Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  But that wasn’t half the story of life in Delta Chi.

  Kent Muccilli, who arrived in 1965 along with the class of 1969 that included Woody Johnson, wasn’t told when he pledged that Delta Chi was already on strict alcohol probation.

  “There were some crazy people in Delta Chi,” he recalls. “Most of the house was drunk by noon on Friday, so nobody went to classes in the afternoon. On a Friday night, there would be beer bottles lined up in the hallways. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough self-control. I was like the other pledges. We weren’t going to class half the time.”

  Because there was just too much partying and not enough stress on academics in Delta Chi, Muccilli didn’t make grades, got his letter of “Greetings” from Uncle Sam, and left after just one semester. To avoid the draft, he joined a military reserve unit.

  “We were just a good ’ol bunch of young guys just having a good time, a crazy time,” recalls Woody’s pledge brother, Walter “Bucky” Lovejoy. “Grades were kind of the last thing we were thinking about.”

  And that appeared to be the case with Woody, who never was formally initiated and remained a lowly Delta Chi pledge for as long as two years because, as Lovejoy and others recall, the Band-Aid heir never scored the frat’s minimum grades required to be inducted into their brotherhood.

  As a Delta Chi career pledge, Woody was required to help clean the frat house and, during Hell Week, carry with him a paddle and get active members’ signatures on it. “In order to get a signature, they got to swat you on the butt,” says Lovejoy.

  Woody stayed with Delta Chi through his freshman and sophomore years, even though his only claim to fame was helping the frat win the Greek Week chariot race.

  Unlike other college campuses where angry demonstrations against the Vietnam War were happening, where young men were burning their draft cards and others were fleeing to Canada, the University of Arizona had little of it, as if it were under a dome in the desert. Bob Dylan’s popular mantra during Woody’s matriculation was “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” except apparently at U of A.

  A classmate and future fraternity brother of Woody’s, Steve Rempe, says, “We weren’t protesting anything. We were like little Bush [President George W.]. If somebody had to go because they failed and got drafted, they got into the National Guard by hook or by crook because they knew someone.”

  Lovejoy recalls one evening watching The Huntley-Brinkley Report, NBC’s then-popular evening newscast with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, when the program closed with a feature about life on the University of Arizona campus.

  “I’ll never forget it,” says Lovejoy. “David Brinkley said something like, ‘We’re going to Tucson, Arizona, Chet.’ And they showed pictures of thousands of guys standing out in front of their dorms screaming, ‘Pants! Pants! Pants!’ and marching up the street and having a good ol’ time, and Huntley and Brinkley pointed out that this wasn’t over Vietnam, but was an old-fashioned panty raid. ‘Good night, Chet. Good night, David.’”

  Woody, as everyone knew, was an active participant in those collegiate frolics.

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  Woody Johnson wasn’t the only young member of the Johnson dynasty who had gone west to have fun at the University of Arizona and avoid the draft. J. Seward Johnson Sr.’s grandson Eric Ryan, whose mother, Mary Lea Johnson, was the first baby face on the Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder container, had also enrolled there along with Woody’s ill-fated younger brother, Billy.

  “It was the Vietnam era and I was involved in the antiwar movement as a high school student and had filed for conscientious objector status, which was denied,” says Ryan. “I had no idea that I was even going to get into college because I was near the bottom of my class [at the elite Canterbury School, in Connecticut]. But I had Vietnam inviting me to come over and shoot people in rice paddies. I fully expected to be drafted, and I fully expected to be a draft resister, and I was considering going to Canada.”

  Instead, he headed to the Tucson campus where the booze flowed, the pot was primo, and, as Woody had acknowledged when he first visited the school, the girls were hot.

  “The attraction was that Woody was already there, and having a great time, and sending home stories about what good times could be had there,” says Ryan. “It was a great place to escape the draft. There were many people at the University of Arizona who viewed it as a safe haven from Hanoi.”

  Ryan, who later went to law school and became a prosecuting attorney in New York City for a time in the 1980s, says Woody was a perfect fit for the university’s Vietnam War–era zeitgeist.

  “He was the ultimate frat boy,” observes his cousin. “Woody fit in to the beer parties and the frat house scene pretty readily. And certainly at Arizona there was a ton of weed. He was a party-hearty kind of guy.”

  Ryan left the university within a year because his mother and his father, William Ryan, the first of her three husbands, were divorcing and there was “total chaos, lots of tension, and tons of fighting” at home. Woody’s brother Billy soon followed, and both began attending classes at New York University. Woody’s uncle—his mother’s brother, Dr. Keith Wold—would refer to the school as “Jew York University,” Eric Ryan recalls.

  After two years of failing to be initiated into Delta Chi, Woody pledged and was initiated into another fraternity with an even more ominous reputation for Animal House craziness, Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

  “SAE was definitely not community service oriented,” says Texas attorney Martin Muncy, who was an SAE fraternity brother of Woody’s and also a member of his class of 1969.

  Among Woody’s other SAE cohorts were the Shadegg brothers, John—a future conservative Republican U.S. congressman from Arizona and an attorney, and David, who became a builder. Their father was ultraconservative Stephen Shadegg, described by The New York Times as Barry Goldwater’s “alter ego.” A veteran political campaign manager who came from Betty Johnson’s Twin Cities hometown, Shadegg had helped Goldwater win his first term in the Senate, and was instrumental in Goldwater’s future political career.

  Steve Rempe, another SAE brother of Woody’s who, like Shadegg and Muncy, also became a lawyer, a public defender, says, “Anything Animal House did, we did better. We weren’t much of a social organization—other than drinking.”

  As a pledge during SAE’s “Hell Week” of hazing, Woody, twenty years old at the time, was required to carry a brick with his name written on it. A fraternity brother would write an obscene limerick on the brick, and Woody was then required to recite it whenever anyone on campus spoke to him. The coup de grace was when he was forced to submit to having his body covered with molasses, and then ordered to roll around in a bed of corn flakes mixed with hot sauce. So covered, he had to wear the molasses and corn flakes gunnysack around campus, looking like the campus idiot.

  When Woody was finally accepted as a brother in good standing, SAE wasn’t open to just anyone.

  “There was a general racial discrimination policy against blacks,” states Muncy, “and in 1966 we pledged a guy by the name of Goldstein. Other than him, I can’t remember any other Jews. The fraternity was a Christian-based organization, which was long lost, I’m sure, by the time it had been adulterated by all the alcohol and drugs.”

  Because the university was just some sixty miles north of the Mexican border town of Nogales it was, says a frat brother, “pretty easy to smuggle” high-quality marijuana into the country and onto the campus, where it was widely smoked and sold.

  The other toxic substance bought in Mexico and brought to the school was high-test, 190-proof alcohol dubbed “Pure Al,” which was readily consumed within Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and at the frat’s parties.

  From a keg in the kitchen, the alcohol, diluted with punch, came through an intricate system of rubber tubes to on-and-off taps in ten or so locations in the house—a delivery system designed by the frat’s engineering school brothers. “You could get the booze anywhere in the house,” states Rempe. “Everyone was a
binge drinker.”

  If the alcohol from Mexico, freely available throughout the house, wasn’t enough, the boys from SAE had blank Illinois birth certificates they used to get false Arizona driver’s licenses to illegally buy liquor in bottle stores.

  An SAE brother and a friend of Woody’s, Pat Lynch, says that parents of the silver-spoon kids who came to the university—many like the Johnson & Johnson scion who couldn’t get into better schools—thought it was safe because it seemed far from places where they could get into trouble. “Me and quite a few of Bobby’s contemporaries were spoiled little rich kids who their parents sent off to get them away from the East Coast and bad influences, and the worst place to send them was to a party school in Arizona. They thought it was safe because it was out in the desert. Oh, God, were they ever wrong.”

  They didn’t call SAE the “country club fraternity” for nothing, because Woody wasn’t the only scion from a hugely wealthy or scandalous dynasty ensconced in the house.

  Among them was the grandson of another billionaire who owned a major sports team and vast real estate holdings in California. A few years before he arrived on campus, his mother, one of the daughters of the magnate, made headlines and shocked society when she ran off and married the rector of the family’s church.

  Fraternity brothers of Woody and the other member recall that both of them stayed under the radar as much as possible regarding their family affiliations, scandals, and money—although Woody drove around campus in a British racing-green Jaguar XKE. “Not many people knew Woody was from Johnson and Johnson,” recalls Steve Rempe. “I never would have thought he came from that family because he just didn’t play that role, and wasn’t a snob.”

  Unlike the traditional blowout Delta House toga party featured in National Lampoon’s Animal House, the SAE brothers threw a traditional blowout luau party at the beginning of every fall semester (and a Hell’s Angels party in the spring), serving a punch made with the virtually pure alcohol bought in Mexico during pot and booze runs.

  The year Woody was a freshman the SAE luau almost turned fatal. A pretty coed who was a member of Delta Gamma, who had never drunk before coming to the university, became critically ill from swigging too much of the high-octane punch. “She passed out and was rushed to the emergency room to have her stomach pumped. She did not die, but she was knocking on the door,” recalls Muncy. Coeds—they had to prove they were virgins to get into the SAE house—would get so inebriated they’d be found passed out on the floor of dormitory elevators.

  One year the financially well-off frat brothers put together a big chunk of change and hired Ike and Tina Turner and the Ikettes to perform. Tina sang from atop an old piano in the house. Some years later an SAE frat brother ran into her in Las Vegas and reminded her about the performance. He’s never forgotten her response. “It was,” she said, “the lowest point in my career as an entertainer.”

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  One of the memorable scenes in Animal House was when some of the frat brothers, facing expulsion by the insanely frustrated Dean Wormer, who had put Delta House on “double secret probation,” decided to take a road trip.

  And it was on such a collegiate excursion at the beginning of his junior year that Woody Johnson, for at least a second time since his near-fatal brush with death in Bermuda, almost lost his life.

  But this time it would be far more serious than requiring thirty stitches to close a head wound.

  Woody’s closest friend and roommate at the time was a “free spirit” by the name of Gary Johnson. As another Sigma Alpha Epsilon brother, Dan Fick, notes, “Bob and Gary lived together. They hung out together. They were Johnson and Johnson, but they weren’t related.” Even their mothers were both named Betty.

  One story involving Woody and Gary that was still being recalled by SAE brothers more than four decades later involved an incident that easily could have been exaggerated in its telling through the years, and might even have been apocryphal. As Martin Muncy heard the story, Gary, Woody, and a couple of other friends, returning from Mexico in a VW van, were stopped at the border. “The Border Patrol asks whether they had anything to declare, and Gary says, ‘We got forty pounds of pot, but you’ll never find it.’ So the cops took that van apart into small pieces, didn’t find anything, and then said, ‘Have fun putting it back together, boys.’ The Border Patrol could do that.”

  Everyone had a nickname in SAE. Because of Johnson & Johnson, Woody was called “Band-Aid,” or “B.J.” for Bob Johnson. Some joked that B.J. also stood for “Blowjob.”

  His bosom buddy, Gary, from Southern California, was dubbed “Beachy,” because of his blond, tanned surfer look. And together, the team of Woody and Gary were known as the “Dupree Brothers.” They had taken the name from two brothers, Ronnie and Paul Dupree, who back in the mid- to late 1960s were professional wrestlers, and former Hell’s Angels.

  “The Johnson boys—Bobby and Gary—they were the money boys, the party guys,” recalls Muncy, the attorney. “They would drink the whiskey and have some fun, and I imagine they smoked, too.”

  Gary was said to have graduated from Hollywood High School, and was the playboy son of a wealthy Southern California developer, Raymond Johnson, who reportedly was involved in the building of Marina Del Rey in Los Angeles, according to Gary’s friend and SAE brother, William Culver White. The Johnsons had moved to Phoenix and lived in a beautiful home on the edge of the elite Phoenix Country Club.

  As those involved recall, it was early September 1968, the start of Woody’s junior year, when he and his girlfriend at the time, Diane Vonderahe, along with her Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sister and roommate, Debby Sceli, and another friend, an SAE brother by the name of Kim Lockwood, were invited to one of Gary’s popular bashes at his parents’ home. Whenever Gary threw a party, Woody was always the guest of honor.

  It was already dark when Woody and his pals hit Arizona Interstate 10 westbound through the desert for the ninety-minute drive to Phoenix. Diane and Debby had just come from a ceremony for their sorority’s new pledges, and all four of them in the car, Diane recalls years later, were drinking.

  “Oh, my God, who knows what we had, but yes, we were drinking alcohol, and I don’t know what it was. Of course, we were celebrating as we do in college.”

  At exit 226, which leads to the small town of Red Rock, about eighty miles from Phoenix, they stopped.

  “We pulled off one of the off-ramps because we all had to go to the bathroom, and it was pitch-black outside.

  “So B.J. and Kim Lockwood went on one side of the overpass and Debby and I went to the other side of the overpass.

  “Even all these years later it kind of gives me the creeps talking about it because it’s not a very happy story. My heart’s still beating. I was in total panic.”

  In the dark, Woody, who had been drinking, was urinating, and when he was finished he took a step or two backward “and as we quickly came to find out,” says a still horrified Vonderahe, “it was like an eighteen-foot drop, and B.J. just stepped off of it.

  “We heard Kim screaming for us, and my roommate, Debby, was actually in the nursing program, luckily. So we ran over and she went down to try to help B.J., and I ran onto the highway. I finally flagged down a trucker, and he said he would go to a phone and call for an ambulance.”

  They were completely without communication in the middle of nowhere, and their friend, Woody, appeared near dead.

  Woody had broken his back and was virtually paralyzed.

  “It took a half hour to forty-five minutes before the ambulance showed up,” recalls Vonderahe. “Debby was able to get B.J. in some kind of position, and Kim held him up. It was kind of dangerous, and Debby kind of knew that, but in those days you just kind of did what you thought you needed to do, and so the emergency people went down the embankment and put B.J. in the ambulance and, of course, he was in excruciating pain.”

  The ambulance took twenty-one-year-old Woody to the closest hospital, which was located in the
small desert town of Casa Grande. But the little hospital there didn’t have the facilities to care for him.

  “So they had to put B.J. back in the ambulance, and I guess by now it was maybe one o’clock in the morning, and they took him to Phoenix.”

  Luckily, one of the best hospitals for treating Woody’s kind of critical back injury was located in the “Valley of the Sun City”—the Barrow Neurological Institute of St. John’s Hospital and Medical Center, which had been founded in 1962, and was recognized internationally for dealing with spine and brain disorders.

  Woody underwent surgery and was in intensive care there for three or four months.

  “They told him he would never walk again,” says Debby Sceli Peacock, the former nursing student. “That was the prognosis after his surgery.”

  News of Woody’s accident quickly got back to the SAE fraternity house.

  “The first news we had was that he probably was paralyzed, or he was going to die, and that he fell off a bridge,” says Martin Muncy. “I remember someone saying, ‘Man, I wonder how screwed up Band-Aid was to step off that bridge? I wonder how messed up he was to do something like that?’ But it didn’t surprise anyone because he was known to party.”

  When word of Woody’s accident reached his longtime friends the Vicino family, who had known the Johnsons for years and had moved from Princeton to Fort Lauderdale in 1965, where Bobby and Betty Johnson had built another home, they were devastated, but not surprised.

  “It was always like, hey, Woody’s here!” says John Vicino, Keith Johnson’s best pal, recalling Woody’s wildness. “He would be doing J-turns on his speedboat. He would be saying, ‘We’re going to sneak out late at night and ring people’s doorbells.’ With Woody, it was—we’re going to do something stupid.