Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  For the team’s positive public image, the owner went public, a rarity for the usually reclusive billionaire who hardly ever gave interviews and, if he did, was a man of few words. On ESPN Radio, however, he told listeners that he had personally telephoned Sainz after learning of his team’s misogynistic treatment of her, and assured her that Jets officials would start questioning players and coaches posthaste to get to the bottom of Sainz’s harassment charges.

  “Right now, we’re working with the league and we’re doing all the fact-finding, checking the facts, doing the interviews,” he asserted. “We certainly don’t want any kind of allegations like this, or anything like this to happen. I apologized to her—if anything happened, what happened, kind of an open apology.”

  As the best known of the contemporary Johnson dynasty, Woody had made his mark in the high-profile, high-test, big-money world of professional football. But one must look to the distant past, and observe the brilliant first generation of Johnson & Johnson innovators, to discover where his entrepreneurial spirit was born.

  PART II

  GENIUS FOREBEARS

  6

  The first Robert Wood Johnson wasn’t quite as courtly with a certain female celebrity of his generation as was his great-grandson Woody with the bombshell locker room reporter from down Mexico way.

  For Johnson, it was all about business, and the business at hand had to do with what had become the company’s famous logo in the late 1800s—the red cross. The female in question was Clarissa Harlowe Barton, better known in the history books as Clara Barton, the prim Civil War heroine nurse and humanitarian who had founded the American National Red Cross Society in 1881.

  Johnson’s problem was that he had been using Barton’s red cross without her authorization, or agreement. Shrewdly deciding that the bloodred icon was the perfect symbol for Johnson & Johnson’s early first-aid and health-care products, he just arrogantly went ahead and had it emblazoned. To be fair, Johnson wasn’t alone. Other entrepreneurs had also used the symbol—from Red Cross Playing Cards to Red Cross Dog Collars. Anyone for a sip of Red Cross Brandy? Or a puff from a Red Cross stogie?

  The list went on and on, making Clara Barton, then in her seventies, as red with outrage and frustration as the color of the disputed symbol itself.

  Fed up, she went to Washington in 1895 and lobbied the U.S. Congress for a bill that would give her organization red cross exclusivity, along with the ability to license the use of the symbol, which was a way to generate income for her worthy group.

  Naturally, Johnson rallied and railed against any such legislation that could take away from his company the valuable asset that the red cross had become in the marketing of his products. With Johnson in one corner, and Clara Barton in the other, they were two popular American heavyweights going into battle. She won round one when the U.S. Senate passed her measure, but the president in power at the time, Grover Cleveland, a pro–big business—think Johnson & Johnson—Democrat of whom the Republican Robert Johnson was a supporter, threw the knockout blow, by nixing the bill, and it never became law.

  Subsequently, Johnson, a shrewd and charming negotiator when he needed to be, had some very private meetings with Barton, and eventually got the bargain of a lifetime. For a single crisp U.S. one-dollar bill, he had somehow convinced her to agree that Johnson & Johnson could use the red cross as a trademark. Later, the company began publishing a monthly magazine entitled Red Cross Notes, which was sent to physicians and druggists with much information about the latest health developments—and, of course, much subtle and not-so-subtle promotion for Johnson & Johnson’s product line. However, this time, Barton was graciously made aware of the publication with “Red Cross” in the name before it was circulated, but she still was upset, admitting, “We are stupid about law”—something that Robert Johnson clearly was not.

  An early issue of Red Cross Notes paid homage to Barton’s vanity. The cover had a color drawing of an angelic Bartonesque nurse all in white holding a box of Johnson & Johnson cotton. The text read: “The only way to secure surgically clean cotton, is to demand the blue carton with the red cross and the signature of Johnson & Johnson.”

  * * *

  Along with his brothers, Edward Mead Johnson and James Wood Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson had founded Johnson & Johnson in 1887 after some rough spots.

  They were the sons of a poor Pennsylvania farmer, Sylvester Johnson, whose lineage went back to England and the early colonists who had settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, almost two decades after the Pilgrims had arrived.

  Like the pioneer women from that time, Sylvester’s wife, Louisa Wood Johnson, a farmer’s daughter, had also descended from English stock. She was nineteen years old when she married, and right away began having babies, giving birth over the next two decades to a brood of eleven. Her first, a girl, died at birth. She was followed by four more girls and six boys.

  Robert was Louisa’s eighth, born a day after Valentine’s Day in 1845, followed in 1852 by Mead, as he would become known, who was her tenth, and James in 1856, number eleven.

  After some public school, Robert—considered the brightest of the progeny, studious and a bookworm—was sent at the age of thirteen to board at the Wyoming Seminary, established in 1844 by the Oneida Methodist Conference in Kingston, Pennsylvania, where Johnson received a classical education, according to Lawrence Foster, a onetime public relations executive for Johnson & Johnson, who self-published a book about the second Robert Wood Johnson, Woody Johnson’s grandfather.

  By the time Robert turned sixteen, the Civil War had started. Fearing he would be drafted in the bloody fighting between North and South, the Johnsons shuffled him off to Poughkeepsie, in New York State, to become an apprentice in a drugstore called Wood & Tittamer.

  It would be the Johnson dynasty’s first business contact with the world of retail health care and pharmaceuticals, and it was in this shop where the first Robert Wood Johnson was taught how to make medicinal plasters to aid in the treatment of injuries, a major turning point in his young life, as time would tell. Making the plasters properly was a difficult task, and years later, as a pharmaceutical and health-care mogul ruling the Johnson & Johnson behemoth, he was quoted in Foster’s book as saying, “Probably no other branch of the pharmaceutical art has been the occasion of so much toil, anxiety, and failure … Expressive expletives could not be restrained.”

  From his experience at the apothecary, he was able to secure a job as an order clerk with a wholesale drug company in downtown Manhattan, where he spent the next four years. During that time he befriended and teamed up with a well-off, socially prominent New York City drug broker by the name of George J. Seabury, according to Foster.

  In 1873, Johnson and Seabury became business partners. Their firm was called Seabury & Johnson; Seabury was president, Johnson was the firm’s sales manager and corporate secretary, and together they marketed sundry medical goods—there weren’t very many of any great import at the time—and plasters, which were manufactured at their plant across the East River in the borough of Brooklyn.

  Always on Johnson’s mind, though, was the development of a sterile surgical dressing, which would forever change modern surgery.

  Seabury & Johnson was quickly expanding, and had started generating business in Europe. Five years after the firm was founded, Johnson sailed to the Continent to study the market and look for new concepts and products, traveling to Germany, England, and France.

  He returned to New York enthusiastic about what he had seen in Europe and proposed expanding the business with new products, but his more conservative partner, Seabury, wasn’t as excited and thought it best that they stay their course without too much sudden innovation.

  Their relationship became tense and rocky, even more so when, in 1876, Seabury decided to bring his brother Robert into the business, and Johnson, not to be outdone, countered by bringing his twenty-four-year-old sibling, Edward Mead Johnson, into the firm as a salesman, although Mead was fa
r more educated. He had studied law at the University of Michigan for a year, and had taught school for a brief time in New York State.

  Two years later, Johnson proposed to bring his youngest brother, James, into Seabury & Johnson, which would, with so many Johnsons, far outnumber the Seabury siblings. In a letter, Seabury declared, “I am opposed to nepotism in business.”

  In time, after Johnson & Johnson was founded, nepotism would be standard operating procedure, a way of life, heralding the “Lucky Sperm Club” of wealthy heirs in later generations, which included Woody Johnson.

  By 1879, the growing company distributed a hefty catalog of its products, among them numerous types of plasters for various ailments. They also hawked a new item called “Lister’s Antiseptic Gauze.” As had happened with Clara Barton’s red cross, Lister’s name was used without apparent authorization from the great surgeon; it was the first product ever to carry Lister’s increasingly world-famous name.

  A year later, Seabury & Johnson production was moved to New Jersey, and set up in a leased facility in the town of South Orange.

  Around the same time, the thirty-five-year-old Robert Johnson began a relationship with a New Jersey girl, Ellen Cutler, and after a quickie courtship they were married in 1880. She became the first of his two wives, and gave birth to a daughter named Roberta. The four-year marriage ended in divorce—the first of what would be many divorces in the Johnson dynasty through the generations—and Roberta was raised by Robert’s brother James.

  The early 1880s heralded a new, and dark era for the personal relationship between Robert Johnson and George Seabury. There were now many disagreements, their business philosophies were at odds—even though Seabury & Johnson had become increasingly successful.

  In July 1885, according to Foster’s account, Robert Johnson had finally had it with Seabury, and resigned from the firm. After tough negotiation by Johnson, Seabury had agreed to fork over a quarter of a million dollars—an enormous amount in late-nineteenth-century dollars—for Johnson’s fifty-percent stake.

  The money, per the agreement, was to be paid out over a period of time, a decision that at the time seemed beneficial to Seabury, but would come to haunt him not far down the road.

  One of the key clauses was that Johnson, in exchange for the huge severance, was excluded from competing in a similar business for the next decade, which would take him into the first decade of the twentieth century.

  But that noncompete clause did not include James and Mead, and what they did in early 1886 was join together with a borrowed one thousand dollars and start a new company as “wholesale druggists and drug manufacturers,” according to a rather hyped announcement in the New Brunswick Daily Times.

  The Johnsons had rented a fourth-floor loft in the abandoned Janeway and Carpenter wallpaper factory, in the industrial city of New Brunswick—halfway between New York and Philadelphia—hard by the Raritan River and along the Pennsylvania Railroad line, which made it perfect for shipping.

  When Seabury learned of the Johnson brothers’ operation he was livid because he suspected—and rightly so—that Robert was a silent partner, pulling the strings and supplying the capital. If he actually were involved competitively, he would be in blatant violation of their ironclad separation agreement. Johnson penned a wink-wink, nudge-nudge letter to his brothers reiterating the legality of his contract with his former partner. He also informed them that he thought they would have a tough time competing with the long-established Seabury & Johnson company and, moreover, he didn’t think his siblings had anywhere near the necessary capital to make a go of it.

  Still, they went ahead, with Mead as the outside man luring customers and hustling products—he was as aggressive and brilliant a businessman as his brother Robert, and that would be underscored in years to come when he would go out on his own and start a major, hugely successful company—while James handled the mechanical end of the infant Johnson & Johnson.

  Meanwhile, George Seabury had shot himself in the foot, metaphorically speaking, by failing to live up to his agreement to make regular payments—he had missed several—on the quarter million dollars he had promised his former partner. Johnson, who was anxious to join his brothers in their startup, made an offer to Seabury that he couldn’t refuse:

  Johnson agreed to forfeit the monies due him from Seabury in exchange for his freedom to return to the business he loved, and be freed to join his siblings.

  Once the deal was consummated, the aggressive and arrogant Robert Johnson let the drug trade know in a letter that he was back in the saddle, that he was becoming a partner with his brothers and, as he boasted, “taking charge of the business.”

  To one of his salesman, he wrote: “We have concluded to stick the knife right into the bowels of the plaster business,” and to one of his distributors, the boastful and confident Johnson declared, “We guarantee the quality of the goods in every way to be equal to Seabury & Johnson or better.”

  On October 28, 1887, Johnson & Johnson was formally incorporated, with Robert Johnson running the show. He held forty percent of the stock, valued at one hundred thousand dollars, and Mead and James each had thirty percent.

  Johnson & Johnson’s first president was Robert, James was general manager, and Mead was made secretary.

  They had hit the ground with serious momentum.

  7

  By the fall of 1888, more than a hundred employees were on the Johnson & Johnson payroll, the New Brunswick factory encompassed thirty-five thousand square feet, and a young advertising huckster by the name of J. Walter Thompson—a close friend of Robert Johnson’s—had been commissioned to help make the company and its products world famous.

  Johnson & Johnson, under Robert—known as “R.W.”—was running full steam ahead.

  Its unforgettable logo, the red cross, appeared on the first Johnson & Johnson First-Aid Kit, the Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder can, and other early consumer products from the company.

  A dozen years after his first marriage had ended in divorce, Robert Johnson, looking older—and heavier at forty-seven—got married for a second time, again to a much younger woman—two decades younger. He shocked those in his social circle, in the family dynasty, and in the New Brunswick community of single women, not so single women, and widows of all ages, all of whom saw Robert Wood Johnson as a great, big wealthy catch—wealthy being the operative word.

  The lucky girl, who would become a June bride and who would wear his ring, was Evangeline Armstrong, the pretty, slender daughter—one of five sisters—of a country doctor and surgeon, Edwin Armstrong, and a schoolteacher mother, Martha, from Upstate New York, the village of Holley.

  Johnson, who often traveled to medical conclaves, may have been introduced to Evangeline by her father, the doctor. Knocked out by her beauty and availability, Johnson wasted no time courting her, and they immediately became intimate as would be underscored by the birth of their first child virtually nine months to the day after their quickie wedding ceremony in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, in a Tennessee burg called Maryville, a week before the Independence Day celebration of 1892.

  The reason Maryville was the setting for the private nuptials instead of New Brunswick, or even the bride’s hometown, was probably because they had eloped. Also never squarely answered was why the angelic-looking Evangeline with her cameo-white skin and blond spit curls fell for the middle-aged, stout, mustachioed, and balding Johnson with his piercing black eyes and quick temper, who easily could have passed for her father. Moreover, as everyone knew, his real love was his company, to which he was truly wed.

  The only conceivable reason Evangeline Armstrong said yes and became the second Mrs. Robert Johnson—Woody Johnson’s paternal great-grandmother—was the same reason a number of women would marry Johnson men, and men would marry Johnson women, through the generations, and that was because they were rich and powerful.

  Robert changed Evangeline’s young life overnight; she went from upstate girl to uptown
girl, the belle of New Brunswick society—although she was never fully accepted by the city’s hoi polloi, and couldn’t have cared less.

  She also became the mistress of Gray Terrace, the biggest mansion in town, of which the hoi polloi also thought little. It was a monstrosity of a Gilded Age palace that Johnson had bought for his bride at the enormous cost in those days of seventy-five thousand dollars, and was located just a block’s walk from the Johnson & Johnson complex, allowing him to come home for a hearty lunch and a cigar. While Gray Terrace was the height of luxurious living back then with its many rooms, greenhouses, and sumptuous grounds behind a low stone wall, photographs of the place before it was torn down and turned into a parking lot for Rutgers University students reminded one of the sinister-looking house on the hill where Norman Bates lived with his mummified mother.

  Johnson’s daughter from his first marriage, Roberta, who had been living with his brother James’s family, joined her father and his bride.

  And on April 4, 1893—nine months and eight days after Evangeline had tied the knot with Robert—she gave birth to a son, who was named, naturally, Robert Wood Johnson Jr., the future ruler of Johnson & Johnson—Woody Johnson’s grandfather.

  He would be the first of what would become the often scandalous second generation of the Johnson dynasty.

  On July 14, 1895, Evangeline gave birth to her second son, who was named John Seward Johnson, who would be even more of a tabloid figure than his brother. Then, on April 18, 1897, she brought a daughter into the world, her namesake, Evangeline Brewster Johnson.