Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Despite her efforts, leading museum members claimed that Barbara had been making “vital decisions without consulting the board,” and acerbically described her style of running things as “one-woman rule,” The Times reported.

  One serious accusation was that Barbara Johnson had engaged in nepotism. After O’Doherty became the fourth director of the museum in four years to resign, an acting director was named who had absolutely no previous museum experience. That person, who had come aboard in 1971, was none other than Barbara’s son, and Seward Jr.’s adopted son, twenty-five-year-old Bruce Johnson, a recent Wesleyan University graduate. In 1974, he was named as the museum’s full-time director despite Barbara’s promise that a search committee had been formed to find a different, experienced permanent director.

  Oddly, The Times, in mentioning the nepotism issue, described Bruce Johnson simply as Barbara’s “relative,” not her beloved son.

  Besides her son, her reported lover, Darby Bannard, had also become involved unofficially with the museum’s operations.

  As he had with Jeniah Johnson, Bannard had also developed a close, seemingly fatherly relationship with her half brother.

  “Bruce was a kid who could have been president of the United States,” says Bannard proudly. “I remember walking up Madison Avenue with him one day and we were talking about the museum, and we were seriously trying to figure out what to do about this problem [the issues facing the museum], and we turned left and we see the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Bruce opened his arms and says, ‘Today the Folk Art Museum, tomorrow the Met.’”

  In attempting to get the museum back in shape, Barbara recruited new trustees—including quite a New Jersey contingent—among them the wife of James E. Burke, a top Johnson & Johnson executive who became the company’s board chairman and CEO, the other the wife of a former New Jersey governor. Also brought into the fold around 1973 was another friend of Barbara’s, a Princeton University graduate by the name of Ralph O. Esmerian, a fourth-generation Manhattan dealer in rare jewels, who under Barbara’s rule became the museum’s treasurer.

  When the issue was raised of Barbara choosing her son, Bruce, as the museum’s director, Esmerian came quickly to his and her defense. “He’s fantastic—perfect for the situation,” he told the Times, and noted, “We have to forget the nepotism factor.”

  Five years after Esmerian left the museum’s chairmanship he was arrested on federal fraud charges. According to the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, the dapper, white-haired Esmerian “allegedly lied and looted to maintain his personal and financial status by tricking his lenders, stealing from investors, and deceiving the bankruptcy court,” all relating to his ownership of Fred Leighton, a high-end jewelry business. Prosecutors charged that more than $210 million in loans had been used to finance his business and lifestyle. In July 2012, Esmerian was sentenced to six years in prison for wire and bankruptcy fraud.

  * * *

  Seward Jr.’s adopted son, Bruce, was a handsome young eligible bachelor with a prestigious Manhattan career, thanks to his mother, and he had a number of attractive women at his beck and call.

  “There were a bunch of girls always after him,” boasts Darby Bannard, like a proud father.

  One who Johnson was seeing fairly regularly was Eleanora Walker, who was thirteen years his senior—she was forty, he was twenty-seven—and who was an agent representing a group of folk art painters. Johnson was planning an exhibition at the museum on the cat in American folk art, and Walker, a cat lover, began working on the project, generating publicity for Johnson’s January–March 1976 show. Johnson had written the catalogue, entitled American Cat-alogue.

  Before long Johnson and Walker were an item.

  “He was very nice, very bright, had a good heart, a good mind, very straightforward, and had a good sense of humor,” she remembers with enormous fondness in 2011. “He was enjoying being director of the museum.”

  He never made her aware of the nepotism issue, she says, or the other problems facing the museum. While he introduced her to his mother, he made no mention of her hellish marriage, scandalous divorce, or his dysfunctional upbringing.

  “It’s not the kind of thing he would discuss,” she observes. “He was just enjoying life, and we were romantically involved.”

  On the sunny Sunday morning of June 6, 1976, Bruce Johnson asked Eleanora Walker to jump on the back of his motorcycle and get out of the city for the day; he needed a break, having been working hard on an upcoming show of baby and doll quilts. Their destination was bucolic Bear Mountain State Park, near the Hudson River about one hundred miles north of Manhattan. They spent the day hiking, and had lunch, but by late afternoon a light rain had started falling and they decided to head back to the city.

  It was pouring by the time they exited the Bear Mountain Bridge around 6:30 P.M. The road was slick and Johnson lost control of the motorcycle, skidded across the yellow line, and slammed head on into a car driven by a fifty-eight-year-old local man.

  Years later the memory of the accident still haunts Walker. “I remember we skimmed a car coming in the opposite direction and the next thing I knew I was sitting on the road and Bruce was lying on the road beside me.”

  The two were rushed to Peekskill Community Hospital. Incredibly, Walker and the motorist survived the horrific accident with just bruises, but Johnson was pronounced dead.

  A memorial service was held at the Princeton University Chapel. Bruce Johnson’s adoptive father, Seward Jr., did not attend. Years later, he says, “My stepfather [Phil Crockett] always hated the Johnson family so much that anything he could do he did, and he catered to Barbara. When Bruce died Crockett insisted on going to the funeral and my mother went along, and I said, ‘Considering what has transpired between us I cannot go.’ I thought a lot of Bruce as a young man. But this [attendance at the funeral] would obviously undo everything. There was so much blood flowing through the bridges.”

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  Sometime in the mid-1970s, Seward Johnson Jr.’s ex-wife, Barbara, had decided to go to law school in Boston. In some quarters, it was thought she did this in order to better deal with Johnson family legal matters if and when they surfaced, and they usually did.

  “She became a lawyer because I guess she thought she did so well screwing me. Anyone who has that mind-set would want to have whatever tools would work the best,” Seward Jr. says, looking back.

  But Walter Darby Bannard, who had remained close to Barbara, maintains, “She suddenly felt the need to do something serious, to show her worth in something solid, like Seward did when he decided he had to make sculpture.”

  Barbara moved into a beautiful house on exclusive Beacon Hill—near the home of then-Boston mayor Kevin White. She had two servants at her beck and call, and was probably the richest and chicest future attorney enrolled in classes at Suffolk University Law School.

  On June 12, 1978, almost two years to the day of her son Bruce’s death, Barbara graduated, and shortly thereafter, she began taking a course to prepare herself for the bar examination, and that’s when she met and quickly fell for her next soul mate.

  Lloyd Williams, son of a New York City fireman, was a coffee-colored, freckle-faced African-American, one of five children from a middle-class black family from St. Albans, in Queens, New York. When he and Barbara became involved, he had a huge red Afro hairstyle, and he sported the cool African nickname Kamau (pronounced “Kam-ou”). Bright and outgoing, Williams had graduated from the highly competitive law school at Boston University, had earned a master’s degree at Brown University, and he was something of a celebrity as a percussionist in Boston’s avant-garde improvisational jazz scene.

  When they began dating, Williams says years later, he noticed that Barbara seemed “very frightened of people and the world. She was too nervous to even sit and have lunch on the Charles River, and I would have to tell her, ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you.’”

  When he asked her what was bothering her, she told him something that
“shocked” him—that about a year before they met, she and her daughter, who was living with her in Boston, had been kidnapped, that they “were saved without ransom money having to pass hands,” but that no one was prosecuted because “she was very interested in keeping it under the radar. I think they [the kidnapper, or kidnappers] were let go because she didn’t want to testify. That’s what she told me.”

  Williams says he did his best to ease her anxiety, noting, “I think part of our attraction for each other was that I was sort of protective and calm.”

  While they had a strong attraction, others in Williams’s circle viewed them as one of the oddest couples anyone could imagine.

  “It was a bizarre matching because Barbara was his senior by at least twenty or twenty-five years, possibly even thirty years—it was hard to tell how old she actually was because she claimed one thing and it was always something else,” says Williams’s close friend back then, Miles B. Neustein, also a Boston University Law School graduate. Along with Williams, Neustein was an improvisational musician, who had “hit it off as kindred spirits” with Williams in Bean Town’s jazz scene. Neustein later became a New Jersey civil trial attorney, and joined the Johnson dynasty when he married the sister-in-law of Seward Jr.’s nephew Eric Ryan.

  “Barbara and Kamau were two completely different personalities,” Neustein observes. “It wasn’t the race thing, but their age difference, their socioeconomic backgrounds, the fact that Kamau was a rather brilliant street-savvy musician-cum-lawyer—and Barbara Johnson had all the affectations of an heiress. She seemed to have reinvented herself after divorcing Seward, and acted like someone who had old money, and gave the impression that she was an heiress from Europe, a descendant of European aristocracy. I just didn’t see them having a thing in common other than the law, which is nothing you want to talk about over dinner.”

  Williams himself had also questioned the difference in their ages.

  “Barbara was very attractive, very impulsive, and a very brilliant person in a lot of ways. But I didn’t know she was as old as she was. She claimed to be much younger. I sensed she was cheating a little more than she said but nowhere near as much.”

  Still, he found her intriguing and beguiling—as had Seward Johnson Jr.—at least at first.

  “For a young guy like me it was fascinating to be dating someone who was so well connected,” he notes years later. “Barbara used to have a saying that there are only four hundred people in the world and all the rest are extras. What she meant by that was the Fortune 400. What bothered me about her was that connection to power and celebrity—and always networking.”

  In September 1978, several months after they met at that bar exam course, they took the vows of holy matrimony in a very simple ceremony officiated by a Boston justice of the peace.

  Their marriage came as a lightning bolt out of the blue to Williams’s friends because he had never given any indication that marriage to the wealthy former Johnson wife—with a mansion in Princeton, a spectacular place in Nantucket overlooking the sea, and more—was even in the cards.

  Neustein’s reaction was, “What? Are you out of your fucking mind? But I didn’t question him. That was an internal reaction. He was getting flack from everywhere. But I wanted to be the one friend he had that wasn’t being judgmental.”

  No one could figure what the attraction was. If anyone in Williams’s circle of friends thought he had married her for her money, that he was a gold digger, something she herself had been thought of a couple of decades back when she married Seward Jr., they were way off base.

  “If anything, he wasn’t materialistic,” says Neustein. “For the life of me I couldn’t say what the attraction was, but he fell head over heels for her. They were both such eccentric individuals that maybe the differences were the attraction.”

  Darby Bannard, too, was surprised that Barbara had once again tied the knot. “I thought, ‘Oh, God, more trouble.’”

  Now that they were married, Williams says he was “often thought of” within the dynasty as “The Black Johnson.”

  Despite Barbara’s rancorous divorce a decade earlier from Seward Jr., she continued to remain friends with a number of Johnsons, including Woody’s sister, Libet. And in that curious familial situation, Williams became friendly with Seward Jr.

  But Williams claims he knew very little early on about Barbara’s Johnson dynasty history because she didn’t talk about it, and he didn’t know what to ask. “I would get into a cab in Princeton and people would assume that I worked for her,” he recalls. “People would say, ‘You work for that woman who shot her husband.’ People would have these weird half-truth stories, and then I’d say to Barbara, ‘Somebody said you shot your husband.’ And then she would tell me what really happened.”

  Most average couples go on a honeymoon for a week or more and then return to their everyday lives. For Barbara and Kamau, however, “It was a constant honeymoon,” he observes. “We had a jet-set lifestyle. For me it was an incredible lifestyle.”

  One of their first stops after they tied the knot was a visit to Barbara’s close friends Pete and Jeanette, who lived in the nation’s capital. She never explained to her groom who Pete and Jeanette were until they arrived at their posh Georgetown home. Jeanette, as it turned out, was the second wife of Peter, more formally known as U.S. Senator Harrison Arlington “Pete” Williams, a powerful and popular New Jersey Democrat.

  Several years after Barbara introduced her groom to the prominent Garden State politician and his wife, the senator was convicted for taking bribes and conspiracy in what was known as the FBI’s Abscam sting operation. He was secretly videotaped telling a phony Arab sheik that he could get him lucrative government contracts in return for a piece of the action. He served a prison sentence, and before his death in 2001, he tried for one of the many presidential pardons Bill Clinton was handing out, but was turned down.

  With the honeymoon over, Barbara and Kamau returned to her estate on Cleveland Lane in Princeton. During the first two years he commuted to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he earned an MBA at the prestigious Wharton School. Then, the two of them set up a law practice in the house.

  According to Bannard, Barbara’s daughter Jeniah, in her late teens at the time, wasn’t very happy about the marriage.

  “Jeniah was disapproving and definitely not thrilled,” he claims. “She just thought it was a bad idea. If the subject of the marriage would come up, Kookie would just say, ‘Well, she screwed that one up.’”

  Williams, however, didn’t see it that way, and says he and the girl got along “great. I don’t know when, or at what point she might have felt that.” One thing he did notice about Jeniah, he says, was that she looked remarkably like Bannard, and “there was a lot of behavior in which Bannard acted like her biological father. Early on I might have said to Barbara, ‘Kookie looks a lot like Darby,’ and that was nipped in the bud. But I had my suspicions.”

  Because she was so very social, charming, and wealthy—Barbara seemed to know everybody who was anybody because of her past ties to the Johnsons and her own high-level networking—she had wangled through her New Jersey Democratic political connections, most likely Senator Williams, an invitation to a dinner party at the White House then occupied by President Jimmy Carter. For Barbara it was one of the great moments of her life, to be seated with her husband in the presence of the commander in chief.

  However, the big evening with a liberal southern president who backed civil and human rights didn’t come off at first as she had planned.

  Recounts Neustein: “They go to the White House and Kamau drops her off, parks the car, and they take a look at him, assume he was her chauffeur, and he was ushered into the chauffeur’s area. To the embarrassment of whoever made the mistake, they verified that he was on the guest list, and he did attend. Kamau told me what had happened, but there was an undercurrent in that he indicated, look what racism has done now.”

  Williams remembe
rs that evening all too well, asserting decades later, “That sort of thing happened a number of times, and it happened on that occasion.”

  But Williams was an enigma when it came to matters of race as evidenced by his subsequent appearance on the outrageously sacrilegious Howard Stern Show on radio that often used crude racist humor satirically, usually eliciting big laughs from Stern’s millions of white blue-collar bridge-and-tunnel listeners, and also from his black cohost and foil, Robin Quivers. At Boston University—where Neustein and Stern were undergraduates together, and both had campus radio shows—Stern was suspended from his very first program on WTBU for a skit called “Godzilla Goes to Harlem.”

  Knowing both Stern’s humor and Williams’s feelings about racism, Neustein was dumbfounded when he learned from his brother-in-law Eric Ryan that Williams had actually made an appearance on Stern’s show.

  “At one point because he had some notoriety being married to a Johnson, or a pseudo Johnson, [and being black and law-degreed], Kamau was on Howard Stern as part of a gag game show, and they called him ‘F. Lee Buckwheat’ after [famed defense attorney] F. Lee Bailey, who was also a Boston University alumnus,” says Neustein. (Bailey, who was white, had been part of the controversial O. J. Simpson defense team, and Buckwheat was the nickname of a black child character—a “pickaninny” stereotype—who was part of the Our Gang movie comedies of the 1930s and 1940s.)

  “I was surprised that Kamau went along with it,” observes Neustein. “It was so out of character for him, but maybe he did it as a spoof, or he did it just to do it because he had very eccentric ways, and he would do things for shock value on occasion.”

  Actually, Williams promoted his appearance on the Stern show, he acknowledges years later, and believes he had good reason to do so.

  “I was in the midst of the divorce, and I was losing,” he says. “My lawyer could have cared less about me. Legal battles can often be about money and Barbara had so much money and she could just continue with motions, and run it on, and I was running out of money.