Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Still, there were many believers, particularly among his young sons and their pals, whose eyes widened whenever they entered Bobby Johnson’s trophy room domain. “It impressed me as a young kid. I’d never seen anything like it. I had no reason to disbelieve any of it,” says Neil Vicino, who spent his adult life as a broadcast journalist, a career where cynicism is the rule rather than the exception. “Maybe the hunting was his way of proving to the General that he was the guy that the General wanted him to be.”

  John Vicino viewed the den as “our little fantasy place. It was like being in a Johnny Weissmuller movie. We were once talking and I said to Mr. Johnson, ‘Boy, one day I want to go do this,’ and he says, ‘Johnny, they are beautiful animals. It’s better to shoot them with a camera than a rifle.’”

  Woody’s cousin Eric Ryan saw Bobby Johnson as a Hemingwayesque character and had no reason to disbelieve his adventures in the bush. He, too, recalls seeing the Cape Buffalo head, and leopard skin rugs, and a certain photograph of Bobby Johnson on the trophy wall.

  “He’s in a fishing camp in Alaska, and he’s pulling his shirt up and patting his belly. And what you can read from the picture, not necessarily knowing all of the circumstances, was that he was proud that he had lost some weight. In the picture, he’s still a big, rotund guy, but he’s a big, rotund guy with two weeks’ growth of beard, and had been out in the woods doing manual stuff.”

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  Along with Bobby Johnson’s relatively rapid rise to the upper echelon of Johnson & Johnson, there came another change in his life that seemed as uncharacteristic as his earlier big-game hunting. His marriage had become endangered when he was said to have begun seeing other women, something not unheard of among Johnson men through the generations; his father, the General, and his uncle, J. Seward Johnson Sr., had had six wives between them, and untold mistresses.

  While Betty Johnson had delivered her first four of five children within the first six years of marriage, she had still managed to retain her Scandinavian beauty; she was described by a male admirer back then as “a willowy blonde who looked Diane Keatonish.”

  Nevertheless, Bobby had grown bored and developed a mid-life crisis in the form of a wandering eye.

  He had revealed his secret to a most unlikely source, his drama queen cousin Mary Lea Johnson, when they were getting drunk together, which was said to have been frequently.

  “My mother and Bob were very close friends, and her idea of a really good time was to sit down with him, mix up a pitcher of martinis, and chat for hours about family sagas—and all kinds of [personal] things would come out,” says her son, Eric Ryan. “They were just telling the truth while being drunk. She would tell him things like how she lost her virginity.”

  And Mary Lea had also passed on to her son, Eric, her cousin Bobby’s bleary confidence that he was involved with another woman.

  “My mother referred to it as an affair, and that Bob threatened to leave Betty and chase after this woman, who was described to me as a model.”

  The reputed affair had happened in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Mary Lea claimed that “Betty found out about the woman, about Bob’s infatuation, whatever it was, and told Bob that she would not grant him a divorce and would not go quietly to slaughter,” recalls Ryan.

  At the time, the Johnsons had been married more than a decade. Woody, the oldest of the four children, was a preadolescent, and the fifth and last child in Betty’s brood, Christopher, was born in 1959, just before or just after Bobby’s claimed fling. “Given the size of the Johnson family—Betty and the kids—a divorce would have not been just messy, but hideously expensive for someone who suddenly found himself cast adrift by family,” observes Ryan.

  The “other woman” was a bathing suit model who Bobby was believed to have met at a boating event. Mary Lea called her “Miss Budweiser” because there had been a number of speedboats by that name in honor of the beer. After Betty learned of her husband’s involvement, she gave him an ultimatum that she would not go quietly, and that she would play hardball to keep the marriage together. Bobby subsequently ended the relationship was the way Mary Lea explained it, “and they resolved it,” says Ryan.

  Mary Lea, however, wasn’t the only one who claimed knowledge of an extramarital fling by Bobby Johnson.

  Mariann Strong, a New York literary agent whose brother-in-law was the first cousin of Mary Lea’s mother, Ruth Dill Johnson, and who had close ties to the members of the Johnson dynasty’s third generation, claims that she, too, knew of an affair that Bobby Johnson was having.

  “The woman I knew about was definitely not a Miss Budweiser,” states Strong. “She was a very good-looking girl, slender, medium height, a brunette, who had a very good job in New York and lived in New Jersey, and was married. She told me she had an affair with him because she knew my husband’s family was related,” states Strong. “I sometimes rode on the train with her coming from New York and once after she told me about him she got off at the New Brunswick station, and I saw him meet her on the platform. I can’t swear that she went to bed with him, but she certainly fraternized with him,” continues Strong. “I don’t know if she was the one, or one of many, but she was one.”

  * * *

  The stress of Bobby Johnson’s position as president of Johnson & Johnson—the competition he faced from backstabbing executives, the ongoing skirmishes with his father, and whatever marital problems existed at home—finally caught up with him in late 1964.

  He was admitted for tests at Middlesex General Hospital, in New Jersey, later to be renamed Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. The results were not good. “When he came out of the hospital,” stated Lawrence Foster, “he reported to his colleagues that he had several health problems, including a peptic ulcer, high blood pressure, and his excessive weight.”

  As he went off to Florida to attend a company business meeting and relax a bit through the Christmas holidays at his winter home, he had no idea that he would soon be sacked. But the day after Valentine’s Day of 1965, he received a not so loving missive from Johnson & Johnson that he had been placed on an indefinite leave, and at half of the compensation he had been receiving. The decision was his father’s and was like a punch in the stomach, and an indication of more dire things to come.

  In the subsequent weeks efforts were made by company intermediaries to bring about a peace between the General and Bobby, to maintain, as Foster noted, “the continuity of the Johnson family policy and leadership in the company,” and to avoid losing the family’s “influence on the business” if Bobby never returned.

  In mid-April, Bobby sent an emotional “Dear Dad” letter to the General, according to Foster, refuting criticism of his leadership that ranged from cronyism for hiring executives he liked and trusted, to pursuing products that had failed, and to overseeing advertising strategies that had been considered unsound. Moreover, he angrily disputed allegations that he had become an alcoholic, and called what was being said about him nothing more than character assassination.

  He asked his father to allow him to return to “our company” but without losing “my self-respect.”

  But by the time he finished the letter, and without his knowledge, his position as president of Johnson & Johnson was abolished, and a new one was created, president of Johnson & Johnson Worldwide, and given to the chairman of the executive committee of the board of directors.

  Bobby termed his removal “a tragedy.”

  “[H]is lifelong dream of someday running Johnson and Johnson was shattered. So was the relationship with his father … Bobby felt that he had been destroyed. His father believed that the decision he had made was in the best interest of the company,” according to Foster.

  This drama was unfolding as Woody was graduating from Millbrook School, and embarking on his ill-fated college career at the University of Arizona. Woody had had a very formal and mostly distant relationship with his grandfather, who had now essentially castrated his father by cutting off his caree
r. Sometimes when Woody was a youngster he’d get a note from the General, but mostly it was about the family business that Woody didn’t understand.

  Betty, who had stood by and cheered her husband’s rise in Johnson & Johnson over the years, was both devastated and furious about how her father-in-law had dumped her husband, and she made her feelings known in what Foster described as “a sternly worded letter” expressing that Bobby had been “victimized at the company.” Foster reported that the General had put the letter, which he marked confidential, in a safe-deposit box, and did not let anyone else ever read it.

  After Bobby was axed, Betty became aware that longtime friends and acquaintances, people they had known from the time Bobby had started at the company after they were married—all Johnson & Johnson people—had suddenly given them the cold shoulder, had blacklisted them socially. It was extremely difficult for her to take since Johnson & Johnson had become as much her life as it was his.

  As a female friend notes, “Betty had been a captive of Johnson and Johnson. She didn’t do anything that wasn’t involved with the company. She was wrapped up in Johnson and Johnson politics, always the corporate wife.”

  Members of the Johnson dynasty, such as Edward Mead (Ted) Johnson, whose father and the General had a close relationship, were outraged and revolted by the General’s treatment of Bobby and felt that his firing was contemptible.

  Afraid to do the actual firing of his son, the General enlisted his brother, Seward Sr., to do the distasteful deed. Ted Johnson says he was told by his father, “The General felt badly about having to fire Bobby and he told Seward, ‘Just tell him he’s finished.’”

  * * *

  The last few years of the decade of the sixties were a dramatic, dire, and devastating time for the Johnson dynasty.

  In early 1967, the General’s health, too, had become the subject of growing consternation. Despite his obsession with being slim and staying in shape, he had been a smoker and had developed a persistent cough that was growing worse, on top of a heart condition.

  So both father and son were dealing with major health issues.

  After his firing, Bobby had made a valiant effort to begin a new career. He started a business in Menlo Park, New Jersey—where Thomas Edison had first conducted his experiments—called Johnson Industries, Inc., with the goal of developing an aloe-based skin cream called Vedra.

  But his work was in vain because, like his father, his health had worsened. Taken seriously ill, he was once again rushed to New Brunswick Hospital, where doctors were considering a diagnosis of cancer and discussing surgery on his colon.

  Not long after Bobby’s emergency hospitalization, the General himself went for a checkup at Roosevelt Hospital in New York and a routine X-ray showed a tumor on part of one of his lungs. It was in a difficult position that made a biopsy all but impossible, so it wasn’t known whether it was malignant or benign. In June 1967, he began thirty days of radiation therapy at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.

  The son and father—two different generations of the Johnson dynasty, one the leader, the other the namesake, two men who had battled for decades from the time one was abandoned as a child by the other—would both be diagnosed with incurable cancers.

  The General’s wife, Evie, the onetime nightclub dancer, had tried to cheer him up, but to no avail. He knew his end was near, and so did she. The days of the General and Evie being the golden couple of New York café society were behind them, and they had long ago stopped sleeping in the same bedroom.

  In discussing the General later, Evie was quoted by Lawrence Foster as saying, “He could, on occasion, be very warm and sentimental, but you didn’t see that very often … We had a very honest and friendly relationship. He would say that most of the men he knew had outgrown their wives. That wasn’t the case with us. He would ask what I thought about this and that—not that he ever paid attention.”

  The day after the start of the New Year 1968 the General was admitted to Roosevelt Hospital in New York. “Johnson’s skin began turning yellowish. He was losing weight rapidly and looked emaciated,” Foster recalled.

  The General had been diagnosed with liver cancer.

  There now were two health crises happening at the same time. Across the Hudson River from New York, at Middlesex Hospital in New Brunswick, the General’s namesake, Bobby, was also being treated for cancer—cancer of the colon.

  The General’s longtime private nurses thought now was the time to have father and son end their feud. The two very sick men had a meeting in the old man’s hospital room, spent a half hour together after several years of not speaking. The deathbed rapprochement lifted the General’s spirits and made him happy in his final days.

  As Seward Johnson Jr. observes many years later, “It really meant something to his father, but it didn’t mean anything to Bobby.” That, he says, was also the opinion of Betty Johnson. Foster, too, stated that the meeting “had not erased all the bitter memories Bobby had of his departure from the company.”

  Obsessive even to the end, the General had written specific instructions on how his body should be handled. He wanted a simple funeral, with no viewing, no flowers, and no eulogy, and wrote that he would be “deeply pleased” if his family and his closest coworkers would be present at the service at Christ Church in New Brunswick, the industrial town where Johnson & Johnson made its first dollar near the end of the nineteenth century.

  Except for family bequests, his immense fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars in Johnson & Johnson stock was left to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

  General Robert Wood Johnson Jr.’s last words to one of his nurses before he died shortly after six P.M. on January 30, 1968, at the age of seventy-four, were:

  “I have millions and I would give everything I have if someone could make me well.”

  * * *

  After the death of his father, Bobby Johnson, himself dying from colorectal cancer, which is often linked to obesity and excessive alcohol consumption, spent the remaining months of his life mostly at the family’s Bay Colony estate in Fort Lauderdale.

  Located on yacht-festooned canals close to the palm-tree-lined blue waters of the Intracoastal Waterway, Bay Colony was the perfect place to live and, in Bobby Johnson’s case, the perfect place to die. It was considered so incredibly luxe that the television news magazine 60 Minutes had once sent correspondent Morley Safer to do a feature story about what a wealthy and exotic enclave it was, an ultra-exclusive community where the homes even had, as Safer wryly pointed out, kumquats growing on the trees.

  The Johnsons’ property had a main house and a guesthouse with a pool in between where Bobby Johnson spent much time, seeking energy from the Florida sunshine. In September 1968, nine months after the General died, more tragedy struck when Woody broke his back in Arizona. Because Bobby was too ill to travel and was undergoing rugged cancer treatments, it was decided that Betty would go to Phoenix to attend to their son during his long recovery from his near-paralyzing injury.

  At first Bobby Johnson was to receive cobalt radiation treatment, but one of the top researchers at Johnson & Johnson told him that cobalt was “going to burn the hell out of him,” a family friend recalls, so it was suggested that his cancer be treated with the use of a newly developed type of X-ray machine, called a linear accelerator, to quickly and more safely beam radiation at his cancerous tissues and tumors.

  The matriarch, Betty, kept a stiff upper lip as her husband slowly slipped away. “Betty’s extremely tight-ass, suppresses her emotions quite well, and manages to keep a game face in place through any kind of adversity,” observes Eric Ryan. “As Bob was dying, I don’t remember outpourings of emotion from Betty. What I remember is her saying, ‘We got to be tough, we got to be strong to get through this,’ and there was a lot of stuffing down emotions rather than allowing them to show.”

  With little or no hope to survive his cancer, Bobby decided to live it up as best he could. To enjoy whatever time he had left, h
e found pleasure in buying two expensive automobiles, which, of course, he could well afford.

  He had always wanted a Rolls-Royce like the one his father had had, but at first he debated buying one. He had conferred with friends in Fort Lauderdale who were aware of his cancer and knew that he was dying, so they told him to just go for it.

  But first he bought a Mercedes Benz 600, which back in the day was a competitor to Rolls-Royce and Bentley and, at the time, was the world’s fastest sedan, owned by the likes of John Lennon, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and even Fidel Castro.

  But Bobby hadn’t lost his desire for the Rolls, and finally, when he knew his chance of surviving his cancer was slim to none, he ordered a convertible, dark green in color, with a dark beige top.

  “He didn’t suffer a lot in the mornings, the mornings were pretty good for him,” a family friend recalls. “So Bobby would get behind the wheel of his Rolls with the top down and just cruise around.”

  In mid-December 1970, his condition became far more critical, the beginning of the end, and he was admitted to Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale. All of his children were there, including Woody, who had by then recovered sufficiently from his accident to be with his failing father.

  Three days before Christmas, three months after his fiftieth birthday, Robert Wood (Bobby) Johnson III died.

  The family held a private memorial service in Fort Lauderdale where he was interred, rather than in one of the traditional Johnson family plots or mausoleums in New Jersey. Some viewed this as a snub aimed at the family for how badly he and Betty felt he had been treated by his father, and the powers at Johnson & Johnson.

  Bobby Johnson was the last known member of the Johnson dynasty to work in what had been the family business. Woody Johnson and his siblings would have nothing to do with the company, career-wise. But each collected the untold tens of millions of dollars in company stock left to them in Johnson dynasty trust funds.