John Barrett instantly knew he had captured something extraordinary the moment he pressed the shutter button. In his lens stood Carolyn Bessette, glowing with genuine happiness, as she joyfully settled into the lap of her fiancé, John F. Kennedy Jr.

Looking dapper in his tuxedo, Kennedy was caught in a moment of pure joy, laughing heartily as his radiant fiancée affectionately nestled against him. The scene unfolded on a balmy June evening in 1996, at New York City’s Hilton Hotel, where Barrett had skillfully slipped past the event’s security.

Fortunately for Barrett, the guards were more preoccupied with securing the gift bags than monitoring the entrance, allowing him the opportunity to capture this candid moment. Under the vibrant dance of disco lights, Kennedy and Bessette were blissfully unaware that their unguarded playfulness was being immortalized by Barrett’s camera.

When the couple tied the knot in a covert ceremony three months later, the New York Post prominently featured Barrett’s photograph on its front page, perfectly encapsulating the joyous news of their secret marriage.

The disco lights danced, meaning Kennedy and Bessette weren’t even aware that the flash of Barrett’s camera was capturing their unguarded playfulness.

When the couple married in secret, three months later, the New York Post put the image on the front cover to illustrate the news.

‘It’s definitely my favorite of the photos I took of them,’ Barrett told the Daily Mail. ‘By far.’

Memories of those heady days have in recent weeks been flooding back, thanks to the smash hit dramatization of the Kennedy-Bessette story.

The show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, has trawled the archives for iconic images of the couple to recreate – among them photos that Barrett and his fellow photographers shot.

And there are plenty to go on.

Barrett, now 79 and retired on the Jersey Shore, first started photographing Kennedy in the mid-1970s, when Kennedy was around 15.

His fellow photographer Adam Scull, now 73, was hired by the New York Post in 1977 and he too spent years following the American princeling.

‘I liked him a lot,’ said Barrett, who was a Wall Street banker before teaching himself to take photos and switching careers. 

‘I was very conscious of not being too overbearing. So I’d find out about an event, ask to take his picture, then leave him alone. I didn’t spend every day outside his house like some did. One time he was on the subway, and I followed him to the subway and took a few shots of him reading the paper. And then I got off the next stop; he kind of knew I wasn’t going to be pestering him the whole distance.

‘He knew it was a game. We were both New Yorkers, we got it. He’d be at an event and we’d race him home, and he’d get back to his loft laughing like, you guys beat me.

‘That’s one reason why he rode his bike everywhere, because he knew we’d try and follow in our cars. It was before the motorbike follows. A lot of times he would just laugh at us stuck on a red light, and he could just get past and lose us.’

Scull was less enamored with the political scion but agreed that initially Kennedy was fine. 

‘In the early days, he was no problem at all,’ he said. ‘He knew the game that he came from. He would go to Studio 54 every so often, and I would photograph him dancing there. And he was very pleasant. He never barked about anything back then.’

That changed, Scull said, with his marriage to Bessette.

‘After that marriage, I detected something funny this way comes,’ he said. ‘He was very grouchy at the end and very unwilling to be nice.’

Barrett said the televised scene of the couple returning from honeymoon, with ‘thirty people climbing on cars,’ was an exaggeration. ‘There are maybe ten of us,’ he said. ‘And we didn’t do things like that.’

But Kennedy, as shown in the series, did come down and ask the photographers to take only a few photos of them and then leave.

‘A few of us looked at each other, and we said, “That’s not going to happen, John. That’s never going to happen.”‘

Because the demand for images of the pair was too strong?

‘Oh yeah,’ said Barrett. ‘We told him, it’s too much for you to control, John.’

Both Barrett and Scull agreed that Kennedy, at that time, was their most lucrative subject and photos of the couple fetched more than either alone.

Barrett sold the image of the couple at the Hilton for $5,000 – by contrast, he said, a photo of Madonna from that time would fetch a few hundred dollars.

The sum – around $10,500 today – doesn’t seem enormous, compared to the vast amounts commanded by mid 2000s pictures of Britney Spears or Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

But the demand from the public, both said, was insatiable.

Bessette hated it.

‘I was up in Hyannis Port at the airport with another photographer, a woman that’s been shooting the Kennedys for years, and we were just leaving as Carolyn shows up,’ said Barrett. ‘I forget if John was with her, but I don’t think he was. And the photographer I guess came too close, and Carolyn spat in her face. Actually spat. It was kind of shocking, like, woah.

‘John would never have done that. He’s gotten angry and stuff like that, but he would never do that.’

Scull said: ‘I’m always asked what she looked like and I tell people – and it surprises them – that the first word that comes to my mind is mousey.

‘Mousey in the sense that, yeah, she was obviously thin and beautiful and a model and blah, blah, blah. But there was something about her dour expression after their marriage.’

What should she have done?

‘Accepted the game and played it,’ said Scull. ‘They should have understood that if they just gave the photographers a few minutes of their time, it’s done with. Yes, some would follow them, but not most.’

Barrett said they should have been realistic about their predicament and left New York City. Or, he should have found someone more willing to put up with the circus that followed him.

‘I didn’t think he picked the right woman,’ said Barrett. ‘She wasn’t ready for the spotlight. She didn’t realize this was a concert playing all the time. I’ve been watching the show on TV, and I feel kind of bad for her too, because it shows her at the beginning and then slowly realizing what she’s got in to.’

Revisiting the past, through the show and the flurry of interest, has been both poignant and painful for the pair.

‘I had the greatest time, throughout my career,’ said Scull. ‘I was reading the papers every day and getting the New York social calendar, and I’d read through it and say, “Oh, this looks good.” Or someone would say, “Hey, there’s a party here. Go to Regine’s, go to this, go to that.”

‘And I was hanging out of Studio 54 every single night, which did nothing for my marriage at the time. But I didn’t care. I was just so determined to do what I was doing, and I was in there almost every single night, shooting, then running to the paper.’

Barrett said he missed the adrenaline of the story.

‘It just rushes in your blood and everything,’ he said. ‘It’s like a drug.’

The death of Princess Diana in August 1997, two years before Kennedy and Bessette’s untimely end, changed things, though.

‘People suddenly turned on us, thought of us as vultures,’ said Barrett. ‘For me, getting the best shots was someone not seeing me take the picture, so I didn’t interrupt anybody’s life. But, yeah, I heard it for so long – like, oh, you’re paparazzi. It was a bad vibe for years.’

Kennedy and Bessette’s deaths had a lasting impact on both men.

Scull said it didn’t come as a huge surprise. He blamed Kennedy’s decision to fly his plane in poor conditions, despite being only a novice pilot, as typical of his arrogance.

Barrett, however, said it left him reeling.

‘I was in the Hamptons and I just rushed home and packed everything and went up to Hyannis,’ he said. ‘I knew all the Kennedys were there. And I felt so bad; I just tried to be close to photographers, to talk to them, see if it was true.

‘It took me a long time to get over it. I didn’t want to go down to their apartment and take pictures. They asked me to go down there and take pictures of the flowers, and I said, let other people do that.

‘John was part of New York. I just felt like we were two city people. And he was gone.’