The same Basia who once poignantly asked, “Is it a shame in America to be a maid and work hard?”
At Seward Sr.’s death of cancer at the age of eighty-seven, in May 1983, “the Cinderella chambermaid,” as she was dubbed by the press, inherited the bulk of his fortune, more than $400 million, leaving five of his six children—four with Ruth, and two with Essie—out of his final will, dated August 3, 1973. Only Seward Jr. received some money and property, one million dollars and a home on Cape Cod.
Led by him, the furious siblings, claiming undue influence and elder abuse by Basia—they also charged that she had “bewitched” the wealthy and eccentric geezer—ignited a scandalous courtroom battle over the will in 1986 that even made Seward Jr.’s divorce trial from his own Barbara a decade earlier seem mild by comparison.
“Basia to me was a European experience,” says Joyce, who had naturally sided with her husband and his siblings during the court battle, but nevertheless had respect for the onetime housekeeper who in time would become one of the world’s richest women, parlaying her Johnson winnings into an even bigger fortune by buying and auctioning off rare art while living the good life in Monte Carlo. (In September 2011, Forbes reported that the seventy-four-year-old Johnson & Johnson widow had a net worth of $3.1 billion.)
Joyce says that she admired Basia’s candidness, even when Basia was critical of the Johnsons, and would confide to Joyce, “Oh, you know, the Johnsons, they’re not very bright. Some of them are stupid…”
“Basia seemed to favor me. She said, ‘You are so much smarter than the Johnson family.’ She sort of related to me in a very personal way.”
Joyce’s esteem for Basia, who married Seward Sr. six years after Joyce married Seward Jr., grew the more the daughter-in-law got to know her.
But Joyce also saw craziness.
“She was almost two different people. In a way, she could be genuine and sincere, and in another way there was something screwy.”
Less than a month before his father died and before his shocking will was read, Seward Jr. and Joyce were spending time with Basia, who then resided in the splendor of Jasna Polana, the spectacular New Jersey über mansion brimming with art and antiques that she had had built with her doddering husband’s millions when he was still alive. (She later sold it after his death. It was turned into a fancy golf course.)
“Joyce and I were sitting there with her, and [Basia] was thumbing through a Park-Bernet art auction catalogue like she was a kid with an FAO Schwarz catalogue and checking off things for four hundred thousand dollars,” Seward Jr. says. Recalling the moment, Joyce claims Basia declared, “I have two mottos. Strike when the iron is hot, and when you see an opportunity take it.”
Even though Seward Jr. was in the forefront of his siblings’ court battle with Basia—he convinced them to sue her to try to get some of those hundreds of millions she had been bequeathed by his father—he reveals more than a quarter of a century later that he actually had liked and respected Basia, particularly her pugnacious, combative style.
But before the trial, when her lawyer asked him, “Where do you stand?” his immediate chilling response was, “I haven’t seen the will yet but if it’s a cold fish in the face I’m going to lead everyone against you.”
* * *
Before the start of what would become the most costly, outrageous, and bitterly fought will contest ever at the time, another vicious battle, known only to the plaintiffs, was being quietly waged outside the courtroom.
Inside Manhattan’s Surrogate Court, the trial, which would last four months, cost untold millions in legal fees, and have an anticlimactic denouement, was docketed as Johnson v. Johnson; the other shootout might have arguably been designated Johnson v. Margolick v. Goldsmith.
David Margolick was the ambitious thirty-three-year-old legal correspondent for The New York Times. With a law degree from Stanford, and well-tuned journalistic skills, he saw the forthcoming Johnson trial as much bigger than a daily hard-news story for the Gray Lady, and decided to write a book about the case.
With visions of a big bestseller, he approached Seward Jr., the fifty-five-year-old leader of the litigious siblings to secure the family’s cooperation.
All seemed copasetic.
But on June 12, 1985, as a prelude to the start of the trial, The Times published a story by Margolick headlined: “A Famous Fortune Entangles Family in a Bitter Fight Over Bequest.”
While the headline was tame—splashed across the paper’s prominent B1 section, known as the second front—Margolick’s story wasn’t.
Quoting Basia’s lawyers and court papers filed by them, Margolick ravaged Seward Jr. and his siblings, especially his sister, Mary Lea. He also gave the Johnsons’ side, but not nearly enough to placate Seward Jr., who wanted it all pro-Johnson and anti-Basia.
Seward Jr. read the piece and turned purple with rage.
A quarter century later, in 2011, he still feels intense animosity toward Margolick.
“I tried to be really straight with him, and boy, oh boy, that trial thing he wrote showed me … that he was a slime bag from The New York Times,” he declares. “I dislike him so much.”
After Margolick’s story ran, Seward Jr. says, “I decided we must stop this [Margolick’s book]. I said to the family, ‘Who the hell knows someone who’s had a bestseller?’”
As it turned out, Mary Lea and her third husband, the gay and Jewish Hollywood and Broadway producer Marty Richards, knew the perfect author: a Park Avenue socialite and writer, Barbara Goldsmith.
Goldsmith, who covered the trial and was given interviews with the siblings and relatives, came up with one major revelation, which became the book’s big hook, which was Mary Lea’s shocking—and, as it turned out, very questionable—disclosure that her father, Seward Sr., had molested her when she was growing up.
Mary Lea clearly had an agenda to sully her father after his death, because she held a huge grudge against him: the two had often feuded, and had gotten into a heated dispute after she sued him in the 1960s in an effort to get more money out of the family trust. He fired back in a toxic letter, declaring, “You are turning out to be a troublemaker beyond my imagination.”
What greater revenge than accusing him after his death of molesting her?
Just as Seward Jr. was apoplectic over Margolick’s Times story, he was knocked for a loop when he got an advance copy of Goldsmith’s opus and saw what was written about his sister and his father.
“I didn’t think it was true,” Seward Jr. declares for the first time a quarter century later. “I was appalled because I had driven the family to teaming up with Goldsmith. I even gave her the title for her book.”
Seward Jr., who acknowledges that he and Mary Lea were a lot alike emotionally, finally began to believe her claim and “felt very badly” for her.
Looking back many years later, he first “assumed” that Mary Lea made the revelation because she had a vendetta against her father. Later, he convinced himself, “It was a way of feeling right about herself, and setting the record straight. It was a way to try to get rid of the scar.”
On the one hand, he believes his late sister’s story to be true, on the other he acknowledges that she could have invented it.
“I can’t say it’s not possible.”
* * *
Two decades after their mother Mary Lea’s death in 1990, brothers Eric Ryan and Quentin Ryan seriously questioned the veracity of her charges of sexual abuse against their grandfather.
They voiced their opinions separately because they, too, had been feuding for a number of years.
For his part, Quentin emphatically disbelieves his mother’s story and claims it was instigated by her flamboyant, publicity-hungry producer husband, Marty Richards. “Marty sold her on it,” he firmly maintains. “I questioned my aunts and there is no truth to my mother’s allegation whatsoever. My mother was not a stable person. She was heavily into alcohol and painkillers.”
States Eric Rya
n, “It’s easy for me to spin out a lot of positions on whether my mom was delusional, or whether she was projecting, or whether she was seeking attention. There are lots of arguments to say that it never happened. That’s really why I object to my mom having gone public with it because I think that’s an exploration that was really only appropriately done between my mother and her therapist, if it was going to be done after her father’s death.”
Like his brother Quentin, Eric believes Marty Richards had pushed Mary Lea into making the charge, true or not, against her father, for publicity purposes.
“Marty was the driving force in seeing a benefit to creating—to cloaking—the Johnson name in celebrity, even if that celebrity has an aspect of notoriety about it,” Ryan avows. “One has to remember that my mom and Marty were in show business, so it was kind of like trying to promote my mother as a celebrity, and a way to promote their shows, and their business, and to attract investors.”
With Mary Lea’s Johnson & Johnson wealth and the Bronx-born Marty Richards’s show business chutzpah and flamboyant style, the pair had formed a very successful production team, and in 1976 they had founded the Producers Circle Company—a winning combination that won them many Tony Awards and a Pulitzer for films like The Boys from Brazil, and Broadway hits like La Cage aux Folles.
Eric believes his mother’s role in show business—even just as the financial angel—may have had some influence on her shocking story of incest.
“As a producer her job was to help raise money to put shows together, and part of that was trying to create personal celebrity for herself so that people would want to be in her company,” Ryan observes. “And part of this personal celebrity was embracing victimhood. She wanted people gathering around her, and have them wanting to be with her, and have them be sympathetic to her.”
* * *
In 1993, David Margolick’s book was published. If he was upset that he’d been refused cooperation by the Johnson siblings, he showed it by exacting revenge with painful and belittling descriptions of the principals.
Calling Seward Jr. “the ringleader” of the lawsuit, he painted him as “a man of pale skin, yellowed, stubby smoker’s teeth, the jowls of a walrus, and the drooping eyelids of a Doonesbury character,” and pictured his wife Joyce as “one of those haggard, haunted characters from the paintings of Edward Munch.”
Mary Lea and other family members fared no better. While Barbara Goldsmith described Mary Lea as “a quiet, generous, gentle blond woman with intense blue-green eyes,” Margolick, who sat near Goldsmith during the trial with a contingent of other reporters, described a completely different persona. “Mary Lea,” he wrote, “was a large, disassociated androgynous woman who looked eerily like the character Zaza in La Cage aux Folles,” and he characterized her husband, Marty Richards, who sat protectively next to her through the trial, as looking “more like an escort than a spouse … boyish, diminutive, immaculately coiffed.”
In his caustic epilogue, Margolick wrote that Marty Richards had been “peddling privately” the story about Seward Sr.’s claimed molestation of Mary Lea, and he emphasized that Goldsmith “was traipsing a doddering Mary Lea around the talk-show circuit to decry child abuse and, incidentally, to help hawk her book.”
After all the sturm und drang and circus-like atmosphere, the trial had ended anticlimactically with an out-of-court settlement, an agreement in which the Johnson siblings reportedly received $40 million, and $25 million was paid for the legal fees of both sides. A Seward Johnson Sr. charity that had also been left out of the will received about $20 million, and Basia was left with a staggering $350 million nest egg.
Not long after the settlement, she demurely invited a contingent of reporters to Jasna Polana, her orange and pink stone mansion, declaring she wanted to show off “not the quantity of my money, but the quality,” and that included a museum’s worth of Rembrandts, Titians, and Flemish tapestries. When she escorted reporters into the living room she boasted that they were standing on what she called “a king’s carpet” that had once been the possession of Louis XIV. Then they moved on to her prize piece—a Raphael drawing of an apostle’s transfiguration: price tag, five million dollars. All of this was just the tip of the priceless stuff she had accumulated during the marriage, and that now was all hers.
She concluded the tour with a comment about the trial and all of the name-calling she had endured from the Johnson plaintiffs.
“The whole thing was envy,” she declared. “Envy causes hate. Hate causes war.”
When Judy Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli, upset by Mary Lea’s disturbing account of Seward Sr.’s alleged incest, began soliciting funds for a group battling child abuse, she wrote to the wealthy Basia, seeking a contribution. Basia’s response was pure unadulterated vitriol.
She advised Minnelli to “contact Barbara Goldsmith, who made so much money from her false accusations that my husband was a child abuser. He was as much a child abuser as I am Liza Minnelli.”
Having become a billionaire, Basia died on April Fool’s Day 2013, at age seventy-six, near her childhood home in Poland.
23
After her divorce from J. Seward Johnson Jr., the former Barbara Eisenfuhr Kline Bailey Maxwell Johnson lived the life of a Princeton socialite. She would always keep the famous Johnson surname, but much later began calling herself “Kristina.”
Barbara’s sprawling fieldstone home that her ex-husband had bought for them, which she got in the divorce, was filled with whaling and nautical memorabilia. Entranced with the hobby, she had even once considered purchasing a dead whale—all sixty-five feet of major mammal—to put on the roof, but was concerned about what the neighbors might think, so she dropped the idea.
Still, a fourteen-foot-high whale’s jawbone greeted visitors to her garden.
“I tried to decorate it the way a sea captain’s wife would have done when her husband brought home all this scrimshaw and gear and she wanted to put it somewhere so she wouldn’t hurt his feelings,” she once explained.
At one point, she had a staff of servants, one of them a butler named Kerche who was required to wear a morning coat when guests were present, and who sported a monocle like the characters played by the actor Erich von Stroheim in the movies. Her household also had a number of pets, among them a fierce German shepherd who stood alert for trespassers, and a giant tortoise, described as being as big as a boulder, who roamed the garden, and who supposedly was born around 1800 and was claimed to have belonged to Queen Victoria.
“She actually got it from a descendant of Queen Victoria,” says Darby Bannard, who was still in the picture. “Some aristocratic lady who married a decorator gave it to her.” With Seward Jr. out of her life—at least for a time—her relationship with Bannard had solidified.
While he never tied the knot with Barbara, Bannard acknowledges that marriage was, indeed, discussed. But, he notes, “Barbara was a lot to handle, and I really needed a wife who was going to give me fifty percent of the deal. But Barbara certainly has all of what it takes. She’s an original.”
The two, he says, “pretty much” began living together with Jeniah and Bruce as one happy family in the Princeton estate that Johnson & Johnson trust fund money had bought. They often traveled together. One destination was Mexico, where she was treated by a homeopathic doctor for severe sciatica and where Bannard bet on and owned race horses for a time.
Three years after the Johnson divorce, Bannard and Barbara celebrated with champagne when he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for his art, and later a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Over the subsequent years his abstract paintings would have hundreds of solo and group exhibitions.
He even once wrote a murder mystery entitled Two Dead Men in Rock Creek Park, which takes place in 1970s post-Watergate Washington.
Among the characters is a woman whose lover is a famous sculptor.
* * *
Having become a savvy folk art collector, Barbara Johnson ha
d aggressively networked with the rich and noteworthy in what was becoming the booming folk art collector’s field. In 1969, with the help of some of those insiders, the wealthy divorcee with the prominent Johnson name was made a trustee of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and in 1971 was appointed president of the board of directors.
At the time, the museum, operating out of a converted townhouse on West Fifty-Third Street, was going broke and Barbara, like a latter-day Joan of Arc, rode to its rescue and hoped she could save it.
With the museum in dire financial straits, with serious questions being raised about how it was being operated, and with Barbara Johnson in a key position, the museum became the subject of an investigation by New York State Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz.
The financial problems had started after the museum’s founder, biggest sponsor, and president emeritus, Joseph B. Martinson, the fifty-nine-year-old scion of the Martinson’s Coffee fortune, died suddenly in late October 1970 of a leg infection he got while skin-diving in Singapore. The flow of money then wound down to a trickle.
“Ailing Folk Art Museum Is Under Inquiry by State,” read the headline in the Thursday, April 30, 1974, edition of The New York Times.
The investigation was started when the museum’s retiring director, Joseph O’Doherty, who was resigning to run for the U.S. Congress from New Jersey, sent a report to Lefkowitz’s office that raised serious questions about the museum’s operations and finances.
“The museum was totally down financially, practically bankrupt, and we were about to be closed, and so I put all my efforts together to get the right kind of board of trustees and money to put it back on a stable foot,” Barbara Johnson says many years later. “But the Internal Revenue Service agent came to the place and tried to close it up.”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 16