Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  They had left in May aboard the ocean liner Majestic, arriving in France, and then traveling through Normandy to Paris, and on to Venice, Scotland, and Geneva, and returning to New York and Washington in October.

  During the European holiday, Evangeline had developed an intimate bond with Edith Wilson, and they became confidantes, if not more. Edith was Evangeline’s kind of woman because the first lady had what a New York Times writer once called “formidable determination,” an attribute they both possessed and understood.

  Evangeline also liked Edith because she was independent and kind of a rebel, especially for a first lady. There had been much juicy gossip in the nation’s capital about Edith and Wilson, with innuendoes that they had had an affair—she was thirteen years the president’s junior—and there was talk that he was cheating with her on his first wife, Ellen Wilson.

  One salacious story had it that Edith had fallen out of bed when the president proposed to her, indicating that they had been sleeping together. There even had been a nasty rumor that Wilson and Edith, who were married a week before Christmas in 1915, had murdered the first Mrs. Wilson. And in the midst of all that sturm und drang The Washington Post was left with egg on its editorial face because of a Freudian typographical error that said the president had spent an evening “entering” Edith, instead of “entertaining” Edith.

  That edition became a collector’s item.

  In her memoir, Mrs. Wilson wrote adoringly—almost romantically—of her first meeting with Evangeline and Belle:

  I shall always recall them as they looked that night. They were both over six feet tall, and were dressed in stunning velvet evening gowns of the latest Parisian stamp. Long earrings matched the costumes. In all they were two stunning-looking creatures as I ever saw.

  * * *

  A couple of months after her return from Europe, Evangeline Brewster Johnson attended a dinner party in Manhattan and met a celebrity she had idolized from a distance—the larger-than-life maestro of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, a brilliant musician, egotistic showman, and legendary Don Juan. She was twenty-seven, a rich and single rebel, he was forty-four, famous but not wealthy, divorced several years earlier after a decade of marriage to an American concert pianist—stage name Olga Samaroff, real name Lucy Mary Agnes Hickenlooper of Texas—with whom he had a daughter, Sonya.

  When Stokowski met Evangeline, it was rumored that he had just jilted his latest lover, a nineteen-year-old Philadelphia debutante.

  Still, Evangeline was open for anything.

  It was love at first sight. Soon the press corps was chasing the two lovebirds, paparazzi style, staking them out, chasing them down, and getting lots of no comments. The couple secretly decided to get married, and Evangeline let her family in on the news a few days before the well-camouflaged wedding.

  One of her brothers—she never identified whether it was Robert or Seward—demanded to know, “Who is he?”

  Replied Evangeline, “He’s a conductor.”

  Contemptuously, her brother declared, “In this family, one doesn’t marry conductors.”

  Rolling her eyes, she responded, “Darling, not a streetcar conductor!”

  On Saturday, January 9, 1926, one of the Philadelphia broadsheets blared: “STOKOWSKI TO MARRY N.Y. GIRL, IS REPORT … Marriage of Philadelphia Conductor and Miss E.B. Johnson Expected Monday … SHE IS LEAGUE FIGHT LEADER.”

  The Johnson heiress was described as “a strikingly beautiful and popular member of the younger social circles in New York and Newport … an enthusiastic advocate of the League of Nations … hostess to Mrs. Woodrow Wilson … and an intimate friend of Belle Baruch…”

  Belle, hopelessly in love with Evangeline, was furious and at wits’ end when told by “my golden girl,” as she called Evangeline, that she was planning to quickly tie the knot with Stokowski.

  “Nothing would do for Evangeline but for Belle to share her ecstasy and participate in the plans for the wedding,” as Belle’s biographer, Mary Miller, noted. “Belle joined in the laughter, but a cold dread was building within her as she struggled to share Evangeline’s happiness. She tried to articulate her feelings but did not fully understand them herself.”

  A week before the wedding, Evangeline wrote a letter to her confidante, the former first lady, Edith Wilson, who was aware of the very close relationship between Evangeline and Belle, and informed her of how unsettled she felt about Belle’s despair.

  Evangeline said:

  Belle I hope and pray will become reconciled to the idea, though in what possible way she is “losing me” is impossible for me to understand. But I want to have her happy too for her love and devotionate [sic] friendship are among the most precious things in life.

  Her words seemed disingenuous.

  Miller says her “personal opinion” was that the very sophisticated Evangeline completely understood why Belle was upset. “Evangeline was a lot more savvy than what she wrote in that letter. She knew very well what was going on.”

  Heartbroken, Belle “reluctantly” was one of the guests at the top-secret marriage of the woman she loved to a man she hardly knew other than by professional reputation.

  The ceremony took place at 4:30 in the afternoon on Monday, January, 12, 1926. The groom’s secretary, Mary McGinty, prepared a press release stating that New York Supreme Court Justice R. P. Leydon had officiated, that Evangeline wore a wine-colored velvet dress, and that the ceremony was performed against a background of gold.

  The wedding ring the groom gave his bride was made from a gold nugget given to him by Evangeline’s friends, President and Mrs. Wilson. To keep the secrecy, it wasn’t until ninety minutes after the knot was tied that the marriage license was made public. Among the dozen or so guests were Evangeline’s brothers, Robert and Seward, and a devastated “Miss Belle Baruch.”

  Wrote her biographer:

  Mourning Evangeline’s marriage, Belle came to the painful realization of why no man had ever lingered in her heart. Her feelings for Evangeline far exceeded those of friendship. With agonizing insight, Belle recognized that she loved Evangeline and would prefer the affection and intimacy of other women to that of men … homosexuality for her, she decided, was normal …

  After the wedding, Evangeline and Belle would visit together a few times, but their close relationship was finished. They each got on with their lives.

  Belle died at sixty-five in 1964, a year before her father’s passing at ninety-four, and a quarter century before her beloved Evangeline’s death.

  Evangeline and Stoki, as he was called, would have an open marriage within the bounds of propriety because he had a public reputation to uphold. But he’d have a number of bedmates, and then a final headline-making affair with one of the world’s most glamorous movie stars and seductresses, Greta Garbo, that would result in Evangeline’s first divorce.

  One day Evangeline’s daughter, Sadja’s sister, Lubya came home from school and asked her mother the embarrassing and hurtful question, “Who is Greta Garbo? Everybody at school says Daddy is having a romance with Greta Garbo.”

  That was the last straw for Evangeline.

  She immediately confronted Stoki and laid down the law, telling him, “Look, the children are going into adolescence and, in order to make a satisfactory heterosexual adjustment in the future, they’ve got to have, for at least a few years, a normal home life, a normal sort of family life.”

  In early November 1937, a headline in the New York Daily Mirror declared: “Reno Unites Johnson Kin.”

  In what seemingly could only have happened in the Johnson dynasty, where marriages and divorces came and went like express trains, both a Johnson wife, Mrs. Ruth Dill Johnson, the first of Seward Sr.’s three, and Evangeline, Seward’s sister, were both in Nevada at the same time awaiting residency requirements for their respective divorces. Evangeline, who was ensconced at the Boulder City Hotel near Las Vegas, went horseback riding with her sister-in-law, and then moved to a dude ranch. A longtim
e female friend of Stoki’s who was also in town to divorce her husband ran into Evangeline, who told her that she and Stoki “were ready to get a divorce anyway,” the Garbo romance notwithstanding.

  On December 1, 1937, Evangeline sued for divorce in Las Vegas, charging “extreme mental cruelty,” a boilerplate reason. Even so, Stoki contested the charge, but not the divorce. “STOKOWSKI HITS CHARGES, Conductor Denies Wife’s Divorce Accusation of Cruelty,” the New York Times headline read. Besides demanding equal joint custody of their children, he declared, “I could not be cruel to anyone, so I certainly could not be cruel to my children or their mother. I deeply resent this untrue accusation.”

  The uncontested divorce was granted on December 2, 1937.

  His third wife was the beautiful, eccentric, neurotic, creative society girl Gloria Vanderbilt, known as the “poor little rich girl” and the “million-dollar baby,” who on her twenty-first birthday had inherited five million dollars. Her sixty-three-year-old groom, the press reported, was “old enough to be her grandfather.”

  On January 27, 1938, in a quickie marriage ceremony in Phoenix, Arizona, Evangeline Johnson took on the title of Princess Evangeline Zalstem-Zalessky, wife of Prince Alexis Zalstem-Zalessky, a Russian of dubious royal lineage, whom she had met in New York and Palm Beach, where he was better known in certain circles as basically a charming gigolo, good-looking, “strong and stocky,” as her daughter, Sadja Greenwood, described him decades later.

  “Ex-Wife of Conductor Is Bride of Russian Prince in West,” the New York Times headline said. The story never mentioned that Evangeline was of the Johnson dynasty, only that she was “a member of a New Brunswick, N.J. family,” her way of distancing herself from her roots. If the reading public didn’t know better, she could have been a plumber’s daughter from Hoboken.

  With the marriage, Evangeline became the first and last member of the Johnson dynasty to ever become a member of Eastern European “royalty.”

  But most family members, like Nick Rutgers, believed Zalessky’s title was phony. “He wasn’t a prince,” he declares. “He was a good Russian, but not a prince. He either gave himself the title, or Evangeline paid for it.”

  It infuriated members of the Johnson family that she insisted on calling herself a princess and being addressed as such. They laughed and made fun of her, especially her brothers, Robert and Seward.

  Robert had once intoned, “Damned if I can understand why that woman insists on calling herself a princess, she’s no more princess than the man in the moon.” Her touché response was, “Well, I guess it’s the same reason you call yourself a general.”

  In the early 1960s, Evangeline and her prince were gallivanting in Europe and had been in Zurich visiting the Bircher-Benner Clinic, a homeopathic health spa that espoused the healing power of raw fruits and vegetables and had developed Bircher Muesli. They were rushing to catch a train in the Zurich station en route to their next destination, when Zalessky, known to have aortic stenosis, suffered a fatal heart attack, and died on the spot.

  Sometime in 1967, the no-longer-grieving widow Princess Evangeline Brewster Johnson Stokowski Zalstem-Zalessky was having her hair done in a Palm Beach salon by a young, good-looking gay stylist who looked half her age, and almost was. He was Charles Merrill, who became her third husband, the one with a penchant for auctioning off interesting items on eBay.

  PART IV

  SEWARD’S FOLLY

  13

  While Evangeline Johnson Stokowski Zalstem-Zalessky Merrill’s life was often passionate and uninhibited, that of her brother, J. Seward Johnson, was unrestrained, narcissistic, and, at times, if accusations are to be believed, criminally immoral.

  His namesake was the future well-known and often controversial sculptor J. Seward Johnson Jr., the only son of what would be a tumultuous union between J. Seward, known as Seward Sr., and the first of his three wives, attractive, titian-haired, blue-eyed Ruth Dill Johnson. She was twenty-one when twenty-nine-year-old Seward, whom she called Johnny, swept her off her feet. During their brief courtship, he aggressively pursued her and deluged her with expensive gifts—a gold Cartier cigarette case with diamonds that spelled out her initials was a typical trinket.

  They were wed in true royal style in St. James Church in London on July 14, 1924. There followed whirlwind tours of the luxury capitals of Europe. Johnny treated Ruth like a princess, since he thought of the Johnson dynasty back home in provincial New Jersey as nothing less than American royalty.

  Ruth, too, came from a prominent and wealthy old-line family, hers from Bermuda, where they had come to live beginning in 1620, the same year the Pilgrims, who had landed on Plymouth Rock, signed the Mayflower Compact. Bermuda was still part of the sprawling British Empire where the sun never set, and Ruth’s father, Lt. Col. Thomas Melville Dill—descended from sea captains—had served as the commanding officer of the Bermuda Militia Artillery. He also was one of Bermuda’s leading political figures, serving almost two decades as attorney general, and was considered quite controversial, particularly when he proposed legislation to limit Bermuda immigration, igniting death threats against the Dills because some families had to be split apart.

  Ruth was named after her mother, Ruth Rapalje Neilson Dill, an American whose lineage went back to the last Dutch governor of New York, Peter Stuyvesant. But Ruth grew up in middle-class circumstances in the New Jersey industrial town of Perth Amboy—perched on the Raritan River, and practically in the shadow of the Johnson & Johnson complex in nearby New Brunswick.

  Ruth Dill Johnson was the oldest of the Dill brood, followed by three brothers, Tom; Laurence, who was said to be gay; and Bayard; and two sisters, Francis, called Fan, and Diana, the youngest, born the year before Ruth married into the Johnson dynasty. Diana was not planned, as her mother was in her early forties and her father nearing fifty, she later wrote in a memoir. He was an irritable, domineering man who sported a monocle, wore a white wig, and doled out punishment with a strap to his children who, much like the Johnsons, were raised by a succession of nannies.

  Unlike the Johnsons, though, the Dills, despite their wealth and power, were a family in which money “was mentioned infrequently as it was considered vulgar to dwell on the subject,” as Diana later stated. When it came to money, however, nothing was too vulgar for a number of the avaricious Johnsons.

  With his marriage to Ruth, Seward had become close to the Dills, and enjoyed their company. It was as if he had finally found a family of his own since, like his sister, Evangeline, and brother, Robert, he had been left in the care of others after their Johnson & Johnson cofounder father died, and their mother went off with a new man.

  Ruth’s first pregnancy ended in a stillbirth, the result of physical problems developed when she sailed in a storm on her husband’s yacht. Her second pregnancy resulted in a beautiful daughter, born in 1926, who they named Mary Lea—the first Baby Powder can baby face, who later became one of the most troubled, vitriolic, and scandalous of Seward’s brood.

  That was the same year the family moved into Merriewold, the immense and spectacularly ostentatious three-story Elizabethan-Norman mansion Seward had built as a wedding present for his bride at 433 River Road, in Highland Park, New Jersey, the same workingman’s town where his brother, Robert, the General, had been mayor.

  The Castle, as it became known to locals, was built by Seward at the enormous pre–Great Depression cost of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and was sited on a private, wooded bluff where the elaborate grounds sloped down to the Raritan River, in virtual eyesight of the Johnson & Johnson plant. The spectacular land had been a wedding gift to the newlyweds from the groom’s brother, the General.

  Seward had then commissioned the noted Philadelphia architect Thomas Harlan Ellett to design the palatial home, for which Ellett won the New York Architectural League’s silver medal. But the Johnson mansion would have a dark future that included divorce, burglaries, a suspected attempted kidnapping, and a gruesome murder. But
all of that was in the future.

  The construction of Merriewold and its mindboggling cost had caught the fancy of the late Roaring Twenties New York press. As Lindesay Parrott, a correspondent for the Evening Post, observed:

  The novel conceit of importing, all the way from England, enough slate to build a roof today has flowered into a house on the banks of the Raritan. Which is simply a more elaborate way of saying that when J. S. Johnson of Johnson & Johnson sets out to build a new home and wants English stone to crown his rooftop, he gets it—about 500 tons of it.

  Seward had decided to import the slate from England on the advice of his architect because “there’s nothing similar in this country,” and he boasted that the particular slate covering the roof, coming from England’s Cotswold District, was used on “many of the Oxford colleges.” While it didn’t make for a better roof, he acknowledged, “It just seemed more suitable to the house,” and it was better for bragging rights.

  The unique roof, though, didn’t compare to the rest of Merriewold, which seemed to go on forever. There were twenty-five rooms, including six bedrooms, a ballroom, eleven fireplaces, a pair of hidden staircases, and turrets with iron steps and stained-glass windows. Many of the rooms were paneled in English oak, the floors covered in Italian marble. The 150 windows were of leaded glass. There was a guesthouse and chauffeur’s quarters, a cottage for the help, and a garage for more than two dozen cars; there were stables for the thoroughbreds, and a portion of the beautiful and expensively landscaped seventeen acres included an airfield for the private planes of the Johnsons and their wealthy guests.