Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Headlines roared: “J&J Heir: Story from Bed to Verse,” and “Drug Co. Heir Wins Divorce, and Wife Wins a Big Wad.”

  Barbara denied all of the allegations made against her by Seward Jr.—the lovers, the chicanery, the adultery, the mental cruelty, all of it—and she filed a countersuit, claiming that not only had her husband deserted her when he left in January 1962, but that he, in fact, was the partner in the volatile and violent marriage who had violated the Seventh Commandment, Thou shalt not commit adultery.

  The alleged paramour was a homely intellectual college student in her mid-twenties by the name of Joyce Cecilia Horton, who Seward Jr. had met at the zenith of his marital troubles (but with whom he maintains he did not become intimate while he was still living with Barbara), and who would become his second wife.

  During the divorce trial, the two women lashed out at one another like mean schoolgirls. At one point, Barbara walked up to Seward Jr. and said, pointing to Horton in the gallery, “She has a face like a pizza,” and at another point Horton stood up in the packed courtroom and barked, “That’s not true,” about something to which Barbara had testified.

  Almost a half century later, Joyce Cecilia Horton Johnson considers Barbara “a liar.”

  In December 1964, Seward Jr.’s uncle, the General, fed up with the whole matter, wrote a letter stating his opinion that Seward Jr. and Barbara—the pair of them—“are abnormal.”

  In order to pay his high-priced divorce lawyers, Seward Jr. desperately needed cash, money that was tied up in his trust. He knew there would be a quid pro quo because his uncle was one of the trustees, and there was: Seward Jr. was required to resign as trustee of his sisters’ trusts because the General wanted control over them.

  “My uncle drove a hard bargain,” Seward Jr. declared. “On the pretext that no Johnson who could get himself into such a marital mess was qualified to be trusted with other people’s money, he declared that if I wanted money for my divorce, I must resign.”

  While he got the funds, he apparently lost millions in future trustee fees.

  Another aspect of the case that seemed to have no end involved Seward Jr.’s effort—his first of what would be a number of them going forward for decades—to disinherit Jeniah, once again claiming she was not his. Under a trust fund, the disputed child was to have received an annual payment of more than $135,000. But Seward Jr. had, on orders from the judge as part of the divorce settlement, reluctantly signed a document on March 3, 1965, which was witnessed and notarized, stating he was Jeniah’s biological father.

  That document, entitled “Acknowledgement of Paternity,” stated: “The undersigned, John Seward Johnson, Jr., hereby unequivocally acknowledges paternity of Jeniah Anne Josephine Johnson, born of Barbara E. Johnson at Princeton, New Jersey, on January 11, 1961.”

  As a colleague, Patrick McCarthy, later observes, “Seward essentially had a gun to his head. He was trying to pursue a divorce and they wouldn’t grant him the divorce unless he acknowledged paternity. If someone wants out of a marriage, especially someone in Seward Johnson’s position, they are going to do whatever it takes to get out of that marriage.”

  Most birth certificates are filed shortly after a child comes into the world. But Seward Jr. claims that Jeniah’s had not immediately been filed by Barbara. In fact, he asserts, it happened as long as four years later, only after he accepted paternity as part of the divorce settlement.

  After about two years of fierce and passionate litigation, the nine-year marriage from hell of J. Seward Johnson Jr. and Barbara Eisenfuhr Kline Bailey Maxwell Johnson ended on March 8, 1965, on the grounds of desertion. Barbara got custody of Jeniah, of course, and her son, Bruce, whom Seward Jr. had adopted. Beyond that, she got one million dollars in Johnson & Johnson stock and cash in addition to the Princeton estate, and financial support for the children until the age of twenty-three.

  Moreover, Seward Jr. says, the deal involved “that I would acknowledge Bannard’s child as mine.”

  In June 1969, Seward Jr. won still another case, that one to have his trust changed so that Jeniah and her half brother, Bruce, could never benefit from his estate when he died. At the time, that estate was worth some twenty-eight million dollars. Under the new trust, his second wife and children would be the beneficiaries.

  Darby Bannard, accused by Seward Jr. of being Barbara’s lover and Jeniah’s father, never testified at the divorce trial, but he was deposed, as he recalls, in part about his relationship with Barbara.

  “There were certain things that were factually based that were obvious, and other things that were just lunacy and fantasy,” he says years later. “If I was going to see Barbara in the nude, I wasn’t going to see her in the nude when Seward was around. That kind of stuff just didn’t make sense.” And he calls Seward Jr.’s charges of adultery “just bullshit.”

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  As he waited for his divorce to be finalized, J. Seward Johnson Jr. took extreme, often melodramatic measures to avoid being spotted with his girlfriend and future wife, Joyce Cecilia Horton.

  “I was worried about being followed,” he says. “I had a whole bunch of cars and drivers and escape routes. I had a car with us [him and Joyce] in it, and a car following us so if someone else was following us my [backup] car would radio us and we’d pull off all of a sudden so they couldn’t follow. We didn’t know [if anyone was following]. I wanted to make sure they couldn’t.”

  Joyce, who had “an incredibly sheltered life” growing up, she avows many years later, never told her parents that the man she intended to marry was a member of the famous and, in some circles, infamous, Johnson dynasty, a troubled heir who had just been entangled in one of the messiest headline-making divorce cases. “I think if they had known more about the Johnson family they would have maybe not been happy and they would have wondered why [she would marry into the family], but they didn’t.”

  A week or two after his divorce was finalized, Seward Jr. and Joyce were married in a small, simple ceremony at the historic Homestead Resort hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia. Those not in attendance were the groom’s father, Seward Sr., still displeased with him, and Seward’s mother, Ruth Dill Johnson, and her second husband, who despised the Johnson family.

  Seward Jr.’s second wife and first wife were from entirely different worlds. Joyce, a Philadelphia girl with a twin sister, was a descendant of the wealthy Hortons who had arrived in 1632 on their own ships from Horton, in England. While most Hortons in the United States were educators, Joyce’s father, a Wharton School graduate, was a government accountant who testified as an expert witness in tax cases, and spent his weekends at home reading Plato and Shakespeare.

  She had graduated from Ravenhill Academy in Philadelphia, the same prestigious Catholic girls’ school once attended by a budding actress named Grace Kelly. When Seward Jr. met Joyce, she was finishing her junior year at George Washington University, with aspirations to be a writer.

  Joyce had closely monitored Seward Jr.’s divorce trial, and had married him when his life was in major turmoil, so her initial shock at becoming a Johnson wife didn’t change for a long time.

  “It still is [a shock],” she firmly states in 2011, even after a half century of marriage, and just months after more Johnson dynasty scandal was in the headlines with the tragic death of Woody Johnson’s troubled daughter, Casey. “It’s all a shock, anything to do with the Johnsons,” she declares. “It’s negative and unbelievable for me.”

  After they were married, Seward and Joyce moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. She had a son whom they named John Seward Johnson III, who later became the liberal supporter of Barack Obama when Woody Johnson was pitching McCain-Palin, and a daughter, Clelia, who started calling herself India Blake when she did some acting. With the stage name, this fourth-generation Johnson distanced herself from the family dynasty.

  It was Joyce who first spotted Seward Jr.’s artistic talents and who he credits with being his muse. Away from the Johnson dynasty drama and out of
his dreadful first marriage, he had started dabbling in painting and sculpture.

  He had tried to get admitted to Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts, but was rejected. It was then that Joyce convinced him to take sculpting classes at the Cambridge Adult Education Center, and the first piece he ever finished, a stylized nude woman he called Stainless Girl, won first place, among some seven thousand entries, in an art competition sponsored by U.S. Steel.

  Seward Jr. never made it into the upper echelon of the family business, stymied by his father and uncle, and had thought of himself as an utter and complete failure. But he was now on his way as a sculptor of often controversial, lifelike, three-dimensional statues, a calling and career in which he would finally succeed, gaining international fame and sometimes infamy. He found joy in his work, and even financial success beyond his Johnson & Johnson trust fund millions, inheritances, trusteeships, Johnson & Johnson stock ownership, real estate holdings, and private ventures.

  Some of his pieces would sell for as much as one million dollars each.

  In a 1970 “Dear Dad” letter he wrote, “I cannot help but hope that I may, through this occupation, give you, as well as myself, something to be proud of me over.”

  Critics, though, weren’t always in his corner.

  By the twenty-first century, his work was considered important enough to be given a show and an entire floor at the prestigious Corcoran Gallery of Art in the nation’s capital, focusing on his curious lifelike renderings of Impressionist art, which the curator of the show, Jacquelyn Serwer, had noted “are clever and witty and beautifully executed.”

  But the exhibit was immediately panned by Blake Gopnik, the Washington Post’s long-respected art critic, who, in the lead to his September 12, 2003, poison pen review observed:

  Don’t you hate the way it feels when you’ve had a couple of rotten-egg and sardine milkshakes, and then you get stuck going backward on a roller coaster for an hour or two, and the only music you’ve got for your Walkman is an accordion version of Carmen? You know that feeling? No? Then go see “Beyond the Frame; Impressionism Revisited: The Sculptures of J. Seward Johnson, Jr.”

  He added, “But let’s not mince words: This show is really, really bad.”

  Seward Jr. was still getting a laugh out of Gopnik’s sarcasm years later, and boasting that despite the repugnant review, or because of it, “my show ended up being the most popular show in the history of the museum. I was going to send him a thank-you note but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

  The Corcoran’s director who had green-lighted the exhibit would later be dismissed, and Seward Jr.’s show reportedly was one of the reasons for his dismissal, along with more major financial difficulties that the gallery was having.

  But a number of other critics disagreed with the naysayers, including Richard Lacayo, writing in Time magazine, who declared that Johnson “is not to be dismissed … Johnson’s work is a very welcome relief from what is called plunk art, mediocre abstract sculpture plopped down in public places.”

  One of his hundreds of life-size, real-life sculptures called Double Check, which portrayed a businessman reviewing a contract, was among some one hundred million dollars in art that had been part of the horrific damage inflicted in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. While works by the likes of Miró and Calder were ruined, only Seward Jr.’s piece completely survived, although covered in the dust of what had been one of the towers, and it became an improvised memorial to the dead on which memorial notes and flowers were placed.

  Spending more than twenty million dollars, Seward Jr. had created and established the Grounds for Sculpture, turning what had been the old New Jersey State Fairgrounds into a sylvan setting for dozens of his sculptures for public viewing. He also established the nonprofit Johnson Atelier to cast bronze, and artists such as Marisol and George Segal have used the facilities to cast some of their works. Seward Jr. fondly recalls how Segal, the painter who later became best known for his own life-size sculptures, first visited his New Jersey studio, and saw his three-dimensional renderings. “He looked around and said, ‘Holy shit!’ and then he copied it and did it in his style.”

  One of those who also had become transfixed by Seward Jr.’s work was the “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson.

  In the early nineties, out of the blue, Seward Jr. was invited by Jackson’s longtime plastic surgeon, Dr. Steven Hoefflin, to Jackson’s home, Neverland, in California, to confer about a sculpture that the entertainer wanted done of himself, and to teach the art of sculpting.

  To break the ice, Jackson offered to take Seward Jr. to see the animals in his zoo.

  “He drove me out in the golf cart to the giraffes, and we went up on a high platform so I could be up with the giraffes’ heads. Animals somehow take to me and all the giraffes came over and started licking my face. Michael was so impressed he started to dance. Apparently I passed some sort of test.

  “I turned to him and I said, ‘Michael, if I’m going to teach you how to sculpt, you’ve got to teach me how to do the moonwalk.’ I was studying as he did this thing, examining his legs, and I swear they were like they weren’t attached to his body. But I could not follow what he was doing, and I fell on my face. He marched off. He had enough trying to teach me.”

  Arrangements were made for Jackson to come to Seward Jr.’s home in Princeton—wearing a disguise—to take sculpting lessons. However, a month or so later Jackson telephoned Seward Jr., who was staying with his family in a hotel in Key West, Florida, where he was buying another home.

  “He got my daughter India’s room by mistake, and she answered the phone and in his high-pitched voice he said, ‘This is Michael Jackson.’ And my daughter said, ‘Oh, come on Dad, quit kidding!’” thinking her father was impersonating Jackson. “Then he got hold of me and he said, ‘Oh, God, you recognize my voice,’ and I was wondering, how the hell I wouldn’t.”

  Jackson informed Seward Jr. that a long-planned world tour was about to begin and he’d have to put off the lessons.

  “That was truly the last time we were in contact.”

  He later received an autographed photo from the Gloved One, with the words: “To Seward, Thanx to a genius, Love Michael.”

  Seward Jr. says that one of his great regrets in life was not learning how to do the moonwalk.

  * * *

  Joyce Johnson, who had kick-started Seward Jr.’s sculpting and was his toughest critic and biggest booster, crows many years later that he is “an incredible innovator. I used to say to him early on, ‘I don’t know if you’re an artist, but I know you’re a genius.’ Seward was the first person to take sculpture off the pedestal.”

  Some people in Chicago didn’t agree with the muse’s assessment in mid-summer 2011 when Seward Jr.’s giant Marilyn Monroe caused a critical cyclone on Michigan Avenue in the Windy City.

  Seward Jr. had made an exact replica of Marilyn in her iconic pose in the film The Seven-Year Itch in which she’s standing above a subway grate with her Frederick’s of Hollywood–style dress billowing up and exposing her legs and her panties. But his version was a Godzilla-like twenty-six feet tall, and in the eye of a number of beholders—parents who had brought their kids to see the statue—Seward Jr.’s Marilyn seemed almost pornographic.

  As the Los Angeles Times observed, the statue “has been called ‘creepy schlock’ and ‘a giant, silent avatar of nonconsent.’ Some observers are appalled at the seemingly endless stream of tourists hugging her legs and voyeurs young and old unabashedly shooting upskirt photos with their cell phones.”

  Back at home in Princeton, Seward Jr., who loved controversy and confrontation, savored it all, including the hubbub over erotic statues commissioned by Prince Jefri Bolkiah, the brother of the Sultan of Brunei. The statues figured in a lawsuit not involving Seward Jr.

  “They make me blush,” a lawyer involved in the case said at the time.

  But Seward Jr. says he never laid his fine sculptor’s hand on the statues,
and didn’t have any idea who had commissioned them for the one million dollars he was paid.

  “Actually,” he says, “I didn’t do them. I did the maquettes,” which were the eighteen-inch models of what was to come. “I had my people do them. I took the Kama Sutra and picked three of the most outrageous positions and I sent them over [to the people who worked in his foundry] and said, ‘Give these back to me life-size, and hire some models and do what’s necessary.’”

  When they were finished, Seward Jr. never signed them.

  The sculptures had been commissioned by an intermediary, an Asian woman representing a company called Silvercrest, with whom Seward Jr.’s associate, Paula Stokes, who handled his lucrative sculpture business, had met with no more than twice. After delivery, the woman and the firm she represented vanished. “It was all very on-purpose mysterious,” Stokes told her boss.

  Despite all the controversy about his work, or because of it, Seward Jr. says at eighty-one in 2011, that he wants to be remembered as an artist, not a Johnson.

  “My art is how I present it, how I fool people.”

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  When Joyce Horton married J. Seward Johnson Jr., she didn’t feel a fit with the Johnson family and wasn’t particularly taken with his mother, Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett, or his stepmother, Esther “Essie” Underwood Johnson, who Seward Jr. himself despised.

  Curiously, of the three women who her philandering father-in-law, Seward Sr., had taken as his wives, Joyce most liked the one who would become the most loathed by her husband and his five siblings, loathed mainly because of money and greed. The object of her fondness and the target of the Johnson siblings’ wrath was Barbara “Basia” Piasecka, the bodacious, curvaceous Polish refugee and former chambermaid, the farmer’s daughter with a college degree, who at thirty-four had married Seward Jr.’s seventy-six-year-old father in 1971, just a week after the old man divorced Essie.