Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  At home in Gray Terrace, Evangeline Armstrong Johnson had a staff of servants to lighten the load for the young mother of three, and stepmother of another. A colorized photograph of her three biological children—showing Robert in a sailor suit, his sister in a white frilly bonnet, and Seward also dressed in navy blue—appeared in a 1986 book called A Company That Cares that marked Johnson & Johnson’s one hundred years in business. The Johnson siblings were sitting in a horse-drawn cart, and naturally it was Robert who was holding the reins and wielding the whip, and glaring suspiciously at the camera—a chubby, pink-cheeked vision of things to come.

  By the last decade of the nineteenth century, Johnson & Johnson was turning out dozens of health-care products.

  If you had a health issue, Johnson & Johnson usually had a remedy. Many were life-saving and history-making, but some had the ring of the snake oil salesman.

  For indigestion and dyspepsia there was Johnson’s Tablets, “Cure Guaranteed—When Directions are followed.” For a time, Johnson & Johnson sold a non-habit-forming, supposedly nonalcoholic product called Vino-Kolafra, an “African-tonic stimulant” that, among other things, “invigorates the Feeble and hastens Convalescence.” Despite the nonalcoholic claim, one of the ingredients was cheap sherry, which Johnson & Johnson workers had started sampling on the job—the product was soon canceled. It was a follow-up to another very successful product that had recently come on the market from another entrepreneur—a drink called Coca-Cola, which was said to have tonic potential. Johnson & Johnson, however, had their version approved by the American Medical Association.

  On the plus side, the company was producing various forms of surgical sutures—catgut, twisted silk. There was the cotton that appeared in the famous blue box with the red cross on it. There were kits to aid in safe births at a time when the maternity ward was the home bedroom with a midwife attending the mother-to-be—among those products were “Dr. Simpson’s MATERNITY Packet,” “Umbilical Tape,” and “Abdominal Binder.”

  There was a cream to clean the teeth called ZONWEISS—German for “white teeth”—sold for thirty-five cents. The product “is praised by dentists and refined people everywhere,” declared a magazine advertisement. Bizarrely, the ad included a drawing of what appeared to be a family of ratlike creatures holding toothbrushes. Before being canceled, ZONWEISS became the first tooth cleaner in a squeezable tube.

  A physician had sent a letter to Dr. Frederick B. Kilmer, a brilliant and successful pharmacist, physician, and analytical chemist, who had been appointed by Robert Johnson as the company’s director of scientific affairs, and who was the father of the poet who wrote “Trees,” Alfred Joyce Kilmer. The physician’s letter noted that a patient had suffered from skin irritations after using medicated plasters. Kilmer thought a form of talcum powder might ease the problem and sent a can to the doctor. At the same time, corporately, Johnson & Johnson began including talc with some of the plasters it was producing. So, it was Frederick Kilmer who, in 1892, had given birth to Johnson’s Baby Powder, which became a mix of talc and medicated plaster. But that was just the start.

  Over time, ingredients numbering some two hundred from lands around the globe were combined to give the product and the pink behinds of a once estimated 60 percent of all babies born in America a distinctive aroma that reportedly has never been changed. Subsequent research, according to Lawrence Foster, disclosed that baby powder was linked to the love of a mother, the bond between her and her baby, through the caressing of the baby with the powder. It was more about the mother’s touch than the powder’s benefits, according to some researchers.

  * * *

  Of the three founding brothers of Johnson & Johnson, Edward Mead Johnson had long gone off the radar in terms of the family business by starting his own companies, completely separate from Johnson & Johnson. Still, there would be a kind of a synergy between Johnson & Johnson of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and his most successful enterprise, Mead Johnson & Company of Evansville, Indiana. While some of Johnson & Johnson’s products were used to pamper the dimpled behinds of America’s babies, many of Mead Johnson’s products helped with their digestion.

  In the mid-1890s, Mead had become fascinated with the curative powers of papaya for indigestion, which had become a growing problem related to the changing and often gluttonous eating habits of Americans in the late nineteenth century. Beyond that, he saw a market—and a need—for products in the then-infant field of infant nutrition. For some reason he was alone among his brothers in his interests, so while still at Johnson & Johnson he started his first independent company, called American Ferment—the word “ferment” referring to digestive aids—in Jersey City, New Jersey, directly across the Hudson from lower Manhattan.

  In 1897, he sold all of his Johnson & Johnson stock to his ruling brother, Robert, and left the company to run American Ferment full time.

  Why Mead would give up all the success and riches he had in Johnson & Johnson—despite his other fledgling interests—was still a big question mark to his great-grandson, Edward Mead Johnson III, known as Ted, a century and a decade later. “It is a mystery, but there’s something that happened, either a dispute with his brothers, or something else. I just don’t know,” he says.

  Around the same time Mead created his company, he had divorced his first wife and married a woman by the name of Helen Dalton, who operated an exclusive hat shop on fashionable Madison Avenue in New York. “She had two characteristics,” says Ted, seventy-three in 2010. “One was that she was very devoted to my great-grandfather, and when his company was initially experiencing serious financial difficulties, she sold all of her jewelry to save it. The other thing, which is probably equally, if not more important, was that when there was dissention in the family all the members felt that they could go to her and talk to her—so she was the great peacemaker. She kind of rose above the male aggressions.”

  In 1905, in his early fifties, Mead Johnson changed the name of American Ferment to Mead Johnson & Company, moved into a new two-story factory, hired a couple of sales representatives, and business started to boom with his main digestive product, called Caroid.

  Soon, Mead Johnson’s line expanded, with its first major product for the feeding of infants, called Mead’s Dextri-Maltose.

  As it happened, Mead’s firstborn, Edward Mead Johnson Jr., had been unhealthy from birth with not only a congenital heart defect—he would die at the age of forty-one—but also serious difficulty in tolerating his feedings.

  “My grandfather was a very sickly person and he had that condition,” says Ted Johnson, “and so my great-grandfather said, let’s try to figure out something that has meaning.” The nation’s top pediatrician at the time prescribed a mixture on which the baby did well—one that would be similar to Mead Johnson’s new Dextri-Maltose, a recipe of carbohydrate powder and milk. A scientist whom Mead had recruited from Johnson & Johnson took it from there.

  One of the product’s ingredients was potato starch that was imported from Germany, but the outbreak of the First World War ended such imports. Johnson needed to find a part of the United States where it was readily available, and that turned out to be America’s heartland, the Midwest. He moved his operations from the Johnson dynasty’s home state of New Jersey to Indiana, and in the city of Evansville, on the Ohio River, Mead Johnson & Company was established in a vacant cotton mill. His three sons, Ted, Lambert, and James, eventually were executives under their father.

  Through the years Mead Johnson & Company would produce iconic—but not always tasty—products that served generations of babies and children such as cod liver oil and Pablum. There was Nutramigan, the first infant formula ever for babies sensitive to cow’s milk, and Vi-Sol, the first water-soluble vitamins in drop-dosage form for infants.

  In the late 1950s, the company joined the weight-loss craze that was sweeping the nation with a product for adults called Metrecal. From a chocolate-tasting diet drink to soups for weight watchers, Metrecal became an overn
ight sensation, with celebrities extolling its virtues.

  “It wasn’t what you would call a serious medical product,” notes Ted Johnson, “and it probably was a fad and when the fad was over other fads came in. My father, who was extraordinarily upset by what happened to Metrecal, had to close a laboratory, cut back on facilities, and he had to lay off employees, and his stock went down.”

  Eventually, unrelated to the Metrecal flop, Ted Johnson’s father sold the family business to another big company, and retired to Palm Beach.

  * * *

  In late January 1910, several weeks before his sixty-fifth birthday, the first Robert Wood Johnson, always healthy and driven, fell ill. He was quickly diagnosed by some of the best physicians of the time—including one who had helped try to save the life of the assassinated President McKinley—with a form of severe kidney disease that was then untreatable.

  At 6:40 A.M. on February 7, 1910, in the family home, Gray Terrace, the brilliant entrepreneur and lead brother behind the founding of Johnson & Johnson, and its rise as an iconic American company, died.

  “Death Calls a Captain of Industry,” mourned the headline in the New Brunswick Daily Home News. The story noted that he had been “unconscious for some time,” and at the time of his passing was surrounded by his family.

  Fear gripped the Johnson & Johnson plant. Robert Johnson had been such an imposing and innovative leader that the employees—there now were some twenty-five hundred—were deeply concerned that Johnson & Johnson would die with him. The next day about half of the workforce, garbed in black, made the pilgrimage from the plant to Gray Terrace to view the boss of bosses, whose body was in repose in a mahogany casket—a duplicate of the one in which McKinley had been buried—in the drawing room of the Johnson mansion.

  His obituary in the Daily Home News noted:

  Mr. Johnson was a man of strong and pleasing personality, as well as of untiring energy. His presence was everywhere felt throughout the vast establishment with which he was always in close touch. He won the loyalty and affection of his entire force of employees … It is probable that along the line of surgical dressings, Mr. Johnson made his greatest success …

  The headline of another front-page story declared: “He Built Up a System That Saved Lives … Helped to Make the Discoveries of Lister Practicable and Popular—A Tribute from Those Near the Man.”

  Johnson & Johnson essentially owned New Brunswick, and Robert Johnson had been the city’s leading businessman and citizen, so he was given the biggest and most spectacular final farewell in the city’s history two days after his passing, with a cortege made up of thirty carriages, untold numbers of other vehicles, and a procession of hundreds if not thousands of the town’s loyal citizenry, a good number of them on his payroll.

  About a year after he died, a final accounting of his estate showed he had a total of $3,372,250—big money in those days. Since his death, his income to his estate was more than $200,000.

  The executors were his brother James; his daughter from his first marriage, Roberta Johnson Nicholas—she had been on a Florida honeymoon with her groom, Robert Carter Nicholas, later a treasurer of Johnson & Johnson, when her father died—and lastly Johnson’s widow, the handsome and elegant Evangeline, who was the chief beneficiary of his enormous estate and the guardian of their three children, all of whom were still in school.

  At Elmwood Cemetery in New Brunswick, an ornate mausoleum that “is like a Greek temple,” according to the Daily Home News, was Johnson’s final resting place, and what a fanciful resting place it was, replete with an artificial lake that, in the florid prose of the newspaper, “ripples at the foot of the hillock on which the splendid building to the dead rests.”

  The exterior walls and the columns were built of Barre granite, the most popular type of granite for the mausoleums and monuments of the rich and famous, then and into the twenty-first century. The granite from Vermont had been used in the construction of the fanciful and ornate last resting places of other generals of American commerce: Sidney Colgate, Phillip B. Armour, Walter Chrysler, and Harvey Firestone, to name a few.

  Not long after her husband died, Evangeline Armstrong Johnson—now a hugely wealthy widow, still young and still quite attractive—surprised family members, company executives, and the people of New Brunswick by hastily moving with two of her three children from Gray Terrace to Manhattan, ready to begin the kind of fun social life she had always craved but couldn’t have with a business-obsessed husband in the stodgy and boorish New Jersey company town where she felt superior to most everyone.

  At the time of Johnson’s death, Evangeline’s firstborn, Robert Jr., was just a couple of months away from his seventeenth birthday, and was devastated by the patriarch’s quick illness and sudden demise. He had adored and idolized his father, was closest to him of the three siblings, and planned to follow in his footsteps someday as the head of the family business—and would do so. Robert’s brother, Seward, was going on fifteen, and their sister, Evangeline, the youngest of the brood, was about to turn thirteen when their father passed.

  Years later Evangeline, the daughter—who would have a wild life with lovers of both sexes—was quoted by Lawrence Foster as saying, “The minute father died, my mother took an apartment in New York, and she took my brother Seward and me with her. Bob at that time sort of moved over, if you want to call it that, and stayed with my [half] sister Roberta and her husband at their home in New Brunswick.”

  However, a much different—and far more sinister—story involving the widow Evangeline, her lifestyle, and her children surfaced many decades later, long after her death in June 1990 at ninety-three.

  As Seward’s son, Seward Johnson Jr., the sculptor, tells it, his grandmother, Evangeline, “Took up with a member of [British] Parliament and she just sort of deserted her children.” He says his father, then a teenager, was left with a female New York socialite who kept him as “a sexual prisoner. He was saved by his brother [Robert Jr.] who came in and got him out of there. It’s a sad story, but also very significant in their relationship.”

  By that Seward Jr. meant that through the years when Robert Jr., a swaggering martinet, was running Johnson & Johnson, and Seward was his submissive second in command, his older brother, as payback for the rescue, would lord it over him emotionally and financially.

  Moreover, Seward’s sexual abuse as a teenager would have a great and negative impact on his future relationships with women, in which he was often sexually aggressive, especially with very young women, even family members. His own daughter, Mary Lea, the first baby face on the Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder container, would later claim to have been a victim.

  But all of that was still to come.

  With the senior Robert Johnson’s death, his brother James took over the presidency. But waiting anxiously in the wings was Robert Sr.’s son, and James’s nephew, Robert Jr.

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  The third brother who founded Johnson & Johnson, James Wood Johnson—slim, mustachioed, and balding—was “quiet and unassuming,” respected by his employees and management team for his kind and gentle nature—far different than his aggressive late brother, Robert.

  But during his watch as president from 1910 to 1932 the company greatly expanded with life-saving products during the Great War; with the company’s Band-Aid showing up in virtually every American household’s medicine cabinet, and with the first expansion into foreign markets—Canada, England, Mexico, and South Africa.

  The trademark Johnson & Johnson red signature on many of the company’s products is James Johnson’s actual handwriting.

  Unlike many Johnson men through the generations of the dynasty, James had had a relatively peaceful and comfortable private life. With the first of his two wives, Mary Law Johnson, he had two daughters, Helen and Louise, and the family resided in a mansion in New Brunswick called Lindenwood.

  Helen—who would play a role through the years in the Johnson dynasty, and was a major stockholder in Johnson & Joh
nson—would go on to marry a self-made Wall Street wunderkind with the very elite-sounding name of Nicholas Gouverneur Rutgers III. His real passion rather than stocks was pipe organs, of all things, according to his octogenarian son, Nicholas Gouverneur Rutgers IV, known as Nick. “My father basically managed my mother’s fortune, and he retired young to play the great organs of the world.” When he was twenty, Nick, a jovial type, married the seventeen-year-old daughter of the author of Mutiny on the Bounty, James Norman Hall, and lived for much of his life on an island in the South Pacific.

  * * *

  Back at Johnson & Johnson, by the time he was in his seventies, James Wood Johnson’s greatest threat was his ambitious, aggressive, and driven nephew, Robert Jr., who was looking to move up at a time when his aging uncle was trying to hang on to his presidency.

  “What bothered James most was having to make way for his nephew, and the next generation of management. To him, it was like repelling an enemy invasion,” wrote Lawrence Foster, in the self-published Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel.

  Foster quoted from a letter James wrote his brother Mead, who was running his own successful company in Indiana, in which he stated what most older generations have thought: “The thing that gets my goat every once in a while, is the disrespect, if you like, or the inconsiderable estimate of ourselves on the part of the young ones.” He was referring, of course, to Robert Jr.

  But James Johnson didn’t mind young ones when they were of the feminine variety, and especially attired in Clara Barton white. A widower for six years, he married again in his mid-seventies in 1931, to his thirty-two-year-old Scottish nurse.

  They returned from an ocean voyage and were greeted by a letter bearing grim news from the Johnson & Johnson board of directors informing James that he was out as president—or, as it was put, officially retired, and without his consent. He did get a pension—what he considered a measly twenty-five hundred dollars, and he voiced his displeasure at the ill treatment, and disrespect, pointing out that under him Johnson & Johnson’s revenue had more than quadrupled in his first full decade as president.