For Betty, it would only get worse, much worse.
In the third week of March 1975, around St. Patrick’s Day, her sons, Woody, now twenty-seven and involved in a land and condo development business in South Florida, and twenty-six-year-old Keith, who was still doing drugs and living self-indulgently, were together on a ten-day cruise aboard the Sea Prince in the British Antilles where Keith had a small circle of friends, some of whom were thought to be involved in the drug trade.
On Sunday, March 23, Woody would later tell the police, the brothers returned by plane through Miami, and Keith rented a car to drive them back to Fort Lauderdale where Woody was now living.
The next day, Monday, March 24, Keith, who had decided to move back to the mainland presumably at Woody’s behest, drove to an apartment complex at 90 Isle of Venice Drive—one of the palm-tree-lined fingers of land surrounded by water with docks off of Los Olas Boulevard, in Fort Lauderdale—to look at a small, furnished first-floor motel-like apartment. With Keith was a well-to-do friend, Roger McMullen, who suggested that he rent the unit from the owners, Tracy and Catherine Geiger. He signed the lease on the spot rather than move back into the guesthouse at Bay Colony because he was still very much at odds with his mother over her marriage to Gene Gillespie.
The following Thursday, March 27, Keith and McMullen returned the rental car to Miami and picked up Keith’s Mercedes that he had stored in a warehouse in Port Everglades.
That night, Woody, whose twenty-eighth birthday was just a few days away, had dinner with Keith.
It was the last time he would see his brother alive.
The next morning, Good Friday, March 28, Keith moved into his new rental.
During the day on Saturday and into the early morning hours of Easter Sunday, Keith’s television could be heard blaring nonstop. Concerned, his landlady, Mrs. Geiger, and her husband knocked on his door, asking if he wanted to go out for breakfast. When they got no response they tried to enter but saw that the door was bolted with a chain lock, which they removed from its hinges, and entered the apartment. What they found caused Mrs. Geiger to let out a scream, like a scene in a television crime drama.
The “narrative summary of circumstances surrounding death,” as documented in the “Report of investigation by medical examiner, Seventeenth District In and For Broward County, Florida,” stated that “Keith Wold Johnson, age 26; race, white; sex, male; marital status, single; occupation, executive; home address, 108 Edgerstoune Road, Princeton, N.J., was found dead lying on his face, completely nude.
“Rigor had set in. Lividity was on the front of the body. There was [a one-inch by one-third inch] abrasion on the chin. A syringe was found lying on the floor in a closet [off the living room] with a spoon containing white powder. A plastic bag with white powder was also found near the syringe. The body showed [at least three] injection marks [that appeared to be fresh] on the antecubital fossae [the elbow pit of both arms.] Nothing was missing from the apartment.”
A local newspaper, the Sun-Sentinel, reported that “Robert Johnson”—Woody—had been questioned by police, and he had told them that “he did not know his brother used drugs,” which was not true. As Sale Johnson notes years later, “Woody knew Keith smoked pot. I don’t think he knew he did drugs like cocaine, and that’s what killed him.”
With his denial, Woody was clearly making a valiant effort to protect the Johnson dynasty name and his brother’s legacy.
In the recent past, he had expressed anger about Keith’s use of drugs, and might even have known, or suspected, the identity of his drug connection, according to Michael Richard Spielvogel, Woody’s business partner in Woodric Enterprises, their fledgling South Florida investment and development company. “Bob [Spielvogel never called him Woody] was always so violently upset about his reckless brothers doing drugs, especially Keith. It ate up Bob. I once saw him put his hand through the solid wood door in our office, he was so mad. It happened to do with whoever supplied Keith the goods, and it was somebody that maybe Bob knew. He was furious.
“Before Keith’s death,” continues Spielvogel, “there was talk on more than one occasion about him going into rehab. I know Bob tried. It wasn’t that Keith died and the family said, oh, we didn’t know he was doing drugs. They knew it. I would have thought he could have been saved because of all the family money, and put in rehab, and coveted more, instead of letting him loose on society.”
But Betty Johnson’s marriage to Eugene Gillespie two years before Keith’s death was said to have created such a “wedge” between Keith and his mother that, asserts Eric Ryan, “Betty lost whatever influence she had over Keith’s behavior, and would not have been able to do an intervention or offer him professional help.”
It was Woody who was given the horrific responsibility of identifying his brother’s body. “It was devastating for him,” notes Sale Johnson.
According to the medical examiner’s report, Keith had died at approximately 11:15 P.M. on Friday, after having dinner earlier in the evening with his uncle, Dr. Keith Wold, for whom he was named. The wealthy ophthalmologist who had married into the Johnson family and was Keith’s mother’s brother told investigators that his nephew “was apparently all right” when he last saw him, which was the last time Keith was seen alive by anyone.
* * *
Dr. Wold, acting for his sister and the broader Johnson family, immediately used his influence with the right people around Fort Lauderdale to keep the story of his nephew’s troubled life and tragic death as contained as possible, thus reducing the chance of yet another very public scandal within the dynasty, and he was quite successful with his cover-up.
As Eric Ryan notes some thirty-five years later, “Dr. Wold was instrumental in keeping the lid on. He was pretty well connected in Fort Lauderdale society. He knew the right lawyers to call, the right politicians to call, the right journalists to call, to make sure the wishes of the Johnson family were respected.”
As a result, there were just a few short wire service dispatches about Keith’s death that ran mostly in small Florida newspapers and in the New York–New Jersey region where the Johnson family was well known.
A headline in the New York Post over an eight-paragraph story buried on page twenty-four read, “J&J Drug Heir Dies of Overdose.” The lead paragraph reported that Keith had been found “with a blue belt tied loosely around his forearm and a sack of cocaine nearby … Officers said the quantity of cocaine was small enough to be considered the average amount bought for personal use and not for resale.”
A three-paragraph United Press International story ran in The New York Times on April Fool’s Day with the headline, “Johnson & Johnson Heir Dies; Drug Overdose Is Hinted.”
The New York Daily News quoted a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson as stating that Keith “had never worked for the company and apparently lived on his investments.”
The dearth of coverage was remarkable, especially compared to the international headlines and commentaries after the death of Woody’s troubled daughter, Casey, some thirty-five years later.
When the Vicino family learned about Keith’s death, they were in a state of shock. “I can remember that I walked into the kitchen and my sister was crying, my mother and dad were all crying, and my dad kept shaking his head and saying, ‘I knew something was going to happen to that kid,’” recalls John Vicino.
If there was anything at the last dinner shared by Dr. Wold and his nephew that had caused Keith to go back to his newly rented apartment and put a fatal needle in his arm, it was probably related to Betty Johnson’s marriage. A well-connected family friend heard that Wold had heatedly lectured Keith and ordered him to control his anger regarding his mother’s second marriage, and that Keith was furious about being told what to do and had stormed off.
Eric Ryan, who was well aware of Keith’s use of drugs, maintains years later that Keith hadn’t been injecting cocaine for very long, just about three months.
On that Easter holiday weekend of t
he overdose, says Ryan, Keith had reached out to some people, saying that he had acquired a quantity of cocaine and wanted to party. But Keith had made himself persona non grata in that community because of his history of bad behavior, so he was left sitting home alone, depressed, and with his stash of toxic white powder.
“I believe it really was an accidental overdose on the basis that the coke that Keith had shot previously was street-quality coke, and the coke that he was able to buy in Florida—Miami then being the cocaine capital of the world—was much stronger and Keith really didn’t know how to do dosages, how to figure out what was going to give him a rush, but not kill him. I’ve always believed that it was death by misadventure, that Keith was just naïve about how to handle drugs.”
Others had different theories.
There was talk in law enforcement circles that Keith had gotten involved with a bad crowd in the British West Indies—that the Sea Prince was being used to transport drugs—and there were whispers that his overdose was actually a case of murder by one or more bad guys with whom he had become involved. And there was chatter among people who knew him well that he had actually committed suicide because he was unsuccessfully trying to deal with his sexual identity.
Keith’s death sparked a series of complex issues involving Occidental Insurance Company of California, which had written a “key man” policy on him for seven million dollars, and the Union Commerce Bank of Cleveland, which was the beneficiary for loans made to Keith’s company, American Video.
According to Woody’s business partner at the time, Michael Spielvogel, who had a background in the insurance business, “Keith didn’t disclose that he was a druggie and the insurance company found out about it and they didn’t want to pay the claim. If Keith had said he used drugs, he would not have gotten the policy. The contention was prove it—prove he used drugs. Everyone knew he did drugs, but that wasn’t proof—being arrested for drug use was proof. The burden of proof was on the insurance company.”
In the end, however, Occidental paid the bank $4.2 million.
Still later, there was a related case involving the Internal Revenue Service and Keith’s estate involving taxes.
After the autopsy, Keith’s body was returned to Princeton, and a couple of days later, a very private funeral service was held involving members of the Johnson family, some of Keith’s cousins, and a few of Keith’s friends.
Ryan, who was present with some of his siblings, says, “There was just so much shock over his death that nobody really knew what to do or say.”
Another family member observes, “It was so strange because nobody cried. The Johnsons are very stoic. They don’t show their emotions.”
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Keith Johnson’s death was naturally shocking and traumatic for his mother. Less than five years after her husband’s demise, Betty was emotionally paralyzed, but remained stoic. Hoping to help her get over this second blow, Eugene Gillespie suggested that they begin traveling and get out from under the dark cloud that now hung over the Johnson mansion on Edgerstoune Road in Princeton.
“They were trying to get over Keith’s death and they were trying to not go places where Keith had been,” says a person who was close to the couple. “Gene had friends who were in England and were taking care of a large, very beautiful estate and they invited them to come and stay as long as they wanted. Keith’s death was very traumatic for Gene, too. But he did convince Betty to come away with him and go to Europe. They left shortly after Keith’s funeral.”
Betty’s fourth-born, Billy, who had mourned at his brother’s funeral, was about to leave, too, to return to Hollywood, where he was living. Like everyone else in the tight Johnson circle, Billy was shattered by Keith’s tragic end. The two had been close even though Billy, born in 1952, was younger by four years.
The siblings had done drugs together but, unlike Keith, Billy had his limits. Like Keith, he drove expensive cars like a lunatic and wrecked at least one of them, and was a speed demon when it came to powerful motorcycles and speedboats. But, unlike Keith, he had set goals for himself. He wanted to do more than just live off of his trust fund inheritance. Billy had big dreams of getting into the movie business and, if one listened to his claims, he seemed close to succeeding around the time Keith overdosed.
Of Betty’s three eldest sons—Woody, Keith, and Billy—Billy was considered the best and the brightest, the most artistic and the most creative. Physically, he stood about five-foot-ten, was skinny, weighing around 130 pounds, wasn’t very athletic but was physically strong. Some thought him to be socially awkward, which was underscored by the fact that he had difficulty meeting women, and was not known to ever have had a serious girlfriend, even after he entered his twenties.
After he left the University of Arizona Billy began taking film study and production courses at New York University. He was living in his sister Libet’s Upper East Side apartment when he turned twenty-one in late 1973 and received his first trust fund check of an estimated ten million dollars. Practically the next day, he quit school with the goal, he told friends and family, of securing the film rights to an Ernest Hemingway novel that he liked and to which he related called Islands in the Stream.
The novel was first published in 1970, nine years after Hemingway, a depressive, had committed suicide, and the same year that Bobby Johnson died of cancer and Billy had turned eighteen. The story is about a Hemingway-type character, an artist by the name of Thomas Hudson, who lives on the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, some fifty miles off the coast of South Florida—a locale that Billy knew well from his childhood, and where Keith, cruising on the Sea Prince with Billy aboard, often sailed. Hemingway’s plot line resonated even more with Billy’s own past experiences, which was one of the reasons he was inspired to secure the film rights.
Hudson, for instance, has three sons who suddenly appear in his life one summer—he had earlier abandoned his family—and they have a bittersweet reunion that includes a deep-sea fishing trip for marlin—a favorite sport of Bobby Johnson—who sometimes took his own sons with him on such excursions.
“In a lot of ways, Billy viewed the book as autobiographical,” says John Vicino, who was close to Billy from childhood. “Hemingway’s story of the character in the Bahamas bonding with his kids was exactly what happened in the Johnson family. The best times I remember was when we used to go to the Bimini Big Game Fishing Club and there was a big, black guy there named Percy. He’d take us out and get us drunk and we’d go fishing for sharks, and wrestle with sharks while we were drunk, and Islands in the Stream is about all of that kind of activity.”
Billy later claimed to his cousins and close friends that he had flown to Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway had moved in 1959 from Cuba, and where some members of the author’s family were still living, and successfully secured the Hollywood rights to Islands in the Stream.
He also boasted that while he was in Ketchum, he had developed a personal friendship with the Nobel Prize–winning “Papa” Hemingway’s granddaughters, the future actress and author Mariel Hemingway, who was then just twelve, and her troubled sister, Margaux, a supermodel at twenty then married to her first husband. Like Keith Johnson, Margaux died of a drug overdose—she at the age of forty-two in 1996, just one day before the anniversary of her grandfather’s suicide by shotgun. In 2011, Mariel, through a representative, says she had no memory of ever meeting Billy Johnson, and knew nothing about him securing any rights to her grandfather’s novel.
But those were the claims Billy had made and no one had any reason to doubt him. They still were convinced many decades later that what he had told them was the truth.
“I certainly remember Billy told me he had the rights,” says Eric Ryan, “and that Islands in the Stream was going to be his film project. He told about being in the Hemingway family home and maybe dealing with Hemingway’s widow.”
However, when Islands in the Stream was released in 1977 as a major motion picture starring George C. Scott, David Hemmings, an
d Claire Bloom, there was nothing in the credits, or in Paramount Pictures’ archives, to indicate any involvement by Billy Johnson. While he told some people that he was going to be the film’s producer, the actual producers were Peter Bart, Max Palevsky, and an associate producer, Ken Wales.
In his review, the New York Times film critic Vincent Canby noted that an American journalist and novelist by the name of Denne Bart Petitclerc “apparently has had the blessing of Hemingway’s widow, Mary, in adapting the novel.” Again, there was no mention of the Johnson heir’s involvement.
He must have been fantasizing about it all because Petitclerc actually had a real-life relationship with Hemingway, had become a protégé of sorts, and had the inside track to Islands.
In the 1950s, working in Florida as a young reporter at the Miami Herald, he had written a letter to Hemingway, who responded with an invitation to go fishing with him in Cuba. On one of their later get-togethers, Hemingway mentioned Islands and thought it was perfect for the big screen, and Petitclerc, wholeheartedly agreeing, ran with it. Their friendship resulted in Petitclerc adapting Hemingway’s novel for the film.
Billy also had boasted that he had bought a famous boat that had once belonged to Hemingway—the thirty-eight-foot motorized fishing vessel called Pilar that the writer and soldier of fortune had bought in 1934 at the height of his career.
“Billy showed me photographs of it that he took,” says Eric Ryan. “It was my understanding that it was the actual boat, and that he had it in Marina Del Rey where he was living.”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 26