Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, the late fashion icon, made a dramatic transformation before marrying John F. Kennedy Jr. married.
The fashion icon’s colorist Brad Johns recalled the behind-the-scenes moments of the couple’s secret 1996 wedding.
According to Johns, Bessette Kennedy wanted to give up her signature blonde hair for jet black locks just days before the ceremony.
Speaking to People Magazine, Johns recalled, “She freaked out. I said, ‘What’s wrong with you?'”
“She said, ‘There’s just something big going on,'” He revealed that Bessette Kennedy kept the wedding a secret from him. “She always went to big events, so every day was a big event. So I said, ‘Carolyn, you’ve been going to big events since you [got together] and you love him, and you look beautiful! ”
“She says, ‘No, this is different! No, this is different! Let’s just dye something completely different, like maybe black, to look different than I looked before,” the stylist recalled.
Johns added, “I said, ‘I’m not going to ruin all my work to make you look like Morticia.'”
He revealed that he talked her down so much that she let him do whatever he wanted with her hair, noting that he had never “seen her so nervous.”
“Then I thought to myself, there’s something big going on with her… but she never told me, I never knew. I never knew,” Johns said. “And she was like… When you change your hair color, you’re not the person nervously looking in the mirror, you’re someone else.”
Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and John F. Kennedy married in September 1996. The late couple’s love story is documented in Ryan Murphy’s American Love Story.
