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When the doctors felt Woody Johnson was well enough to be transported, he was flown from Phoenix and admitted to the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitative Medicine, part of New York University Hospital, for a number of months of more rehabilitation for his paralyzing back injury. The Johnson family had rented an apartment near the hospital to be close to him.
It was an excruciating ordeal that seemed to go on forever. “Woody spent eight months at Rusk on morphine,” says his first wife, Nancy Sale Frey Johnson Rashad. “He always needed more drugs and he told me after we were married that he would throw his fork out into the hallway to get the nurses’ attention. The muscles on the front of one of his feet atrophied, so when he walks it’s almost like he has to swing his leg to get his toe to come up to take a step forward, but it’s almost impossible to notice.”
A friend from Princeton, John Bigelow Taylor, recalls Woody “hanging upside down in some kind of traction. He was able to talk, but in a terrible position.”
When Woody was finally ambulatory enough in 1970, he attended the wedding in Vermont of his Millbrook School roommate, John Stewart Mills, who was then in his first year of graduate school, studying urban planning in the School of Public Administration of New York University. His bride was twenty-year-old Laura Freeman, a pretty, bright junior at the University of Vermont, where she was a member of the women’s ski team.
Unlike twenty-two-year-old Woody, Jack Mills was moving forward with his life, taking on responsibilities, preparing for a career, while Woody was still at loose ends, recovering from his accident, floundering about, still needing to finish college. The only difference between Robert Wood Johnson IV—one of the four ushers in the Mills’s wedding ceremony—and the other young people celebrating Jack and Laura’s marriage, was that Woody was a multimillionaire who had collected his first trust fund payment of about ten million dollars.
Mills hadn’t heard from Woody—he still called him Bob, the name he knew him by at Millbrook School—since a year or so after they had graduated in 1965, and wasn’t aware of his accident until he arrived at the wedding “kind of stiff and had a little difficulty walking. He told me they had been out in the desert and had been drinking and he fell into a dry wash, or something like that. He didn’t go into any great detail. But his mother called and said he needed to be very careful. There had been some talk about all of us going out that night on toboggans and his mother tried to convince Laura to discourage Woody from any of that kind of activity.”
Of the two, Mills had been the “shy one” and Woody the “far more gregarious” one through their prep school years. Mills was also the better student, while Woody “was average, not extraordinarily academic. He didn’t seem driven,” says Mills. “He was just fun to be around. He had a pretty nice stereo in our room at Millbrook and he had all the Beach Boy albums, he loved the Beach Boys, and Barbra Streisand—and that’s an interesting combination.”
While Mills’s father was a Republican politician most of his life—he once ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress and had received a contribution from Bobby Johnson—the Mills family was financially middle-class and modest. What Jack liked about Woody was the fact that “he was down to earth, and with his family background he could have been a supreme jerk, and he wasn’t.” During one of his visits to the Johnson estate in Princeton, Mills asked Woody who some of the people were socializing with his parents. “‘Oh, those are the DuPonts,’ he responded, but he didn’t think it was any big deal.”
The last time the prep school roommates had been together before the Mills’s wedding was their grand tour of Europe during the summer of 1966, after their first year in college. Neither had been there before. The Johnsons had rented a Volkswagen for the boys, and they racked up some six thousand miles traveling around. The only hitch occurred when Woody lost his passport as they were about to enter Italy, causing a delay in their trip. But a local Johnson & Johnson representative helped to expedite their passage over the border with a new passport.
When they were in Norway, above the Arctic Circle, they didn’t have the proper outerwear. Woody, wearing a raincoat and sneakers, decided to trek across the ice on a glacier where he had found reindeer antlers. “He’s holding these antlers in his hand,” recalls Mills, “and he’s jabbing them in the ice to stop from sliding into a crevice. It could have been a total disaster.”
* * *
Woody returned to the University of Arizona sometime in 1970 to finish his junior and senior years that were interrupted by his back injury (and finally was awarded his degree, a BA in history, in February 1972, almost seven years after he graduated from Millbrook.)
Despite the seriousness of his back injury, his partying resumed to some extent, especially when his brothers, Keith and Billy, and cousins, Eric Ryan and Clint Wold, and other friends began showing up on the Tucson campus, either to take classes, or to just hang out and party. Woody also began dating Debby Sceli, the nursing student who was with him the night of the accident and who had come to his aid.
For a time, while working on his degree, he rented a condo apartment at 941 North Euclid Boulevard, some five blocks from the campus in a complex that was as much an animal house as were his former frat houses.
“The place was just a madhouse, absolutely insane, and full of crazy people,” recalls another resident who had graduated from Millbrook and was a pal of Keith Johnson. “There was tons of pot and a lot of beer. We had a roommate who brought home a gun one day and shot and wounded himself, a fool trying to show off to his girlfriend.”
Despite the fact that Woody had gotten his first big trust fund check, “he wasn’t living” what Eric Ryan remembers as “a particularly flamboyant lifestyle.” After Euclid, he had rented a small stucco house at 232 North Vine Street, in Tucson, one of a row of similar places, each having two small windows with a door in the middle, with absolutely no curb appeal.
“Woody was driving a beat-up VW bus, had shoulder-length hair, and was just trying to fit in like a regular guy,” says Ryan.
Woody had also started drinking again and doing crazy stunts that risked getting him reinjured.
During a bout of boozing with Ryan, Woody initiated a wrestling match, and had gotten Eric in a headlock. “It was a whole physical tussle, two guys having a little too much to drink and goofing around,” recalls Ryan. “And Woody falls over and rolls on his back and I was suddenly aware of other people in the room who are yelling, ‘Oh, my God!’ and they intervened to stop the horseplay because they were really concerned that Woody should not have been doing that.”
Remembering that scene, Ryan said he was concerned about Woody’s willingness to take chances.
Ryan and Billy Johnson, taking classes at the university, had rented a thousand-dollar-a-month three-bedroom house at 3001 East Helen Street in Tucson for the half year Ryan took classes, and the full year Billy stayed, and the place became a crash pad for friends and relatives from the East Coast.
Eric and Billy had gotten motorcycles. Not to be outdone, Woody bought a Norton Commando, a high-performance, big bike that was considered the Porsche of the motorcycle world. “It was definitely the motorcycle of choice,” observes Ryan, “of someone who was walking a tightrope in terms of risk.”
Billy, considered more creative and brighter than Woody, or Keith, was also something of a risk-taker. He had driven out to Arizona in one of the presents his father had given him for his eighteenth birthday, a very fast, bright red Mercury Cougar XR7 convertible powered by a big 390 horsepower V8 engine, with a four-barrel carburetor and fast Hurst shifter.
When he arrived on campus he saw that Ryan had already bought a Kawasaki 500 motorcycle with the one-thousand-dollar transportation allowance his mother, Mary Lea, had given him. “One thousand dollars in those days would have bought me a pretty nice secondhand VW Beetle,” says Ryan, looking back, “but being young and stupid I went down and bought the motorcycle, which was really hot.”
The Kawasaki,
one of the fastest production cycles at the time, was dubbed the “widowmaker” among bikers because so many people had been killed on them due to its dangerous handling characteristics.
That was dramatically—and almost fatally—underscored when Billy Johnson convinced his cousin Eric to loan him his “red, fire-breathing death wish.” While there was no helmet law in Arizona at the time, Ryan talked Billy into wearing his. He must have had a premonition.
Within thirty seconds, Billy had run a stop sign and driven the motorcycle into the side of a VW bus, with his head hitting the air intake right above the rear wheel, pushing it in.
“All of this was happening right outside of Woody’s house, and so Woody and I run out and we see Billy lying in the street and we run up to him, and he’s taken to the ER, and he’s treated and released and, incredibly, has no serious injuries. He bought the wreck of my motorcycle from me that day. But, he had no business whatsoever on a motorcycle.”
Not too long in the future that would be proven.
Billy had also wrecked the blood-red Mercury Cougar, almost killing himself and Ryan.
“Billy tried to get across train tracks before a freight came, and he took a turn too fast and the car flipped,” says Ryan. “I still thank God he did because we never would have beat the train. He just kind of walked away like, Oh, well, no big deal. I felt lucky I wasn’t killed.”
* * *
Like his brother Billy, Keith Johnson had become a regular visitor to the Arizona campus, mainly to hang out and to party with his siblings and cousins.
But back in New Jersey, he had recently gotten into trouble for the first, but not the last time, with drugs.
Keith had been part of a triumvirate with John Bigelow Taylor and another friend—boys who had grown up together in Princeton, went to Princeton Country Day School, and later Keith and the friend had been part of a rowdy and wealthy group of boys from PCD that went to Millbrook School for a time when Woody was in his senior year there.
A jock who played football and soccer at Millbrook, the friend, like the Johnson boys, was a scion of an iconic dynasty.
“We were just sort of three buddies running around Princeton in 1968, 1969, 1970,” says Taylor, who was from a far less wealthy and powerful family. One summer day the threesome, in their late teens, had driven from Princeton to the New Jersey summer resort town of Seaside Heights on the Atlantic Ocean. To more thoroughly enjoy the boardwalk’s amusement park rides, says Taylor, they had smoked marijuana and gotten stoned.
“It was the three of us, and we’d been on some ride and we were laughing and having a good time and carrying on, and some plainclothes cops were watching us and just thought we looked like we were high, and so they asked for identification, and wanted to know how we got there, and when we said by car they made us go back to the car, and they found pot in the glove compartment,” says Taylor, who later became a noted photographer.
One of his photographic projects was for the 1995 book The White House Collection of American Craft, assembled with the encouragement of first lady Hillary Clinton and her husband, the president, who once famously claimed “I didn’t inhale” when the issue of his youthful pot smoking came up.
After the marijuana was found in their car, Taylor says, the three of them were arrested.
Looking back years later, he says, “It was just a little misdemeanor thing. In those days marijuana was almost legal, it was everywhere, and there was so much of it around Princeton because it was a university town.”
Nevertheless, the three had to go to court, and they were sentenced to a thirty-day suspension of their driver’s licenses, he recalls. (The record of their arrest and adjudication has long ago been expunged from police and court files.) But the boys were boastful about it at the time. “John or Keith told me about it just in the sharing of war stories,” recalls Ryan.
While the boys might have viewed their bust as something cool in that age of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, their parents didn’t—in particular, Betty Johnson, who had just gone through hell with Woody’s accident attributable to his own night of heavy partying.
Betty blamed the drug activity and Keith’s arrest on Taylor, and banned him from the Johnson home.
“She assumed that it was somehow my influence on Keith, which is something I always resented, and her view was wrong in fact. I was much more of the follower, but she was saying, ‘It can’t be my son.’ If any one of us lived a reckless life and could be a bad influence it was Keith. He thought it was all a joke. It didn’t mean anything to him.”
Keith was cut from different cloth than his pals. The latter two, friends say, were macho and athletic, while Keith was considered effeminate—even gay—by people who knew him from the time he entered Millbrook School until his death a decade later in 1975 from a cocaine overdose.
The marijuana arrest wasn’t the first time Taylor was with Keith Johnson when the Band-Aid heir got into trouble.
The second time was far more serious and nearly fatal.
It was the night of June 4, 1972, Taylor’s twenty-second birthday, which was being celebrated with lots of drinking at a bar and dance club called Goodtime Charley’s in the small town of Kingston, New Jersey, near Princeton.
Since the pot arrest Taylor and Keith hadn’t seen much of each other, going off in different directions. Keith had received his first trust fund millions—like Woody, about ten million dollars—and was spending crazily on exotic cars, fast boats, designer clothing, five-star restaurants, and every other luxury imaginable, and that included primo drugs.
“We were living very different lives,” says Taylor. “I was trying to make my way in the world and Keith was investing in cable companies and taking cocaine.”
But while their lives diverged, he and Keith had kept up, and Keith, then twenty-three, had showed up at Taylor’s birthday bash in a fast, new Porsche, one of many exotic cars he bought and usually wrecked. Then living mostly in Fort Lauderdale in the Johnson family estate’s guesthouse, Keith had arrived at Goodtime Charley’s with pretty Barbara Miller, who was nineteen, and lived in Yardley, Pennsylvania, not far from Princeton.
After drinking and getting high, Keith, who was developing something of a reputation for being rough and abusive with women, had gotten into a loud argument with his date, Eric Ryan had heard, and the two, having a yelling match, raced off in his Porsche.
“I was behind him and he just zoomed off at an amazing rate of speed and we eventually caught up with him down the road,” recalls Taylor. “Unfortunately, his car was upside down and he and my friend, Barbara, were thrown out of the car and spilled out all over the road, and the car was basically upside down and a total wreck. They had terrible injuries. She was in really bad shape. They came real close to dying, and it was just Keith’s typical craziness and irresponsibility that caused it.”
The headline in the June 7, 1972, issue of the weekly Princeton Packet newspaper read: “2 Injured As Car Hits Rt. 27 Tree.”
The story reported that Keith’s 1971 Porsche was headed west on the Princeton-Kingston Road at 1:07 A.M. “when his car left the pavement and hit a tree. The car was totally wrecked.”
Keith and his date were taken to Princeton Medical Center. She had received lacerations on her right arm and contusions on her forehead, while Keith suffered a fractured jaw and neck, according to the Princeton Township Police department’s initial report.
A subsequent newspaper account in the Town Topics newspaper on June 8, with the headline, “Sports Car Totaled,” said that Keith’s Porsche had actually hit two trees that were forty feet apart after missing a curve in the road. Keith had suffered a fractured vertebra and fractured jaw, and his date had suffered multiple head injuries. The impact was so intense that the Porsche’s right rear wheel was sheared off and found fifty feet away.
Taylor remembers that the girl “was in really bad shape. It took her years to recover, and a lot of surgeries.”
It was believed that the Johnsons
were sued by her family.
After Keith was released from the hospital, his jaw was wired shut for a number of months.
“At one point he could hardly eat, and that’s what started him on pain pills,” says Anita Tiburzi Johnson, who had married a Johnson dynasty cousin, Stephen Johnson. “Keith told me how he got hooked on pain pills after the accident. He could only eat soft foods, and he talked about how much pain he was in. He looked like he was wearing braces.”
Keith had given others a different story about his wired jaw, boasting that he had his jaw intentionally broken for cosmetic purposes, and then rebuilt so it would look like the signature chin of a famous actor closely related to the Johnson dynasty: Kirk Douglas.
With millions of trust fund dollars at his disposal, Keith had purchased a twelve-cylinder, signature red Ferrari Daytona, of which a limited number were ever produced. The car was considered so iconic and rare that a replica of it was featured in the popular 1970s TV program Miami Vice. Keith’s was a true racing car, and not easy to handle.
There was just one problem. Keith couldn’t drive it.
“He’d stall it at every traffic light because of the clutch pressure,” says Ryan. “He would buy things that he had no use for, but he bought them because they were icons of wealth, prestige, and status.”
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Keith Wold Johnson had had little formal education beyond high school. For primary school and part of junior high, he had followed his brother Woody and gone to Princeton Country Day, which was aptly described by one graduate as “an exclusive school in a privileged community, which meant that kids got Porsches for their first cars.”
Famous and infamous PCD graduates through the years included Christopher Reeve, the singer Mary Chapin Carpenter, and the parent killers Lyle and Erik Menendez.
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 23