Vows of Secrecy

Forget winning an Oscar.

Renee Zellweger pulled off an arguably more impressive feat earlier this month: getting hitched to country singer Kenny Chesney in a top-secret beach ceremony that caught the celebrity world by surprise.

She joins an elite group of celebs, including Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts and John F. Kennedy Jr., who outwitted the public by tying the knot without the media finding out ahead of time.

“We have to be far more creative and more secretive,” says Yifat Oren, wedding planner to the stars, who is “shocked” at the public’s fascination with celebrity weddings.

“Even B-list celebs’ weddings have now become headline news,” Oren says.

And with that appeal, every whisper of a possible Hollywood “I do” rouses hundreds of paparazzi and entertainment journalists into a frenzy to be first to spoil the surprise.

Ever since Madonna and Sean Penn’s 1985 vows were drowned out by hovering helicopters, stars have searched for ways to marry quietly.

Like others who have pulled it off, Chesney and Zellweger did so by downsizing: They were married in front of just 35 friends and family members.

After word leaked out about their lavishly planned October nuptials last fall, Spears and Kevin Federline instead held a clandestine ceremony Sept. 18 in front of 27 guests in the Studio City, Calif., home of their wedding planner, Alyson Fox.

“The celebrities who have pulled off weddings where no one is the wiser, almost universally it’s a 50-person-or-less wedding,” says photographer Denis Reggie, who captured Kennedy’s ultra-private September 1996 wedding to Carolyn Bessette on Georgia’s secluded Cumberland Island.

“The longer the guest list,” he says, “the greater the propensity for word getting out.”

Another key to secrecy for Chesney and Zellweger: “It really helped that they did it offshore,” Oren says. “It’s much easier to do it out of the country, because, honestly, in St. John, people really don’t care as much.”

It worked for Heidi Klum and Seal, too, who married quietly last week in Mexico.

Fake invitations with bogus dates or locations, designed to mislead nosy reporters and prying paparazzi, are a rarity, the pros say. But it does work sometimes.

Brooke Shields leaked to the press in 2001 that she and fiance Chris Henchy were exchanging vows in Catalina. The couple hit the beach, she donned a white dress, helicopters hovered and the press descended.

“The next week, she quietly got married in Florida,” Oren says.

The quest for secrecy has created a cagey new approach to Hollywood wedding invitations, so celebrities can avoid leaving a paper trail for paparazzi to follow.

“We shut down the printer for a whole day and destroy and shred any overages,” says Oren, who masterminded weddings for Kevin Costner, Mariska Hargitay and Natasha Gregson Wagner.

“I’ve gone as far as hiring security guards on the day invitations are delivered or mailed,” says Ellen Black, whose company, Lehr & Black, created invitations for Spears and Federline and for the Lopez/Ben Affleck affair before it was called off.

These days, celebrities rarely print their names on invitations, and the location is often deleted. “Instead, it reads, ‘You will be contacted at a further date for location,’ ” Black says.

And while most wedding invitations arrive to guests eight to 10 weeks in advance, celebrities send out invitations one to two weeks ahead of the ceremony.

Stars who want larger weddings use middlemen – wedding planners and personal assistants, or assistants to assistants – to work with vendors who don’t learn their clients’ real identities until as late as the wedding day. Almost always, Oren says, the first decision is on a pseudonym for both bride and groom.

Another alternative: Every aspect of the wedding is booked using the name of a friend of the couple.

“I’ve had people go through the trash bins out back looking for contracts and receipts,” Oren says. “This makes it much easier.”

And the celebrity has no direct contact with any of the merchants, either, says Elizabeth Allen, who planned the October 1998 wedding of NBC’s Matt Lauer and model Annette Roque and Ben Stiller’s nuptials to Christine Taylor in May 2000.

“In Ben’s case, I picked up the wedding cake and flew with it to Hawaii,” Allen says. “My office took care of every single travel arrangement, so Ben and Christine’s names were not attached to anything. We rented the cars and picked them up and greeted guests as they were coming off their flights. That’s what it takes.”

Oren works with celebrity lawyers to create confidentiality agreements that cover vendors’ staff at the wedding. The biggest request: no photographs. Staffers, who are checked out ahead of time, are required to wear credentials and checked for cameras before they enter the party.

But more often, it’s “a very close relation to the celebrity who will accidentally leak wedding information just out of excitement,” wedding planner Mindy Weiss says. “We often have the couple write a personal letter to their guests on how important this day is and to keep the memories private.”

Often, even guests are caught off-guard. Roberts surprised friends and family visiting her ranch in Taos, N.M., over the July Fourth weekend in 2002 when she and cameraman Danny Moder were married around midnight.

Last June, Lopez invited people to a private bash at her Beverly Hills home and ended up marrying Marc Anthony in her back yard. It was a quiet departure from the planned 2003 “Bennifer” media spectacle.

And guests, including the wedding party and family members, thought they were attending Spears and Federline’s engagement party but “found out it was a wedding from an invitation that they were handed when they walked in,” Fox says.

Besides Spears and Federline, “only four of us knew about the wedding,” Fox says. “That’s how we outwitted the paparazzi.”

Not even wedding-dress designer Monique Lhuillier knew what was going down. As for Fox’s neighbors, they thought she was simply having a party and “wondered why they weren’t invited.”

Other potential complications?

“The wedding dress is the one thing that could be a problem, because you need to be fitted for it,” Allen says. “So a celebrity asks a designer for a fabulous white dress for a dinner party.”

It helps if a star has a close bond with a specific designer, as Zellweger does with Carolina Herrera, who created her white gown.

But even so, Zellweger didn’t let Herrera in on the secret. At the bride’s final fitting May 5, the designer still “didn’t know what it was for,” she told Women’s Wear Daily. “Deep in me, I knew it was going to be something special like a wedding, but I didn’t want to ask too much. So I knew, but I didn’t.”

Even when weddings aren’t a surprise, precautions are airtight to keep out interlopers who can sell details to the tabloids.

Oren brought paper shredders to Costner’s Aspen ranch for last September’s wedding to Christine Baumgartner, a weekend-long event. That way, she could immediately destroy all receipts that might hint at wedding details, such as menu items, floral arrangements or – big scoop! – the cost of the wedding.

As the wedding day approached, the winding roads became lined with journalists, and the hills were peppered with paparazzi. And, yes, trash routinely was pilfered for scraps of information, Oren says.

Security guards with guest lists typically man the entrances and check photo IDs. And often, tents are set up to block the view of airborne shutterbugs.

“I’ve been chased by helicopters when I’ve been trying to take a photo of the couple coming out of the church,” says photographer Reggie, who also shot Mariah Carey’s 1993 wedding to Tommy Mottola.

“There’s nothing like the sound of a helicopter whirling above to take away from the spirit of a wedding.”