“We used to sit and drink beer together and make notes on what beer was best,” says Bannard. “Seward always had these ideas of classification of things. He decided it would be fun to rank all the beers that there were according to taste, and then we drank them and we argued about how they tasted. Seward was a very likeable guy, but he seemed very lonely and he would always constantly and compulsively complain about his family, about the General and about Bobby Jr., and it just sounded pathetic and horrible. He would mumble about conspiratorial bullshit within the company. I wouldn’t call that crazy talk, but he was kind of obsessed with it.”
Bannard, however, had his own family problems.
He had married young to a beautiful girl—the first of his three wives—whose goal was to become a Hollywood or Broadway star. A year or so after he had become part of Seward’s circle, she ran off with his best friend from college. “Before the shit hit the fan,” as he puts it, Bannard became a regular at the Johnson dinner table, and a regular at Seward and Barbara’s parties.
One guest at one of the gatherings who would become infamous was Dr. Max Jacobson, as Bannard recalls. He had an Upper East Side Manhattan practice with a long list of celebrity clients, including the actor Anthony Quinn, who happened to be a friend of Barbara’s. But his most famous patient was President Kennedy, whom Jacobson was injecting with amphetamines during secret White House visits. Because of his star-studded patients, many of whom were troubled emotionally and or physically, Jacobson had earned the sobriquet “Dr. Feelgood” for dispensing drugs he claimed would make them feel good.
“He visited the house and he had Dexedrine [an amphetamine] and he said, ‘You have to take Dex otherwise you’re always half dead. That’s what I gave to Kennedy, ’” Jacobson told Seward Jr., Barbara, and others at the gathering, according to Bannard, who also was present. “He was a Dr. Feelgood and knew somebody the Johnsons knew because Barbara met all these interesting people when she would ride on the Queens all the time—the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth—back and forth to Europe, and these people would come to the house. The doctor was very intense about Dexedrine and he thought it was a cure for everything in the world. I think he was trying to suggest something for Seward I guessed because Seward was always sort of semi-depressed.”
Because Bannard got to hear Seward Jr.’s horror stories about the Johnson family and his complaints about the Johnson & Johnson company ad infinitum, and got to meet a number of the Johnson family members, he came away with a very negative opinion of the lot of them, one he still held decades later:
“They are a mixed-up, weird bunch, and always have been,” he came to believe. “You couldn’t make them up in fiction. They are dysfunctional and just don’t know how to live a normal life. The whole family is like a great big spiderweb that innocent people would drop into—normal people who get caught in the Johnson web of craziness. There were the three brothers who started Johnson and Johnson, and they were smart. By the time they got down to Seward’s generation this was a pretty pathetic bunch. It’s almost like European royalty.”
Seward was always trying to come up with ideas that would make an impression and get him some positive notice from his uncle and father. One such concept was for Johnson & Johnson to market a roll of toilet paper that had different lengths of tear-off squares—small, medium, and large.
“He saw it as a great invention for them,” recalls Bannard, whom Seward Jr. had briefed about the idea. “I said, ‘Seward do not under any circumstances send it to them because they’ll just think you’re crazy.’ I thought, Jesus Christ, if these people are down on Seward already, they’re going to be a lot more down on him when he sends them that one.”
After a period of recuperation following his botched suicide attempt, Seward Jr. wanted to return to his position at the Johnson & Johnson division Ethicon, but his father and uncle would not permit it until he saw a psychiatrist of whom they both approved, and who would give him a clean bill of mental health, or at least that’s what they claimed needed to happen in order for him to come back to work. Over a period of months, Seward Jr., following their mandate, saw a succession of psychiatrists, but his father and uncle, he recalls years later, “kept telling me the psychiatrists I was seeing weren’t good enough,” and as a result he remained barred from the family business, which by then was already a public company.
One of the psychiatrists had trouble buying what he was telling him during their fifty-minute-hour sessions, so he told Seward Jr. he wanted a third party to substantiate his claims. While it appeared to be an off-the-wall request from the Freudian with a platinum-plated Manhattan practice, Seward Jr. was desperate to bring an end to his endless rounds of shrink visits.
Bannard claims Seward asked him to meet with the doctor, and that he met with the psychiatrist on two or three occasions.
But Seward Jr. says he never made such a request of Bannard.
“The psychiatrist talked to me to ascertain facts,” maintains Bannard. “He wanted to know things that had happened, and to establish whether things were true or not. There was something the psychiatrist told me that gave me the creeps. He said that what Seward would do is tell stories about himself that were not about him, but were things that happened to other people. I actually witnessed that once at a party. He told a story about something he said happened to him, and it was a story that I had told him had happened to me. Now that’s going to raise hairs on the back of your neck. The doctor said that kind of activity was a deeply disturbing sign. The psychiatrist analyzed Seward pretty quickly and then figured there was really nothing he could do for him, except for Seward to keep out of trouble.”
Seward Jr. eventually came to the realization that his father and uncle’s demand that he see a psychiatrist who had the Johnson & Johnson seal of approval was actually a ploy to force him out of the company.
And it worked.
After he saw the last unapproved shrink, he received his pink slip in the form of a letter from Johnson & Johnson executive Richard A. Sellars, who one day would become chairman and CEO of the company. Sellars informed him that his services would no longer be needed, because, says Seward Jr., “I’d been gone so long that they filled my place, so I never could go back.”
Seward Jr., however, had started to agree with his father and uncle about Barbara, especially when she began pushing him, he claims, to get as much money as possible out of his trusts. If he didn’t, he alleges she later said, she hoped he would be more successful the next time he tried to kill himself.
The gun under the bed contretemps was another warning sign of big trouble in the marriage.
Seward Jr. says he had discovered that Barbara had hidden an automatic pistol under the marital mattress, on Seward’s side of the bed, “and it used to bother the hell” out of him. He had complained to Barbara about the gun, but one day it had suddenly vanished.
“She said, ‘Where is it?’
“I said, ‘Where’s what?’
“She said, ‘You know what I mean.’
“I said, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
“She said, ‘Where’s the pistol? Where did you put it?’
“I said, ‘It’s probably under the mattress where you stupidly put it.’
“She said, ‘No it isn’t, and you know it isn’t there.’
“I said, ‘I know nothing of the sort.’
“She said, ‘You probably were so frightened that you’ve forgotten what you did with it.’”
The war of she-said, he-said over the missing gun went on ad infinitum for weeks, he claimed.
Barbara finally came up with a plan to get to the bottom of the mystery, or so it seemed.
“She said ‘There’s just one thing you’re going to do,’” recalls Seward Jr., about the missing gun. “‘You’re going to go to a psychiatrist and get him to give you sodium pentathol so you can remember what you did with it.’”
Seward Jr. followed Barbara’s edict—he knew he hadn’t taken the
gun, or at least thought he hadn’t—and had a psychiatrist put him under with the psychoactive truth drug, popular in Hollywood melodramas that resembled the kind of life he was now living for real.
“When I came up [from the drug] I said, I didn’t take the gun, did I? He said of course not, all you did is talk about your father and how upset you were with him. Then he said, ‘Do you think she took the gun?’ And the thought had never occurred to me, and I just sat there as though somebody had shot me, and I was terrified.” To Seward, it was like Gaslight with Charles Boyer where he’s trying to drive Ingrid Bergman crazy. “Barbara was gas-lighting me. I said, ‘What the hell am I going to do?’ The psychiatrist said, ‘When the time comes you’re going to know what to do.’”
18
Like Greta Garbo, whose signature movie line was, “I vant to be alone,” Barbara Johnson told her husband, Seward Jr., that she, too, needed some quality time alone, which meant a first-class cabin for herself and without him aboard the Queen Mary to Europe.
Barbara had carefully packed for the round-trip transatlantic crossing, and included in her luggage a variety of Johnson & Johnson products gotten gratis in the company store, and that she would give out to other passengers—a bit of self-promotion that secured her an invitation to the captain’s table. After all, she was part of one of America’s most iconic corporate families, which she always liked to make quite clear. It was there, at dinner, that she met a dashing—and very married—Englishman by the name of David Proudlove, a World War II Royal Air Force ace, some fifteen years her husband’s senior.
Proudlove’s father-in-law owned an aircraft company in Great Britain, and he had hired the ex-fighter pilot to be his firm’s U.S. sales representative. When Barbara met Proudlove, he, his wife, and daughter were in the process of settling into a home in the upscale New York City suburb of Scarsdale, about ninety minutes from Princeton.
“Proudlove was saying that his family hadn’t moved in properly yet and they were going back and forth to England. He was giving me a lot of garbage,” says Seward Jr., recalling that personally horrific time decades later when “Barbara brought him home with her, and he moved in with us. His wife filed for divorce.”
When Seward Jr. complained about how unseemly cozy the Johnson abode had become with Proudlove in residence, he remembered Barbara stating, “How could I be so mean, with poor David going through his nasty divorce. When poor David lost his job that became still another reason for not asking him to leave.”
Darby Bannard also was starting to spend a lot of time in the Johnson house—he had since been hired by Seward Jr. as Barbara’s “secretary” to help her catalogue her whaling collection.
In short order, the original man of the house—the Band-Aid scion—was reduced to being a virtual voyeur in his own home, watching as Barbara, allegedly clad in sheer lingerie, played hostess to live-in guest Proudlove.
“She received many intimate notes and love poems from Proudlove,” Seward Jr. would later claim in titillating divorce papers. Moreover, he would charge that Barbara “frequently permitted Proudlove, while in their home, to fondle her amorously while she was scantily clad, and kiss her lips, legs, thighs, and other parts of her body.”
Proudlove seemingly began playing the man-of-the-house role, taking on the tasks of interviewing prospective servants, overseeing Barbara’s bookkeeping and check-writing, while Seward Jr. became the household’s chief cook and bottle washer, or, as he later put it, “baby sitter, chauffeur, and errand boy.”
Just before New Year’s Eve 1959, the Johnsons and Proudlove went to England, leaving Bruce with the help. Barbara told her husband she wanted a divorce, and planned to marry Proudlove. Furious, Seward Jr. returned home. Not only was he feeling angry and foolish, but he needed to rush back to Princeton because he had errands to perform, including putting Bruce, then twelve, back in school.
Barbara returned home a few weeks later.
She had good news, and she had bad news.
The good news was that she had decided not to marry Proudlove.
The bad news was Barbara’s insistence that Darby Bannard spend a lot more time in the house helping her to catalogue her collection of New England’s early whaling industry.
Her relationship with Bannard had clearly grown fonder.
And Bannard was taken by, and intrigued with, the lady of the house.
“She looked like [the French novelist] Françoise Sagan,” he observes admiringly many years later. “Barbara had a sort of filling-the-room kind of personality … She was just a tremendously energetic—a typical Sagittarius who just goes off in a direction. Off the wall? Well, maybe. But in all sorts of positive ways.”
Seward Jr. would later charge that Barbara committed adultery first with Proudlove, then with Bannard. At one point she allegedly demanded that her husband sleep on a sofa and not in the marital bed, he claimed, and he said that he also was forced to spend a month in the dressing room adjoining the locked master bedroom occupied by his wife and allegedly Bannard. Another time she invited him to join her and Bannard—three in a bed, the tabloids gloated, because “it would be cozy,” an invitation that Seward Jr. declined, or as a legal complaint later stated in his eventual divorce case, “Plaintiff refused such a tripartite arrangement.”
Bruna Szaloky, a forty-year-old Hungarian seamstress who worked for the Johnsons, would later testify that she often saw the lady of the house stripped to nothing more than her bra and panties while Bannard ogled her. At times, she alleged, Seward Jr. also was present with Bannard in the bedroom when Barbara tried on different outfits.
Seward Jr. would later contend that Barbara had “on many occasions permitted herself to appear nude or scantily clad” in front of Bannard, and had permitted herself to be “kissed and fondled” by him. He further swore that Barbara requested Bannard “to dress and undress her.”
Besides the claimed erotic clothing changes, a Johnson maid, Mrs. Queenie Knowles, would testify about seeing Barbara bathing in Bannard’s presence. Later, Seward Jr. would insist, “She permits him to watch her while she goes to the toilet and takes baths and showers.”
Barbara and Bannard spent more and more quality time together.
“They worked continuously day after day and into the nights,” stated Seward Jr. “Though the [whaling] collection was extensive, I began to wonder as the months passed how long they were going to take to finish the job.”
Bannard, at least six years Barbara’s junior, claims it was Seward Jr. who had brought him on to assist Barbara with her whaling project, and he vehemently denies Seward’s allegations that he had essentially moved into the Johnson home.
“I was there to some extent. One of the reasons I was there a lot was because the whaling project was kind of like a second job, and I got to be quite an expert on the subject.” So much so that while working alongside Barbara he produced a four-hundred-photograph scrimshaw book called Scrimshaw that was eventually published years later.
Seward Jr. claimed that in February 1960 Barbara had wanted to get away to a cabin in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania to work up a compendium of the whaling logbooks she owned, which she hoped would be used in some sort of TV series, and had arranged to spend a week there in solitude.
“Darby Bannard,” he says, “would drop her off, then drive on to New York to meet his father. I was to drive up near the end of her stay and bring some supplies. When I arrived, Darby was there. He’d been ‘snowed in,’ they said. I was deeply troubled by this obvious, careless, contemptuous deception and withdrew.”
That week in the Poconos and what may or may not have occurred there, depending on who was telling the story, would incredibly reverberate into the twenty-first century, four decades hence.
More than a half century later, Bannard denies he ever was there, or says he doesn’t remember being there, and claims it was Seward Jr. and Barbara who had spent that week together in the mountains. “He’s just trying to make a case, so let him make a
case.”
The case is an important one because Barbara had become pregnant, and the blessed event would later be timed by Seward Jr. to that Poconos escape, the one in which he alleges that Bannard was in residence, and which Bannard denies.
When Barbara became pregnant, Seward Jr. asserts, “I was not having intercourse with her for a full year.”
A month or so after what would become the much-disputed Pocono Mountains getaway, Seward Jr. maintained that Barbara “suddenly became amorous. That surprised me. We hadn’t had any sort of sexual relations for a long time,” he avowed. “She was challengingly seductive and I tried to comply but in vain because it seemed so awkward and repelling. We never related sexually again. I was fuzzy on obstetrical matters and the timing of childbearing, but I do remember being surprised when, in August, I saw not only that she was pregnant but that her state seemed so advanced.
“All that summer into the autumn and winter,” he asserted, his wife and Darby “were very close. They’d share a private joke or a little intimacy and then, as an afterthought, suddenly remembering I was in the room, they’d make a show of including me.”
* * *
When the stork arrived on January 10, 1961, Barbara Johnson was taken to the maternity ward at Princeton Hospital by her husband—with Walter Darby Bannard anxiously tagging along like he, too, was the expectant father. Seward Jr. has never forgotten the scene. “There were two fathers pacing the waiting room floor,” he has stated. And he quoted Barbara telling him, “Isn’t it good of Darby to come give us support?”
Barbara became the proud mother of a healthy girl on January 11, 1961, her second child. When it was time to show the newborn to the father, the maternity nurse was greeted by both Seward Jr. and, Seward claimed, Darby Bannard.
Unlike most new fathers who hand out cigars to celebrate the blessed event, the very suspicious Seward Jr. held on to his Cohibas and Montecristos.
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 13