Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  With the threat of kidnapping still real back in America, Seward’s sister, Evangeline, then still married to Leopold Stokowski, also genuinely feared that her two young daughters, Sadja and Lubya, were targets for abduction, given the fame of their father, and the wealth of their mother. While Evangeline lived in Manhattan during the week, where chances for a kidnapping seemed slim, she and the children spent weekends at a better target—her isolated country estate, Cloud Walk Farm, in the blue-collar farming community of New Milford, in Litchfield County, Connecticut (later to be owned by the fashion designer Diane Von Furstenburg and her media mogul husband, Barry Diller).

  Concerned about her children’s security, Evangeline asked the Litchfield County district attorney for special protection. She also had her daughters under the close watch of a hired couple, and a trusted handyman by the name of Henry Perlowski, but the children were never informed about what was going on, in order to avoid frightening them.

  “I think she shielded us from that,” recalls her daughter, Sadja Greenwood, almost nine decades later.

  Evangeline was soon the target of two extortion attempts with harsh demands: turn over money or the kids get snatched. The first, however, was by a crank by the name of Davis who wrote a letter demanding eight hundred dollars—the authorities never found him, or the location in the Bronx for the dropoff.

  But the second caused great concern because the extortionist called Sadja and Lubya’s exclusive and private Dalton School in Manhattan and demanded that Evangeline, who volunteered at the school as head of the art department, meet him with one thousand dollars in cash at Park Avenue and Eighty-Sixth Street if she didn’t want her daughters abducted.

  She called New York’s finest, and a sting operation was set up. An envelope was filled with scraps of newspaper and, with cops staked out, Evangeline went to the location and waited—and waited. Several hours went by, but the caller never showed. There were no other threats against her, at least not any that she revealed.

  It would take more than two years for the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, to be apprehended, charged with the federal crime, found guilty of first-degree murder at a media-frenzy trial, and executed in the electric chair at the New Jersey State Prison in April 1936.

  * * *

  A few days after Thanksgiving 1937, Ruth Dill Johnson was granted a divorce from Seward on the grounds of “cruelty of a mental nature.” In front of the judge her lawyer had asked her how Seward had treated her.

  “Extreme indifference,” was her instant response.

  In her settlement with Seward, minus alimony she got Merriewold, custody of her kids, and what amounted to a measly twelve thousand dollars annual income, chicken feed to Seward, and a drop in the bucket in the Johnson & Johnson realm.

  In early December, a free woman after thirteen years as a Johnson wife in a horrific marriage, Ruth sailed for England, telling reporters gathered at the pier, “I want to be at the Isle of Wight in time to hang up Christmas stockings for my children.” As part of their settlement she had convinced Seward to pass on fifty percent of his growing fortune to her brood when he died, which years later would ignite a family war over the money, the usual subject over which members of the Johnson dynasty would fight through the decades.

  After all the hell she had gone through as Seward’s wife, her assessment of him years later was simply, “Johnny was crazy.”

  Less than three years after her divorce, on June 21, 1940, Ruth Dill Johnson became Mrs. Philip D. Crockett, in a civil ceremony at Merriewold with just immediate family members in attendance. He was a Lehman Brothers investment banker, whom she had met in London.

  Before her death at eighty-three, in March 1987—while she was having a colonoscopy, her colon was accidentally punctured—she and Crockett, with the main house sold off, had been living relatively modestly in what had been Merriewold’s groundskeeper’s cottage. It was a far cry from her former grandiose lifestyle, but also a far happier one.

  Seward Jr. says his stepfather, Crockett, who had outlived Ruth and had inherited the cottage, was an old, embittered man because he always lived “in the shadow of Johnson & Johnson” wealth, power, and fame.

  The stately Merriewold mansion seemed to some to be cursed, what with the acrimonious Johnson divorce, the frightening break-ins, and the once-presumed violent kidnapping attempt.

  Whatever it was—a curse, or a jinx, or simply the ill fortune of the very rich people in residence—it continued into the early sixties with another marital breakup within its walls, this one ending in murder.

  On September 18, 1963, Merriewold’s latest owner, sixty-two-year-old Johnson & Johnson consultant Charles R. Farmer, shot and killed his estranged fifty-year-old art patron wife, Barbara, with three bullets, and then turned the snub-nosed .38 caliber revolver on himself, suffering a wound in his left shoulder, in what prosecutors had called an “apparent murder and apparent attempted suicide.”

  In 1968, Merriewold saw an end to its days as a private home when it was sold to a construction company for $400,000 to be renovated into offices. The price was little more than what Seward Johnson had paid to have it built back in the late 1920s.

  15

  Around the same time that Ruth Johnson remarried, so did Seward Sr., in 1939, to the second of his three wives. His bride was Esther Underwood, a proper, politically and socially correct liberal, and an artsy, very well-to-do Bostonian who was a descendant of William Underwood, founder in 1822 of a canned food company that became hugely successful for marketing a sandwich spread called Underwood Deviled Ham—ground ham with spices—that through generations sported a red devil, sometimes holding a pitchfork.

  The company’s logo somehow seemed apropos vis-à-vis the second Mrs. Seward Johnson, known as Essie, in that her husband, the second in command at Johnson & Johnson, was a demoniacal philanderer who would have many affairs during their union of some three decades that produced his fifth and sixth children—Jennifer in 1941, and James (Jimmy) Loring Johnson, in 1945—and that would end in another scandalous divorce.

  Seward, it appeared, clearly enjoyed the act of making babies, but raising them in a fatherly and loving manner was a different story. They were left to their mother and the help, and given whatever they needed in order to keep them out of his hair.

  Essie was an odd choice as a mate for Seward. Rather drab in looks and demeanor, she never really turned him on sexually as was underscored on their wedding night when, it was said, he spent the night with another woman. Those few who remember her decades later still can’t fathom why Seward married her. He certainly didn’t need her money, although it didn’t hurt, and she had a good name. The speculation was that she was an agreeable beard for his womanizing.

  “Essie was an old maid schoolteacher type,” says Seward Jr. of his stepmother. “She definitely was not what turned him on.”

  Still, Seward and Essie lived the Johnson lifestyle to the fullest.

  They were driven by a chauffeur when he wasn’t speeding around the New Jersey countryside looking for girls to pick up in his classic Jaguar roadster; they had servants in uniform at their Oldwick mansion; they wintered at their waterfront estate in Hobe Sound, Florida; summered at their big, ivy-covered home in Essie’s hometown of Chatham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod; had a small fleet of classic sailboats designed by Seward’s close pal, the noted naval architect Francis Spaulding Dunbar, also known as a womanizer who was Seward’s skirt-chasing sidekick; and because Essie feared flying and getting aboard Seward’s Johnson & Johnson private plane, she traveled in style in a private railroad car.

  As Seward and Essie’s daughter, Jennifer, once declared with grand understatement after her father’s death, “We lived a nice life.”

  But she herself faced tragedy when just before Christmas 1980 her former husband, the father of her two sons, forty-year-old Harvard graduate Peter Gregg, a champion race car driver, shot himself in the head with a .38 caliber gun on a Florida beach. A s
ales slip for the recent purchase of the gun was found in his briefcase, and he had left a suicide note to Jennifer and his recent bride, Deborah Mars, stating, “I must have a right to end it.” He had been suffering from what a Johnson family member described as an incurable nervous system disorder, and had been undergoing psychiatric treatment for manic depression.

  Seward Sr. and his friend Spaulding Dunbar, also married, had many girlfriends—Seward boasted of a Norwegian stewardess who he dubbed his “Norwegian salmon”—and their long friendship was said to have ended over a woman who Seward chased even though she preferred Dunbar.

  Meanwhile, there was talk among the Johnsons that Essie might not have really cared about her husband’s philandering because her interests might have involved women.

  “She had a certain masculinity about her,” says her stepson, Seward Jr. “She sure wasn’t feminine, and she was not my favorite person.”

  Seward Sr. and Essie had little in common even beyond her lack of sexual attraction. She came to think of him scornfully as a loser because he let his brother, the General, run the show at Johnson & Johnson, and she’d often give him the business in no uncertain terms, calling him “stupid.”

  The marriage ended in November 1971, with Essie doing far better than the first Mrs. J. Seward Johnson had, by negotiating a twenty-million-dollar divorce settlement. The then-doddering Seward—with his signature libido still active—had fallen for the couple’s much younger, voluptuous, Polish immigrant chambermaid, Barbara Piasecka, called Basia, who, as it happened, had been hired by Essie.

  The new servant had one hundred dollars and an interest in art when she arrived in America in the late sixties. Seward, head over fallen arches in love, married Basia when he was seventy-six years old, and she was thirty-four. That May-December relationship would, in the mid-1980s, ignite a courtroom battle royal between Seward’s adult progeny—among them Seward Jr. and his sister, Mary Lea, all very wealthy from Johnson family trusts—and Basia over the $400 million fortune she had been bequeathed, after his death at eighty-seven in 1983.

  During their bizarre years together, Seward would build a mansion for Basia that would make the Merriewold he had had constructed for his first wife seem like a hovel in comparison. The new palace would be called Jasna Polana, which was the name of Leo Tolstoy’s Russian estate, and in Basia’s Polish meant something like “bright meadow,” and it certainly would be a bright place, underscored by a one-month electric bill of more than $52,000, a portion of which was due to the wattage used to air condition her dogs’ kennels.

  Where Merriewold cost $350,000 to build, the new Georgian-style mansion—all 54,000 square feet of it—would cost Seward a whopping $30 million to construct over four years on 170 of New Jersey’s finest acres, making it one of America’s most expensive homes at the time, one that when finished would soon be filled with Aubusson rugs, Empire chairs, and George III mahogany bookcases, along with a world-class art collection—Rembrandts, Titians, and Bellinis, along with tapestries, antiques, and sculpture. The immense manse would have made the Guinness Book of World Records, too, if there was a category for homes with the most toilets: Seward’s Jasna Polana was flush with them, thirty-nine in all.

  His six children’s greedy court battle over their father’s fortune left to his immigrant ex-chambermaid widow would have a scandalous odor of its own, and once again sully the Johnson name, imprinting it in tabloid headlines, and in at least two titillating books written about the epic case.

  * * *

  When Seward and his first wife, Ruth, divorced, their children were greatly impacted—from firstborn Mary Lea on down. “When he divorced Mom, it was the end of a chapter,” she later said. “It was like he divorced us too.”

  Years later, she would make a startling and very public accusation about him: that over a period of years when she was a child and a teenager he had sexually molested her. This touched off a debate with some family members who refused to believe her. But all that was still to come.

  Especially hard hit by the divorce was Mary Lea’s younger brother, seven-year-old Seward Jr.—a tyke who then idolized his very distant and uncaring father—who was in a state of utter devastation when he walked out, just as Bobby Johnson had been when the General abandoned him and his mother. The divorce would impact Seward Jr.’s future life, especially his relationship with his father, the first of his two marriages, and sever important Johnson family bonds.

  The abandonment, Seward Jr. asserted years later, made him feel “disenfranchised.”

  Like other Johnsons, academia wasn’t Seward Jr.’s forte. One of the schools he attended was the Forman School, in Litchfield, Connecticut. Founded by young educators John and Julie Forman, the school gave personal attention to boys who had real or perceived learning problems, specializing in helping them to read through phonics. At one point, Albert Einstein, who had reading problems when he was young, became a member of the school’s academic board of advisors.

  Besides having learning issues, Seward Jr. was something of a hell-raiser. As he later revealed in a New York Times story about his time at Forman, “It was a place for dyslexics, although we weren’t called that in those days. I got kicked out at one point because I couldn’t pay attention. I was eventually sent back and then I used all my energy to wreck the place.”

  He was sixteen when he was ejected and it was actually for coming to school drunk. Disgusted with his behavior, his stepmother, Essie, refused to let him stay in the house. “She made my father make a bed for me in a boat,” he says, decades later, in his early eighties, having never forgotten her ill treatment of him. “I was absolutely crushed. I hated her with a passion. My sisters were upset, too, and just sort of felt that my father should have stood up for me.”

  His teen drinking at sixteen was attributable in part to his uncle, the General, who had loved the New York nightlife, and had bought or gotten financial interests in some popular Manhattan nightclubs. “Uncle Bob said I could go to any of those clubs and sign his name.” At one of them, he thinks it was the Maisonette Room at the St. Regis Hotel, he swooned over a cute singer by the name of Dorothy Shea, who would come to his table and sing a pop tune called “Park Avenue Hillbilly.” Decades later he still recalls and belts out verses of the zany song.

  While he drank at sixteen, he still was shy with girls and was sexually inexperienced, but his very liberal aunt Evangeline “tried to take me under her wing” with a plan to get him laid. He was having lunch with her; her then-husband, Alexis Zalstem-Zalessky; and Evangeline’s two daughters, Sadja and Lubya; when, as he clearly recalls, “Zalessky comes out with, ‘We have to figure out the problem with Seward’s virginity.’ I couldn’t believe my ears.”

  Evangeline with her millions, and her prince with his contacts in Russia, were helping to finance the Bolshoi Ballet, and every winter they would bring a group of the leggy ballerinas to Cuernavaca, Mexico, for a vacation.

  “Evangeline said, ‘It’s very simple. We’ll just bring Seward down there and one of them’s going to fix his problem.’ Though I was blushing to the roots of my hair, my imagination was running wild. I pictured myself being handed from one ballerina to another until there was nothing left of me, and I loved the idea. But my father got wind of it and cut the whole thing off. I don’t believe it was paternal concern over my teenagehood. I think it was pure jealousy.”

  While the orgy with the ballerinas never took place, Seward Jr. finally lost his virginity when he was twenty, courtesy of the experienced and very aggressive teenage Catholic schoolgirl daughter of Johnson & Johnson’s man in Bogotá who was visiting Merriewold.

  After the Forman School, the final stop on Seward Jr.’s road to higher education was in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Maine, where he studied poultry management—on the advice of his father, who thought chicken-raising rather than the Johnson’s goldmine of a health-care business might be more of a fit. He later noted that poultry husbandry “was the only thing
they’d let me into.”

  A family confidante was less diplomatic. “It was a way for his father, who thought him a moron, to tell him to fuck off. At school he just goofed off.”

  The study of poultry management didn’t require the Johnson & Johnson heir to burn the midnight oil, and after some boisterous semesters he dropped out in 1951, and enlisted in the navy. Like his first-class yachtsman father and his uncle, the General, and most if not all of the other Johnson men past, present, and future, he relished boats and the sea. So, playing sailor boy for four years for Uncle Sam was a no-brainer for him, and involved much fun, adventure, and danger, such as when his ship, the frigate U.S.S. Gloucester, took fire from the enemy during the Korean War in a duel with shore guns; the ship took a direct hit that killed one of Seward Jr.’s shipmates and left eleven others wounded. He escaped without requiring a single Band-Aid.

  Discharged honorably in 1955, Seward Jr. wanted a role in the family business. But, once again, Seward Sr. avoided his son’s request.

  “He bought me a farm to keep me out of Johnson and Johnson,” Seward Jr. says decades later.

  However, through persistence, he finally got in the door, starting at the bottom in Johnson & Johnson’s surgical suture division, called Ethicon, in Somerville, New Jersey. He had to endure teasing from coworkers who scoffed that while he was a member of the ruling family, he had a low-rung, do-nothing job, but still sat at the president’s table on special corporate occasions. He was bored at Ethicon, was timid and relatively unsophisticated. While shy, he had an eye for the ladies and wished he had the guts to pursue some of the pretty secretaries, but, without elaboration, he once described himself as “extremely undeveloped.”

  With all of his personal demons, he was absent from work more often than he was present.