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For Caroline, Trix, Mr. R, Toby and Jesse, Louise, Julien, and Max, and in memory of Cukes
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Leading Cast of Characters
Family Tree
Prologue
PART I: Power Broker
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
PART II: Genius Forebears
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
PART III: Eccentric Evangeline
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
PART IV: Seward’s Folly
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
PART V: Woody’s Secrets
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
PART VI: Troubled Mary Lea
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
PART VII: Acquiring Identity
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
PART VIII: Family Matters
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note on Sources
Selected Bibliography
Photographs
Index
Also by Jerry Oppenheimer
About the Author
Copyright
LEADING CAST OF CHARACTERS
Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV—The great-grandson of one of the three founding brothers of Johnson & Johnson, he was the de facto patriarch of the contemporary Johnson dynasty, a Republican power broker, and the billionaire owner of the New York Jets.
Nancy Sale Frey Johnson Rashad—Woody Johnson’s first wife, the mother of his three daughters, was from a prominent Jewish family in St. Louis. She met the Johnson heir while she was helping to market his Florida condo development. Divorced, she married ex-footballer Ahmad Rashad.
Sale Trotter Case “Casey” Johnson—Woody and Sale Johnson’s troubled firstborn who was struck as a child with diabetes, and in the midst of very public scandals years later was secretly diagnosed with a debilitating mental illness before her 2010 death at age thirty.
Robert Wood “Bobby” Johnson III—Father of Woody Johnson, he was the namesake of his father, the “General”—fiery ruler of Johnson & Johnson who humiliatingly fired him as president of the family business after years of battling. They died two years apart, both from cancer.
Betty May Wold Johnson Gillespie Bushnell—Mother of Woody Johnson and his four siblings, she was the daughter of a St. Paul physician, became de facto matriarch of the contemporary Johnson dynasty, and married twice after her husband, Bobby Johnson, died at fifty, in 1970.
Keith Wold Johnson—Woody Johnson’s troubled brother, the second of his parents’ brood, he began using drugs in his teens, and was considered effeminate as well as extravagant with his inherited wealth. He wrecked many exotic cars and overdosed while shooting up cocaine in 1975 in his midtwenties.
Willard Trotter Case “Billy” Johnson—Born after his brothers Woody and Keith, he was considered the brightest and most creative of the siblings, but was also a recreational drug user and often reckless. He died just weeks after Keith in a high-speed motorcycle accident.
Elizabeth Ross “Libet” Johnson—The only daughter among unruly brothers, Woody Johnson’s sister blossomed into a beautiful, eccentric heiress with a ravenous appetite for boyfriends and husbands—five of them, with whom she had four children, and adopted another.
Guy Vicino—A gay interior decorator and boutique owner, he was Woody Johnson’s best friend from childhood, and was his GQ-like advisor and tastemaker. When he was diagnosed with AIDS in the Rock Hudson era, Woody did everything he could to save him, and make his final days easier.
Michael Richard Spielvogel—An aggressive entrepreneur in his twenties from Long Island, he became Woody Johnson’s first business partner because the Band-Aid heir’s father advised him to team up with a successful Jew who wasn’t born with a silver spoon. They had a rocky partnership.
J. Seward Johnson Jr.—The once-troubled namesake of J. Seward Johnson, the second in command of the family’s business, his first marriage included attempted suicide, claims of live-in lovers, a bizarre shootout, and a decades-long paternity battle. But he came into his own as an internationally noted sculptor.
Robert Wood “The General” Johnson Jr.—Until his death in 1968, Woody Johnson’s grandfather controlled Johnson & Johnson with an iron hand, brilliantly marketing and obsessively overseeing virtually each and every product. A martinet and a roué, he had three wives and many lovers.
Evangeline Brewster Johnson—The heiress sister of Seward Johnson Sr. and the General, she was cheated out of company stock and Johnson & Johnson control by her greedy, domineering, misogynist brothers. Bisexual, she had two daughters and three husbands, one of whom was gay.
J. Seward Johnson Sr.—Second in command of Johnson & Johnson under his brother, the General, he was a playboy who divorced his second wife to marry his household’s sexy Polish chambermaid, leaving her his fortune, sparking a scandalous will battle by his six children who wanted their share.
Mary Lea Johnson Ryan D’Arc Richards—The first infant face to grace the Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder container, she was the firstborn of playboy Seward Johnson Sr.’s four children with the first of his three wives. After his death, she questionably claimed that he molested her into her teens.
PROLOGUE
They have been called perhaps the most dysfunctional family in the Fortune 500.
From the founders of the Johnson & Johnson health-care behemoth near the close of the nineteenth century up through the fourth and fifth generations of the twenty-first century, which included billionaire New York Jets owner Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV, the Johnson dynasty has been beset by scandals, tragedies, and misfortune. To be clear, these were not wicked people. Most if not all of the horrors they faced were attributable to the vast fortunes they had inherited, and the psychological impact on them of all that unearned wealth.
Money was always both a blessing and a curse for members of the very private, insular, and Byzantine dynasty. Many of the family members, like Woody, had grown up wondering whether people liked them for who they were, or because of their wealth. Sadl
y, it was usually the latter rather than the former, a fact of life that a number of them would often comprehend when it was too late. Women and men who married into the dynasty were routinely suspected of being gold diggers, and based on the number of bitter, sometimes violent divorces through the generations, some might have been.
Over the years money and the attendant greed had pitted Johnsons against Johnsons over trust funds, wills, divorce settlements, paternity, and other familial issues. What was internationally known as Johnson and Johnson for health-care products began showing up more frequently through the generations as Johnson versus Johnson on court dockets.
Drug addiction, alcoholism, overdoses, adultery, homosexuality, child abuse in the form of molestation, suspected kidnapping, a murder plot, a shooting, tragic accidents, suicide, attempted suicides, and other mayhem—all were part of the ongoing drama and soiled fabric of one of the richest and most powerful families in the world. For a number of the family members, their fortune—all of that inherited wealth—was intoxicating and toxic at the same time.
“We used to make a comparison between the Kennedys and the Johnsons,” states Neil Vicino, a veteran broadcast journalist and close Johnson family friend, “that there was kind of a Kennedy curse and a Johnson curse.”
The Johnson dynasty drama began with the brash, entrepreneurial spirit of three relatively uneducated but ambitious brothers—Robert, who was Woody Johnson’s great-grandfather, James, and Edward Mead Johnson—who, in 1886, founded what became the world’s largest health-care business.
The brothers operated fast and loose, sometimes using cutthroat tactics, even going up against an early business partner who had helped give one of them, the very ambitious and shrewd first Robert Wood Johnson, his start in the business that made him extremely wealthy. The tough-talking Johnson once promised to “stick the knife right into the bowels” of his mentor’s medical supply business and others. The brothers audaciously appropriated from others without authorization, such as when they brazenly emblazoned legendary nurse Clara Barton’s iconic Red Cross symbol on their early products—Johnson & Johnson Absorbent Cotton Rolls and Johnson & Johnson Red Cross Bandage. She eventually was sweet-talked into accepting a dollar bill in exchange for exclusive use of the bloodred symbol as the company’s internationally recognizable logo.
At the same time, it was those same Johnson siblings, sons of a poor farmer and his baby-making machine of a wife (mother of eleven), who saw the dire need and marketed the world’s first sanitary, packaged, ready-to-use antiseptic surgical dressings at a time when doctors were still using rags to dress wounds and incisions. Their marketing inspiration came from the landmark work of the British surgeon and pioneer of antiseptic surgery Dr. Joseph Lister, and their eponymous surgical dressings and plasters saved lives in wars and disasters and epidemics.
After an apparent feud—the first of many vicious familial battles in the Johnson dynasty through the generations—one of the founding brothers, Edward Mead Johnson, split off and started his own eminent and very prosperous business. But there was a synergy between Johnson & Johnson of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Mead Johnson & Company of Evansville, Indiana. While some of the Johnson & Johnson products powdered and oiled the dimpled bottoms of America’s babies, many of Mead Johnson’s helped to settle and feed their little tummies with Pablum and cod liver oil.
Before long it became practically impossible to get well without products made by the New Jersey-headquartered Johnson & Johnson that eventually became a publicly traded, global juggernaut with more than 250 companies located in some sixty countries. Generations have grown from bassinet to adulthood using Johnson & Johnson products—from baby powder and Band-Aids, to the female sanitary pad Modess, to the schizophrenia drug Risperdal, to the pimple medication Remicade, the lubricant K-Y Jelly, the over-the-counter cold and headache pill Tylenol, and scores more drugs and sundries.
The red “Johnson & Johnson” script on the company’s products actually was the handwriting of James Johnson, the second head of the family business following the passing of his ruling brother, Robert.
While the corporate side is one amazing international success story, the family members behind the household brand are even more astonishing. The Johnsons through the generations are to everyday health-care products what the Kennedys have been to politics and public service—a genuine royal dynasty, and an all-American Greek tragedy.
The immense wealth accumulated by the first, second, and third generations of Johnson men (not women) who ran Johnson & Johnson—chauvinism reigned—made for regal lifestyles of their descendants through family trusts and inheritances. And the result was often vicious court battles over the money involved.
One such mindboggling case was ignited by the adult progeny of a Johnson senior over the $400 million he left his much younger wife, the family’s former chambermaid, after divorcing his second wife, a suspected lesbian. In another of the many cases, a twelve-year-long court battle ensued over the definition of just a single word—“spouse”—because tens of millions of inherited dollars were at stake. New Jersey’s highest court once took a subtle shot at the very litigious Johnson family, noting that a case it was hearing “is one of the many such disputes involving trusts or trust property that have arisen within the Johnson family over the past three decades.”
Johnson inherited wealth was immense. When Robert Wood Johnson Jr., known as the General—Woody Johnson’s grandfather—took the family owned, privately held Johnson & Johnson company public on the New York Stock Exchange on September 24, 1944, a block of one hundred shares sold for $3,750. By the end of the twentieth century those same shares reportedly were worth a whopping $12 million (not including dividends), and with splits had ballooned to 125,000 shares. Every Johnson dynasty member—past, present, and future—became wealthy beyond anyone’s imagination as the value soared in the open market.
Many Johnsons never had to do much except clip coupons and live large. Woody Johnson, for one, never worked a day in his life in the Johnson dynasty’s health-care monster. He never had a chance. When he was still in prep school his martinet of a grandfather, who ran the company with an iron hand, humiliatingly fired Woody’s driven father from his position as company president. Like a scene in a Greek tragedy, the two, who hadn’t spoken in years and were both critically ill, had a virtual deathbed rapprochement. Both succumbed to cancer a couple of years apart.
Woody had to find his own way in life. It didn’t hurt that he received his first trust fund check of ten million dollars when he turned twenty-one and then millions more every five years until his midforties. His first business partner was a young entrepreneur, Michael Richard Spielvogel, who says Woody chose him because he was “a Jew” who wasn’t a silver spoon—a choice based on curious advice from Woody’s dad. They went into the condo construction business in South Florida and lived the good life with Woody’s trust fund millions. He finally acquired an identity by buying the Jets for a record $635 million of his own money in 2000 when he was in his fifties—thanks to the sales of Band-Aids and baby powder, Tylenol and Modess.
As his first wife, Nancy Sale Frey Johnson Rashad, observes, “He didn’t have to do a damn thing. He could have been a total ne’er-do-well, sailing around on a boat and smoking pot, but he didn’t. He just went right to work.”
His life, though, was littered with tragedy. But as the de facto patriarch of the dynasty in the twenty-first century, he was a rarity in that he had actually pursued a calling. Many others didn’t, resulting in a sometimes bizarre and often eccentric cast of characters who populated the ongoing Johnson dynasty drama.
As one who became involved intimately with them and their soap opera–like lives observes: “They are a mixed-up, weird bunch. You couldn’t make them up in fiction. The whole family is like a great big spiderweb that innocent people drop into—normal people who get caught in the Johnson web of craziness. It’s almost like European royalty.”
From the entrepre
neurial wheeler-dealer founders to those Johnsons of later generations—the fascinating, complex, and enigmatic lucky sperm club members who have lived royally on their trust fund inheritances—this, then, is their story.
PART I
POWER BROKER
1
When Woody Johnson was vigorously and aggressively raising funds for what would become the failed 2008 Republican presidential campaign of the Vietnam war hero and conservative senior U.S. Senator from Arizona, John McCain, and his controversial vice-presidential running mate, Sarah Palin, he began hitting up as many masters of the universe and captains of industry as he knew—and, in his American Express Black Card milieu, he knew many.
Woody, sixty-one at the time, had actually turned the notoriously secretive fifteenth-floor Rockefeller Center offices of his privately held investment firm, the bland-sounding Johnson Company, of which he was chairman and CEO—no relation to the Johnson & Johnson empire of his forebears—into McCain campaign central. It became a war room from which he was making dozens of calls every day, soliciting money for his candidate.
Woody was working the phones like a maestro conducting a symphony orchestra, much like the legendary baton-wielding Leopold Stokowski, who was the first of the three husbands of Woody’s eccentric great-aunt, Evangeline Brewster Johnson.
The walls of Woody’s office had once been covered with splendid family photographs. His favorite showed Woody’s father, Robert Wood “Bobby” Johnson III, looking down at his father, Robert Wood Johnson Jr., known as the “General,” holding baby Woody. Looming behind was an oil portrait of Woody’s great-grandfather, Robert Wood Johnson. There was also much Johnson & Johnson memorabilia on the wall, including a framed copy of the corporate Credo penned in 1943 by the General.
All of it, though, seemed a bit misplaced and a trifle hollow since Woody’s father, Bobby, had been harshly treated throughout his life by Woody’s grandfather, the General, who ultimately punished him by firing him from the presidency of Johnson & Johnson. Woody would never be a part of the family business, and would have to find his own way. The dynastic ephemera on his office wall made for fascinating decoration, however, and impressed visitors.
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 1