“So I went on the Howard Stern Show to say I had this famous legal case, but the case only became famous because I was on the show and that piqued the world’s interest and most importantly embarrassed my lawyer into taking the case seriously when her phone started ringing off the hook, so that was motivation for her to go forward.”
Williams readily admits that through the years he’s been highly eccentric.
When Williams drove on the toxic New Jersey Turnpike he had begun wearing a gas mask “because he was afraid that the fumes were carcinogenic. He was germophobic, but not to the extent of a Howard Hughes,” notes Neustein.
Eric Ryan recalls hearing that Barbara and Williams were spotted in Nantucket and Princeton riding in an antique European sports car, garbed in white linen jumpsuits like beekeepers’ outfits, which were believed to be intended to ward off germs. “It was like two nutjobs hooking up,” opines Ryan. “As long as their hormones were in balance, they were probably fine. When the bad chemicals took over, they probably couldn’t stand each other.”
Bannard says he never knew Barbara to be phobic about germs, but he had inklings about Williams. “I went to an antique show with him and I had to go to the restroom, and as I was going to wash my hands he said, ‘Don’t do that!’ I asked why, and he said, ‘The water’s got AIDS in it.’ If he was joking I would have taken it as a joke, but he was serious.”
In 2012, Williams still gets a kick out of the way people perceived him and his sometimes outlandishness ways—and his marriage to the former Barbara Johnson.
He says he was never afraid of germs but rather of “pollution” because “I’m very connected to nature.” He claims he wore a gas mask “maybe once” on the turnpike in order to make a point.
The beekeeper-like outfits he and Barbara were spotted wearing were, he asserts, actually white decontamination jumpsuits “like you’d wear after a nuclear attack.” And he claims they wore them not to ward off germs, but rather because the suits “were cool-looking and offbeat.”
As for AIDS in the water supply, he says that was all tongue-in-cheek. “I would say to people, ‘Don’t use a public toilet because AIDS can travel up the stream of urine.’ That was a joke.”
Seward Jr., always keeping tabs on his ex-wife, Barbara, and Jeniah, the daughter whose birthright he long disputed, had become friends with Williams, who had many complaints about her. “She treated him terribly,” Seward Jr. claims Williams told him. “He probably wanted my help in dealing with Barbara. She treated him insultingly. She wouldn’t give him the key to the house and things like that.”
Williams says that toward the end of the marriage things got “ugly. Things happened. There were certainly long periods of time when I did have a key to the house. When things started going south, I cried on people’s shoulders, like Seward.”
After ten roller-coaster years of marriage, he and Barbara Eisenfuhr Kline Bailey Maxwell Johnson Williams were divorced in 1988 in New Jersey.
“It was pretty predictable,” observes Bannard. “Barbara told me stories about how he was running off with some blonde, all this kind of hysterical stuff, and I just said, ‘Well, you just gotta get rid of the guy.’”
Women, especially wealthy Princeton women, sought him out as a lover, he acknowledges, but he denies cheating on Barbara. “That’s nonsense, “he says. “The reason the marriage ended was because we grew apart … I was no longer content to live in her shadow as ‘Mr. Barbara Johnson.’”
In 1993, Williams remarried, and helped raise a son, a future Princeton University graduate, from his wife’s first marriage, and he remained living in Princeton, and took on a new career as a respected film and book critic for mostly black publications and Internet sites.
Every so often in town, he says in 2012, he bumps into Barbara “and we’ll smile at each other. She lives very much under the radar.”
* * *
Around the same time that Barbara graduated from law school with her LL.B, Walter Darby Bannard had remarried, to a woman at least a dozen years his junior who, he says, resembled the voluptuous fictional superheroine Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. He says, “She was really something else—a real California girl with long blond hair, and an hourglass build.”
Some months into the marriage, Mya Bannard gave birth to a son, whom they named Billy. Seward Jr., who was still keeping a close watch on Barbara and Bannard in an effort to get evidence about Jeniah’s paternity, found out that the Bannards often socialized with Barbara, and that Bannard always attended Jeniah’s birthday parties, bringing along his son.
On one such occasion, claimed Seward Jr., Billy Bannard said, “Kookie is my sister,” which caused Barbara to get “very upset and said that wasn’t true. Billy started to cry and said, ‘Daddy told me so.’”
Seward Jr. stated that the information about the child’s outburst, which he viewed as more ammunition supporting his theory that Bannard was Jeniah’s father, was part of a sworn affidavit from someone who was present at the party, heard the children talking, and informed on them.
Bannard says it didn’t happen exactly the way Seward Jr. claimed, although he acknowledges, “We used to have elaborate birthday parties for Kookie. Billy would go to those parties, but Billy wouldn’t cry. He’d just shrug it off.
“It just sounds like another Seward fantasy.”
25
In the late 1980s, J. Seward Johnson Jr., still desperate to get a sample of his daughter Jeniah Johnson’s DNA through a blood test in order to prove he was not her biological father and keep her from benefiting from rich family trusts, reached out to a private detective in Hollywood with quite a reputation. His name was Anthony Pellicano, and he billed himself as the “PI to the stars.”
His client list included high-priced Beverly Hills lawyers whose own red-carpet clients encompassed the likes of Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, and Elizabeth Taylor, and his Rolodex listed superagents like Michael Ovitz and others on Hollywood’s A-list.
Pellicano, with skullduggery that ranged from telephone-bugging—Sylvester Stallone reportedly had his phone tapped—to harassing a Los Angeles Times entertainment reporter who once found a dead fish with a rose in its mouth on her car as a warning to get off his back—had a reputation for getting the goods, despite his devious methods.
In one case, the ex-wife of the billionaire MGM mogul and Las Vegas hotel sultan Kirk Kerkorian claimed that Pellicano had tapped her phone conversations in an effort to show she was lying when she claimed Kerkorian was her daughter’s father. Later, DNA tests proved he was not and that a film producer was the actual biological father.
Seward Jr. was impressed with Pellicano’s success and flew out to Hollywood to meet with him. He outlined the Jeniah story and said he wanted help to get a sample of her DNA.
According to Seward Jr., Pellicano had an immediate answer:
“He said, ‘Well, Jeniah is just going to have an accident,’” After the accident, which someone would have to arrange, the private eye explained, Jeniah would be taken to a hospital where a DNA sample would be secured.
When he informed his lawyer, a former district attorney, what the private eye had advised, the attorney told him to “get away from him, dump this guy. He said, ‘If Jeniah has an accident the first person that I would look for would be you.’ He meant me because I had motive.”
Seward Jr. took his lawyer’s advice.
In 2008, the sixty-four-year-old Pellicano was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, convicted on a total of seventy-eight counts, including wiretapping, racketeering, and wire fraud, stemming from two separate trials.
But Seward Jr.’s efforts to prove, or disprove, Jeniah Johnson’s paternity didn’t end with the rogue detective’s imprisonment.
* * *
Jeniah “Kookie” Johnson had a seemingly full and happy life in Princeton in the wake of all the scandal and legal wars and ongoing skirmishes over the identity of her biological father, issues she declines to discuss.
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�It was a big strain that went on forever about her inheritance, and that got her down,” Walter Darby Bannard states. “But, Kookie’s a very normal, practical, realistic person and she just dealt with it. She’s not like the Johnsons, who are totally nuts and neurotic.”
After private school, Jeniah attended Georgetown University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history and English, and later studied landscape design and horticulture at Rutgers University.
In the entrepreneurial spirit of the Johnsons, and with the artistic flair of both Seward Jr. and Darby Bannard, she created two imaginative businesses. Her first was a landscape firm called Glorious Gardens, and she was its chief designer for some fifteen years. Later, she became a jewelry designer for a couple of years, selling under the business name Kooka Jewelry.
All through her life, though, Jeniah continued to embrace the famous—and, in some circles, infamous—Johnson surname, even after she got married—just like her mother, Barbara, had done after her divorce from Seward Jr.
Jeniah had married a talented decorative painter, muralist, and musician by the name of Thomas Sheeran, the son of a prominent Princeton physician, Dr. Archibald D. Sheeran. With her husband, she had a son, Henry Bruce Sheeran—his middle name after her deceased half brother. She was active in her son’s private school, and became a part of the Princeton social scene, volunteering and working mostly in the artsy sector.
As Bannard observes, Jeniah became “a socialite.”
She and her husband were among the sponsors of the “Pino to Picasso-Vintage 2008” event, described as “one of the hippest and liveliest art happenings” in Princeton. And they were members of the “Mozart Circle” of wealthy contributors—$50,000 to $99,999 (all tax deductible)—to the Arts Council of Princeton’s campaign to build the Paul Robeson Center for the Arts. Ironically, among the contributors in the “Rembrandt Circle”—$100,000 to $499,999—was Woody Johnson’s mother, Betty Wold Johnson, and the J. Seward Johnson Sr. 1963 Charitable Trust (which years earlier had specifically banned Jeniah as a beneficiary).
For some seven years, Jeniah had been a volunteer for the prestigious Princeton Arts Council, serving on the board and working as a marketing and development consultant, before becoming its full-time director of community relations.
Her mother, Barbara, using the name Kristina Johnson, was a member of the board of trustees, and both she and Jeniah served on the board together at one point. Among the funders—strange bedfellows since Jeniah wasn’t thought of as a biological Johnson—were the J. Seward Johnson 1963 Charitable Trust, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies, Inc., and Woody Johnson’s mother.
* * *
In September 2002, Seward Jr. sent an emotional and caustic letter to Jeniah, who had just turned forty-one, spelling out in great detail his tumultuous marriage to her mother, his knowledge of her mother’s relationship with Darby Bannard, his questions about her pregnancy, and Jeniah’s birthright.
With a heartfelt, albeit hard-edged tone, he ended the seven-page, single-spaced letter by writing:
I have often wondered how you’ve felt about this elaborate fiction your mother has required you to live. On the most obvious level, you must have noticed that, as photographs demonstrate, you and Darby Bannard share a remarkable resemblance, and that, from pictures of me you must have seen in the newspapers, you look nothing at all like me. How have you managed to deal with this stubborn fact? How have you explained to yourself Darby’s attitude and behavior toward you, consistently paternal rather than merely sympathetic—his officiating at all your birthday parties, his presence at all the important times, and so on.
I’m sure you could cite countless other ways Darby has demonstrated his true relationship with you, his natural bond with you. Yet you and Darby both have had to deny that bond and veil that relationship. It’s truly sad.
You may have a wholly different view of it, but to me it seems clear that before your birth your mother, driven by extraordinary cynicism, conducted a false structure around you and, over the years, trained you to live in it. As much as you may love her and as dutifully as you may have learned to play your part, you must have become troubled on some level that your mother’s grim scheme had become your reality. It doesn’t take a Shakespeare or Chekhov or a Tennessee Williams to recognize your plight for the moving tragedy it is.
Despite all these indications, all the questions that must have come into your mind, you yourself have continued to use the Johnson name in preference to your married name or the name Bannard. You call yourself Johnson, but you have never in forty years contacted me or any other member of the Johnson family.
The fact that there is a lot of money involved does not excuse your living this deception. I hope you find the strength of character to renounce the whole sorry thing.
* * *
Four decades after Jeniah Johnson was born into a very dysfunctional and disturbed family situation, the heated battle over her paternity had escalated even more—incredibly into the new millenium—with the highest court in New Jersey, and that state’s legislature, being brought into the conflict.
The twenty-first-century battle over Jeniah’s paternity and whether she should benefit further from Johnson family trusts was ignited when Seward Jr.’s two children from his second marriage, John Seward Johnson III and Clelia Constance Johnson, known professionally as India Blake, joined with two of their cousins, the late Mary Lea’s sons, Eric and Hillary Ryan, to appeal the decades-old divorce court ruling that held that Seward Jr. was Jeniah’s father, and that a trust worth a fortune that included her could not be challenged.
Their ultimate goal was to see that Jeniah never received one red cent from that trust. If she did, they and their siblings would presumably get a smaller piece of the money pie—not earned through jobs or professions, but left to them as part of the immense Johnson & Johnson fortune.
The New Jersey Supreme Court heard the case in the fall–winter session of 2000–2001. After all of that legal wrangling, most likely costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees, the court decided in Jeniah’s favor. She had roundly won, without ever having to take a blood test (or later a DNA test) to prove or disprove the identity of her biological father.
Much of the court’s decision was based on New Jersey’s 1983 Parentage Act, which held that a child born in wedlock is presumed to be the legitimate offspring of the husband. The fact that Jeniah was born while Seward Jr. was married to Jeniah’s mother, Barbara, meant that he was the father, whether he agreed or not, and that no blood or DNA test would ever have to be administered as Seward Jr. had sought in hopes to disprove paternity.
After the defeat in New Jersey, the Johnson cousins asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case, but were refused.
But that didn’t stop Seward Jr., who began a big-money lobbying campaign, giving more than $280,000 in contributions to New Jersey politicians and party committees, in an effort to change the Parentage Act in his favor and for other men in similar situations.
In 2001, New Jersey’s Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill to change the controversial Parentage Act in such a way as to benefit Seward Jr. in his war to prove he wasn’t Jeniah’s biological father.
But Robert Singer, the state senator who had sponsored the measure, soon went public declaring he had been misled by a Johnson lobbyist and attorney. Singer claimed Seward Jr.’s representative had given him the impression that the bill would fix a major inequity in the law, rather than simply help the Johnsons in their battle with Jeniah over paternity and trust fund money.
In 2004, with Singer out of the picture, a pair of then–highly respected New Jersey assemblymen, Anthony Impreveduto and Neil Cohen, became the primary sponsors of Seward Jr.’s legislation.
But the Garden State being what it is—long a haven for corrupt politicians and real-life Tony Sopranos—it turned out that the Band-Aid heir’s supporters were a couple of bad apples.
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Impreveduto, a teacher by profession, subsequently pleaded guilty to state charges of having spent tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions on personal expenses—clothing, travel, even paying his income taxes. Meanwhile, Cohen, who had been talking up Seward Jr.’s proposed measure dealing with child legitimacy and paternity, would later be indicted on charges of possession of child pornography—reportedly viewing the many sick images on his computer in the state office building. He eventually pleaded guilty to distributing child pornography.
After years of fighting, Seward Jr. eventually gave up his battle, but not his belief.
And Jeniah came out on top when a secret agreement was reached between the Johnson trustees, who were three top executives at Johnson & Johnson, and the lawyers for Jeniah, then in her early fifties.
“She ended up getting seventeen million dollars out of the trust as a settlement,” Seward Jr. reveals.
He calls the deal “a deep wound,” and describes the settlement as being “upside down. It’s wrong is right. When you have something that’s totally indigestible, what the hell do you do with it, and the only thing I can do with it is preoccupy myself with trying to accomplish what I want to accomplish, and concentrate on that and not allow myself to sink into bitterness.”
On April 18, 2013, Barbara Johnson died. Her obit made no mention of Seward Jr.
PART V
WOODY’S SECRETS
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It was one of those steely gray overcast afternoons in usually sunny Palm Beach, near the end of the 2010–11 winter social season, when Woody Johnson decided to rent a bicycle and take a leisurely ride along a scenic stretch of North Lake Way in the very private and posh far north end of the fabulously wealthy resort town.
For Woody, the Gold Coast of South Florida held many memories, both happy and sad. Like most other members of the Johnson dynasty, his parents, Robert Wood “Bobby” Johnson III and the former Betty May Wold, had spent most winters in the Sunshine State, where they owned spectacular homes, first in Pompano Beach along “Millionaires’ Mile,” and later some miles south in Fort Lauderdale’s exclusive Bay Colony, where Woody and his brothers, Keith and Billy, always had flashy convertibles and nifty speedboats from the time they were in their early teens.
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 18