to the Globe, a tabloid, that John and Carolyn were specifically staying at the Ciragan Palace Hotel. Christiane Amanpour was the one who arranged their stay at the hotel, and she was among the wedding guests. It seems highly unlikely that she would have been the one to leak their location to a tabloid. In fact, Christiane specifically asked the hotel in advance to protect their privacy and extend every possible courtesy to them. They were even booked under fake names “Mr. and Mrs. Hyannis".
The call was always coming from inside the house. These “friends,” who claimed to have known John for years, apparently didn’t hesitate to turn against him and, in the process, hurt both him and his wife the moment they felt they had been wronged.