There were a number of oddities about the mansion, too.
For instance, over the breakfast room fireplace were Seward, Ruth, and firstborn Mary Lea’s zodiac signs—Leo, Libra, and Cancer, with the crab mark being repeated at the gable. Seward also had a boat called Zodiac, the one on which Ruth had sailed in the rough seas that resulted in the loss of her first child during pregnancy.
The gothic ambiance of Merriewold was frightening to the Johnson children, especially to Seward Jr., the sensitive and easily upset namesake who, like his sister, Mary Lea, would have a troubled future.
“I used to be frightened as a child there, and I used to kiss my mother good night carrying a loaded twenty-two rifle when I was nine or ten,” he recalled at eighty-one in 2011.
There were a number of secret passages, including what was described as an escape tunnel three football fields long that led from Seward Sr.’s personal, fully equipped barber shop in the basement to the guard booth and the garage. In another part of the castle was a circular staircase, a replica of one in Philadelphia’s old City Hall. Above a balcony a lobster was carved in stone, and in front of the home were sculpted whale heads because of Seward and Ruth’s love of the sea.
Oddly, dead whales would play a role in Seward Jr.’s troubled and bizarre first marriage. But again all of that lay in the future.
Behind Merriewold’s library a hidden staircase went up to Seward’s dressing room.
“I used to hide there and listen to people talking in the library,” recollects Seward Jr.
To get to the well-stocked liquor and wine—it being Prohibition—one had to have a key to open a heavy-duty Yale lock, and know the secret of how to swing the hidden hinges of a routine-looking bookcase, holding a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Inside was a full-fledged barroom that even federal Prohibition agent Elliot Ness and his crack squad of “Untouchables” would have had a difficult time discovering.
* * *
Everyone who visited Merriewold—tycoons, politicians, celebrities—was astounded by the mansion’s grandeur.
Some years later a budding young actor with the newly branded stage name of Kirk Douglas saw the estate for the first time with his bride and first wife, Diana Dill, Ruth’s baby sister. He couldn’t believe his eyes. For a poor Jewish boy from the New York tenements—real name Issur Danielovitch, son of an illiterate immigrant Russian ragpicker and junkman—Merriewold was something of a fantasy place out of a storybook.
Douglas had met the very pretty Diana Dill when the two, in their twenties, were acting students at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York just before the start of World War II. Because of her sweet nature—Diana sympathized with Kirk and let him cry on her shoulder when their teacher criticized his acting abilities—he glibly called her “Miss Everything Is Lovely Dill.”
She, too, would become an actress and a model; during the war she made the cover of a special spring issue of Life magazine on which she was photographed in black-and-white wearing a checked blouse and straw hat and holding a parasol.
For the Jewish Douglas, she was the ultimate shiksa, from Bermudan royalty, yet. They were married on November 2, 1943, the nondenominational service officiated by a navy chaplain in New Orleans, where Ensign Douglas was stationed at the time.
Because of a serious case of amoebic dysentery, he received an early discharge in June 1944. By then Diana was pregnant, and it was arranged that they would stay for a time at her sister Ruth’s home, which the bride told the groom was just a place in the New Jersey countryside. Kirk, a tenement boy who knew nothing about the Johnsons, let alone country places, figured it was a little cottage with a white picket fence.
As they were driving down a road bordered not by white picket, but rather a high stone wall that seemed to stretch on for miles, he asked her when they’d finally reach Ruth’s house.
“This,” Diana told him, “is the beginning of my sister’s place.”
Kirk thought she was joking until they arrived at Merriewold’s main entrance with gatehouses on either side of an imposing stone archway. As they rounded a curve he spotted a house that he thought was “just perfect,” but Diana explained that it was only the gardener’s cottage, that the Douglases would be staying in the main house.
As Kirk recalled years later in The Ragman’s Son, his memoir, “In front of us was a gigantic, sprawling English castle with turrets and a slate roof. I was dumbfounded.”
Diana told him they would be residing in the west wing, which was up a circular stone staircase, and down a hallway lined with art and suits of armor, which finally ended in their luxurious suite of rooms.
Using Merriewold as a temporary home, Douglas commuted to New York from New Brunswick by train every day seeking his first professional acting jobs, which he quickly won, appearing in a radio show, and acting in a play called Kiss and Tell.
He was performing on radio on September 24, 1944, when Diana gave birth in a New Brunswick hospital to a bouncing baby boy who they named Michael K. Douglas—the middle initial “K” having no real meaning. It was a compromise because Diana wanted to name the infant Kirk Douglas Jr. but Kirk explained to his gentile wife that no one in the Orthodox Jewish religion is named after a living family member, so they gave him a fake middle initial instead.
Michael Douglas spent the first three weeks or so of his life in the castle that Seward Johnson had built, and was then and forever more considered an integral part of the Johnson dynasty.
“Ruth was very gracious,” Kirk Douglas remembered. “She helped us enormously and enabled us to save money by allowing us to live there.” Not to overstay his sister-in-law’s hospitality, the Douglases and their baby boy soon moved to their first apartment, in Greenwich Village.
“We left on a dreary fall day,” he recalled. “As I looked back at the castle, I thought, Boy, I’d hate to have to build a wall around that and fill it with horse manure.”
The Johnsons and the Douglases would forever have close family ties. But along with the Douglas dynasty’s Hollywood fame and the Johnson dynasty’s riches, a number of them would be plagued by divorce, drugs, tragedy, suicide, and scandal.
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For the frigid central New Jersey winters, and broiling hot summers, J. Seward Johnson Sr. made certain that Merriewold had the most technologically advanced heating plant, which used oil and coal, and one of the first air-cooling systems. The house had to be comfortable, especially since Ruth would become pregnant every couple of years.
Two years after firstborn Mary Lea came into the world, Ruth gave birth to another daughter, Elaine, in 1928. In 1930, the namesake Seward Jr. was born, followed on January 26, 1932, by Diana Melville Johnson, named by Ruth in honor of her baby sister.
Ruth was young, healthy, and fertile and continued to get pregnant after Diana. But, on orders from her husband, she was forced to undergo illegal abortions—supposedly arranged for by his sister Evangeline—because he had the bizarre belief that additional children would weaken the Johnson dynasty bloodline.
When the infant heiress Diana was just a few weeks away from turning two months, the eyes of the nation, and the world, were transfixed on the nearby New Jersey town of Hopewell, and the family home of beloved hero-aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Around 10 P.M. on March 1—just five years after Lindbergh’s epoch-making trans-atlantic flight—the world-famous couple’s twenty-month-old toddler, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., was abducted from his nursery, in what became the biggest story “since the Resurrection,” as the journalist H. L. Mencken observed at the time. At the least, it was certainly the crime of the century.
As a massive search was under way for the celebrity baby and his abductor, a shocking kidnapping attempt occurred at Merriewold just eighteen days later, with baby Diana Johnson the presumed intended target. The apparent attempt had all the initial earmarks of the Lindbergh case, and fear gripped the nation that the same fiend had struck again.
As the lead of one local newspaper accou
nt declared on March 19, 1932, “A second kidnapping sensation in many ways paralleling the Lindbergh case, startled New Jersey today.”
Declared another:
“An attempt to break into the nursery of a sleeping baby in the exact manner used by the kidnappers of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. was made early yesterday at the home of J. Seward Johnson, wealthy vice president of Johnson & Johnson, manufacturers of surgical supplies … The Johnson home, Merriewold, is only twenty miles from the Lindbergh home.”
It was 3 A.M. at Merriewold that Saturday morning, and Diana was asleep in the second-floor nursery, a suite consisting of several rooms where all the children slept, in the middle of the rear of the mansion, and some distance from Seward and Ruth’s master bedroom. The infant was in her bassinette next to the Johnson family’s dozing full-time nurse, Albertine Filiatrault.
Although the Johnson estate was well protected by an armed security guard stationed at the front gatehouse, the intruder managed to sneak onto the grounds and take a ladder from the garage, and place it under the window where Diana was sleeping.
As would soon be learned, the man knew the layout well.
When he cut a hole in the window screen and turned the window latch, the sound awakened the nurse, who spotted him framed in the window. Holding back her urge to scream, the quick-witted Miss Filiatrault grabbed the receiver of a bedside phone—a hotline connecting the main house with the quarters of night watchman John Shea—and whispered what was happening.
Shea grabbed a shotgun and headed toward the house, thoughts of the very recent unsolved Lindbergh case racing through his mind, as he would later tell police.
The man was still on the ladder, still trying to enter the room, when Shea opened fire, but missed. The intruder whipped out a revolver and returned one shot as he jumped fifteen feet to the ground, leaving deep shoe prints. Seward and Ruth, awakened by the shots, ran to the nursery, fearing the worst. Like everyone else, they had been following the Lindberghs’ horrific situation, and like so many of the rich and famous, also feared being the target of a kidnapping.
Unable to reload his shotgun, Shea chased the agile intruder, who disappeared into the shadows on the sprawling grounds. Meanwhile, the nurse used an outside phone line to call police, and an all-points alarm was sounded, as a squad of Highland Park police converged on Merriewold.
Initially, New Jersey law enforcement’s immediate suspicion was that the Lindbergh kidnapper had struck again, but this time had failed in snatching his target. If it were the same man, the press corps speculated, any cop who arrested the kidnapper would reap a huge reward and instant fame, and hopefully find the abducted celebrity baby alive.
In the borough of South Plainfield, about eight miles from Merriewold, police chief Cornelius McCarthy and patrolman Andrew Phillips had been alerted to the attempted kidnapping, and at 4:30 A.M. were cruising the town when they spotted an unfamiliar, fatigued-looking man stumble into an all-night greasy spoon and slump into a booth.
Their suspicions aroused, they confronted him. The chief barked, “I am an officer and you are a stranger. What are you doing in South Plainfield?”
When the powerful-looking suspect appeared to be reaching for a gun, McCarthy bopped him on the head with the butt of his Smith & Wesson. The man was found to be carrying a gun, one bullet having recently been fired.
Handcuffed, he was taken in, and under questioning would only identify himself—falsely, as it turned out—as one George Malden, giving an address, also untrue, of 518 East Sixteenth Street, in Manhattan. He said he was thirty-six years old and claimed he was an ironworker, and had just arrived in town after hitching a ride on a freight train when he was picked up. But he refused to answer any other questions during hours of grilling.
Placed in a lineup in the morning, the suspect was identified by Seward, the nurse, and the night watchman, as the same man who, on February 2, a week after Diana was born, had gotten past security, entered Merriewold, and robbed the Johnsons of three thousand dollars in their own bedroom, a case that had received no publicity at the time. The suspect’s shoe also fit the imprint left in the ground during what was suspected to be the kidnapping attempt.
“I am convinced he came back to steal the baby,” Seward Johnson told reporters. “It seems to me that with the Lindbergh case and incidents like this one, we ought to have some action to put a stop to this sort of thing.”
Seward himself personally questioned the suspect “to get him to say something, but he won’t talk,” he told reporters.
Meanwhile, the man’s fingerprints were rushed to the state police investigators pursuing the Lindbergh case.
A couple of days after he was taken into custody, Malden, who was being held on a concealed weapons charge while being investigated for attempted kidnapping, was identified as Richard Cowan, an escapee from the Western Penitentiary, in Rockview, Pennsylvania. After serving just ten days of an eight-to-fourteen-year term for burglary, he had walked away unnoticed from a prison gang on a wheat threshing detail the previous July. His involvement in the Lindbergh case was ruled out, and investigators concluded that another burglary at the Johnsons, rather than a kidnapping, was his motive for the attempted break-in. He was indicted, and returned to prison with an additional sentence of fourteen years.
Meanwhile, all hope of finding the Lindbergh baby alive was snuffed out when the little body was discovered on May 12, not far from the Lindbergh home, with a massive skull fracture, despite the payment of a fifty-thousand-dollar ransom.
Still fearful, Seward had turned Merriewold into an armed camp with bars on the windows and barbed wire around the grounds.
* * *
With the kidnap fears rampant, Robert Johnson, the General, then running the family business, convinced Seward to leave the country to protect his children.
On the surface that appeared to be concerned brotherly advice, and some of it might have been, but it also was the General’s first step in a Machiavellian plan to gain majority control of Johnson & Johnson by keeping Seward away from the New Brunswick headquarters for as long as he could.
In 1944, when Johnson & Johnson became a public company and its stock soared in value, the next-to-final act in Robert’s plan would be played out when he convinced his brother to take a third of his wealth and put it into trusts for his children, with Robert as one of the trustees. At the time, the brothers had equal shares in Johnson & Johnson, owning 84 percent of the company, with their sister, Evangeline, mostly out in the cold. But with a third of Seward’s fortune tied up in the trusts, Robert had gotten majority control. Two years later, in 1946, he would boot Seward out of the executive suite.
Seward Jr. says his uncle’s tactics back then drove him crazy with anger. “I thought he [his father] was giving up our legacies to the strong arm of his brother.”
On his brother’s advice, Seward and Ruth took the children to stay with her family, the Dills, in Bermuda.
“My father took us down there and my uncle managed to keep him out of New Brunswick for three or four years.”
The family’s stay in Bermuda was both buoyant and horrendous.
In the summer of 1933, the Dills and the Johnsons rented an enormous Victorian home, Stanhope Lodge, owned by Lady Blanche Stanhope, and that summer Seward and Ruth’s brother, Bayard, representing the United States, won the Prince of Wales Cup with Seward’s yacht called Jill.
That was the joyful part of their stay.
The horror occurred when Seward fell in love with Ruth’s fourteen-year-old sister, Fan, a quarter century his junior. While the teenager had flirted with her brother-in-law, she had no further interest. But he did, and he actually fantasized about marrying the child.
Ruth was shocked when he told her, said he wanted a divorce, and left her, at least temporarily.
When Ruth and Seward finally split, the Dills were devastated. Fan, who knew the score, sobbed when she heard the divorce talk. “Secrets hung in the air,” her sister, Diana Dill, who he
rself would be divorced from Kirk Douglas, who had a reputation as a Casanova, after seven raucous Hollywood years, recalled later in her memoir. “Through all the summer nothing was mentioned, and it wasn’t until Ruth confided in me the following year as she left for Reno that some of it was clarified for me.”
What Diana didn’t know when she discovered her sister crying, and what Ruth later revealed to her, was Seward’s intoxication with their sister, Fan. (Fan later married a British military officer, settled in England, and in her midnineties in 2011, was said to have Alzheimer’s.)
Because of Seward’s scandal with Fan, “We had to leave Bermuda,” recalls Seward Jr. “After we returned home, my uncle, who was hysterical to get my father out of New Brunswick again”—as part of his plan to completely take over Johnson & Johnson—“had him take us out with FBI coverage to Santa Fe, New Mexico.”
There, the wandering Johnsons stayed for a time with the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz.
And from there, the Johnsons went to England where, at Ruth’s urging, husband and wife had a trial reconciliation, mainly for the sake of the children.
In Leicestershire, Seward, the yachtsman, had gotten hooked on hunting, and took on the pose of an English squire, purchasing best-in-breed hunting dogs, rifles and shotguns, and a country manor house similar to, or even more grand than Merriewold, replete with a large staff of servants and even its own private chapel.
Most of the time the Johnson children, now free from potential kidnappers in America, were cared for and taught in a gothic environment by icy British governesses, steely nurses, strict tutors, and housed by themselves in the immense estate’s nursery wing.
Young Diana Dill, also living with the Johnson children at the time in England, where she was being educated, recalled the period when Seward and Ruth were “going through their troubles,” as she put it in her memoir, In the Wings. Mary Lea, who was three years younger than Diana, was in awe when her cousin won a school prize. “I didn’t think our family ever won anything,” Diana quoted the little Johnson & Johnson heiress as saying. Looking back years later, Diana saw it as “a sad comment from a sad little girl.”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 10