Surprise! Barbara Pierce Bush Had a Second Wedding in Texas 6 Months After Secretly Marrying Husband Craig
Six months after saying “I do” in front of her closest family, including her late grandfather George H. W. Bush, Barbara Pierce Bush had a second, “bigger” wedding for family and friends this past weekend in Texas, PEOPLE confirms.
“Barbara and [husband] Craig did have another wedding,” a source tells PEOPLE. “They wanted to make sure her grandfather got to be there so they kept their first wedding small and intimate.”
“This party was a chance for them to celebrate with all their friends and family as well,” the source says.
According to social media posts from some of the guests, the big day appears to have been held at the family’s ranch in Crawford.
Among the 100-plus guests, according to Page Six, were actress Megan Ferguson, T Magazine editor Isabel Wilkinson and fashion executive Alyssa Zachary — plus Barbara’s dad, President George W. Bush.
“This time it was definitely bigger, and they had all their friends there,” the source adds. (A Bush family spokesman declined to comment.)
“My dearest friend, the gorgeous BB got married this weekend and we danced the nights away,” designer Prabal Gurung wrote on Instagram along with a photo of him and Barbara. “Love you B, congratulations to you and Craig.”
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A post shared by Taylor Pace (@mtaylorpace) on Apr 14, 2019 at 11:41am PDT
Barbara, 37, the eldest twin daughter of the younger President Bush, told PEOPLE last fall she wed screenwriter Craig Coyne in October in a “very short, sweet ceremony” at the Bush family home in Kennebunkport, Maine.
It was, fittingly, an only-family affair with some 20 total attendees: Barbara’s aunt, Dorothy “Doro?? Bush Koch, married her and Coyne and her father walked her down the aisle as her grandfather, mother and other relatives watched.
Twin sister Jenna Bush Hager was the matron of honor and the couple’s nieces were the flower girls.
From PEOPLE’s Original Report on Their Secret Wedding:
Barbara wore a custom Vera Wang gown of ivory silk crepe. Her “something borrowed” was a bracelet that former President H. W. Bush gave to former First Lady Barbara Bush, the younger Barbara’s namesake, on their 70th anniversary.
And though her grandmother had passed away six months before her wedding, Mrs. Bush was not absent from the special occasion.
“The second that it was announced that we were husband and wife, it started to rain,” Barbara later recalled on the Today show. “I thought, ‘That’s my grandmother. She’s with us, too.’ “
Less than two months after Barbara’s wedding, H. W. Bush passed away as well.
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Coyne — an Atlanta native who has previous acting credits in Jarhead, Look at Me and The Snowtown Murders — tied the knot with Barbara after a whirlwind, five-week engagement and in the same week when he relocated from Los Angeles to make his new home with Barbara in New York City.
The couple, who kept their romance under wraps until the wedding, were set up by friends on a blind date in November 2017 and committed as a couple by that New Year’s Eve — despite living on opposite sides of the country, with Coyne in L.A. and Barbara in Manhattan.
It was during a family gathering at Kennebunkport last summer, Barbara told PEOPLE, that she and Coyne were walking along the oceanside rocks when he suddenly dropped to his knee in the same spot where Barbara’s grandparents got engaged almost exactly 75 years earlier, in August 1943.
