Moreover, Woody’s early business career after he received his first eight-figure trust fund payment when he turned twenty-one was as a real estate developer and cable television entrepreneur in South Florida beginning in the mid-1970s, and it was there where he had met his first wife, Nancy Sale Frey Johnson, and where she had given birth to the first of their three daughters, Sale Trotter Case “Casey” Johnson.
Florida also held dark memories for Woody. It was where his father had died from cancer in 1970, in the prime of life at the age of fifty, following his humiliating and very public firing as the president of Johnson & Johnson by Woody’s grandfather, the General. And it was in Florida where one of Woody’s three brothers, Keith Wold Johnson, had died of a drug overdose five years later, just a little more than a month before another brother, Willard “Billy” Trotter Case Johnson, was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Still, with all of that hurt in the far distant past, Woody enjoyed the luxury of life whenever he visited Palm Beach.
In the afternoon of March 3, 2011, just a month before his sixty-fourth birthday, and days away from the thirty-sixth anniversary of his brothers’ tragic deaths, the New York Jets owner and Republican power broker had shown up at the Palm Beach Bicycle Trail Shop, at 233 Sunshine Avenue, a three-decades-old landmark for bike sales and rentals, located just a football field away—one hundred yards—from a safe, authorized bike trail.
He rented a tan-colored Trek for fifteen dollars an hour, didn’t bother with a helmet, and rather than taking the bike trail, he rode north on two-lane, well-trafficked, undivided North Lake Way.
It was about ten minutes after four, as he was pedaling on the wrong side of the road, without the protection of a safety helmet, when Woody collided with a vehicle driven by one Shawn P. Brett, a forty-four-year-old West Palm Beach resident, who was exiting the driveway of the estate at 1486 North Lake Way.
Knocked off the bike, Woody was in serious pain and was rushed by Palm Beach Fire Rescue to Good Samaritan Hospital, according to the police report. Brett, uninjured, was released from the scene, and no charges were filed.
“When the cop brought the bike back, I asked if everyone was okay,” recalls the bike shop owner, Mark Quinn, some months after the accident, “and he said, ‘Oh, no. He [Woody] went to the doctor’s, but the accident was his fault. He was on the wrong side of the road.”
Quinn says he never heard from Woody after the accident, and was never paid for the rental, or the cost of the minor damage to the bike. He also noted that his shop recommends helmets and the traffic-free bike trail, both of which Woody ignored.
At the split second that Brett’s car and Woody’s bike connected, it was as if two American dynasties had collided.
As it turned out, Brett was the personal chef of Ogden Mills “Dinny” Phipps, a hugely wealthy financier, legendary Thoroughbred owner and breeder, and vice chairman of the board of his family’s Bessemer Trust, headquartered at 630 Fifth Avenue, in Rockefeller Center, in Manhattan, just floors above where the Johnson Company, Woody’s suite of offices, was located. This was the address that Woody had curiously given as his residence (which it wasn’t), according to the police report.
From a family of longtime loyal Republicans like Woody, Phipps was a contributor to, and supporter of, John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, of which Woody was a key backer and national fundraiser.
Phipps says he had no idea why the Johnson & Johnson scion was riding outside his gated mansion, and he was shocked that Woody was pedaling on the wrong side of the road and without a helmet.
“He was lucky he wasn’t seriously hurt.”
Woody was, indeed, lucky.
When he fell off the bike, he didn’t hit his bare head, but suffered a badly bruised and fractured left ankle that required surgery seven days after the accident. His injury, initially kept quiet as per his modus operandi of extreme privacy and secrecy regarding his personal life, only became known several weeks later when he publicly surfaced on crutches on March 22, 2011, at the National Football League’s annual meeting in New Orleans.
When spotted limping like an injured wide receiver, he glibly told the New York Post, “I took on a car, and the car won … I wasn’t wearing a helmet and all that stuff. You are supposed to do all that stuff. Luckily, I didn’t hit my head or anything.”
When asked who was to blame, Woody declared, “A driver’s not supposed to hit bikes.”
He also told Gang Green Nation, a Web site that was devoted to news about the Jets, “The car was coming out of a driveway, I was just kind of lulled into complacency, maybe. I wasn’t paying as much attention…”
As the owner of a professional football team, Woody, more than most anyone, was aware of the importance of helmets to avoid head injuries.
Just three months before the accident, in early December 2010, he had stood beside National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell, and Woody’s close friend and Republican ally Chris Christie, in the New York Jets’ and the New York Giants’ shared stadium, when the New Jersey governor signed into law a comprehensive concussion bill to protect high school and college football players from head injuries.
Woody told the gathering that Goodell was “trying to get every state in the union to pass legislation” regarding helmet safety and head trauma.
As a member of the exclusive club of thirty-two NFL team owners for more than a decade in 2011 when his bike and the car collided, Woody had taken seriously the controversial head injuries and concussions suffered by players on the field as a result of purposeful brain-jarring helmet-to-helmet contact. He was an ardent proponent of penalties and fines levied against players who were violators, and he always favored even better helmet protection.
So it was shocking that Woody Johnson, a billionaire in his midsixties with much personal and professional responsibility, would get on a bike without a helmet, ride on the wrong side of the road, and be “lulled into complacency” and not be “paying as much attention” as deemed necessary.
But Woody Johnson had always been a chance-taker, and the Florida incident wasn’t the first time he had been involved in a serious accident. At least twice before, his life had been at risk and he had been lucky to survive.
As John Vicino, a retired Florida policeman who along with his brothers, Neil and Guy, was a close friend of Woody and his ill-fated brothers, Keith and Billy, since childhood, observes:
“Woody was the carefree, jocular, accident-prone guy. It always seemed Woody was breaking something, or he’d have an accident, or he’d turn over a motorbike, or something like that.”
* * *
While high school and college kids from working-class families were taking their spring breaks back in the 1960s in beach towns like Fort Lauderdale—made popular by such drive-in movie films as Beach Blanket Bingo, starring former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello and South Philadelphia teen idol Frankie Avalon—the scions and heirs like Woody Johnson who attended the elite Millbrook School partied in the breathtaking island nation of Bermuda.
In 1964, Woody, then still known as Bob by most of his classmates, was in his junior year, the fifth form as it was called, at British-style Millbrook, when he and about a dozen boys from his class spent an alcohol-fueled spring break with some three thousand other preppies who had descended on popular Elbow Beach, known for its pink sand, azure waters, fancy hotels, and wild blowouts on the Atlantic Ocean side of the island, close to the town of Hamilton.
The two-week break that late March–early April had not been organized or sponsored by Millbrook, and the group had no escorts, recalls John Stewart “Jack” Mills, Woody’s travel companion to Bermuda, and his roommate during all four of their years at Millbrook. While Woody was in Bermuda, and at the behest of his parents, he took some time to make some social calls, visiting the Dills, the family of his uncle J. Seward Johnson’s first wife, Ruth, whose sister, Diana, was Kirk Douglas’s first wife and the mother of Michael Douglas.
About a wee
k into the trip, Woody was on one of those traditional rented Bermuda motorbikes used to get around the island. He was leaving a booze bash where a hot new group, The Temptations, had just entertained, singing one of their first big hits, “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” and he was on his way to another drinking party, according to Mills and another Millbrook School chum, Steve Kroll, who were following behind on their own rented motorbikes.
In 2010, Kroll, a Wall Street powerhouse, and Mills, a retired environmental coordinator for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, had somewhat different recollections of exactly where it happened on that fateful day in Bermuda almost a half century before, but they did agree on one pertinent fact: Woody was lucky he hadn’t been killed.
“Drinking in Bermuda was easy for us, so we’d all go down and get rum punches, and every day at lunch they’d have a party somewhere. It was during the day and I was on my motorbike in back of him, and we were six bikes coming back from the Bermudiana Hotel, and Woody came around the corner at Elbow Beach for one of those booze fests, and he crashed head-on into a taxi, and went through the windshield.”
The account of Jack Mills, son of the first county executive of Orange County, New York, differs slightly as to location, but has the same near-fatal finale.
“He was zooming down the road and then he took a sharp left to go into the entrance of the Princess Hotel,” Mills vividly remembers. “He cut it too sharply and smacked head-on into this car that was coming out, and he hit the windshield. They had an ambulance come right out and took him to the hospital, and then I called his parents, and he left shortly after that and was flown back home. The accident definitely put a pall on the trip.”
Kroll recalls that Woody’s head injury required at least thirty stitches.
“Afterwards we nicknamed him ‘Band-Aid’ because of the accident, and obviously the Johnson and Johnson thing.”
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When Woody Johnson graduated from Millbrook School in June 1965, he hadn’t made much of an impact academically or socially during the four years he was there, other than that near-fatal impact when his head hit that windshield in Bermuda, a horrific event that was still remembered as his Millbrook legacy by some classmates years later.
Before the Bermuda accident, he had also suffered a broken arm while at Millbrook, and was in a cast and sling for some months. Jack Mills, his roommate who also played on the Millbrook football team with Woody, says it might have happened when Woody was hurt on the field, or back at his home in Princeton, but it was yet another accident in what was becoming a streak of them, and they’d only get worse.
During his four-year Millbrook matriculation after spending his primary schooling at the private and fancy Princeton Country Day School, Woody played one season, mostly as a benchwarmer, on the football squad; had been a member of the Wednesday Night Cook Squad; was on the A.A. Committee; served up candy bars at the Milk Bar; and headed the Grounds Committee in his senior year, which basically meant cleaning up leaves and mowing lawns. Such menial jobs were required of all students at Millbrook by the headmaster, Edward Pulling, who had founded the school, and whose retirement came with the graduation of Woody’s class.
The June 1965 class yearbook, the Tamarack, said of Robert Wood Johnson IV:
Bob Johnson and Jack Mills formed an impulsive and somewhat enigmatic team on the Millbrook campus. Bob was the quieter of the two, yet one could not help but wonder if this quietness did not mask the more diabolical mind. When the Guest House groaned under the weight of restless, elephantine-sounding Sixth Formers, one could be assured that Ronson was avidly involved in the fray. There was more to his fiendish machinations in the dorm than mere physical rebellion. Bob had also a mild dosage of cunning. Did not anyone ever wonder why Bob, with his seemingly endless knowledge of television, never happens to appear with the rest of the gang in the Milk Bar in order to view his most popular programs … hmm?
A Princeton man, Bob pursued the country-club life by vigorous participation in the squash program. Bob was responsible for keeping the quads clean this year as head of the Grounds Committee.
The reference to television was a nudge-nudge, wink-wink way by the yearbook editors of revealing that Woody had sneaked a set into his dorm room, had hidden it in a closet, and watched it surreptitiously, which was against Millbrook’s strict rules and was reason for expulsion. But he was never caught, says Mills.
While Mills, a bright, easygoing young man, was much the opposite of Woody in terms of social station, personality, academics, and interests, the often tongue-in-cheek Tamarack described him as “the other half of the ‘me-and-my-shadow’ team of Johnson and Mills”—mostly because they were roomies, were usually together, and weren’t part of any Millbrook clique.
Mills, according to the yearbook editors who wrote the blurbs, Tom Doelger and Noah W. Hotchkiss, was an “ebullient character” who “spent many of his waking hours quietly bemoaning the rape of the American frontier, the demise of the Buffalo and Indians, and the steady, slow pillage of our nation’s natural resources,” which later explained his career as a dedicated environmentalist for the federal government.
Together while at Millbrook, Woody and Mills went on a camping trip in the woods of Minnesota near where Woody’s maternal grandparents, the Wolds, had a country home, and the two chums made the grand tour of Europe in a rented VW Bug.
* * *
While many of Woody’s classmates went on to elite colleges and Ivy League universities such as Dartmouth, where Jack Mills matriculated and from where he graduated, Woody, not the brightest in the 1965 class of some forty students, managed to get into a completely different kind of school that had a certain singular reputation: the University of Arizona topped the list as one of Playboy magazine’s ultimate party schools.
Woody gave the reason for his college selection many years later.
“When I first visited Tucson with my father—to be exposed to mountains and sunshine—I had never seen anything like it,” he told the University of Arizona’s Alumnus magazine in the Fall 2009 issue. “Then I saw all the girls from Southern California coming out of the home economics building, and I said, ‘Dad, this looks like a pretty good spot here.’”
Besides the pretty girls, there was a life-and-death reason Woody signed up at the University of Arizona: Like many privileged men of his generation, he was there to avoid the Vietnam War draft. As his cousin Eric Ryan, who also attended there for a time, notes, “The University of Arizona was our haven from Hanoi.”
With the escalating combat in Southeast Asia, the Band-Aid heir needed the safety net of an easy-to-get-into, fun-loving college, and the draft exemption that went with it. Moreover, he is said to have gotten into Arizona with the help of his uncle, Dr. Keith Wold, Woody’s mother’s brother, according to longtime friend John Vicino.
“That time in American history the draft was nipping at everybody’s tails, and Dr. Wold had a good connection at the University of Arizona to get Woody in,” says Vicino.
His influential source, according to Vicino, was Barry Morris Goldwater, the conservative and powerful five-term U.S. senator from Arizona, and the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 1964. In his unsuccessful bid to be commander in chief, Goldwater had the vigorous support of most, if not all, of the voting members of the Johnson dynasty.
“Woody was close to not getting into Arizona,” Vicino asserts. “I can remember because it was a panicky day. Woody wasn’t a real studious guy, but he had gotten in, and Dr. Wold was the one who was friends with Barry Goldwater.”
Known as “Mr. Conservative,” Goldwater was a highly respected figure and a major influence at the University of Arizona, which had been his alma mater for one year before he dropped out because his father was ill. As a senator, the university was one of his constituents.
Years later Woody, as a billionaire Republican power broker, would team up with his cousin, Dr. Wold’s son, GOP bundler Keith Wold, who had
also gone to the University of Arizona. The two worked closely in support of the presidential campaign of the U.S. senator from Arizona who had succeeded Barry Goldwater when he retired—John McCain, who had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
When Woody enrolled at Arizona, safe from the draft, more than 125,000 U.S. troops already were on the ground in Vietnam—by the end of the war, two and a half million American men would have served—but not one of them would be a member of the influential and privileged Johnson dynasty.
Woody began classes in September 1965 and easily morphed into the ultimate hard-partying frat boy reminiscent of characters in National Lampoon’s Animal House, the comedy about the alcohol-besotted misfits in Delta House.
During “rush week” in his freshman year Woody made the rounds of the various fraternities, but chose to pledge with Delta Chi, known as the “Intramural House,” mainly because many of its members were jocks who won most of the sporting events with other frats, including football. Delta Chi was considered, at least by its members looking back years later, as the animal house of all animal house fraternities on the campus of the party school of all party schools back in the Swinging Sixties.
Delta Chi, located in a two-story redbrick building, was a frat that had seemed to always be on one form of university probation or another—usually for excessive drinking, but there was pot smoking, debauched parties, and academic failure.
At one point, remembers Phil Calihan, son of a wealthy Phoenix businessman, who was president of the frat during the first year Woody pledged, “We rented a hangar down at the airport and had a whole bunch of kegs of beer delivered, and we invited all the fraternities and sororities and, of course, hundreds of people showed up, and then the school got there and said, ‘You can’t do this!—You can’t have a party off campus,’ so they put us on probation.”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 19