Because at least two of her sons and their father went there, Betty Johnson was a big supporter of the school. She was later named trustee emerita.
Keith began classes at Millbrook School on September 18, 1964, with four of his PCD classmates, when Woody was starting his senior year there.
According to Millbrook’s 1965 Tamarack yearbook, which carried a blurb and photos of Keith’s freshman class of some forty students, “… it was apparent that this form was definitely unique—a fact which foreshadowed an extremely interesting year … In the dorm they fell prey to a ceaseless barrage of reports” that resulted in punishments, dropouts, and expulsions, and “… they met the hardy resistance of upper formers…”
Because Keith had such low grades at PCD, he and a few, if not all, of his Princeton clique were admitted to Millbrook with a special condition.
“We all were accepted if we did ninth grade all over again,” says the de facto leader of the Princeton pack, James Field Delano, known as Jeff, whose father was a principal in the Applied Science Corporation of Princeton, which developed and advanced airplane telemetry. “We did one ninth grade at Princeton Country Day, and we did the ninth grade again at Millbrook.”
Keith desperately required tutoring help. His academic underachievement had come to the attention of Millbrook’s founder, Edward Pulling, then in his last year as headmaster before taking his retirement. With a wealthy and powerful family like the Johnsons on the books for future endowments and contributions, Pulling took a special interest in seeing that Keith made it through by having him tutored.
He had asked a bright sophomore, Fred Lowell—the future head of the political law department at a prestigious California law firm—to tutor him. “The Johnson family paid me, and I would spend time with Keith, helping him. It was kind of unusual, that sort of tutoring, but apparently he needed help. Keith just struck me as very average, very quiet, kind of shy. I wouldn’t know how he would turn out.”
With his blondish hair, pale white skin, and a bad case of acne, Keith had an ethereal Warholesque countenance, and to many of his classmates he was an enigma. To classmates like ski team captain Brian Sisselman, Keith seemed like a hollow shell. “There was nothing there. There was no there, there. There was absolutely no personality,” he recalls.
“Keith was skinny, not muscular, and he was somewhat soft,” states one of the few boys in Keith’s class with whom he had bonded. “I wouldn’t call him necessarily manly. Some guys shaved early, some guys had hair on their chests. He didn’t have any of that.”
To Jeff Delano, who had quickly earned a reputation as the Millbrook “class clown,” Keith “was a little effeminate in the way he walked, the way he talked. I was a big athlete. Keith was different.”
The image people had of the Johnson heir was underscored very publicly, and with hilarity, by the entire school one evening early in his freshman year.
One of Millbrook’s long-standing traditions for “bennies,” as the third-form freshmen were called, required them to participate in a lighthearted evening of skits produced and directed for the most part by the sixth-form seniors. The skit that senior George Nathan Cowan Jr. directed, which featured Keith Johnson and two other third-formers, was considered the laugh riot of the show.
“It was about a vampire who comes to a guy’s house and steals his wife,” recalls Cowan. “The punch line is, as the vampire is running away with the wife, he says to the husband, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll bring her back when she’s empty.’”
The scene got lots of laughs, and especially raucous cheers for Cowan’s diabolical casting because it underscored something about Keith’s persona that many had perceived.
“The guy who played the wife was this really big guy, and I specifically cast him as the female because he was so big,” says Cowan, scion of a Wall Street family, still chuckling about the skit and the players more than four decades later. “The wife was played for laughs and the vampire was played for laughs. And Keith played the straight guy, the husband. Keith had effeminate mannerisms, especially in his speech, and that’s the main reason I cast him as the husband, because it was definitely funnier than if he played the wife.”
Keith became the brunt of some teasing—the sophomoric but hurtful slang terms “faggot” and “queer” were whispered, or hurled in his direction.
Millbrook was a far different place in the 1960s than it had been in the 1940s when William F. Buckley Jr. was a student, the editor of the National Review later claimed in an essay about his alma mater called “God and Boys at Millbrook.” Published in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, October 4, 1981, he wrote, “Millbrook encouraged a civility among its students. There was practically no bullying, and when an instance of it was uncovered Mr. Pulling dramatically announced at the morning prayer session that he would close down the doors of the school rather than tolerate such stuff.”
* * *
Drugs had entered the scene at Millbrook, and Keith Johnson and a couple of other boys had started getting together to smoke marijuana. It would only get worse for him.
Like some Stephen Kingish nightmare, the staid and cloistered Millbrook School had also suddenly found itself at ground zero of the sixties psychedelic revolution when, in the fall of 1963, Dr. Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor who was the leading proponent of the hallucinatory drug LSD, moved to the bucolic town of Millbrook, and became a neighbor of the school when the Johnson scions, Woody and Keith, were students there.
Leary’s anthem was “turn on, tune in, drop out,” and Keith Johnson, with a budding serious addictive personality, along with a few other Millbrook students, became quasi adherents.
At least one of Keith’s classmates, with whom he was said to have turned on at Leary’s, later succumbed from too much tripping. Another committed suicide. And Keith himself would have a fatal drug overdose.
In his essay about his alma mater, Buckley noted that “Timothy Leary ran a kind of anti–Millbrook School for drug users until the elders finally ran him out…”
Leary’s Xanadu was set behind gates at the edge of town, not far from the Millbrook campus. “I remember seeing the flashing lights,” recalls Keith’s class president Mark Smith, one of the first two black students admitted to Millbrook. “Leary’s house was right over the hill.”
With Leary in residence, the party was nonstop under the guise of studying the effects of LSD. One of the great snake oil salesman of the twentieth century, Leary, who Richard Nixon termed “the most dangerous man in America,” named the Millbrook estate the Castalia Institute, which was part of his “League of Spiritual Discovery,” its acronym, LSD.
Along with the LSD there was sex—lots of it. One, it seemed, couldn’t be consumed without the other. Leary and his acid attracted scores of beautiful, liberated young women, many of them chic high-fashion models—one of the most beautiful of all was five-foot-nine Eileen Ford model Nena von Schlebrugge—a Vogue cover girl who married Leary. She was the mother of Uma Thurman, who was one of four children fathered by another husband after Leary.
The drugs, the free love, all of it was a natural aphrodisiac for young people, virginal teens like Keith Johnson and a few of his more rebellious, druggie classmates.
At Leary’s place, they were the kids in the candy store.
Pulling, the headmaster, proclaimed Leary was “off-limits to everybody,” recalls Keith’s classmate Phil Ross. “He said something like, ‘Nobody is allowed to be there, and they will be dealt with harshly if they’re found out to be there.’”
It didn’t take long before the national press, learning of the goings-on in the small Hudson Valley New York village, began running stories about the guru and his drug. The New York Times ran a lengthy piece in a column called “The Talk of Millbrook” that was headlined “Leary Drug Cult Stirs Millbrook, Uneasy Village Fears Influx of Addicts.”
The townspeople were angry and scared and had wanted to march on the Leary estate like the torch-bearing frightened
peasants in the Frankenstein story.
Millbrook was an easy getaway from the fashionable Manhattan avenues of Park and Fifth, and the manicured estates of Princeton, and for as long as anyone could remember, the town had been on the high-society map for the horsey set, the foxhunt crowd, and the gentleman farmer. The Johnsons would always keep close ties to Millbrook. Woody and Keith’s sister, Libet Johnson, bought an immense estate in the town. From the air in her private helicopter, her property resembled a small town, as one of her many boyfriends later remembered it, because it was so sprawling, and there were so many buildings on the land beyond the spectacular main house.
In mid-April of 1966, local authorities, convinced all kinds of laws were being broken, raided the Leary estate, an assault that in part was orchestrated by the Dutchess County, New York, assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy, a onetime FBI agent, who would gain infamy and a prison sentence as one of President Nixon’s Watergate burglars. In his 1996 autobiography, Will, Liddy stated that, “Local boys and girls had been seen entering and leaving the estate. Fleeting glimpses were reported of persons strolling the grounds in the nude. To fears of drug-induced dementia were added pot-induced pregnancy. The word was that at Leary’s lair the panties were dropping as fast as the acid.”
At the time of the raid, more than two dozen men and women were found lolling, or more, on mattresses.
Among some of the Millbrook boys attending Leary’s trippy bacchanal to turn on along with Keith was the co-editor in chief of the 1968 Tamarack yearbook, Christopher Reilly Praeger. His yearbook page had a psychedelic drawing of a face with a tulip growing out of its right eye, a quote from Bob Dylan, and the LSD-related line, “Our first trip together was a real goof!” Another was Sigourney Thayer of the yearbook’s literary department, who had Mansonesque glaring eyes on his page, and the identical “first trip” caption under his photo.
After he was caught smoking marijuana and booted out, Praeger, the son of the architect who had designed Shea Stadium, the original home of the New York Jets, went mad from too many LSD trips and was later found dead in a pond in Colorado. His family placed the blame on Leary for turning him on. Two years after attending Woodstock, Thayer blew his brains out with a shotgun “because he was hearing voices, and he had been doing acid,” according to his Millbrook classmate Sherwin Harris.
Around the time the local authorities led by Liddy were planning to raid Timothy Leary’s headquarters, Keith Johnson had suddenly vanished from Millbrook School before he completed his second year there.
“He just took off, and was gone,” recalls classmate Stephen Gidley, who was himself expelled from Millbrook for infractions. “Christmas vacation ended and there was no Keith. It was so unusual a disappearance. There was no good-bye, nothing. When he took off and didn’t come back I thought to myself, he is one of the strangest people, and I think the whole class reacted similarly. He just left like he was never connected.”
Keith completed his remaining high school years in Florida, where his father was ill. He graduated in June 1968 from the six-year-old private Saint Andrew’s School, an Episcopal academy in Boca Raton that was named for the patron saint of Scotland, and was mainly attended by rich kids who played lots of sports and drove expensive convertibles. Most of its notable alumni were jocks—golfers and tennis players such as Jennifer Capriati, who spent just one term there. Its campus during Keith’s matriculation was used by the Miami Dolphins of the National Football League as the team’s training camp.
Sherwin Harris, art editor of the class of 1968 Tamarack yearbook, included an “In Memory” page of all the people from the class “who had been tossed out,” or had quit, and the montage included a snapshot of Keith Johnson, seen reading a paperback copy of Harold Robbins bestseller The Carpetbaggers, which the critic for The Times complained “should have been inscribed on the walls of a public lavatory,” noting that it was filled with “a collection of monotonous episodes about normal and abnormal sex.”
35
Betty May Wold Johnson was considered one of the most attractive and eligible widows in the town of Princeton in the very early years of the 1970s. In her early fifties, still slender after five pregnancies, blond and coiffed, she was a millionairess many times over, possessed a huge block of Johnson & Johnson stock, and had a lovely estate in town, as well as another on Florida’s Gold Coast. And while she had problems with some members of her brood—Woody and Keith in particular—life for her was returning to normal after the torturous death of her husband, Bobby, in late 1970.
In the wake of his passing, she was said to have traveled on cultural trips to such places as China and Venice through a Princeton University program that arranged educational excursions for wealthy potential donors as a way of cultivating relationships.
Then she met a man.
Eugene P. Gillespie, tall, good-looking, charming, was one of the most eligible widowers in Princeton. His artist wife, George Ann, had died of cancer in the summer of 1972. The father of three—two young adult sons, Peter and William, and a daughter, her mother’s namesake and also an artist—Gene Gillespie had been a Princeton University graduate, class of 1940, of which he was president, and a high-ranking career army officer. After a year at the University of Virginia law school, the Second World War came along and he served with distinction with the Artillery Corps, and then as a pilot in Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany. At one point, he was General Mark Clark’s personal pilot. After the war he earned a regular army commission.
During the Kennedy administration, when the buildup for the Vietnam War began, he and his family were sent to Cambodia for a two-year hardship tour, and lived in Phnom Penh as part of MAG, the Military Advisory Group. At Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, he was commander of the Target Acquisition Department of the army’s missile school. He was awarded the Legion of Merit medal for “outstanding achievement in the most cherished traditions of the United States Army.”
Having risen to the rank of full colonel, he subsequently was offered the position of aide to George Samuel Blanchard, a four-star army general, who also was the godfather to Gillespie’s daughter. Gillespie turned down the post because it involved long days and much travel, and he wanted to settle in one place after years of military service, and that place, when he retired in 1964, was Princeton.
That was the official story of his esteemed career. A family confidante had a somewhat different take, which was that Gillespie ended his career mostly because he had become opposed to the Vietnam War. “They told Gene, ‘You’re going to be a general and it’s going to be wonderful, and we’re going to make you [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara’s desk officer.’ But Gene said, ‘I’ve been to Cambodia, I know what’s going on.’ He said, ‘I will not do that,’ and they said, ‘Well, you’ll have to leave the army.’”
Whichever way it happened, Gillespie honorably retired and returned to his alma mater, Princeton, as an administrator and fundraiser, and became active in the Princeton community as trustee of the Medical Center at Princeton, helping bring in contributions for the McCarter Theatre, and was active in the Princeton Club of New York.
All in all, Gillespie seemed to have all the right stuff for a strong woman like Betty Johnson, herself in the military during World War II as a WAVE.
“When he worked for Princeton, he was doing alumni relations, which was basically fundraising and planning, so he got back in touch with all of his classmates at reunions,” says his son Peter, who became a home builder. “One of them knew Betty and introduced them, and they went out together for several months and decided they would get married.”
As a woman friend of Betty notes, “She was on her own after Bob died, and the next thing we knew Gene and Betty found each other. Gene was attractive to Betty. He had traveled all over the world, he was charming and elegant, and he was very social—and she fell for him. The two went out a number of times. Gene wasn’t wealthy, but Betty sure was, and when he married her, it was, well, la de d
ah, and the rest is history.”
But Betty’s marriage to Gillespie was never really a part of the Johnson dynasty’s history, at least publicly.
It had always been kept very quiet.
There was never a wedding announcement in The New York Times, such as one would expect for such a marriage, because, as Peter Gillespie says, “Betty and the Johnsons guard their privacy.” Betty was not known to have even used the Gillespie surname during the marriage. Gillespie’s obituary in the October 25, 2006, issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly—he died May 31, 2006, at the age of eighty-seven—made no mention that he had even been married to the Johnson & Johnson heiress and mother of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson. “Gene lost his first wife, George Ann, to cancer in 1972,” the obituary states. “He found ‘a new life companion’ in Sara Tiedman, his second wife. Golf, bridge, and travel, including winters spent in Florida and Antigua, were their pastimes.”
His life with Betty Johnson—and it was turbulent—had all but disappeared from his biography. And even more so from hers.
Only his obituary in one of the local Princeton newspapers, which had heard the news of his marriage to the Johnson & Johnson widow through the grapevine but never published anything about it, did report, “His second marriage, to Betty Johnson, ended in divorce.” That was one of the very rare times that the two had been linked publicly.
Betty’s very quiet second marriage took place in July 1973. While she had waited some thirty months after Bobby died to take the big plunge, Gillespie tied the knot with her just twelve months after the death of his first wife and mother of his children.
“My dad liked being married, so I wasn’t shocked that he did it so fast after my mother died,” says his artist daughter, George Ann Gillespie Fox. “I was very pleased he had found somebody to love, and who loved him enough to marry him. I was just happy for him.”
But Betty’s decision, and especially her choice for husband number two, had little, if any support from members of the Johnson dynasty to whom she had always been so loyal. In fact, a number of them, like the sculptor Seward Johnson Jr., were shocked by her decision.
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 24