Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  On the day Barbara left the hospital to return home with the infant, Seward Jr. “stayed to pay the bills and it was Darby” who drove the new mother home, and it was Bannard who, in the following weeks, “was so insistent” on changing the baby’s diapers, and heating her bottles that “it somehow became less and less necessary for me to involve myself,” he claimed.

  With all of that happening, it would be a few years and much legal wrangling before the child’s birth certificate was signed. She was named Jeniah Anne Josephine Johnson, as in J A J, as in Johnson & Johnson. Seward Jr. says it was Barbara who had chosen the name.

  When Jeniah was two months old, in March 1961, Barbara flew to Bermuda and “begged” Seward Jr.’s uncle, Sir Bayard Dill, to “persuade” the Johnson family to attend the christening of Jeniah, then scheduled for May in Princeton. “She especially wanted my father to come,” declared Seward Jr. “She knew he had very strong reservations about her … had opposed our marriage … and had kept away from me almost entirely since the wedding four and a half years earlier. She asked Uncle Bayard to help her mend this rift between my father and me.”

  Barbara had made elaborate preparation for Jeniah’s christening ceremony in order to honor her baby and impress the Johnson family and especially Seward Sr., and to bring him around, hopefully with the help of Bayard Dill, who was a brother of Seward Jr.’s mother, Ruth.

  Barbara’s grand plans included importing to New Jersey from London the entire world-renowned Westminster Boys’ Choir, who had performed for potentates and royalty. For tiny Jeniah’s christening gown, she had commissioned the noted designer Mr. John, whose clients included the Duchess of Windsor, Gloria Vanderbilt, Lauren Bacall, and Joan Crawford. An Episcopal minister was being flown in from Kansas to perform the ceremony, which was scheduled to take place at the Johnson home rather than in church for reasons of privacy.

  After Barbara’s return from Bermuda, Seward Jr. noticed a stark change in her attitude toward him: she had suddenly begun treating him “as the father, requiring me to do all the baby duty. I was pleased but confused.”

  He said he later realized that “the shift” from Bannard to himself had come about because of the upcoming christening and that Barbara “wanted me to act like a father in the presence of the Johnson family. She told Darby to make himself scarce during the christening.”

  While he didn’t attend, at Barbara’s urging—“I was around but I didn’t go”—Bannard remembers the event as “quite a do. It was done in the backyard and the place was absolutely jammed, and there were all kinds of high-powered people. The christening dress designed by Mr. John was beautiful.”

  One of the christening gifts that baby Jeniah received, he recalls, was a solid gold “piss pot, a chamber pot” that was inscribed.

  The May 20, 1961, christening was a huge success and had come off exactly the way Barbara had planned it.

  “Uncle Bayard [Dill] made the speech that he’d been asked to make about mending the family break,” Seward Jr. stated.

  Even Seward Sr., who had shut himself off from his son, had made an appearance, which was a major family breakthrough, or so it appeared.

  But once the service had ended and the guests had left, Bannard once again returned to the Johnson household’s daily life and, according to Seward Jr., “immediately relieved me of daddy duty … it more and more became evident that I was unwanted” in Jeniah’s room.

  Looking back, he felt “the exclusion grew so intense” that by the end of 1961, he “just gave up. I packed a bag and hid it.” And in January 1962, while Barbara and Bannard were spending a day together in New York City, “I took the opportunity to leave for good.”

  Free of what he termed Barbara’s “intimidating personality,” he did the “unpleasant” math, counted back nine months from Barbara’s full-term pregnancy to determine the date of conception, and concluded that it had occurred when she was snowed in in that cabin in the Poconos, allegedly with Bannard.

  Seward Jr. had visited his father, from whom he had been long estranged—the christening of Jeniah, though, had helped to break some of the ice between them. But now he was forced to tell his father that he “suspected” that Jeniah was not his after all. He later quoted Seward Sr. as responding, “Damn! Two weeks ago I set up a trust, and I included her name in some way. It seemed in the spring things were finally going well with you.” Believing his son’s claim, and wasting no time, Seward Sr. telephoned one of his lawyers, told him about Seward Jr.’s suspicion, and was advised that it didn’t matter because the trustees had “absolute and uncontrolled discretion” as to who would benefit from the trust.

  Seward Jr. claimed many years later, “I was not having intercourse with [Barbara] for a full year prior to the child’s birth,” and alleges that Bannard was Jeniah’s biological father. Bannard calls Seward Jr.’s allegation “ridiculous.”

  So if Seward Jr. denied that he was Jeniah’s father, and Darby Bannard denied that he was her father—“I denied it a million times and I still deny it,” he declares in 2011—then who was her father?

  “Maybe it was an immaculate conception,” offers Bannard glibly. “Certainly by the time we went through all those [future court] procedures, it wasn’t very immaculate anymore.”

  In January 1962, a year after Jeniah Johnson’s birth, Seward Jr. filed for what would become a nasty, rancorous, very public and humiliating divorce that would put a harsh spotlight—not for the first or last time, however—on the unconventional world of one of America’s wealthiest families.

  He claimed “extreme cruelty and adultery” and sought a blood test to prove paternity.

  Seward Jr. later claimed that Barbara responded by asserting that he had actually “condoned” a “sexual relationship” between her and Bannard. She also claimed that Seward Jr. had “connived to throw” the two of them together as a way of securing “evidence for a divorce.”

  19

  The very secretive Johnson dynasty had closely guarded the scandalous goings-on in J. Seward Johnson Jr.’s home, but that changed a week before Valentine’s Day 1963 when shots rang out in the Princeton mansion where Barbara had continued to reside, and was receiving nine hundred dollars a week in temporary alimony.

  The gunfire shot Seward Jr. and Barbara’s marital mess onto the front pages and into the Princeton police blotter. For the well-to-do residents of the placid Ivy League community, such louche and scandalous behavior was unheard of within its bucolic and manicured boundaries.

  The Johnson scandal became the talk of the town, and made headlines around the nation.

  What ensued in the predawn hours was a nightmarish film noir scene that even Raymond Chandler couldn’t have invented, and at the same time it had the sense of a comedy of errors like the Keystone Kops.

  It was around 3 A.M. on February 8, 1963, “a date that shall live in infamy,” declares Darby Bannard, recalling what happened—when a raiding team of seven men, some of them armed Hollywood Confidential–style with camera equipment, gained entry to the Johnson home at 75 Cleveland Lane, seeking evidence of adultery for Seward Jr.’s divorce case against his estranged wife.

  His hope was that they would find and photograph Barbara and Bannard in flagrante delicto.

  Bannard had moved into the Johnson home “to some extent” and had even set up an art studio there, he acknowledges. But he says he’s innocent of anything more.

  Years later, he says: “When Seward moved out there was a lot of animosity and I identified with Barbara’s situation. She was getting telephone threats on her life from somebody calling himself Mr. X, and Mr. X was going to do things to her. She was scared to death. So sometimes I’d just stay over there. He then sent that gang of thugs in. I was there that night. He wanted to catch me in bed with her, but I wasn’t in bed with her.”

  Before the private eyes could find out who might be in bed with whom, they had to get past Barbara’s ferocious-looking and snarling white English bulldog, Ebenezer, so the te
am leader, forty-year-old Harold Purcell, president of the Essex Investigating Bureau, fired a five-and-dime plastic water pistol filled with ammonia into the dog’s eyes, temporarily putting him out of commission.

  Meanwhile, hiding in a car outside the house was Seward Jr., closely watching the not-so-clandestine action that was unfolding.

  “I had to go with them on the raid to let them in the house, quote unquote,” he says many years later, chuckling at the memory. “I said, if I’m going to go, my lawyer’s going to go, too, so he went and he was scared to death.”

  Once inside, a fifty-year-old Philip Marlowe wannabe by the name of Harvey D. Blount quietly climbed the stairs and entered Barbara’s bedroom. Wearing skimpy pajamas she jumped out of bed and confronted the intruder—Blount was black—with a gun.

  Sounding like a tough-talking Chandler-style tomato, the estranged Johnson wife—dubbed “an attractive red-haired Princeton socialite” by the press—later told a packed magistrate’s hearing in Princeton what had happened:

  “I was awakened simultaneously by noise and also the sense of someone being present. I saw a man … a colored man … coming toward me.

  “I pushed him real hard. He fell. I got my gun in the lower drawer of the cabinet. I looked up and told him to get out. He kept coming and I shot him. He kept coming and I shot him a little higher.”

  Two-year-old Jeniah, in her crib, was yelling “bang, bang, bang” as the reports from her mother’s gun reverberated through the house, Bannard clearly recalls.

  Outside in the car, Seward Jr. and his lawyer panicked.

  “I said, ‘Someone’s been shot!’ He said, ‘Let’s get out of here!’ There was a car that was supposed to pick up everyone, but the rest of them got arrested. We left and drove back to Newark.”

  Blount, taken to Princeton Hospital, was critically wounded—shot four times with Barbara’s .22 caliber target pistol. The bullets hit him in the face—he would lose an eye—in the right shoulder, left hip, and neck.

  During the bedroom melee the photographers fired away, too; their popping flashbulbs and blast of lights mixing with the sound and sight of gunfire was almost psychedelic.

  Not surprisingly, a shootout involving one of the country’s wealthiest families became daily tabloid headline fodder: “Redhead Tells of Shooting ‘Eye,’” screamed the New York Daily Mirror. The Daily News proclaimed, “Rich Wife Tells of Shooting in Her Bedroom.”

  One of Blount’s colleagues, Lorann R. Pike, a twenty-five-year-old carpenter who participated in the raid, would later claim in court that he saw Bannard running out of Barbara’s bedroom.

  He was, Pike claimed, “dressed in his skivvies.”

  Barbara, however, had a different version of events.

  It was a whale of a story.

  She stated that Bannard was, indeed, with her in the bedroom, but only because the bedroom was also where her whale cataloguing and research was being conducted and, besides, she asserted that Bannard wasn’t in the bedroom at the time Blount forced his way in, despite what Pike claimed, when the private dicks showed up. At one point there was even a scuffle between Bannard and the raiders, and while all that was happening, Barbara climbed out of her bedroom window, ran to a neighbor’s house, and called the cops.

  One of the Johnson raiders, Joseph S. Pelusio, reportedly held Bannard, his helper, Irving Potts, and Barbara’s then-fourteen-year-old son, Bruce, at gunpoint against a wall and threatened to shoot them if they moved.

  “We were innocent bystanders and got beat up,” maintains Bannard. “What a bunch those guys were. They were just sort of hired off the street. They came into that room where I was calling the police and they lined everybody up with guns—the raiders had guns, and then they kicked us down the stairs.”

  Seward Jr., who had instigated the disastrous raid, and who had fled the scene when the bullets started flying, had holed up in a room at the Nassau Inn in Newark, waiting to be summoned by authorities about his role in the almost fatal fiasco. He was awakened the next night by New Jersey Democratic Party political power Balfour Bowen Thorn Lord, known as Thorn, who was married to his second wife, Nina Underwood McAlpin Lord, one of Essie Underwood Johnson’s sisters, and the ex-wife of an heir to the McAlpin hotel fortune.

  In a classic understatement, Thorn says, “Seward, you’re in a big pickle. I’m going to see what I can do to help you.”

  Figuring the cops were on the Johnson & Johnson heir’s trail, Thorn told Seward, “‘I’m driving by the hotel. I have a Lincoln, get in, but get right down on the floor as soon as you get in,’ so I got in the car, and Thorn said, ‘Get down!’ I thought, what’s with him?” recalls Seward Jr. “And he drives all around Princeton. Every time we pulled up to a light, Thorn says ‘Get down!’ I thought, Holy Mackerel, I’m not a criminal.”

  Seward Jr. soon learned that Lord, who a couple of years earlier had been New Jersey’s unsuccessful Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, was in the midst of a nervous breakdown, was in a troubled marriage, and had been acting oddly. It only got worse. Lord subsequently committed suicide at the age of fifty-eight by strangling himself with an electric shaver cord wrapped twice around his neck. His body was discovered sitting in an armchair at a friend’s home.

  As a result of the raid, there were some eighty charges and countercharges filed by the state of New Jersey against Barbara—one was a technical charge of atrocious assault and battery—and against the investigators, against Bannard, described as Barbara’s “bookkeeper and secretary” in the court papers, and against Irving Potts, a twenty-one-year-old clerk who worked in a local Princeton bookstore and who was assisting Bannard and Barbara as curator in the whale project, and also cataloguing her collection of porcelain birds.

  With all of the participants and all of the wild charges, the Princeton magistrate who was assigned the case for a preliminary hearing, Theodore T. Tams Jr., declared it was developing into a “Roman circus.”

  In the end, the grand jury, after hearing a dozen witnesses, declined to indict Barbara and Seward Jr. However, two of the detectives, Harry Purcell, who had spritzed Ebenezer with the ammonia, and Joseph S. Pelusio, who was employed by Purcell, were indicted on charges of assault. As a result of the bizarre late-night events at the Johnson estate, the grand jury also recommended stricter license rules for New Jersey private detectives, in order to keep clowns like the raiders out of the P.I. profession.

  “One might have thought the exposure of the adultery and the photographic evidence that the raid produced would have been sufficient evidence to justify a blood test” to determine the paternity of Jeniah, Seward Jr. later stated. “But the sensational shooting somehow clouded the situation.”

  In a postscript to the whole outlandish affair, the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals attempted to go after the detectives for knocking out Ebenezer, but that case was eventually dismissed. Barbara, however, claimed the dog had suffered psychological scars in the wake of the incident. “He used to wag his tail,” she said sadly. “Now he hides under the table whenever anyone appears at the door.”

  20

  As J. Seward Johnson Jr.’s divorce case slowly moved forward after the disastrous raid, he “lived not only with frustration but also in fear,” as he later observes.

  “We had an affidavit from a woman who said that after I left [Barbara] had hired a man, the woman’s husband, as a guard and gave him a gun to shoot anyone who came into the house.”

  The bodyguard wanted to make certain he didn’t shoot Seward by mistake so he asked for his description.

  The affidavit described Seward Jr. as weighing 370 pounds, twice what he actually weighed—“which meant that if I’d shown up and the man had done as he was ordered, I’d have been shot,” he claimed in a letter to his father.

  Meanwhile, Barbara Johnson’s attorney decided that Seward Jr. required more “psychiatric, psychological, and psychoanalytical assistance.”

  In one of the many deposition
s in the case, Seward Sr. reportedly was asked whether he recalled Barbara once telling him that she thought her husband required psychiatric treatment “for some very unusual tendencies” that he had. Under questioning, it was revealed that those tendencies reportedly involved “frequent masturbation.”

  In response to another question, Seward Sr., the second in charge of the nation’s largest health-needs conglomerate, said he did not recall saying to Barbara, “If that’s the way he derives his pleasure, that’s for him to determine.”

  A week before Christmas 1963, some ten months after the raid, a Mercer County judge, George H. Barlow, ordered that Jeniah Anne Johnson undergo blood tests after Seward Jr. once again maintained that he was not her father, and that Darby Bannard was her father. Seward Jr.’s prominent New Jersey attorney, Warren W. Wilentz, in asking for the tests, charged that Barbara had slept with Bannard.

  Barbara, however, insisted that the publicity might cause psychological harm to the toddler. Seven months later a New Jersey appellate court ruled that such tests should be administered only as a last resort. Judge Milton B. Conford said that the child “is entitled to protection from the threats in respect of its legitimacy and property rights involved in the taking of blood grouping tests in these circumstances unless and until no alternative is left.”

  Conford recommended that lower court hearings be held on the issue of adultery, and if Barbara had committed adultery the court should determine whether Seward Jr. condoned it because Barbara’s lawyers argued that Seward Jr. permitted Bannard to reside in the Johnson house long before he made the claims that Barbara and Bannard had slept together.

  As for Jeniah, there never would be a blood test administered to determine paternity.

  For ten days in November 1964, all of the juicy bits about the horrific Johnson marriage were made public in a packed Trenton courtroom with New Jersey Superior Court Judge Charles F. Paulis presiding. The titillating divorce trial was covered in all its salacious detail, in particular by New York City’s high-circulation, straphanger daily tabloids, and by the international wire services.