“But when we heard that he broke his back, my mother got us all together and we went to church and we prayed for him because they thought he wouldn’t make it, or he’d be paralyzed.”
After several hellish months at Barrow Neurological, he was released and taken to Gary Johnson’s family home where he underwent more therapy before he was moved back east to undergo intense rehabilitation and learn to walk again.
“At Gary’s house, Bobby was placed in a gurney of sorts and had to be turned over by full-time attendants several times a day to avoid bed sores,” says SAE brother Pat Lynch. “He was completely immobile, completely rigid, and very depressed.”
Woody’s mother, Betty, had left a hellish situation at home where her husband, Bobby Johnson, was critically ill to come to Phoenix and be at the side of her firstborn. “She was the mother hen,” states Lynch, who was there beside her offering to help as best he could. “Her focus on Woody was tremendous. Her love was just incredible.”
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Brought up by his mother and nannies after the General left them for another woman and with the family chauffeur as a father figure, Robert Wood “Bobby” Johnson III wanted more family life for his own children, especially his sons. When Bobby was a youngster he had been sent away to board at Millbrook School, where he graduated near the end of the Depression. Hoping to establish a tradition for the next generation, he had sent his first two boys, Woody and Keith, there.
After Millbrook, Bobby Johnson spent two years, from September 1939 until June 1941, at small, rather isolated Hamilton College, in Clinton, New York. There were just 158 members in his freshman year, a number that diminished each semester as the boys enlisted, or were drafted. The 1940 Hamiltonian yearbook had a photo of a serious-looking Bobby Johnson with his Psi Upsilon fraternity brothers.
Hamilton’s motto was “Know Thyself,” something with which Bobby Johnson would always struggle because of his lack of self-confidence inculcated by his father’s odious treatment and abandonment of him.
Despite the General’s resentment, Bobby wanted to prove himself, and went to work at Johnson & Johnson when he was twenty in the summer of 1940. The best job he could secure—even though his father ran the family business, and probably because of it—was as a laborer in the dusty mill where plaster casts were manufactured, according to Lawrence Foster. Bobby’s coworkers were mostly second-generation Hungarians, and the struggling heir to a great fortune received the same low hourly wage and was treated no better and no worse.
After the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, he was drafted into the army and received his training on the campus of Ohio State University. Unlike his father, who had pressured President Roosevelt into making him a brigadier general, Bobby always remained an enlisted man, and never received a promotion higher than sergeant.
At some point just before or after the United States entered the fighting, Bobby had met his future wife—slender, attractive blonde Betty May Wold, the daughter of well-to-do Saint Paul opthamologist Dr. Karl Christian Wold and Maybelle Lundgren Wold. Betty’s father was the foster son of a Swedish-born St. Paul physician, Dr. Olof Sohlberg, who had married Helvina A. Wold in 1886.
Betty’s family—she had two brothers, Keith and Sidney, who also became physicians, and a sister—lived in a Gilded Age Victorian at 1157 Summit Avenue, considered one of the city’s finest streets at the time, and located in the prestigious Summit Hill neighborhood that was once home to the city’s robber barons, and the rich, famous, and infamous—ranging at times from F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to the Ma Barker–Alvin Karpis gang that had terrorized the Midwest.
Because her father had a thriving practice, Betty was sent to the exclusive, all-girls Summit School during the Depression when many such elite private schools couldn’t afford to remain open. At Summit, she became close chums with several other girls from well-off St. Paul families, among them Jean Schilling Chockley Ricketts, whose father was the president of a large paper products company, and the two remained lifelong friends. They were among just eleven graduates in the Summit School class of June 1939.
Betty, as Ricketts recalls her in their school days, was “blondish, very attractive, always slim.”
Attractive, yes; academically bright, well …
“Betty was not the greatest student,” maintains Ricketts, who at the age of ninety in 2011, and also three times married like her friend, had a clear memory of their school days together.
Betty’s lack of academic achievement at Summit was underscored when the girls graduated.
“Out of our class of eleven, two went to Wellesley College”—Jean was one of them—“two went to Smith College, two went to Vassar, one went to Wheaton College, and one went to the University of Minnesota. They were all very bright,” she observes. “But Betty went to Pine Manor Junior College, which then was a two-year finishing school for girls from moneyed families who could bring their horses and ride. Betty wasn’t stupid, she just wasn’t much of an intellectual.”
Betty Wold had chosen fashionable Pine Manor because it, too, was in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she could continue her friendship with Jean. Also in the town of Wellesley, a bicycle ride away from Pine Manor, was what was then a two-year business school for men called the Babson Institute. Its founder, Roger Babson, hired executives as instructors, and the curriculum mostly involved on-the-job training rather than academics, practical experience rather than lectures.
One of the students at Babson when Betty Wold was at Pine Manor was Bobby Johnson, according to Jean Ricketts. “That’s where they met and Betty dated him. The boys from Babson, which was a school for the sons of very wealthy men who couldn’t get into Princeton, Yale, or Harvard, dated girls from Pine Manor.”
Betty May Wold began her finishing school career in a class of about one hundred young women who had come from twenty-four states and five foreign countries, and was the largest new class the school had ever had. They were there to learn social and personal etiquette, and the salient points of being prim and proper, while preparing for their coming out in society, eventual membership in the Junior League, and the country club set—all with the goal of that generation of meeting a handsome, wealthy husband of good lineage to take care of them in the manner in which they had been raised.
In September 1940, when Betty returned for her second and final year, the world was in crises. The Luftwaffe was dumping tons of bombs on Britain, killing thousands. Japan had joined the Axis powers. In Washington, the first draft number was drawn by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. And in Tokyo, a top-secret plan was being finalized by Emperor Hirohito and his henchmen for a fatal sneak attack on a U.S. Naval base in the Pacific. With the world seemingly in flames and getting worse by the day, Betty’s class began a war relief program, and with proceeds from various school events—the French club carnival, a fashion show, tickets sold by the Mimes and Masques players—a rolling kitchen was sent to blitzed London.
Betty graduated from Pine Manor in June 1941—the same month Bobby Johnson left Hamilton College—five months before Pearl Harbor.
Twenty-two months later, on April 4, 1943, the wedding page of The New York Times carried a two-paragraph item, with a St. Paul dateline, and the headline: “BETTY WOLD BETROTHED, Fiance Robert W. Johnson, Jr., Is Son of WPB Vice Chairman.” It also said said that the intended groom, who was “of the Army”—he was then a private—and the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Karl C. Wold “of this city” had become engaged. The item noted that Bobby was the “son of Mrs. Ross Johnson of Belleview Farm, New Brunswick, N.J.” and “son also of Colonel Robert W. Johnson, vice chairman of the war Production Board and chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation.” There was no mention that the future groom was the grandson of one of the founders of Johnson & Johnson, which was then booming—supplying medical supplies to our boys and allies in combat zones around the world—or that he was the heir to a great fortune.
By the time they tied the knot that October 7, in St. Paul,
Betty was serving as a navy technician in the WAVES, the acronym for “Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.” Private Bobby was then stationed at Camp Campbell, in Kentucky.
During his service, he reportedly spent four years in England, France, and Germany with the First and 14th Armored Division. But he may have been out of harm’s way. He once told his son Billy’s friend John Vicino that his job in the army was documenting and cataloguing pistols that were turned in by officers, and that at the end of the war he had been given a captured German Luger that he had brought home as a souvenir, a prized possession that he showed visitors.
Because of the war, Betty and her friend Jean lost track of one another. “But I eventually heard she had married Bobby Johnson. We were all very, very surprised and happy for her and said, ‘She wasn’t the smartest one in the class, but she married the best.’ She ended up extremely wealthy. Extremely.”
Because of her separation from Bobby Johnson caused by the war, Betty didn’t give birth to the first of her brood of five until April 1947 when Woody was born, followed by Keith in 1948, and her only daughter, Libet, in 1950, with Billy and Christopher still to come.
At Bobby and Betty’s nuptials, her brother Keith, then at the University of North Dakota Medical School, met Bobby’s cousin Elaine Johnson, the second-born daughter of Seward Johnson Sr. and his first wife, Ruth Dill Johnson.
That meeting was like hitting the lottery for him, for he became the second Wold sibling to marry into one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful families.
On the afternoon of July 2, 1949, in Christ Protestant Episcopal Church in New Brunswick, Keith and Elaine tied the proverbial knot. Betty, who had played Cupid for her brother, along with Elaine’s older sister, and Mary Lea, were matron and maid of honor, respectively. Dr. Wold was the lucky groom’s best man, and the ushers included Keith’s brother, Dr. Sidney Wold, Seward Johnson Jr., and Elaine’s cousin Bobby Johnson, Woody’s father.
When Betty’s brother, Keith, married into the Johnson dynasty, their staunchly Republican father, the doctor—Woody Johnson’s maternal grandfather—had become embroiled in a heated national controversy. He had written a controversial book entitled Mr. President—How Is Your Health? that charged that the late President Roosevelt and his doctors had been involved in a shocking cover-up of his health during the crucial war years.
But the Roosevelts came out fighting, calling Wold’s accusation a bald-faced lie. The president’s daughter, Anna Roosevelt Boettinger, declared that Wold’s claim was “absolutely and completely untrue.” The late president’s son, Elliott Roosevelt, called Wold’s book “dirty journalism,” and the Roosevelts further asserted that Wold had never even met F.D.R., and had never talked to his White House physician.
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After Bobby Johnson’s honorable discharge from the army in 1945, he was determined to earn the respect of his father, the General, and to prove himself as an executive and a leader. He returned to Johnson & Johnson and began moving up the ladder, working in various departments, from personnel to manufacturing, and in the process getting a good overview of the company. His main interest was advertising and merchandising.
When he turned twenty-seven in 1947, the same year Betty gave birth to Woody, Bobby was elected to the board of directors, mainly because he was the boss’s son, and the grandson of one of the founders. Whatever his feelings were about Bobby, the General wanted to keep it all in the family. In the mid-1950s, he activated a seven-member executive committee that included thirty-four-year-old Bobby, which put father and son in offices practically next to each other.
They began having petty disagreements over such things as whether Bobby’s office should be contemporary or traditional, or whether his secretary should eat in a private dining room or the cafeteria. “It soon became apparent to the General that Bobby was going to stand his ground on issues both large and small, but because both men had a distaste for open conflict, they managed to keep their differences from flaring into arguments, for the time being,” according to former Johnson & Johnson public relations head Lawrence Foster.
Moreover, in the highly competitive upper echelon of Johnson & Johnson, Bobby faced constant backstabbing from other executives who weren’t part of the Johnson family, but who dreamed of one day succeeding the General when he retired, or as many said, when he was carried out in a box. Envious executives rarely gave the General commendations about his son, and usually had sniping things to say about him.
Still, he continued to move up the ladder. In 1955, he became executive vice president for marketing, a promotion that received coverage in the business section of The New York Times, which reported that he would be in charge of “marketing, field sales, merchandising and advertising.” At the time, Johnson & Johnson was doing business in more than one hundred countries.
Five years later, at the age of forty, he was named executive vice president and general manager, and a year after that, on January 1, 1961, he reached his goal: president of Johnson & Johnson.
That same year the General established hugely lucrative “spendthrift trusts” with increasingly valuable Johnson & Johnson stock for his grandchildren, Woody and his siblings—which was the first time he had made any sort of generous gesture toward them. The General had previously established similar trusts for his two children—Bobby, from his first marriage, and Sheila, who was adopted during his second marriage.
The trust fund money was doled out based on age and would make Woody and his siblings very wealthy—tens of millions of dollars wealthy—beginning when each of them turned twenty-one, and with bigger increments thereafter. With the gift from their grandfather who they never really got to know, Woody and his brothers and sister became members of the lucky sperm club, and could live like royalty without ever having to raise a finger to do anything. Among his siblings, Woody would be the one the best known for actively pursuing a business career, mainly as the owner of the New York Jets, but that wouldn’t happen until he was in his fifties.
Spendthrift trusts were usually established to protect the beneficiary from his or her own extravagance, or inability to wisely manage his or her finances. When the trusts were established, Woody was just beginning his schooling at Millbrook. He received his first check when he turned twenty-one in April 1968—about ten million dollars—but didn’t get to enjoy any of it immediately because about five months later he broke his back and was laid up for many months.
His next payment was at the age of twenty-five and was said to be in the range of twenty-five to fifty million dollars. That’s when he went into business as a condo and land developer in Florida. The next payments kicked in when he turned thirty, around the time he married his first wife, then at thirty-five when he had children, and the final payment was when he turned forty-five in 1992.
As he once told his first business partner, Michael Spielvogel, after receiving his second big trust fund check, “‘If I blow this, I still have the next chunk of money coming to me.’ He was always complimentary about how brilliant his family was when it came to doing things like trust funds,” says Spielvogel.
* * *
Bobby and Betty’s home, where Woody and his four siblings spent their childhoods and some of their teen years, was a sprawling, redbrick, center hall colonial-style mansion with a circular drive with a big tree in the middle that virtually hid the house at 108 Edgerstoune Drive, in one of Princeton’s most exclusive neighborhoods. The grounds were impressive and included a greenhouse for Betty, who enjoyed gardening, and an Olympic-size pool, with a pool house. There was a three-car garage for Bobby and Betty’s Cadillac Eldorado convertibles, and his pride and joy—a restored Packard.
They also owned a winter mansion in Florida and a summer place at the Jersey shore.
The Johnsons’ home was staffed by two Scandinavian maids who also did cooking and cleaning, and assisted as nannies. Betty and Isabel lived in a room above the kitchen, had a close relationship, and were believed to be lesbia
ns. “To an extent they helped raise the Johnson kids, and they were disciplinarians,” says Neil Vicino, who spent much time in the house as one of Keith Johnson’s best friends.
Neil’s brother John, who was Billy Johnson’s close pal, says the two women were “very protective” of the Johnson children. He recalls that when Keith raced down the driveway in his go-kart and into Edgerstoune Road where he skidded and overturned, breaking both his legs, it was either Betty or Isabel who rushed to his aid. “The police tried to keep her from the accident scene, so she jumped into her little Sunbeam and drove over the sidewalk around three cops and jumped out of the car to help Keith.” A photo of Keith, his legs in casts, was prominently pinned on the wall of the Johnson kitchen.
The other regular member of the household was a man named Jimmy, who acted as a bodyguard for the Johnson children. He also was said to have been the longtime family chauffeur who had become a virtual surrogate father for young Bobby when the General abandoned him and his mother. He later became Bobby Johnson’s bodyguard, and there was family lore that he had even gone into the army with Bobby to watch over the Johnson heir.
Bobby Johnson’s prized room in the Princeton house, the den, was the ultimate macho man cave. On the walls were the mounted heads of wild animals, among them a Cape Buffalo that he claimed he had shot in Africa after it had charged him and driven him up a tree.
The thing was, Bobby Johnson didn’t seem the sportsman type. Always very heavy and out of shape, which infuriated his father, and laid-back with soft features, there was nothing about him that screamed great white hunter, so there were those who questioned the veracity of his big-game stories, and believed that the display was strictly for show. Another reason for doubt was that there didn’t seem to be much of a window in his life to have gone on such hunting expeditions, what with his going away to prep school, then to college, followed by his army service, marriage, fathering a brood of five, and his driven devotion to Johnson & Johnson.
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 21