After a bit of a squabble, he formally resigned.
In late August 1932, he died while on another sea cruise.
A month and a half later, on October 15, 1932, his power-hungry nephew, Robert Wood Johnson Jr., who had turned thirty-nine that April, was named president and general manager of Johnson & Johnson.
Under him, a new and even greater era for the company was born. It was the third year of the Great Depression.
* * *
If, decades later, Woody Johnson had decided to run for the U.S. Senate from New Jersey, he would have become only the second member of the Johnson dynasty to enter politics as a candidate.
The first was his grandfather, the blond and wiry Robert Wood Johnson Jr., who once claimed that he learned the most about the psychology of people—and how to manipulate and dominate them—at the age of twenty-five while serving on the Borough Council of Highland Park, New Jersey, and soon after as its mayor. His own father, the first Robert Wood Johnson, Woody Johnson’s great-grandfather, had once been asked to run for mayor of New Brunswick, but after he told the Republican leadership that he would fire most of the “useless” officials, and slash appropriations, they decided to find another candidate.
Robert Jr.’s political career, brief though it was, came in the wake of some youthful wildness, including heavy drinking, barhopping, and skirt-chasing, followed by the first of his three marriages, and two scandalous divorces.
Robert Jr. had earned a reputation as a “rouster” with “pepper in his pants,” and was known as a “hell-raiser.” Like his grandsons decades later—Woody, Billy, and Keith, and especially Keith—Johnson was a speed freak; expensive speedboats and imported fast cars were one of his pasttimes. He’d have the car engines souped up by the mechanics at Johnson & Johnson.
“Then he’d go out and wreck them,” his former supervisor, Walter Metts, recalled to Lawrence Foster. “It’s a wonder he didn’t kill himself.”
Woody’s grandfather’s out-of-control lifestyle finally caught up with him when he showed up at Johnson & Johnson in what he himself later described as a “drunken stupor” and collapsed on the floor outside the board of directors’ offices while a meeting was under way. His uncle James Johnson, the company head, with whom he was living at the time, was furious.
“Uncle Jimmy told him that if he didn’t stop fooling around he would sell the business,” Metts told Foster. “He stopped that kind of behavior almost overnight and became a very serious-minded young man.”
On April 15, 1914, Johnson, having just turned twenty-one, became a member of Johnson & Johnson’s board of directors, replacing one who had recently died. Four years down the road he would also possess a vast and growing fortune in company stock as provided by his father’s will. Between securing his appointment to the Johnson & Johnson board and inheriting the company stock, he was promoted to head one of the company’s departments.
The Johnson heir also began pursuing a local society girl, Elizabeth Dixon Ross, whose father, Millard Fillmore Ross, ran the biggest and most successful coal business in New Brunswick. Her late maternal grandfather—last name Dixon—had been a Jersey City judge. Her late paternal grandfather was Miles Ross, a Democratic U.S. Congressman from New Jersey.
In the summer of 1916, with the Great War raging in Europe, Johnson & Johnson was getting richer, producing “thousands of miles” of gauze and adhesive plaster, and “hundreds of millions” of bandages for the battlefronts, its plant running seven days a week around the clock, utilizing a large female workforce because their men were overseas fighting.
And that summer, Robert Jr., a stay-at-home captain in the army reserve, asked for Elizabeth Ross’s hand in marriage. (Decades later Woody Johnson’s sister was named after her—Elizabeth Ross Johnson, but known as Libet, which was how one of her young brothers mispronounced the name Elizabeth, and it stuck.)
The first Elizabeth Ross—with large breasts; a thin waist; a pretty, oval face; but a bit chunky—readily accepted Johnson’s proposal, and on October 18, 1916, a Wednesday, they were married in royal style to the music of the romantic opera Lohengrin in an eight o’clock ceremony in the library of the bride’s family mansion at 100 Lexington Avenue, in New Brunswick.
The groom’s mother, Evangeline Armstrong Johnson—now Mrs. John W. Dennis of 875 Park Avenue, and also of London—attended with her new British husband. Her other son, Robert Johnson’s brother, Seward, was the best man, and the whole hugely expensive affair—hundreds of flowers, potted palms, magical lights, ribbon cutters, bridal attendants, groomsmen—was topped off with a gourmet dinner overseen by a popular French caterer, and the après supper dancing was supplied by an orchestra big with the debutante set.
“After the [Bermuda] honeymoon,” the New York Times wedding announcement stated, “the couple will reside at Belleview, New Brunswick, the Johnson country home, on the Raritan River. Mr. Johnson gave his farewell bachelor dinner at the St. Regis on Thursday evening.”
The newlyweds’ estate actually was in Highland Park, a town of some five thousand, and that’s where Johnson, a self-styled, albeit contradictory “conservative-liberal” registered Republican, first got involved in politics.
Because he was handsome, charming, rich, and powerful, plus he could talk anyone into anything, he was asked in 1918 to fill the seat—until the next election in 1919—of a Republican member of the borough council who had left town. Johnson then ran a campaign to fill his own soon-to-be vacant seat.
But just a few months before the election, tragedy struck when the matriarch, fifty-four-year-old Evangeline Armstrong Johnson Dennis—mother of Robert, Seward, and her namesake daughter, and the paternal great-grandmother of Woody Johnson—died from injuries sustained in a freak accident; she had tripped on a curb in London, broke her hip, and two weeks later succumbed to a blood clot. Young Evangeline, who had been in Europe at the time, rushed to London and was at her mother’s hospital bedside when she passed away. She was buried in Noxton, Lincolnshire, where she and her husband had recently moved into a country estate.
Back home in New Jersey, life went on.
An advertisement from the Republican Committee supporting Robert Johnson declared:
“Whenever he starts anything he sticks to the finish and sees that everything goes ‘Over the Top.’”
He received the most votes on the ticket, but he wasn’t going to hold the council seat for long. Less than two months after the election, the council appointed him, at twenty-six, the mayor of Highland Park.
* * *
Highland Park was a workingman’s town, located not far from the world headquarters of Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, and a lot of the borough’s citizens worked at the plant.
One of them was a Johnson & Johnson cotton buyer by the name of Earle E. Dickson. Unlike Robert and Elizabeth Johnson, who lived on an opulent estate, Dickson and his young wife, Josephine, occupied a simple home on a small, grassy lot on narrow, two-lane, tree-lined Montgomery Street, number 326. They had recently been married and their relationship was going swimmingly, except the missus had a problem: she was clumsy when it came to preparing meals and often cut her fingers. Dickson was always responding to Josephine’s cries of, “Earle, honey, guess what? I cut myself again,” and he would come running with something he had jerry-rigged to cover the wound.
Finally, tired of playing Mr. First-Aid, he decided there had to be a better bandage. And there was. He gathered a long, narrow strip of surgical tape—a Johnson & Johnson product, naturally—and attached to it a few pieces of gauze, and covered the adhesive with some spare crinoline that Josephine kept in her sewing basket.
Dickson mentioned his patch at work, and as he later recalled, “The boys in the front office loved the concept,” according to Lawrence Foster’s account. A few weeks before Thanksgiving 1920, a virtual copy of Dickson’s makeshift idea was packaged, containing a single strip, and put on drugstore shelves.
The Band-Aid, which would become one of J
ohnson & Johnson’s biggest selling products worldwide, though it still needed some tweaks, had been born.
But the Band-Aid didn’t immediately take off, probably because the consumer had to take each strip and cut it to size just like Josephine Dickson had done. Too much work, which was underscored by the first year’s revenue—a measly three thousand dollars—and sales remained at such low levels for most of the Roaring Twenties, even when bathtub gin–fueled flappers cut their pretty knees falling while doing the Charleston.
But soon enough the Band-Aid became one of the most popular and purchased first-aid products in America, and the world—used in the billions to treat minor cuts and scrapes—and by then Earle Dickson, who had invented the product by chance, had been made a very well-paid Johnson & Johnson vice president.
The same year the Band-Aid was invented, there would be another birth of great import in the Johnson dynasty.
In January 1920, around the same time her husband had been named the mayor of Highland Park, and across town Earle Dickson had invented a product to cover his wife’s food-preparation scrapes, Elizabeth Ross Johnson had gotten pregnant.
On September 9, 1920, she gave birth to a cute, chubby son.
To carry on the Johnson line, the infant’s domineering father, rather than his submissive mother, personally chose the name.
The boy was christened Robert Wood Johnson III after his father, and he would later be known as Bobby.
But the relationship between Johnson and his wife, and Johnson and his growing son—the future father of Woody Johnson—would come to a bad end.
9
The year 1930 had been something else.
Jobless Americans were struggling through the first year after Black Friday, October 25, 1929, when, as Variety famously proclaimed, “Wall Street Lays an Egg,” and the Great Depression was under way.
But it wasn’t all that bleak for those who still had money—big money.
For instance, in late December of that very gloomy year, the eighteen-year-old Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, in a bouffant frock of white tulle—not a dime-store number—had her debut at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at an extravagant cost of sixty thousand dollars—enough to feed, clothe, and house almost fifty Depression-ravaged families for a year.
“Brilliant Ball for Miss Hutton: Ballroom Suite Transformed into a Garden in Moonlight,” swooned a headline in The New York Times. Some thousand swells from around the world had been invited to the affair. Rudy Vallee and the Meyer Davis Orchestra entertained. Dressed as Santa Claus, because it was just days before Christmas, was Maurice Chevalier, who, with Santa’s helpers, was handing out, incredibly, such party favors as gold jewelry, diamonds, even emeralds and rubies—while outside in the street there were soup lines and hollow-eyed men selling apples from pushcarts in order to feed their families.
In the high-society crowd that evening was Robert Wood Johnson Jr., dapper and handsome in a tux, rubbing shoulders with other masters of the universe and Park Avenue matrons who were bedazzling in their priceless jewels.
Johnson was sporting his own kind of arm candy—a gorgeous, slim, and chic new number who was definitely not the mother of his son and namesake, Bobby Johnson III.
Besides toasting the poor little rich girl’s coming out, Robert Jr. was also celebrating another very special occasion—his divorce from Bobby’s mother, Elizabeth Ross Johnson, and his more recent secret marriage to the new Mrs. Johnson—petite and chic Margaret Shea, known as Maggi, who had modeled in Paris, was an actress, supposedly a fashion columnist for the French edition of Vogue, a budding dancer, and a talented amateur photographer.
In actuality, she was a small-town girl from Norwich, in Connecticut, and then Elmhurst, in Long Island, who had gone to New York, where she had appeared in a musical comedy called Good News. Scouts for the French fashion designer Jean Patou had spotted her, blond and beautiful, and after several requests she agreed, with her stage mother’s permission, to come to Paris and become one of his models, and that’s where she and Johnson began what would soon be an intimate relationship when Shea was twenty-five and Johnson was more than a decade older.
“I thought he was the most divine man I had ever seen,” she once told Lawrence Foster, the former Johnson & Johnson public relations vice president who self-published a book about Robert Johnson Jr.
They had quietly tied the knot in September 1930 in Paris, and had honeymooned at a posh resort near fashionable Biarritz—all of which was happening while Robert Jr. was combining European Johnson & Johnson business with fun.
His divorce had been secretly granted in New Jersey’s state capital, Trenton, on August 12, 1930. It had ended a mostly tumultuous fourteen-year marriage—tumultuous because of his womanizing, his around-the-clock devotion to his company, and his blatant disregard of his son.
Four years earlier, when Elizabeth Ross Johnson, known to everyone as Ruth, refused to give her philandering husband a divorce, he had gone ahead and simply left her and their son, Bobby, the future father of Woody Johnson. She then had charged the ruler of Johnson & Johnson with desertion.
“He just abandoned her and [eight-year-old] Bobby,” states Nick Rutgers, who not only was Robert Jr.’s cousin but also his godson. “It was terrible.”
The general consensus within Johnson’s circle, according to Foster, was that he had outgrown his wife, and that he found her boring.
But the “main reason for the split was because Ruth had become fat,” maintains Rutgers decades later. “She was a heavyset woman and he couldn’t stand that about her. He was obsessed about his own weight and demanded that others be thin, too. He told my mother [Helen Johnson Rutgers] that he didn’t like any lady who was fat. Plus, he was the playboy of the Western world at that time. He was absolutely a womanizer, no question about that.”
The first Mrs. Johnson got a cool one million dollars, plus their New Jersey estate and other property, a huge settlement in those days, and especially during the Depression.
But it wasn’t consolation for the way he had treated her and their son.
“It was especially hard on young Robert III, who was then nine but had not yet seen very much of his father. The boy was puzzled and hurt,” noted Foster.
Johnson and his new bride—the second of his three wives, not to mention any number of women on the side—had moved into “Morven,” in Princeton, a 1755 Georgian-style, fifteen-room mansion on five thousand acres, with an astounding history of guests, including eight presidents, among them Washington and Madison, and also the home where the creation of Princeton University was planned.
Johnson had leased the estate, which had become run down. He promised the original owners, the descendants of one of the signers to the Declaration of Independence, to renovate it to its former glory, an assignment that Maggi took on with relish.
The New York Daily News had broken the news of the Johnson marriage on Saturday, December 20, 1930, with a Speed Graphic photo of Johnson in a dapper derby hat, and a tabloid headline that screamed: “Johnson’s Secret Wedding Follows Hushed Decree.” The story described him as a “middle-aged manufacturer, a member of one of New Jersey’s oldest socially-elect families,” and characterized Ruth, his first wife, who had been dumped for the new model, as a “leader in Jersey society.”
In boldface type, readers were told, “The newlyweds took elaborate, precautions to ensure secrecy upon their arrival. They left the ship and went almost immediately to Morven, the new Johnson ménage near Princeton.”
The News pointed out that the custody of Johnson’s son, Bobby, had been divided evenly between the parents, and quoted the New York Social Register as saying the little boy was living with his father at Morven, which wasn’t exactly true. Robert Jr. would have nothing to do with the boy.
The second Mrs. Johnson had a wild streak that the Johnson & Johnson mogul savored. When he was once entertaining some politicians, she and a female chum put on skimpy French maid outfits and took orders for drinks from the
men while her excited husband looked on.
She had reinvented herself as a dazzling Princeton socialite and hostess, but ignored another marital duty—that of caring stepmother to her husband’s young son, Bobby. And that was mainly because the boy’s own father cared little for the youngster, according to Nick Rutgers, whose mother, Helen, was Bobby Johnson’s godmother.
“My mother told me Robert and Maggi never even remembered his son’s birthday, so my mother used to always buy him presents because his father ignored him. They ignored Bobby completely because he was fat like his mother, Ruth [Elizabeth]. His father just didn’t want to have any part of him. It was a sad life for Bobby.”
Instead of spending much time with his father and his stepmother, Bobby Johnson and his biological mother developed a powerful and mutual bond. As Foster noted, “Elizabeth and her son grew very close, and Bobby shared with her the pain of the divorce and the absence of his father. In later years he remarked ruefully that it was the family chauffeur who used to take him fishing and on other boyhood adventures, not his father.”
Because Maggi Johnson had difficulty getting pregnant, the Johnsons adopted a newborn girl, Bobby’s stepsister, who they named Sheila.
Many years later, after her father’s death, Sheila Johnson Brutsch—she had married a Swiss husband, had homes in Palm Beach and Switzerland, and often sailed the world with her husband, Francois—talked with Foster about her adoptive father: “Johnson and Johnson was his wife, his mistress, his child, his friend, his toy. It was his life, much more than the rest of us of flesh and blood.”
10
When Robert Wood Johnson Jr. was in high school, he had become a member of the Rutgers Prep drill team with the rank of private, and during the Great War he wore two silver bars as a stay-at-home army reserve captain. He took to military discipline—looked handsome and manly in a uniform, and he knew it—but he would never actually serve in a real man’s army in actual combat.
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 6