Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  16

  In 1956, when J. Seward Johnson Jr. was twenty-six, he met the woman he thought would be the love of his life—fascinating, exotic (at least to him at the time), and, as the tabloids would later call her, “statuesque.”

  Barbara Eisenfuhr Kline Bailey Maxwell was a twenty-nine-year-old sometimes brunette, sometimes redhead dish who was raised in Germany and Switzerland—her father was variously described as a Frankfurt banker, or a lawyer, and her mother was said to be from Russia, and possibly Jewish. As it would turn out, she knew more about Seward Jr. and his roots than he did about her and hers when they first met.

  Or so he says.

  Just prior to meeting Seward Jr., she had spent some time in Bermuda, where she was doing what she later claimed was research for stories about the sea, and had become fascinated with whales and whaling.

  She also became fascinated with another kind of catch: a Johnson & Johnson heir.

  While in Bermuda she is said to have met and befriended the very important Dills, Seward Jr.’s mother’s family, and she learned about the young Band-Aid scion, who happened to be a very eligible bachelor. At some point, she had settled in his hometown where, as Seward Jr. notes many years later, “the Johnson and Johnson shadow hangs over Princeton, and [did] especially in those days,” meaning most everyone, including Barbara, knew about the wealthy and powerful family whose company was an American legend.

  Visiting Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett at Merriewold in 1956 was David Dill, one of Ruth’s brother Bayard Dill’s two sons. David, who had gotten to know Barbara when she was in Bermuda, invited her to accompany him to Merriewold in order to introduce her to his bachelor cousin. That invitation was at Barbara’s “insistence,” asserts Seward Jr., who would believe in retrospect that she “used them [the Dills] to meet me.”

  In any case, she bowled him over with her looks and charm.

  “She flattered me up and down,” he’s never forgotten, “and because my ego was about as big as a pea it kind of felt good.” He also was attracted to what he calls Barbara’s “street smarts.” He felt that with his dyslexia and the many issues he had with his uncle, the General, and with his father, Seward Sr., “the only way I was going to survive was if I could get somebody like her to help.”

  In other words, he was a very mixed-up young man, but with his own agenda of sorts vis-á-vis this new woman in his life, his first serious romance.

  Unlike young Seward, Barbara was no virgin when it came to a titillating lifestyle. By the time he’d fallen for her, she’d been a merry divorcee, and had a six-year-old son, Bruce, from a failed marriage, the last one ending after four years at virtually the same time the Johnson heir was hooked on her.

  She was quite a potent Euro cocktail, a mix of dazzling charm, femininity, intelligence, and unbridled ambition.

  When she met the Johnson scion Barbara was a successful commercial artist’s agent with a client list that included the pre–Campbell Soup Can Andy Warhol, who in the mid to late fifties was doing print ads for companies like I. Miller shoes, and she also handled U.S. representation for the French graphic artist Raymond Savignac, who designed iconic advertising posters for such products as Bic razors and Yoplait yogurt. She also claimed to friends that as an agent in New York she had acquired and sold the rights to Winnie the Pooh, and many decades before the “Soup Nazi” of Seinfeld fame, she had talked about opening a chain of soup kitchens in Manhattan with a friend, the actor Anthony Quinn.

  Barbara also was trying to interest Johnson & Johnson to use Savignac’s work in its advertising through its prestigious Madison Avenue agency, Young & Rubicam, where she was hoping to get a shapely leg in, so to speak, for more business.

  The General, who had an obsessive interest in the advertising and marketing of his company’s products, was not always pleased with Y&R’s research and creativity. Advertising, he felt, should be simple, and too often he was bombarded with bar charts. After one such presentation, he voiced his exasperation in one of his many harsh memos. “It was a repulsive experience,” he wrote. “The copy was third-rate,” and he termed the Young & Rubicam mad men at the conference table, “Flannel-headed human scenery.”

  There was nothing, however, third-rate, repulsive, or flannel-headed about Barbara in green and guileless Seward Jr.’s eyes and heart. She was like no other woman he had ever met—artsy, creative, with hip friends in Manhattan. She was wired, chic, and spontaneous, which was right up his alley. She owned a romantic cottage with a pool on Tyler Road in Princeton, and she had decorated the love nest herself in shades of virginal white, everything from the slipcovers to the book covers. Everything about her was irresistible, and not too long after meeting, he moved in with her—lock, stock, and trust fund, which was reportedly worth at least seven million dollars (in early 1960s dollars) at the time, and he soon gave her an engagement ring.

  The live-in arrangement had triggered alarms in the New Brunswick executive suite: the brothers Johnson—Seward Sr. and the General—were concerned about who this seeming seductress really was, what she had in mind for the naïve Seward Jr., and whether their merger would ignite negative image problems and bad publicity down the road for the company.

  Their worry would, in fact, prove to be warranted, depending on whom one believed.

  The General ordered an intensive investigation into Barbara’s background, looking for anything that might convince his nephew to bring about a quick end to the relationship.

  Heading up the very secret probe was Kenneth Perry, the head of Johnson & Johnson’s law department, who was, along with the General, a trustee of the Johnson family trusts. Perry’s duties reportedly also included acting as a family fixer of sorts—arranging for abortions if virtuous single Johnson women had gotten pregnant, or aborting potentially scandalous relationships like the one in which Seward Jr. had now gotten himself entangled.

  Under orders from the General, Perry was trying to dig up whether Barbara had a police record, whether members of her family were followers of Hitler back in the Fatherland—she claimed to Seward Jr. that she had been raised in Switzerland—or whether she was of Jewish heritage, which to Perry was the far greater evil.

  “Ken Perry was very anti-Semitic,” states Seward Jr., looking back to that time. “He reminded me of J. Edgar Hoover. He had a little bit of femininity to him, but he was also like a Nazi.”

  Perry supposedly turned up information that Barbara’s Russian mother was Jewish, or might have been—and in Judaism if the mother’s Jewish, her children are considered Jewish—and Perry voiced that fact loud and clear, “so I was forever protecting Barbara from his slurs,” says Seward Jr. But he claims that Barbara “didn’t want to admit” that “she was half-Jewish. To her Jewish was a bad thing.”

  Barbara was rightfully furious when she learned about the investigation. The two had a knock-down, drag-out verbal fight and Seward Jr., angry at her for blaming him when, in fact, he was defending her, walked out and left her, at least temporarily.

  “She threw her engagement ring at me because they went and investigated her family in Germany,” he reveals many years later. “Her father was worried he was going to lose his job in Frankfurt, so she threw the ring at me and I went into the law department and threw the ring at Ken Perry and told him off.”

  But that wasn’t the end of it.

  “Barbara kept calling me and I kept not answering the phone. I was working at Ethicon and the secretaries were getting very mad at me because I wasn’t accepting her calls. Finally, she had her maid call me and say that Barbara had fainted on the bed. So I stupidly went over there and, of course, she was all made up, had her lipstick on straight, and was lying on the bed, and I just slid into it.”

  Because Ken Perry was accusing Barbara of lying about her background, and Barbara was accusing Perry of lying about what he had turned up about her background, Seward Jr. set up a meeting between both sides to try to set the record straight. But he became so nervous as the confrontation was
about to begin that he had to rush off to the men’s room. By the time he got back to Perry’s office he found Barbara screaming at the Johnson & Johnson general counsel.

  “She was saying that he insulted her. She said he was leering at her and then she said he said, ‘You look all right for a Jew,’ and I just grabbed her hand and marched her out of there.”

  Having kissed and made up, and once again wearing his engagement ring, Barbara had to finalize her divorce before she could marry the Johnson heir. But first she needed some expert opinion and assurance that the baby oil scion was really Mister Right.

  She convinced Seward Jr. to go to Los Angeles with her to be seen by a psychiatrist she had gotten to know on the ship when she first came to the United States.

  Chuckling about it years later, Seward Jr. says, “She wanted him to meet me to check me out to see if she should marry me.”

  Presumably the shrink gave her two thumbs up. But Seward Jr. says he wondered at the time—who was going to check out Barbara to see if she fit the bill for him.

  On September 16, 1956, less than a week after Seward Jr. was given the psychiatrist’s Good Husband Seal of Approval, he took Barbara’s hand in marriage, to have and to hold, for better or for worse.

  The latter, as it turned out, would prevail.

  Knowing his father and uncle were against the marriage, Seward Jr. and Barbara (along with her son, Bruce, whom Seward Jr. eventually adopted) eloped, taking the vows of marriage in Virginia City, in Nevada, an ominously appropriate setting because Virginia City was a gold-mining boom town back in the nineteenth century, and Seward Sr. and the General suspected that the latest wife to join the Johnson dynasty was a gold digger.

  As Seward Jr. observes more than a half century later, “When I went [to get married] I was so over my head. I didn’t know what to do. So, it was pathetic.”

  In a Dear Dad letter, he once wrote, “My marriage is under threat … my life is hell.” At the same time, the General received an Uncle Bob missive, calling upon his “sense of humanity,” his “very manhood,” to end the harassment.

  In a note to his wife, Seward Jr. called both his father and his uncle “stupid jerks.”

  But he later would agree with his father and uncle’s assessment that Barbara was after his fortune.

  He says, “She married me for my money,” and he claims, “I never loved her.”

  * * *

  In the scheme of really bad marriages, theirs could make it into the record books.

  Still, there was a sincere attempt at domesticity.

  The couple went house-hunting and Seward Jr. bought for them a beautiful twenty-two-room Rocky Hill fieldstone home with six garages that was built in the 1920s at 75 Cleveland Lane, in one of Princeton’s exclusive areas. It was said to have been the most expensive house sold there in 1957 when he paid seventy-five thousand dollars. One of the home’s immense rooms—twenty by fifty feet—had been used in the early 1940s as a Jewish chapel and Sunday school at a time when there were very few Jews living in Princeton. Restrictive covenants and discrimination against Jews were prevalent, and they needed a place to worship. With the Johnsons now in residence, that room became Barbara’s “Whale Room,” where she had on display what was fast becoming a world-class collection of whaling memorabilia.

  About a year after they tied the knot, sometime in 1957, during what appeared on the surface to be a relative period of calm in Seward Jr.’s constantly turbulent life, the young married couple, their son, Bruce, whom he was in the process of adopting, and Seward Sr., still quietly seething about his namesake’s choice of a bride, were vacationing together in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They seemed like one very rich, tanned, and happy family. But appearances are deceptive.

  Leaving Seward Sr.’s wife, Essie, behind, they had decided to take a boat trip to an island near Bimini in the Bahamas, some fifty miles off the coast of Florida. While Seward Jr. and Bruce played together on the boat, Barbara and her father-in-law, the compulsive womanizer and philanderer, disembarked and they, too, played, claims Seward Jr. years later.

  “I was on the boat with Bruce and they returned with their arms around each other,” he asserts. He says he “just knew” that they had had a liaison because of how they looked together. “They couldn’t keep their hands off of each other,” he says. But he didn’t confront his father, or his wife, because “I didn’t need to hear it. I knew it. It was proved to me.” When pressed, however, he could offer no other support for the allegation.

  Around the same time, another bomb dropped when the trustees of a 1944 trust Seward Sr. had established for his children informed Seward Jr. and Barbara that they would not recognize their marriage. The reason: the trustees claimed to have unearthed alleged evidence that one of Barbara’s previous divorces “was not truly legal,” and as such she would not receive any of the millions if Seward Jr. suddenly died.

  Barbara “then put tremendous, unrelenting pressure on me to correct the situation and get the trustees to give up their adamant opposition. Young and unhardened and no match for this determined, canny European woman, I cracked under the pressure…” he later stated.

  It had all become too much for the sensitive Johnson & Johnson heir.

  He fell into a severe depression, and right after the New Year 1958, some sixteen months after he married Barbara, he tried to kill himself.

  His decision to take his life, he reveals decades later, “had to do with my father’s relationship with Barbara.”

  Like he did with so many other endeavors in his young life, Seward Jr. failed to carry out his grim mission.

  In a barren area of Princeton, sitting in his Edsel—a car that was as much a Ford flop as Seward Jr. was thought of as a Johnson dynasty failure—he’d brought a gun, but the wrong ammunition. More curious, the gun was one of two that had inexplicably been given to him in the recent past by a Johnson & Johnson security guard as he left the General’s office where a heated discussion had taken place about his marriage. Seward Jr. was never sure that the guns were a subtle message to take some sort of extreme action.

  Since he couldn’t shoot himself, he chose asphyxiation, with a hose attached to the exhaust pipe, hoping the carbon monoxide would do him in and take him out of his misery.

  He left two suicide notes, one “to whom it may concern … to certify I took my own life,” the other a Dear Barbara note, stating, “I love you very much you are as beautiful inside as a saint.”

  He wrote he was “dying very happy.”

  It didn’t happen.

  A suspicious passerby spotted him “nearly dead” in the car, and a policeman came to his rescue, revived him, and he was rushed to Princeton Hospital.

  Bobby Johnson—Seward Jr.’s first cousin (and father of nine-year-old Woody)—who was a decade older and at that point close to being named president of Johnson & Johnson, rushed to the hospital and invited him to stay at his home, which he did for a time after his release. Bobby felt sorry for his cousin because, as Seward Jr. explains, he was convinced that his own father, the General, in ordering the investigation of Barbara, had inadvertently pushed Seward Jr. into the marriage, and he believed his suicide attempt was linked to those issues—unaware of the real reason.

  “Bobby knew that his father had forced the marriage,” states Seward Jr. “He didn’t know anything about my father [and Barbara].”

  After Seward Jr. went home, he was faced with more pressure.

  Barbara demanded that he adopt her son, Bruce, as soon as possible, declaring that it was “the responsible and loving thing to do.”

  The adoption was completed within two months.

  “In my naivete, I didn’t realize what was really involved.”

  Seward Jr. believed that his wife, “having been excluded from the 1944 trust money by the trustees, was trying to create a new claim on the trust, albeit a questionable one, by supplying me with an adopted stepson. I’d have an heir should I die. A legally adopted son, she learned, counted,”
he later stated.

  “Even if I’d seen what her aim was, I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist her. At that point in my life I was deeply confused, exhausted, and without defenses.”

  17

  Sometime in 1958, J. Seward Johnson Jr. made a new friend, Walter Darby Bannard, a talented artist in his twenties with an Ivy League pedigree, a freewheeling manner, and a keen eye for interesting women, as his new chum would soon discover.

  The two got to know each other at the Little Gallery in Princeton, which Bannard was managing and where Seward Jr. was a customer.

  “He wasn’t all tied up with square, Princetonian social rules,” Seward Jr. notes years later. “He seemed free like an artist—he was friends with other artists—and not a guy in a gray flannel suit.”

  But their camaraderie would end in one of the most scandalous, humiliating, and violent divorce cases ever, and a feud that would continue for decades, into the twenty-first century, with the complex and sensitive issue of paternity at its core.

  Having met Barbara Johnson, Bannard would become a central figure in the Johnsons’ increasingly twisted marriage.

  More than five decades later, in 2011, at the age of seventy-six, having become a noted abstract painter and a professor of art at the University of Miami, he recalled his turbulent and scandalous relationship with the Johnsons.

  The son of a Pennsylvania Railroad vice president, Bannard, who at age six was drawing “realistic pictures of birds,” considered himself “sort of a child prodigy,” he once told a newspaper reporter. He had graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, and was in the class of 1956 at Princeton University, his father’s alma mater, where he had earned a B.A., and where he became friends with the abstract artists Frank Stella and Michael Fried, in whose footsteps he would follow.

  But there clearly was nothing artsy or abstract about Bannard’s early friendship with Seward Jr.—the two acted together like a couple of frat boys at the Johnson home in Princeton where Bannard would become an ever-increasing presence—mostly, as Seward Jr. asserts, at the behest of the lady of the house.