Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  “It was sad,” reveals Greenwood, “and I don’t know why my mother went for it, but I think it was to please Charles.”

  Evangeline was a collector of priceless Kandinskys, Klees, and Mirós, and other iconic abstract artists—“but in the 1980s,” her daughter sadly states, “things started falling apart for her.”

  Because Evangeline was aging, Sadja, a physician, flew east a few times every year from her home in Northern California to check up on her mother—and what she began discovering at what Evangeline and Charles had named the World’s Edge Apple Organic Farm was shocking.

  “There were animals, dogs and cats, everywhere, and they weren’t housebroken,” Sadja sadly recalls. “Charles had planted an organic apple orchard, but he didn’t take care of the trees. He had a flock of chickens that multiplied, but they were not contained, and they were roosting everywhere. He had a herd of horses that were kind of wild and were multiplying out in the field. I would come and visit and try to clean up. God, it was just so painful.”

  Life at the farm was heiress Evangeline Johnson’s own version of life at Grey Gardens, a decrepit mansion in East Hampton, New York, where Edith “Big Edie” Beale and her daughter, Edith “Little Edie” Beale, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, lived in squalor. The difference between the oddball Beales and the eccentric Johnson heiress was that the Beales were broke while Evangeline had millions, which made her lifestyle in redneck hell seem even more off the wall.

  But Merrill was in control—her Svengali—and she was too old to protest.

  The fall that caused Evangeline’s death was attributable to the rocky, rough, and uneven land on the farm. Frail at ninety-three, though “very health-oriented” otherwise, asserts her daughter, she had apparently been out walking, possibly alone, with her little white dog when the last surviving child of the company cofounder Robert Wood Johnson tripped on the leash, fell to the ground, suffered serious injury, and died a few months later at the Bryan Health Care Center in Hendersonville.

  Knowing her time was near, Evangeline had actually written an otherworldly missive to members of her family and friends “to be sent to you after my so-called death. I believe that there is no death, only eternal forms of Universal energies which are unending.”

  She signed it, “Love always, Evangeline.”

  After Evangeline’s death, Charles Merrill sold the farm and moved to Palm Springs, California, and through a friend began meeting other rich, elderly women. “He became very friendly with a woman who was part of the Standard Oil Rockefellers who was in her eighties. I think she was hot for him,” says the friend, Michael Grace, a writer. Merrill also regaled Grace with bizarre stories about his life with the Johnson & Johnson heiress, a marriage that lasted thirteen years.

  “He said the first night that they went to bed together they fucked both thinking about her second husband, the Russian prince,” Grace says.

  Charles Merrill died in 2010, at the age of seventy-five.

  None of Evangeline’s strange life with Merrill and others ever came as a surprise to her daughter, who had spent a lifetime distancing herself from her mother and the Johnson dynasty and its dramas. A retired general practitioner in her eighties in 2011, Sadja’s surname Greenwood was, in fact, an alias.

  “Greenwood is a name I took,” she says, laughing, and sounding and looking much younger than her years. “There is no Mr. Greenwood. I really enjoy saying that—There Is No Mr. Greenwood.”

  A Radcliffe graduate, she had dropped her maiden name of Stokowski when she married and later divorced another student doctor. Sadja decided to rename herself. “For a year I thought about what name I wanted. I liked hiking in the woods, so Greenwood just appealed to me.”

  * * *

  Evangeline Brewster Johnson was not your average stay-at-home soccer mom. Mostly, the heiress traveled the world with her first two husbands, Stokowski and then the Russian prince, while Sadja and her sister, Lubya, were sent away to boarding schools, six or seven of them.

  Not surprisingly, mother and daughters had an odd sort of relationship, which some in the twenty-first century might consider extreme, if not possibly abusive, especially in conservative family values circles: When the girls were just toddlers, Evangeline began teaching them about sex.

  “Every year beginning when we were two or three she would bring us into the bathroom and open a certain drawer and there were diaphragms and contraceptive jellies, and she would explain the whole thing about how to take care of yourself,” recalls Greenwood. “It was way before I had any idea that this would be a taboo subject to be embarrassed about. I can remember saying when I was five, ‘I think, Mom, I know all about this sex stuff.’”

  Beyond the toddler sex education, Evangeline promoted as early as the 1920s and ’30s what were then illegal abortions, and had boasted to her young daughters about her adventures in the clandestine abortion underground.

  Sadja and Evangeline had a difficult relationship.

  She says her mother’s husbands, including her biological father, Stokowski, were never involved as parents. At the same time, Evangeline never played the role of the loving, doting grandmother to Sadja’s two sons from her marriage. Regarding parenthood, she was much like her brother, Robert, the General, who had abandoned his young son, Bobby.

  And Sadja never considered herself a part of the Johnson dynasty, which she was by blood. She thought little of, and about, her mother’s heritage, past and present, and wanted no part of the ongoing dynastic saga.

  “I checked out of that whole fancy Johnson life,” she declares. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  At one point when she was working for Planned Parenthood she had applied for a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, founded by her uncle, the General, and considered the nation’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to the health and health care of all Americans, “but it didn’t come through,” she says, laughing about the irony of it all.

  As her stepsister Sonya, a daughter from Stokowski’s first marriage, asserts, “There seemed to be very bad relationships between all the Johnsons. My son, a psychologist, calls them a dysfunctional family. I was rather horrified by them. Those people hurt themselves so much.”

  There was little or no contact among Sadja, the General, and Seward, mainly because the General had cheated her mother in the family business.

  Seward’s son, Seward Johnson Jr., the sculptor, who, when he was in his late teens, had somewhat gotten to know Evangeline, then in her early fifties, says he became aware that she had been given “preferred stock by her father, and that Uncle Bob [the General] converted that stock to common stock [substantially reducing its value], and Evangeline felt that he really screwed her blue. In a way, Evangeline did have a very strong business mind, but it was very hard to say because her mind was also very dramatic. I remember Evangeline called her brother [the General] ‘Te-De-Lo,’ because it’s a diminutive sounding name, and she was subtly putting him down.”

  Lawrence Foster once heard the General remark, “If Evangeline had been a man she would have been the one to run the company.” Foster found it to be “an amusing compliment that Johnson probably did not believe—just like the time he said to her, ‘Babe,’—a nickname she resented—‘if you had not been my sister, you are the one woman I would have married.’ Evangeline said she knew better.”

  12

  As a young woman, Evangeline Brewster Johnson’s best friend, traveling companion, roommate, (and probable lover) was Belle Baruch, the six-foot-two, masculine-looking, Junoesque daughter of multimillionaire speculator, financier, and philanthropist Bernard Baruch, known as the “Lone Wolf of Wall Street,” because he had made his untold millions by buying and selling stock without being affiliated with a major firm. Overnight, he became a financial legend, a Jew who became the brunt of attacks by rabid anti-Semites such as Henry Ford.

  Evangeline and Belle had much in common. Both were liberal political activists an
d heiresses—when Belle turned twenty-one in the first year of the Roaring Twenties her father, who she idolized and emulated in many ways, gave her a million dollars to do with as she pleased.

  Belle sometimes dressed in tailored men’s three-piece suits, replete with tie and dress shirt, and wore her hair cropped short. She “could outride, outshoot, outhunt, and outsail most of the young men of her elite social circle … Unapologetic for her athleticism and interests in traditionally masculine pursuits, Belle towered above male and female counterparts in height and daring,” according to her biographer, Mary E. Miller.

  Looks-wise, Evangeline and Belle made an odd couple.

  The Johnson girl was pretty, the Baruch girl was not, and if she resembled anyone in familiar twentieth-century pop culture, it was Herbert Buckingham Khaury, better known as Tiny Tim, an oddball character who sang “Tip Toe Through the Tulips” in a falsetto voice and was often a guest on TV talk shows. Like Tiny Tim, Belle was gawky, with large feet and a pronounced nose.

  Evangeline, who was two years older, had met Belle in the social whirl of debutante New York when they were in their late teens—the beginning of the Roaring Twenties—and there was an immediate physical attraction, at least on Belle’s part.

  As Mary Miller asserts, “Belle was in love with Evangeline.”

  And there was a lot about Evangeline to love.

  She was tall, athletic—she was an early feminist who wore pants when a skirt was called for—sexy-looking with bedroom eyes; had a throaty, raucous voice; was a drama queen; was very smart, very rich, very rebellious; and was an activist back in the day, always ready for action and excitement.

  For instance, a month before the armistice ending the Great War in 1918, an explosion ripped through a munitions depot located on Raritan Bay, not far from Johnson & Johnson’s New Brunswick headquarters. It was a disaster of major proportions, many were maimed and killed. Evangeline, then twenty-one, an officer in New York City’s Red Cross Motor Corps—known as the “heiress corps” because so many of the young women members were from wealthy and prominent families—drove to the dangerous and toxic scene. Even though there were still live bombs and ammunition among the flames, she remained there for several days risking her life transporting the victims and assisting doctors with Johnson & Johnson first-aid products.

  Years later, Evangeline, looking back and analyzing that sort of activity, came to the conclusion that she had a “Jeanne D’Arc complex.”

  Her activism, though, didn’t always have some great social purpose. Often zany, it still made a point.

  Furious that the conservative powers in ritzy Palm Beach, where she had first visited when she was seventeen, would not permit women to wear the more revealing bathing suits that were coming into vogue in the second decade of the twentieth century, the Johnson & Johnson heiress decided to take matters into her own hands.

  She donned her leather helmet and goggles, got into her hand-cranked biplane powered by a single Rolls-Royce engine—she was one of those early aviatrixes like Amelia Earhart; they both were born the same year a few months apart—and bombed the wealthy town’s beaches with incendiary protest leaflets.

  Years later, when she was seventy-six, she told the Palm Beach Daily News: “It made me so mad to have to wear stockings with my bathing costume. So, I wrote out some articles and flew in my plane, dropping the handbills on the beach, arguing against stockings. And what do you think the outcome was? The story went around that a stocking manufacturer was advertising stockings.”

  Belle was with her that day and congratulated her on her zany stunt. “Evangeline and Belle were angry about that [dress code],” says Mary Miller, who notes that Belle, too, would take up flying, emulating her bosom buddy, whom she adored.

  While Evangeline’s intimate relationships with the likes of Belle Baruch and other women were kept secret in an age when such things were not publicly revealed, many decades later another Band-Aid heiress from the Johnson dynasty—Woody Johnson’s daughter, Casey—would have very public affairs with women—scandalizing her family.

  Evangeline was Belle’s frequent houseguest at Hobcaw Barony, a spectacular retreat on the South Carolina coast that Bernard Baruch had purchased in 1905 and where he entertained presidents and potentates. At twenty, Evangeline was photographed at Hobcaw, skeet shooting with a long-barrel rifle like a military marksman from the front yard of the estate’s boat house called the Old Relick as Belle, coming into her own as a lesbian, lovingly looked on.

  In the guest book at Hobcaw, Evangeline called the place “the very altar of friendship.” And Belle once poetically wrote, “I am a little Hobcaw flower; growing wilder by the hour; nobody can cultivate me. Gee! I’m wild!”

  The two young women were inseparable.

  The headline in the November 13, 1923, New Brunswick Daily Home News read: “Miss Evangeline Johnson Largely Instrumental in Wilson’s Great Radio Talk.”

  Because Evangeline was from the Johnson & Johnson family, and New Brunswick was the company’s hometown, she made it in the headline, but it wasn’t just Evangeline who convinced President Woodrow Wilson to deliver a highly promoted Armistice Eve message to hundreds of thousands of American radio listeners. Evangeline and Belle had put their heads together and had come up with the idea and made it fly. The two had volunteered to serve in the Woman’s Pro-League Council, an organization that supported the League of Nations, of which Wilson was a major mover. Evangeline chaired the speakers’ bureau, and Belle headed the council’s public relations.

  The two had written to the president asking him to deliver the address, but he declined at first. “Miss Johnson wrote him an urgent argument to reconsider,” the Home News reported. “Later, Miss Johnson and Miss Baruch went to Washington, visited Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, and at that interview secured his consent to the proposition.”

  The radio address, on November 10, 1923, was listened to by the largest audience Wilson had ever had. The twenty-eighth president, who had served two terms, had formerly been governor of New Jersey, so he had ties to one of the state’s largest corporations, Johnson & Johnson, and was close to Baruch, who was an advisor to him, so the girls had good White House connections, and a good shot at winning his agreement.

  By the time of Wilson’s ten-minute radio message, Evangeline and Belle had been living together for several years, sharing an opulent apartment in the exclusive, white-glove building at 515 Park Avenue. “The Baruchs were appalled,” opines Mary Miller, “because young women didn’t move out on their own in those days unless they were in the care of some family member, so it was rather unusual.”

  Evangeline and Belle were together at a time when New York was jumping with Prohibition-era nightclubs, speakeasies, and clandestine clubs for lesbians and homosexuals in Greenwich Village, which the two heiresses often explored with Belle sporting one of her butch outfits in order to fit in, and with the very femme Evangeline as her arm candy.

  Beyond Belle, another very close friend and traveling companion of Evangeline’s was the New York society heiress and out-of-the-closet lesbian Alice De Lamar, who had inherited ten million dollars at the age of eighteen with the death of her Dutch immigrant father, Captain Joseph De Lamar, the goldmine, copper mogul, and art connoisseur who had a spectacular Beaux-Arts mansion at Thirty-Seventh and Madison.

  Evangeline had met Alice at the Miss Spence school, and the two were later volunteers together at the Red Cross where, like Evangeline, Alice was not only an ambulance driver but also a grease monkey.

  Evangeline’s chum was once described by a friend as “a queer girl with lots of character, but all angles and resentments and revolts.”

  In the spring of 1920, Evangeline, then residing at 270 Park Avenue, and Alice, who was two years older and lived near Evangeline on Park, had vacationed in Europe together, and while there Evangeline surprised everyone in the Johnson family—and Belle Baruch in particular—by claiming in a cablegram home to her brother, Robert, that shortly after arrivi
ng in London she had fallen in love and had become engaged to an Englishman by the name of Douglas Elliott Craik, who supposedly had served as an officer of the Royal Garrison Artillery during the war. She gave no other details.

  On June 18, 1920, a three-paragraph engagement announcement appeared in The New York Times. “Robert Wood Johnson of New Brunswick, N.J. made the announcement. His sister is spending the summer in Europe with Miss Alice A. De Lamar,” the notice said.

  But almost a month to the day later, on July 17, 1920, the New York Tribune reported that the engagement of Evangeline to Craik “has been broken.” Once again, no other details were given.

  Evangeline, who was known as a prankster, may have fooled her brother for laughs by saying she was getting married, and in the process duped two of New York’s most prestigious newspapers. By planting the engagement notice, Evangeline also was covering up her relationship with De Lamar, and her sexual preference at the time. Gossip columns would carry other unconfirmed engagement items involving Evangeline on and off until she actually did get married for the first time in 1926 to Leopold Stokowski, who happened to be a close friend of De Lamar’s.

  Evangeline’s daughter, Sadja Greenwood, says her mother had mentioned her friendships with Belle and Alice, though she had no knowledge of them being intimate. “But it doesn’t shock me at all. My mother was very tolerant of any kind of sexuality. I do know that she had a lot of gay male friends, and, of course, she married a gay guy, so she was very tolerant.”

  * * *

  In 1925, a year after President Wilson died, Evangeline and Belle Baruch accompanied their friend, the widowed first lady, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the president’s second wife, who was an attractive and vibrant woman in her early fifties, on a five-month summer vacation in Europe. It was Mrs. Wilson’s first European trip since the president’s death. He had suffered a stroke in 1919, and it was later learned that she had taken charge of a number of White House matters and was dubbed by the press “the Secret President” and “the first female president of the United States” until his death.