But according to an October 3, 2007, article in Yachting Magazine entitled, “Saving Pilar and Hemingway,” his widow, Mary Hemingway, had actually given Pilar to her late husband’s “beloved Cuban captain,” Gregorio Fuentes, who turned the Pilar over to the communist government of Fidel Castro, where it had been a tourist attraction since the early 1960s, and was still in Cuba at the time the article was written.
Billy Johnson was clearly fibbing about owning the prized boat, clearly had some sort of an obsession with Hemingway, and was quite successful in convincing everyone in his close circle that he was making a success of himself in Hollywood with the Hemingway project. At twenty-two, with his vivid imagination and powers of persuasion, he certainly had lots of chutzpah, which is often all it took to be successful in the movie business. He might have had a bright future.
Sadly, he never would get the opportunity to genuinely prove himself.
Late in the evening of May 19, 1975, the phone rang in Eric Ryan’s Manhattan apartment. Calling was his cousin, Libet Johnson, Billy’s sister, who was then twenty-five and into the second of her five marriages. She had horrific news. Billy had just been in a serious motorcycle accident in Santa Monica. He had been rushed, she told Ryan, to Santa Monica Hospital and was undergoing emergency surgery. She and her brother Woody had divided up the important calls to announce yet another family tragedy.
“Libet was saying to me, ‘It really doesn’t look good.’ Then I got another call a couple of hours later saying that Billy had passed,” Ryan vividly recalls. “It was an oh-my-God moment. It was kind of disbelief, then acceptance and then a feeling of what a waste of a life, in a pretty rapid cycle. I felt that Billy had tremendous potential and I had looked forward to a future of professional involvement with him. I just always knew our friendship was such that we would be doing stuff together.”
Billy had died in the operating room three hours after his powerful motorcycle sped out of control at high speed, slammed into a parking meter, and threw him some sixty feet through the air after it crashed.
His death came just fifty days after his brother Keith had injected a fatal dose of cocaine into his arm.
The next morning John Vicino was called out of his history class at Emory University, in Atlanta, by a dean and told there was an important telephone call. “My mother told me Billy had been killed, and I said, ‘Oh, my God!’ I went out in the quadrangle and I just started crying like a little boy. I know that he was affected by Keith’s death to the extent of recklessness.”
Vicino recalls that one of the last conversations he had with Billy had to do with speed. At the time, Billy had a fast mid-engine Porsche. “He told me, ‘I’m just taking more chances driving than I ever have,’ and I told him to take care of himself and he said he would.
“If he had lived,” speculates Vicino, who firmly believed Billy’s Hollywood success stories, “he would have been another Scorsese.”
There was talk that Billy was either stoned, or had had a few drinks before rolling, and that he had been traveling at an incredible rate of speed at the time of the crash. And as had been the case with his brother Keith, there was chatter that his death was a suicide. “Billy had a lot of unresolved anger that was expressed in self-destructive tendencies,” asserts Eric Ryan.
“Cycle Crash Kills Heir to a Drug Firm,” said the headline over the four-paragraph New York Daily News wire service and staff story the next day.
“Johnson Scion Killed,” read the headline over the three-paragraph report in the New York Post.
Both stories offered basic details about the accident, and both mentioned the tragic irony of two heirs to a great American fortune dying within weeks of one another.
A search was immediately begun to find Betty and her husband in Europe to inform them of the latest tragedy, and a Johnson family attorney quickly tracked them down on a layover in Geneva.
“They were actually in the airport waiting for a flight and there was an announcement that said would Mr. and Mrs. Gillespie please come to the office,” recalls a friend of the couple. “They were there to get over Keith’s death and they were given the phone and told that Billy had been killed. Betty was in a state of shock. Gene was paralyzed. They immediately got on a flight back to New York and home to Princeton for the second funeral for one of her sons in just a few weeks.”
Back in Princeton there was a very private church service, and Woody offered the eulogy for his brother.
“It was pretty emotional,” remembers Ryan. His brother Quentin Ryan recalls, “I was with our father and my brother Roderick in Hilton Head and we got a call from Seward, or Eric, and Rod and I drove up to New Jersey for the funeral. It was just horrendous.”
The death of his two brothers was “crushing” on Woody, recalls his onetime business partner, Michael Spielvogel. “He basically disappeared, went underground, and there was very little communication. He was totally in shock, consoling and being with his family, and the family went very quiet. It was a very sad time.”
Billy left $100,000 to the Lawrenceville School, his and Guy Vicino’s New Jersey prep school alma mater. The Willard T.C. Johnson Foundation, Inc., was also established regarding his inherited fortune.
Betty was said to have later endowed a section of the Central Park Zoo in Billy’s name because of an animal there that he loved as a child.
Meanwhile, the high drama of the two recent tragic events had put a permanent pall over Betty’s second marriage.
“That was really a hard blow for her,” says Gene Gillespie’s son, Peter, looking back. “Not too many mothers and wives could deal with the death of a husband and then five years later the deaths of two sons. Betty had a really hard time and that put stress on their marriage, and it was just impossible for my father to help her. He just couldn’t deal with it.”
Within months of Billy’s death, the Gillespies separated and a divorce action was started after just three very difficult years of marriage.
“I really didn’t talk to my father about the divorce,” says the daughter, George Ann Gillespie Fox. “He was very private, and I just respected whatever his choices, or her choices, were. We all went our separate ways. It was a part of my life that I don’t think about very much.”
While most thought Betty’s decision to get a divorce resulted from the tragedies, that wasn’t the reason she gave to some others.
“I hadn’t seen Betty for some time and when I next saw her she was married to her second husband, and the next thing I knew she was divorced from him,” says Betty’s longtime friend from childhood, Jean Schilling Chockley Ricketts. “When I next saw her she told me that he had just married her for one reason, and one reason only, and that was for her money, and she told me it was a big mistake on her part marrying him.”
Both Betty and Gillespie each got married for a third time.
He married Sara Tiedeman Davies, a longtime friend with whom he had once worked. Later, the third Mrs. Gillespie introduced Betty to a neighbor, the man who became her third husband, Douglas Fountain Bushnell, a well-to-do widower with two sons and a daughter—the same as Betty—who had worked for many years for the American Express Company. Bushnell was a New Jersey native, had gone to Rutgers University, and during the Second World War had served in the navy in a bomb disposal unit.
Sara Gillespie had known that Bushnell had lost his first wife, Margaret, in 1970—by coincidence the same year Betty had lost Bobby. She was also aware that Betty was now a divorcee. Playing Cupid, she had invited them both to a dinner party. There was an instant attraction, they began dating, and before long, in the kind of Hollywood ending her late son Billy might have appreciated, Betty and Bushnell were married in a very quiet and very private service in 1978, and lived happily ever after.
Unlike Gene Gillespie, Bushnell was well liked by Betty’s surviving children—Woody, Libet, and the youngest, Christopher, who was then nineteen, and by the wider Johnson dynasty. Bushnell was credited with helping Betty come out
from under the dark cloud of the tragedies she had bravely endured, and the two became very social. Betty, with her Johnson & Johnson millions, became philanthropic, and was known in news accounts, despite being Mrs. Bushnell, as “New Jersey philanthropist Betty Wold Johnson.”
She had become a supporter of a number of arts institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In 2001, she and Bushnell received an annual award from the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) for being significant benefactors—Betty had donated one million dollars in 1999 and again in 2000, and had made other gifts totaling one hundred thousand dollars.
And both were active contributors to Republican candidates and causes.
In December 2007, the same month Bobby Johnson had died almost four decades earlier, Bushnell passed away at the age of eighty-seven. His obituary stated, “Life for him was a great adventure. He enjoyed everything he did. He will be remembered for his kindness and thoughtfulness. Equally at home on his tractor or the dance floor, he was a consummate gentleman.”
The next year, Betty, widowed twice, divorced once, continued with her philanthropy, and gave eleven million dollars to NJPAC, which at the time was the single largest individual gift in the Newark arts center’s history. The center’s president at the time, Lawrence P. Goldman, said that Betty had asked him “a question that I never get asked: ‘What is the hardest category for which you’re seeking money?’ I said, ‘Nobody wants to support keeping the building in “like new” condition,’ and she said, ‘That’s exactly what I want to give the money for, then.’”
Betty had a tough façade but could be sprightly in her old age. Many years after she divorced Gillespie, she ran into his widow, Sara, at someone else’s memorial service in Princeton and, according to an observer, Betty said to her, ‘Let’s give everybody a good laugh and let them see us together since we both were married to the same guy and no one would believe we’d be speaking to each other.” Betty then walked down the church aisle with her.
“She got a good giggle when she saw the other women whispering and pointing at her.”
PART VI
TROUBLED MARY LEA
38
Around the time Betty May Wold Johnson Gillespie Bushnell was coming to terms with the tragic deaths of her two sons, and was securing a divorce from her second husband—all handled discreetly—a very public and quite bizarre drama involving another member of the Johnson dynasty was being acted out on the world’s largest media stage, to wit:
“Jury Told That Heiress Was Target of Murder Plot Husband Planned”
The New York Times
“Husband Gay, Hit It Off With Hitman, Heiress Tells Court, Says Spouse was Homosexual”
New York Daily News
“$20M Will Cited in ‘Plot’ on Heiress”
New York Post
All through New York City’s long, hot summer of 1977—when a power failure blacked out all five of the city’s teeming boroughs for twenty-five hours during a heat wave; when the “44-Caliber Killer,” better known as “Son of Sam,” continuing a murder spree begun a year earlier, shot six and killed two more before he was caught, and when some optimistic Mad Men came up with the iconic, and ironic for the times, slogan, “I Love New York”—the Big Apple’s bedraggled straphangers also were gripped by news stories about the latest titillating scandal involving a member of the dynasty that had brought the world Tylenol and Modess.
The heiress in the headlines was Mary Lea Johnson, whose picture, as a cute infant, was the first on the can of Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder. The inheritor of a trust fund estimated at upward of one hundred million dollars, she had gone to the office of Bronx District Attorney Mario Merola with a doozy of a tale—“my husband’s plotting to kill me”—that sounded like it was spun out of James M. Cain’s Underwood.
This was the same Mary Lea Johnson who would later claim that her own father, Seward Johnson Sr., had molested her from childhood and into her teens—a tale that even some of her own children were convinced she had invented after his death to gain sympathy and attention.
In terms of pure shock value and sheer outrageous wickedness, Mary Lea’s hit-man case even surpassed the titillation factor of her brother Seward Johnson Jr.’s earlier divorce battle with his first wife, Barbara.
Now fifty, Mary Lea had accused her second husband, Victor D’Arc, a prominent fifty-three-year-old Upper East Side child psychiatrist, of wanting her dead so he could cash in on the twenty million dollars that she had bequeathed to him in one of her many wills.
She claimed that D’Arc had asked thirty-two-year-old John Fino of the Bronx—Mary Lea’s trusted chauffeur, handyman at her New Jersey estate and Manhattan apartment, and a struggling actor (who reportedly was Robert De Niro’s double in the 1974 film Godfather Part II)—to arrange for a contract killing, and to make it look like a mugging gone bad. As much as two hundred thousand dollars were to have changed hands if Mary Lea suddenly became a corpse.
She further claimed D’Arc had gone to Fino to get the job done because the two were lovers.
Despite the seriousness of her allegations against D’Arc, he was never charged in the case, or even called to testify.
“There were insane accusations flying around,” says Karen Scourby D’Arc, one of two daughters from his first marriage many years later. “If they were true, something would have come of them, and nothing came of them regarding my father.”
To combat Mary Lea’s tale of murder, and since D’Arc wasn’t facing any formal charges, he took his case to the press, telling a Times reporter:
“My wife is very naïve. She has so much money she’s like a Howard Hughes, and those around her will tell her anything she wants to hear. All they want is her money.”
Moreover, according to the News, he claimed his life, too, was in jeopardy.
“I keep getting these threatening phone calls,” D’Arc stated, “and once I received a voodoo doll stuck with pins.”
The doctor, who had instantly given up his fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year practice to manage Mary Lea’s multimillion-dollar financial assets, then proceeded to claim that Mary Lea had “a menopausal problem.”
D’Arc maintained that his estranged wife wanted to use the money to invest in Broadway plays and films. When the two separated and filed for divorce a year earlier, Mary Lea already was involved with the gay Jewish show-business maven Marty Richards, who would become her third husband, and a major player, one not always beloved, in the Johnson dynasty dramas. She had already invested about a million dollars in a few of Richards’s big-name productions on the Great White Way, including Chicago, and later Hollywood productions like The Shining, all of which they were doing through their Mary Lea–financed company called The Producer Circle.
* * *
Mary Lea had fallen for Vincent D’Arc, who was affiliated with the psychiatric department at St. Luke’s Hospital, in Manhattan, when he was treating her troubled teenage son Seward Ryan, “who had a significant substance abuse problem,” says his brother Eric. “Seward was talking to him about how he has this mother who is a trust-funder and that she’s in a bad relationship with his nut-job father and Victor invited my mother to come up to New York to discuss my brother’s case and then they ended up dating.”
Her mind-boggling story that D’Arc planned to have her bumped off became public for the first time in a Bronx courtroom—and on the pages of every New York City daily, and in wire service stories across the country. The shocking revelations began on June 1, 1977, at Fino’s trial for contempt of court, and then in Mary Lea’s New Jersey divorce proceedings, all happening around the same time.
When Fino was called before a Bronx grand jury and questioned about her charges, he refused to answer and was charged with contempt. Despite the spate of headline stories about a murder plot and other crimes and misdemeanors, contempt was the only charge ever formally lodged in the case, and Fino was the only key defendant.
The prosecutor in the case,
Donald Levin, an assistant Bronx D.A., said there was evidence to show that Fino, who was friends with Mary Lea, had actually told her about the murder plot, not because he was looking out for her welfare, but rather because “he knew where his bread and butter was.”
Fino’s lawyer, Stephen Weiss, claimed his client was fearful of testifying because D’Arc “wouldn’t hesitate to snuff out two lives for his own gain … there’s a large bounty on her head.”
Mary Lea’s allegation that her husband and Fino were lovers was made by her lawyers during a divorce action in Somerset County Court, in Somerville, New Jersey, where D’Arc had filed for divorce in September 1976. Mary Lea had filed her own divorce action that November in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Mary Lea claimed that beginning in mid-December of 1973 the bespectacled, mustachioed D’Arc pursued “an open, notorious, continuous course of deviant homosexual intercourse” with Fino, a swarthy and tall ex-Marine with a bent nose, who sported a mustache, mutton-chop sideburns, and a pompadour hairdo. Moreover, she claimed that D’Arc “repeatedly requested” her to “engage in sexual intercourse with various men” of his choice, and in his presence.
The court papers stated that D’Arc had made “arrangements to liquidate her through a paid assassin.”
If D’Arc’s sexual activities were being exposed, so were Mary Lea’s.
D’Arc had filed a complaint with the New Jersey court charging that on a vacation in March 1975 on the tony island of Saint Martin in the Caribbean, Mary Lea had gone barhopping with a male friend of hers, without her husband, and had ended the boozy night swimming nude with her friend and one of the “local natives” at a town beach at dawn.
Her lawyers also released a transcript of a phone conversation between D’Arc and Fino’s father, Ted Fino. In it, D’Arc was quoted as saying, “Tell him, Teddy, I’d like it to be, you know, a mugging … And if it comes up and costs a couple of thousand more, okay … and I’ll give you fifty thousand dollars over the next year after the operation.”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 27