“Betty married somebody who they all hated,” Seward Jr. asserts. “Gillespie was an aggressive, social-climbing guy. He was distasteful and I could not understand her vulnerability to him. I was vice president of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton and they”—Betty and Gillespie—“supported one of the plays, and I went there with them, and he kind of steered me by the shoulder and I just reached up and took his hand and threw it away. I found him so repelling.”
Even worse, according to Seward, Betty’s children—Woody, Keith, Libet, Billy, and Christopher, but especially Keith—“hated him,” he asserts. “They hated him, and they called him Hitler.”
Rather than move together into a new home free of the memories that Betty had with Bobby Johnson for some three decades of marriage—the good and the bad—she invited Gillespie to move into her estate at 108 Edgerstoune Road, which he did, selling his own family home in Princeton.
By the time of his mother’s marriage, Keith was living large with his trust fund millions and mostly on his own in the guesthouse of the Johnson’s Bay Colony estate in Fort Lauderdale. But he was furious at his mother, irrationally so, almost as if Gillespie had stolen her away from him. Of her four sons, he was considered a mama’s boy.
It became a family psychodrama of immense proportions.
“Keith hated Eugene Gillespie—hated, hated, hated him—and it created a great deal of tension between he and his mother, and Keith was the ringleader of his siblings’ hate, too,” says his cousin Eric Ryan. “He felt it was inappropriate for his mother to remarry so quickly, and Eugene had children by a prior marriage and there was a sense on Keith’s part that the Gillespie children were displacing the Johnson children in the household, and that did not go down well with the Johnson kids.”
In fact, Betty was being overly protective of the pre-Gillespie Johnson domain. When Gillespie’s daughter, George Ann, in her teens, returned to Princeton from France where she had been staying with family friends, working on her art, she butted heads with Betty, according to Betty’s woman friend. “Gene’s daughter came home from France to see her dad and his new wife and Betty gave her a very nice room. I know George Ann said to Betty, ‘Oh, this is so nice, I’m going to call my friend, a girlfriend, to show it to her.’ But Betty said, ‘This is my house, and you won’t have anybody in here who I don’t know and approve of.’ Betty was very private and possessive in that way, and tough, so tough she scares me.”
Still, Keith seethed at his mother’s marriage, and their relationship had become resentful.
“Before Betty married Gillespie, there was already tension between her and Keith because of his lifestyle, because of his not being gainfully employed, because of him being sort of profligate in his spending,” asserts Ryan.
But her marriage to Gillespie sent Keith over the edge.
“I remember Keith saying that he couldn’t stand it that Gillespie was sitting in his father’s chair, and sleeping in his father’s bed,” recounts Ryan.
And when Keith, who was car-crazy, learned that Gillespie was driving one of his late father’s prized autos, the Mercedes-Benz 600, he actually tried to destroy it.
“He went out and wrecked the car when they were in Florida early in the marriage,” says Ryan. Feeling guilty and fearful of the consequences, “he managed to get all of the body work and repairs done without his mother being aware that the car had been damaged.”
* * *
Keith Wold Johnson had become even more of a menace to himself and to others, doing more drugs, destroying more cars, and having even more bizarre relationships with women than ever before.
Betty, then beginning her new life with Gene Gillespie, wasn’t aware, or chose not to get involved.
Keith’s near-fatal accident in his Porsche in Princeton, which left him and his date seriously injured, was the only one that had ever become public. On another extraordinary occasion, in Florida, he drove a new BMW coupe onto the beach in Pompano while he was on an apparent LSD trip. He was with a girl at the time and had dropped the acid to watch the sunset. But the new car had gotten mired in the sand and when the tide came in, the expensive German import was swept away, and he was too stoned to do anything to save it.
“Keith wrecked innumerable fast cars,” Eric Ryan says, “something over a dozen. The cars were practically disposable in Keith’s case. There was a canary yellow Mercedes roadster that he had and within weeks, it was turned upside down on one of the back roads in Princeton. That inability on his part to do effective risk management in his life seemed to me to forecast his [eventual] drug overdose.”
According to Fort Lauderdale Police Department records Keith received two traffic warrants on the same day in February of 1972, and in July 1974 he was charged as an “incompetent driver.” The cases, with no details given, were listed on an arrest card with an FBI number of “802712J2,” and an arrest number of “ID*80159.” The card gave his description and noted that he had “braces on top and bottom teeth,” probably related to his broken jaw from the accident in Princeton.
When Keith was seen with women they were usually spectacularly beautiful and mostly on his arm in order to show them off.
At the same time, he also had a lot of rage toward women, according to people in his circle.
“Keith became aggressive with women at parties after having ingested drugs and alcohol—the women’s clothes torn, that sort of thing,” asserts Ryan. “It was his misdirected sexuality, his anger towards women, his feeling that he was in a public role where he had to be amorous, but feeling repulsed by the women themselves. It was a whole complicated thing. There was a whole self-destructive spiral that was manifesting itself in his relationships with women, his relationships with automobiles, and his relationship with wealth.”
At one point, around 1973, when his mother was getting remarried, Keith invited a pretty young woman to accompany him to France—all first class, all expenses paid, in one of the best cabins—aboard the luxury ocean liner SS France, the flagship of the French Line, sailing from New York to Le Havre. The girl, who expected a romantic voyage, and might even have had visions of marrying into the young Band-Aid heir’s dynasty, was vastly disappointed. The first night out, Keith drank himself into a stupor and threw up on her shoes, and they never slept together the entire voyage.
“My understanding is that he ended up having to get his own cabin, and when the ship landed in Le Havre, she got the train to Paris and got on a plane home,” says Ryan. “Keith had these grand romantic gestures, but they weren’t really based on wanting to have arm candy.”
Of the ill-fated trip Keith later boasted how many glasses of Rémy Martin he had that had made him ill—and how that “damn bitch didn’t understand, and got all upset over a little vomit on her shoes.”
For a time Keith dated the glamorous sister, Jane, of his best friend from childhood, Neil Vicino, whom they all thought had movie-star looks. “Keith’s feelings for Jane were stronger than hers for him, and of course Jane was something very nice to have on your arm, like a Liz Taylor lookalike,” observes Neil many years later.
Jane was well aware of Keith’s troubles with cars, drugs, and women. When they were dating he once took her to the elegant Club International in Fort Lauderdale, the city’s first true society hangout that had yacht slips and catered to stars like Johnny Carson and Paul Newman when they were in town. But instead of a romantic candlelight dinner Keith got smashed and when they got out to the parking lot someone had flattened the tire on one of his many exotic cars. Because he couldn’t figure out how to change it, Jane had to get on her knees and do it.
Her gay brother, Guy, also the brother to John and Neil Vicino, actually stepped in and ended the relationship. “He was very intuitive to problems that were occurring with Keith,” recalls John. “We all smoked a little pot back then, but Guy could see that more was happening with Keith in terms of drugs.”
Jane had started seeing a distant Johnson cousin, Stephen Johnson, who was her date t
he evening of her brother Neil Vicino’s 1972 wedding party at Windows on the World on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center.
When Keith arrived, offending Neil and his bride by not bringing a gift, he was infuriated to find Jane with Stephen. Keith stormed out, bringing a few members of the wedding party with him with a promise of getting high, and they got stoned in a car parked in a nearby lot. One of them, however, soon returned to the party and was asked by another guest, “Did you guys smoke a J?” The one who had accompanied Keith said, “No, he wanted to turn me on to cocaine and I just shook my head and walked away.”
Like his brother Woody, Keith had developed a very close friendship with the tall, dark, and handsome Guy Vicino.
Woody had met Guy at Princeton Country Day School and they had become lifelong friends. When Woody went off to Millbrook, Guy prepped at the exclusive Lawrenceville School near Princeton where one of his housemates was Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, who later became Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States. It was a relationship that Guy often boasted about later in life.
When Woody went out to Arizona, Guy Vicino went to Boston College, then transferred to the University of Miami, class of 1968, where Woody’s first wife, Nancy Sale Frey, also matriculated, class of 1971. After college, and to escape the Vietnam War draft, he joined the U.S. Coast Guard, where he had homosexual encounters during his two-year enlistment. When he returned from active duty, he began living what his brother John termed “a sheltered gay life. He wasn’t out there with Rainbow Coalition stickers.”
Keith and Guy had much in common—dandified clothing, exotic cars, decorating, all expensive and fashionable. “From the time he was a kid,” says his brother Neil, “Guy always wanted the best. He was very much into keeping up with the Johnsons as opposed to keeping up with the Joneses. It caused strife within our family.”
Guy also had a very curious relationship with his sister, Jane, which especially intrigued Keith, and may have been one of the reasons why he was attracted to her beyond her good looks. Of the four Vicino siblings, Guy was closest to Jane and, says Neil, “Guy wanted to be seen with her on his arm. Guy would literally dress Jane when she was in her teens so she looked like she was twenty-five, and he would take her out on dates.”
But Guy, described by Neil as “flamboyant but not effeminate,” wasn’t simply dolling up and glamorizing his sister to use as a beard in order to make people believe that he was straight; he had a far different and twisted motive.
“He would take her out to show her off because it might be a way for Guy to attract young men [to him, not her],” asserts Neil. He was convinced that Guy was using his sister as bait. “It was a gay thing to do,” observes Neil. “Jane went along with it because she was treated like a princess.”
Keith Johnson had found Jane and Guy’s kinky relationship right up his alley, and he emulated it in his own way. He dated attractive women so they’d be on his arm for show-and-tell.
* * *
Looking back years later, Eric Ryan thinks it “fair” to describe his cousin Keith as a closeted homosexual.
Keith’s supposed sexual preference was “generally accepted” by his parents and siblings, but wasn’t discussed. “Maybe,” Ryan suggests, “there was some belief that if he met the right girl, she would straighten him out.”
Not everyone thought like Ryan, however, including Keith’s sister-in-law-to-be, Nancy Sale Frey Johnson Rashad, who years later says, “He was definitely not gay, and that never occurred to me in a million years.” But she knew Keith for only a short time before he died while she was dating Woody. She considered Keith a “fabulous renaissance man, far ahead of his time and age, and he definitely was into girls. Woody and I went on trips with him with dates. I knew the girls, we talked, and there was definitely a sexual relationship. Maybe he was bisexual and I never realized it.”
Keith once boasted to a friend that his first heterosexual experience, during which he lost his virginity, was with a Parisian prostitute while he was taking his grand tour of Europe after finally graduating from prep school.
In dress and style, Keith resembled a 1970s version of the character Waldo Lydecker, a pretentious dandy played by Clifton Webb in the 1944 film noir Laura, in which the divaesque gossip columnist is so obsessed with the character Laura Hunt, played by Gene Tierney, that he attempts to murder her—twice—because she desires more masculine men.
Keith dressed expensively like the Lydecker character. In the 1970s era of shaggy-haired twenty-somethings wearing ragged bellbottoms and denim work shirts, he had closets full of handsomely tailored clothing—most, if not all of it, of the bespoke Saville Row variety. But there were several pieces that stood out that only Liberace might have been caught wearing. One was Keith’s one-of-a-kind Burberry-style trench coat that was lined with the skins of some 150 hamsters.
The other piece in Keith’s closet that raised eyebrows was a pretentious and costly motorcycle jacket designed for him by Pierre Cardin, not Harley-Davidson.
If anyone was ready for the Front Row, it was the Band-Aid heir.
With his trust fund money, Keith bought silver cigarette cases, Cartier lighters, Tiffany cuff links, and didn’t even think about spending hundreds of dollars on a simple cotton button-down shirt as long as it had a fancy designer label, items that most young people weren’t thinking about when they were mobilizing back then against the war, or yelling “Black Power!”
Like the fictional Lydecker, who was obsessed by the beautiful Laura Hunt character, Keith had become consumed by another gorgeous fantasy: the glamorous French actress Catherine Deneuve, who was six years his senior, and had appeared in such kinky films as Repulsion, in which she played a woman who had LSD-like hallucinations, and The Hunger, which has a lesbian love scene.
Deneuve was a gay icon of sorts, in the realm of Liza Minnelli and Judy Garland. She once provocatively posed on the cover of a French gay male magazine with a nude male model, and reportedly was the sexy inspiration for a lesbian publication actually called Deneuve.
Keith had become so fixated on her that he had planned to throw a fancy dinner party for some fifty guests at his private dining club if she attended. He began making plans for her arrival and had purchased a white tuxedo for his fantasy evening.
“Keith thought she was gorgeous, beautiful, stylish,” recalls Eric Ryan. “It was never quite so overt as him saying, ‘Oh, what a great outfit she’s wearing, I wish I could wear that kind of outfit, too,’ but kind of along those lines.”
Whether Deneuve ever responded to Keith’s invitation, or whether the party was ever held, was never made clear.
But Keith’s brother Woody and their gay pal Guy Vicino had disparagingly branded him with the nickname “Catherine Deneuve-Nanette Fabray,” according to Sale Johnson.
Not all of Keith Wold Johnson’s desires and acquisitions were completely frivolous.
Aside from the exotic and fast cars that he bought and usually wrecked, he had purchased a classic sailing ketch that he named the Sea Prince, which was usually anchored in Fort Lauderdale. Keith had bought it with the help of Guy Vicino, who had been working as a yacht salesman and interior decorator of yachts for Charles P. Irwin Yacht Brokerage, in Fort Lauderdale.
But it was on Woody rather than Keith that Guy always focused.
“Guy talked about Woody all the time—‘I was at his house for dinner, I was this with Woody, I was that with Woody, or we did this, or Woody did that.’ They were very close,” recalls Irwin.
Keith had staffed the Sea Prince with an experienced captain, whom Eric Ryan met and says was gay. Keith made certain the captain looked the nautical part, and had him outfitted in a crisp white uniform—a shirt with epaulets, white shorts with a sharp crease—that was appropriate for the waters off of Florida, the Caribbean, and the British West Indies, where Keith liked to sail.
Ryan had sailed with Keith and was knocked out by the Sea Prince’s detail—all burled wood—construction, and t
he decorating. “The cabinetry below deck had bird’s-eye maple, teak joinery around the bunks, and strips of mahogany held the foam mattress pads in place. It was a gorgeous boat that would have been in a lot of cocktail table picture books of sailboats.”
Ryan had conversations with the captain, who told him that Keith “had no real desire to learn to sail,” and that he was “never going to attempt to steer the Sea Prince into a harbor. Keith didn’t care about that. What he cared about was that the Sea Prince was his boat.”
Keith had also put as much as seven million dollars of his trust fund millions into a more speculative enterprise, the search for gold bullion and treasure from Spanish galleons that were sunk off the coast of Florida. The treasure hunt was a good investment and supposedly paid off to the tune of about thirty million dollars in bullion that was discovered in a sunken galleon. A court battle reportedly ensued with the state of Florida, which wanted part of the take because the treasure had been found within the state’s territorial waters, and a fifty-fifty split was said to have been negotiated.
On the advice of his financial advisors, Keith also invested wisely in a budding new consumer communications business in South Florida. It was called cable television, a business his brother Woody later inherited and parlayed into many millions of dollars in value and profit.
36
Betty Johnson’s marriage to Eugene Gillespie was in trouble almost from the start. Not only did her children and members of the larger Johnson dynasty despise him—unjustifiably for the most part—but Betty herself had come to the realization that she had not gotten over the loss of Bobby, and had clearly made a mistake leaping again so quickly into a second marriage.
“She was still so wrapped up in Johnson and Johnson and still clearly in love with Bobby, and Gene was saying that it was driving him crazy,” says a person who was close to the couple. “He told me, ‘I can’t get Betty to come out and be social. I can’t get her to move, and I can’t get her to stop thinking about the fact that her husband died.’ He also was concerned because Betty would not cry, and Gene said that if she just let all that emotional stuff come out she might heal. He felt she was still emotionally paralyzed. He was just trying to make her part of his life, but was getting sort of fed up.”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 25