Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  In early 1943, a little over a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and with Johnson & Johnson supplying record amounts of medical supplies for the war effort—its business quadrupled—President Roosevelt, knowing of Johnson’s executive abilities, appointed him to run the Smaller War Plants Corporation, created by Congress to assist the country’s forty thousand small businesses to participate in war goods production.

  Because Johnson soon ran into a brick wall dealing with the Washington bureaucracy, Roosevelt infuriated officers in every command by granting Johnson, on May 17, 1943, the full military rank of Brigadier General of Army Ordnance.

  Without knowing what he was doing, the commander in chief had turned an already bloated ego into a strutting martinet.

  Johnson, who practically carried a swagger stick in the civilian world, was in heaven.

  “Oh, boy, he loved that—loved it!” recalls Nick Rutgers. “He had an office at Johnson and Johnson with all his flags and mementos.”

  The General had retained an Italian tailor, presumably not a fan of Mussolini, to custom make his uniforms. “The results were impressive,” his biographer, Lawrence Foster, observed. “He was slender, and had a ramrod military posture. There was no better-fitting military wardrobe in Washington.”

  The way Johnson outfitted himself with that gleaming silver star, and the way he swaggered around Washington and New York, one would have been led to believe he had spent the duration commanding troops along the Siegfried Line.

  In fact, he had served just sixty-four days—little more than two months—as a brigadier general before resigning his commission, mainly because of claimed chronic stomach problems.

  But this leader of industry and egoist referred to himself until his dying day—another quarter century—as “General Johnson,” and required that those who worked for him and those who knew him address him as such. With General as his new title, he dropped the appendage Jr. from his name, feeling it wasn’t befitting of someone of his stature.

  As his nephew the sculptor Seward Johnson Jr. asserted decades later, “My uncle dealt in fear, but he also dealt in theatrics.”

  The same year that the General donned and doffed his army uniform, 1943, he also decommissioned the second Mrs. Johnson, Maggi, after thirteen years of another bad marriage—during which he had a number of affairs. The future third Mrs. Johnson was a glamorous, leggy, auburn-haired, very-married Manhattan nightclub dancer by the name of Evelyne Vernon, who was part of a then-famous dance team, The Vernons, with her husband, James “Jimmy” Lewis Bruff.

  It was at the fashionable Manhattan nightclub La Martinique where the General fell for Evelyne, known as Evie (pronounced Eav-ee), where she was the gorgeous performer and dance instructor. Although the General was quite a dancer, he decided to become one of Evie’s star pupils, the better to get close to her, literally and figuratively.

  The gossip columnist Walter Winchell had become aware of the flirtation, but never published an item because he liked the Johnson & Johnson chief, who, as Winchell saw it, was now patriotically serving his country and deserved a break; Winchell had his enemies list, but the General wasn’t on it.

  Despite Winchell’s protection, Maggi heard about her husband’s growing involvement with that dancer.

  “People would say to me, ‘Maggi, where were you last weekend? We saw Bob dancing around New York with that redheaded girl,’” Foster quoted her as saying. “Finally, he did come home one weekend in the late spring of 1943, and I said, ‘Bob, I don’t think you’re very happy. I think you’re under a strain’ … He went to his room … I cried my eyes out all night long … I drove him to the train … I was in shock.”

  Winchell, in his popular nationally syndicated column in the New York Daily Mirror, finally broke his self-imposed friendship embargo on the Johnson-Vernon relationship on June 20, 1943—with the surprise revelation that Maggi also had someone new in her life and wasn’t quite in the kind of mourning she had described after the General gave her the heave-ho.

  General Robert Johnson (heir to the Johnson & Johnson medical supplies firm) settled $1,000,000 on his wife, now at Lake Tahoe for the divorce. Her next groom, chums insist, will be Edward Eily [Winchell misspelled it as Ely], the Egyptian from the Stork Club Set … General Johnson has already selected his new bride … She is the lovely Evelyne Vernon, co-owner of La Martinque, the night club on 57th Street …

  On July 23, 1943, The New York Times, via the Associated Press, reported that a day earlier Maggi Johnson had obtained a Reno divorce from the General on “grounds of extreme cruelty.”

  The news of Johnson’s marriage to Evie Vernon came in Winchell’s Daily Mirror on August 5, 1943, under the headline: “Dancer Weds Gen. Johnson at Salt Lake.”

  One of the Johnsons with whom Evie soon bonded was Edward Mead “Ted” Johnson IV. “She was an interesting character,” he said fifteen years after her passing in 1996. “There was that showgirl kind of element to her. But, there was also a kind of remote, grande element as well.”

  Ted Johnson was especially knocked out by the bling in which Evie always bathed herself, even when she was just lolling around the house.

  She had an unquenchable passion for diamonds and jewels, and the General constantly fed her ravenous appetite.

  “The jewelry was a big thing,” recalls Ted, still astounded decades later in his seventies at what Evie possessed. “The General made her among the five most important collectors of major rocks in the United States, if not in the world.

  “She had a sixty carat, pear-shaped diamond ring. It was a huge thing that Cecil Beaton had gotten for her. There was a lady of noble lineage, a woman of some stature in Britain who needed the money, and she was an acquaintance of Beaton’s and she said she wanted to sell the ring quietly, and Bob said ‘yes,’ and Beaton told her that Evie Johnson would buy it. You looked at that ring and it was sumpin!” (Evie had become close to Beaton when he had painted a portrait of her that was commissioned by the General.)

  “She had what was like a breastplate, and it was kind of molten gold with sharp diamond tips sticking out of it like stalactites—it looked like some sort of mining thing, and she wore that at a cocktail party at Buckingham Palace, and the Prince of Wales said, ‘Oh, that’s very beautiful, may I show it to the Queen Mother?’ Evie said ‘yes,’ and she took it off and he took it over to the queen.

  “She had this one ring that was many, many diamonds and it kind of puffed up near the top of the hand and it went down to the knuckle—all that distance, into kind of a point and it moved. She always used to tell me, ‘Dear, it’s so nice on the back of a gentleman’s shoulder.’”

  Along with her glamorous, bejeweled show-business persona, Evie was a staunch Catholic. She introduced her non-churchgoing Episcopalian husband to a friend, a very famous Jesuit at Oxford, Father William Slattery, and the two bonded. With her prodding, they were granted a VIP audience with Pope Pius XII at the Vatican. As a parting gift the Holy Father presented the holy terror of Johnson & Johnson with a souvenir of their visit—an almost foot-high medal honoring the patron saint of travelers, St. Christopher, a routine religious remembrance he often handed out to visiting dignitaries. But the General took the gift as something very special and very personal.

  Back in New Brunswick, he had the oversize medal replicated by a Johnson & Johnson mechanic—and had it cast in bronze, which was “heart-and-ulcers time” for the employee because the boss watched over the project like a hawk. He also had Evie arrange to have a priest from the New York Archdiocese bless it, and had the copies built into the grilles of every new model of his cars, five Cadillacs and a Chrysler, according to Foster.

  “I have a childhood memory of the General coming to our family home in this quite incredible Cadillac that had a St. Christopher’s medal cut into the custom grille that looked like a fricking battering ram,” chuckles Eric Ryan, a grandson of the General’s brother, Seward. “And I thought, ‘Wow, what the hell is St. Christoph
er doing in the front of the car?’”

  * * *

  The General ran Johnson & Johnson with an iron hand, expanding its product line and writing the company “Credo” that outlined its responsibilities to the medical community, the consumer, and the Johnson & Johnson employees. He also started and funded with his fortune the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the biggest medical foundation in American history, devoted to “people living healthy and productive lives”—unlike a number of Johnson family members themselves.

  And on September 24, 1944, he took the family owned, privately held Johnson & Johnson company public on the New York Stock Exchange with an initial public offering of $37.50 per share. A $3,750 investment for one hundred shares was worth a whopping $12 million by the end of the twentieth century.

  By then, with splits, those hundred shares had ballooned to one hundred and twenty-five thousand shares, and none of those huge numbers included the many dividends over the more than fifty years when the stock was first purchased. The public aside, every Johnson dynasty member—past, present, and future—who had been holding stock became wealthy beyond anyone’s imagination as the value soared in the open market.

  To the General, Johnson & Johnson headquarters in New Brunswick was the U.S.S. Caine, and he was its Captain Philip Queeg. While there would never be a mutiny, the General’s crew of executives feared him, and thought him as compulsive and obsessive and rigid as the crew of the fictional Caine felt about their own bizarre martinet of a leader. Like Queeg, who demanded that his ship be shipshape, the General required that Johnson & Johnson’s offices be pristine—not a spot of dust anywhere—when he made his frequent military-like inspections.

  “Whenever he came back to the office after an absence, everyone was ready for his inevitable inspection,” recalled Lawrence Foster. “For weeks before, it was customary to apply paint and polish liberally to any area of the office or factory that might not pass his close scrutiny. His obsession with neatness and cleanliness was by now widely known, and feared. To him a smudge was tantamount to treason.”

  The movie character Queeg was known for demoting, even court-martialing, members of his crew for minor infractions. The General, with his take-no-prisoners management style, just went ahead and gave his executives and underlings their walking papers, like he did his wives.

  “He fired whole staffs at one time,” asserts his cousin and godson, Nick Rutgers, recalling him with both distaste and admiration, more than four decades after his death. “He fired a lot of people just because they didn’t move fast enough.”

  The General’s obsessions and iron-clad rules carried over to Johnson & Johnson’s product line, which was a big positive for the consumer.

  For instance, he had decided that the one product that was most intriguing to him, and the one he believed exemplified Johnson & Johnson in the public’s mind, was Johnson’s Baby Powder, even though the brand itself generated a minuscule amount of revenue compared to all other Johnson & Johnson products sold worldwide.

  The General had “hovered over the advertising, package design, and marketing strategy like a doting parent,” maintained Foster, who worked under him for a decade. “For years he had helped to nurture the growth and success of the brand, and he wasn’t about to let anyone tinker with the product without first doing battle with him…”

  As time passed, changes were made—advertising was tweaked, packaging underwent some modifications. But Johnson oversaw it all, even down to the minute sprinkle holes in the new plastic containers.

  Johnson’s Baby Powder was followed by other Johnson & Johnson products for babies’ bodies—lotion, soap, oil, and advertised as, “Best for Baby—Best for You.”

  Another product in which the General took a special interest was the sanitary napkin called Modess—how it would be advertised and marketed. He also wanted it to be inexpensive so that untold millions of women around the world could use and afford it. Johnson & Johnson wasn’t the first to market a menstrual napkin, but it sold the first American disposable, called Lister’s Towels, in 1896, named after Joseph P. Lister, the British surgeon and father of bacteriology, who had founded antiseptic surgery.

  Because Modess—a competitor to Kotex—took off so quickly, the General formed a separate entity, the Modess Corporation, subsequently aptly called the Personal Products Company. But he was never really happy with any of the Modess advertising, so he personally conceived a revolutionary new campaign after the Second World War.

  He envisioned—he demanded—that the advertising for the very private product that men jokingly called “the rag,” and many women bought surreptitiously, come out of the shadows, and highlight ultra-femininity and high fashion instead of the monthly period.

  For the campaign, the supermodels of the time—the beautiful sisters Susie Parker and Dorian Leigh, for instance, wearing gowns by Dior and Valentino, and photographed by the likes of Evie’s friend Cecil Beaton, were featured in the very successful “Modess … because” campaign.

  “The brilliance of the ‘Modess … because’ copy”—essentially conceived by Johnson—“was that it enabled each woman who read it to fill in her own reasons for wanting to buy the product,” stated Foster.

  While the General was in charge of virtually everything at Johnson & Johnson, his sister, the gorgeous Evangeline, had been given his cold shoulder personally and corporately. But her life was something else. She was a novelist’s dream.

  PART III

  ECCENTRIC EVANGELINE

  11

  In August 2000, a curious item went up for sale on eBay, with a minimum bid of nine hundred thousand dollars. The seller was listed as charles6@aol.com, and his location was Western North Carolina, USA.

  This auction is to announce a screenplay for sale. Attention Producers, Directors, management companies, investors, agents … TRUE STORY ACTION DRAMA FOR SALE. Potential to be the next big box office Titanic hit. UNCONVENTIONAL LOVE STORY. Older woman/younger man.

  Charles6, the seller, was actually Charles Merrill, and the listing carried with it a snapshot of him. Taken two decades earlier in Palm Beach, he was a handsome fellow, with long, streaked blond hair, wearing dark Jim Jones–style aviator sunglasses, and with what appeared to be a feathered boa around his shoulders.

  Merrill, an artist, a onetime professional tennis player, also a former foundry worker; furniture refinisher; soda jerk; factory operator; horse groom; cook; photographer; Tarot card reader; charming walker of rich, elderly women—and flamboyantly gay—was the third husband of Johnson & Johnson heiress Evangeline Brewster Johnson, the General and Seward Sr.’s sister.

  Evangeline and Charles Merrill, who claimed to be a member of the Merrill-Lynch investment dynasty, had shocked Palm Beach society—and most if not all of the Johnson dynasty—by getting married on Monday, September 12, 1977, on the yacht Mazurka, captained by Seward Sr., who had officiated at the knot-tying.

  “Until the death of love!” was Evangeline’s exuberant champagne toast.

  The General did not attend the odd ceremony. He and his sister had been feuding for years, mainly because he had cheated her out of company stock and equal company control.

  In a photograph in the Palm Beach Daily News on September 15, 1977, announcing the Merrill-Johnson nuptials, Evangeline looked more like her groom’s wealthy and matronly great-aunt, with an AARP membership card in her Chanel purse, than his new bride—not surprising since she was more than three decades his senior. At least.

  Merrill’s eBay auction for his screenplay pitch ran a decade after Evangeline’s death at ninety-three on June 17, 1990. She had died from injuries resulting from a fall—a fatal accident eerily reminiscent of the manner in which her mother, Evangeline Armstrong Johnson Dennis, had died in a fall some seven decades earlier.

  Wrote Merrill in his eBay listing:

  In a nutshell, this is a true story of “High Society” meeting “Deliverance.” It is about us, me in 1980 (46) and my late wife Evangeline (80). We made
a move from a sheltered and affluent lifestyle in Palm Beach Florida to the beautiful but primitive mountains of North Carolina. Through difficult times of adjustment and living in the backwoods, we discovered love of self and a deep abiding affection for each other.

  She loved me and I loved her, that is why we got married. Our age difference was another cause for raised eyebrows. We discovered that our love for each other was beyond gender and age. We really didn’t care about what others thought, we were happy and that is all that mattered. A year after Evangeline passed away, I was again fortunate to have found love with another companion, this time with someone of the same gender.

  The pièce de résistance of Merrill’s bizarre auction—which came as a shock years later to Evangeline’s few survivors, especially one of her two octogenarian daughters, who were unaware of it—was his “suggested cast.”

  He saw either Marisa Berenson, Elizabeth Taylor, or Vanessa Redgrave playing the role of Evangeline Johnson, and the part of Merrill himself going to either Matthew McConaughey, Brad Pitt, or Jude Law.

  From all accounts there were no buyers.

  About a year after Merrill’s unsuccessful auction, the 9/11 terrorist attack happened. To show his anger, he burned a rare antique copy of the Koran, valued at sixty thousand dollars, that had been bequeathed to him by Evangeline. He had also edited a copy of the Holy Bible with a black marker and cut out portions with a scissors as part of his protest.

  “The purpose of editing and burning Abrahamic Holy Books is to eliminate homophobic hate,” he declared at the time.

  The final days for Evangeline Johnson Stokowski Zalstem-Zalessky Merrill, in rural North Carolina under the spell of her much younger and gay third husband, had become a virtual living hell. She was forced to live with chaos and squalor, according to her daughter, Sadja Greenwood, whose father was her mother’s first husband—the late maestro, actor, and notorious womanizer Leopold Stokowski.