As John Fino’s contempt trial played out, Mary Lea, a frustrated diva who loved drama, and had once in her late teens studied for a time at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, said that because of D’Arc and the plot on her life, she had had “a year of sheer torture.” To protect her life, she had hired bodyguards to be with her around the clock. At one point, when she learned of the purported relationship between D’Arc and Fino, she claimed that she had tried suicide by pinning a note to herself, taking what she asserted was enough prescription and over-the-counter drugs to “kill an elephant,” and positioning herself in bed waiting for death to come, but that all she suffered was an upset stomach. Like her brother, Seward Jr.’s earlier suicide attempt, hers had failed, too.
Mary Lea’s son Eric says the whole case was “so unclear and so charged with drama that it ushered in the start of an era in my mother’s life where she traveled with bodyguards. My mother was never a picture of mental stability, and she took on the role of a hunted victim.”
John Fino was eventually found guilty of contempt.
He received an indeterminate sentence of up to four years in prison—with a minimum of a year behind bars for refusing to testify before the grand jury probing Mary Lea’s charges of a contract killing plot—and he actually served twenty-six months.
He soon broke his silence and gave his side of the story. And it was as much of a whopper as the one Mary Lea had told that ignited the whole case in the first place.
Fino denied there ever really was a plan to kill her, and he dismissed her claims that he had had a homosexual relationship with D’Arc, stating, “I don’t know where that came from. There was one little scene.”
He claimed it all had to do with helping D’Arc scare off Marty Richards, who was stealing Mary Lea’s affections. He said he refused to testify before the grand jury as a way to protect D’Arc’s two teenage daughters.
“I just couldn’t see any reason for making myself look like a rat, ruining the doctor’s reputation … hurting his children in school upstate, just to make a big smear case in the papers or to help Mary Lea get her divorce.”
He characterized the Johnson & Johnson heiress as “gullible” and said she was the target of influence of “a bunch of gay guys.” He acknowledged that Mary Lea’s Merriewold West was the setting for kinky sex and much drug-taking, which only intensified, he maintained, when Marty Richards became a player in the scenario.
By late summer 1977, Mary Lea had written D’Arc out of her will. By year’s end, she and D’Arc’s no-fault divorce was granted.
With Fino behind bars, the Bronx D.A. dropped the whole case.
D’Arc died in 1995, according to his daughter, Karen Scourby D’Arc.
Eric Ryan says he “heard from more than one source” that the cause of D’Arc’s death at seventy was AIDS-related.
* * *
Despite her claims that her husband wanted her dead, Mary Lea Johnson Ryan D’Arc (soon to be Mrs. Marty Richards) was living life to the fullest.
She had four homes, was chauffeured around New York City in a gleaming tan and black Rolls-Royce that had been built for a maharaja, wore silk caftans and feather boas along with rare pieces of jewelry from Africa and the South Seas.
Her sprawling high-rise co-op apartment, 19H, in the Sovereign in Manhattan’s tony Sutton Place neighborhood, was more like a ranch house in the sky, and decorated in an eclectic mix of priceless English antiques and contemporary pieces. Her gay beau, Marty Richards, also had an apartment, 41G, in the Sovereign, where he was living with a business partner before Richards and the Johnson heiress moved in together.
Richards once said that he was “terrified” of Mary Lea’s “wealth. It’s been one of our major problems.”
Still, he went along for the ride because even more terrifying was “[t]he thought of living without her.”
And living without her fortune.
With Richards, she had bought a lavish estate in Beverly Hills, originally built for Ruby Keeler by Al Jolson, and while it was being refurbished and furnished, she rented a huge suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. She soon bought a mansion that she named “By the Sea” on fashionable Gin Lane in chic Southampton on Long Island where the Cristal and cocaine flowed. She had an immense art collection, some two hundred works, most of them by the early-twentieth-century Danish artist Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen, who was known as the “Audubon of steam vessels.” Many of them decorated the production office she shared with Richards.
She invested, and lost a small fortune, in an art gallery, the M. L. D’Arc Gallery, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was a losing proposition mainly because she had a small stable of artists on stipends ranging from thirty to fifty thousand dollars a year, with guarantees that she’d buy their work, and some took advantage of her generosity and naivete about the business.
“In some cases their money went into good wine, and in some cases into their arms in the form of drugs,” maintains her son Eric, who was in his midtwenties at the time. He says she also had sponsored some extreme performance art in the gallery.
One live piece in front of an audience involved two actors standing at two lecterns and pretending to be in a debate. “But, inside one of the lecterns was a girl giving one of the actors a blowjob, and the audience was watching on a monitor. It was all sort of being staged against the backdrop of my mom being an enthusiastic supporter and patron of the arts.”
Mary Lea never understood the concept of restraint. The poor little rich girl had grown up without it, and she wasn’t alone; restraint had never been part of the Johnson dynasty genes. While the headlines blared embarrassing and scandalous stories about her bizzaro world, her father, J. Seward Johnson Sr., then in his late seventies, was ignoring it all, and living it up with his decades-younger Polish housekeeper wife, Basia, and they were building their thirty-million-dollar dream mansion in New Jersey.
39
Mary Lea Johnson was just twenty when she got married for the first time. The date was November 22, 1950, the place St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in Highland Park, New Jersey—where her uncle, the General, had once been mayor—and the groom was William Kendall Ryan, a Jersey boy, a radio journalist at a small station, a devout Catholic, and later a right-wing Goldwater Republican who was not well liked by her siblings. Her brother, Seward Jr.—the best man at her wedding—says Ryan had turned Mary Lea “into a baby-making machine. He was a psychotic from what I was told by his children.”
During two difficult decades with Ryan, Mary Lea had five sons and a daughter; her first child, Eric, in 1951, her last child, Quentin, in 1958.
The Ryans’ first home was a one-hundred-acre spread in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Mary Lea raised her kids and where they lived like the Beverly Hillbillies with millions of dollars, along with six hundred chickens, four pigs, and two cows. During the marriage, she bought another farm—four hundred chickens, eighty sheep—in Easton, Maryland, where Ryan owned a small weekly newspaper, the Mid-Shore Times, for a time.
Ryan had a violent streak, and his children were often his target. “My father was a rager,” says Eric Ryan, recalling his childhood. “While I never saw him be physically violent toward my mother, he was certainly physically violent toward his kids—he used belts, hairbrushes, and shoes.”
Because of his Catholicism, Ryan had sent most of his sons to the Canterbury School, an exclusive Catholic boys’ boarding school in rural New Milford, Connecticut, the same blue-collar town where their aunt, Evangeline Brewster Johnson, once had her estate, Cloud Walk Farm.
Eric soon discovered that Canterbury was a breeding ground for homosexual activity. “I saw blowjobs in the shower. I saw a guy come into my room one night and pull down my covers and attempt to suck my dick. I waked up and the guy freaked out and left the room to go try the same thing with somebody else down the hall. I had the quintessential Catholic experience where I went to the headmaster about the incident and was told that it could not have happened.�
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The Ryans were divorced in 1972, with Mary Lea then headed into her second marriage, the bizarre and frightening union with Vincent D’Arc.
Bill Ryan got a one-million-dollar settlement and one of the farms. Years later, after Mary Lea died, Ryan went to court unsuccessfully seeking 10 percent of each of his children’s inheritances. But she had already disinherited them, igniting yet another battle to restore the wealth they felt was their due.
As her son Quentin observes: “There were so many lawsuits and battles and crap that flew around in the Johnson and Ryan families. It was just one mess after another. There was just tremendous bitterness.”
Bill Ryan, who had been estranged from his children for years, died in October 2010, in Hilton Head, North Carolina.
While Mary Lea claimed that her second husband, D’Arc, was a homosexual, and she was open to the fact that her third husband, Marty Richards, was gay, Eric Ryan says his biological father’s “sexuality was also pretty tortured,” and that he thinks he was “a repressed homosexual.”
Ryan says he learned posthumously that his father had become “very friendly with the gay community” in Hilton Head, “and very supportive of gay rights. He even spent some time working in an AIDS hospice on a volunteer basis.”
But Eric was unable to discover whether his father had ever been involved with another man.
* * *
When Mary Lea Johnson Ryan married Vincent D’Arc in 1972, just a few days after divorcing her first husband, she bought a spectacular 140-acre estate in Far Hills, New Jersey. The main house had been a Revolutionary War inn, which she named Merriewold West, in honor of her father Seward Sr.’s estate, Merriewold. She also used her mansion as an art gallery where she sponsored several shows, including outdoor exhibits of sculpture by the likes of Louise Nevelson and Alexander Calder.
Her youngest son, Quentin, says many years later that because of all of the homosexual, bisexual, cuckolding, and sometimes even heterosexual sex going on there during the D’Arc era, “Merriewold West was a circus, a freak show. D’Arc was gay and had his boyfriends out there on the weekends. The contractors working there used to refer to the house as ‘Mirror World West’ because the master bedroom was floor-to-ceiling—and ceiling—mirrors.”
As a licensed psychiatrist D’Arc had legal access to all kinds of drugs—painkillers, barbiturates, uppers and downers—and made them freely available, dispensing them like M&M’s on Halloween to Mary Lea and her sons.
“He literally would write prescriptions in my name and my brothers’ names for everything—Seconal, Demerol, Tuinol, you name it,” Quentin Ryan says. “He had all kinds of pills in his medicine cabinet and my brothers would steal them, and he never complained, or even raised an issue. I once told my mother and Dr. D’Arc that my brother Seward had a drug problem, and told them they had to deal with it, and they were like, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, we know.’ My mother’s house, Merriewold West, was out of control. The police had a map of the place, they knew it so well.”
Mary Lea Johnson Ryan D’Arc (and soon Richards) would never be voted mother of the year.
“She let us use drugs,” says Quentin, fifty-five years old in 2011. “For my eighteenth birthday, she gave me a blank check, and a quarter ounce of cocaine. I was like, ‘God, Mom, this is what you’re thinking? It’s really pathetic.’ She had a very bizarre and twisted personality. Dealing with her was like dealing with a fourteen-year-old. She certainly was not maternal.”
His brother Eric says that on occasion he smoked marijuana with her, and claims that Quentin and Seward both had dealt with drug problems. “My brother Seward for years and years struggled with it, so it was just really prevalent,” says Quentin. Eric says Seward was once arrested for holding up a New York cabbie and served a one-year custodial sentence in drug rehab in lieu of incarceration “after a deal was worked out with the court.” He later contracted hepatitis, Eric says, “from being an IV drug user,” but was successfully treated by a psychic healer in Brazil. Married with four children, Seward was studying sculpture and living off his Johnson family trust fund in 2011.
Quentin, also a Johnson & Johnson trust-funder, became a “glass blower,” according to his wife, Dale, whom he married in 1983. In 2012, she self-published a picture book about living in their Litchfield, Connecticut, farmhouse with her husband, two sons, and five dogs.
40
In October 1978, on a plane headed for Hollywood, Mary Lea Johnson Ryan D’Arc told her companion and business partner, Marty Richards, that it was about time that they tied the knot. The Band-Aid heiress and the gay producer soon had a quickie, private ceremony in a lawyer’s office without any family members in attendance.
At the Stork Club in Manhattan, they threw a glitzy wedding reception. Afterward, her son Hillary Ryan, her fourth-born, furious that his mother had married someone he considered to be yet another leech, was said to have gone to the trustees who held the pursestrings to her fortune, and reportedly told them that she had tied the knot with “a Broadway Jew fag,” and to keep his mitts out of her pot of gold.
“For Marty, meeting and marrying my mother was a win-win situation,” says Eric Ryan, looking back many years later. “He went from being a small-time casting agent to being a big-time producer overnight with her financial backing. The place Marty lived in when he first met my mother was a shared apartment on Central Park West, ground floor, with a bedspread hung up on the windows to create some privacy. He went pretty much directly from there to the penthouse in the Sovereign, and on from there [in the early 1980s] to the River House.”
The fourteen-room, nine-thousand-square-foot River House duplex that cost in the neighborhood of three million dollars, and was appointed and furnished for about the same amount, underscored Marty Richards’s overnight affluence due to Mary Lea, whose own fortune was attributable to the sale of lots of baby powder and Band-Aids.
The maisonette, in what was considered one of Manhattan’s most luxe buildings, a gated co-op with spectacular views of the city and the East River, was so exclusive that Gloria Vanderbilt sued when she was turned away. When Joan Crawford wasn’t considered the right caliber for a River House residence she reportedly arranged to have a big, bright sign advertising Pepsi-Cola placed on the other side of the river in hopes it would piss off another resident of the building—the president of Coca-Cola.
But Marty Richards, with the Johnson & Johnson heiress on his arm, got in, and he put his mark on the place.
“Marty had his own bathroom that had a tile ceiling with his initials like a monogram,” recalls Ryan. “It was probably six feet high and it was all done with a royal blue background and his initials ‘MR’ were in gold leaf. Marty could lie in the tub [that could bathe four at a time] and look up at his monogram.”
Visitors had compared the lavishly decorated place to Versailles. There were gilt-edged mirrors and the rooms were arranged with French and English furniture from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Everywhere were marble sculptures, such as a Greek male torso, and priceless antique china in beautifully carved cabinetry. In the powder room hung a painting by Jean Dufy.
The initials over Marty Richards’s tub could have read “MRK” because his real name was Morton Richard Klein and he was one of the first Jews to become a member of the very un-Jewish and, at times, anti-Semitic Johnson dynasty. Unlike Mary Lea, who had grown up very much unloved, but with great wealth and in grand style, Marty was the progeny of Sid and Shirley Klein of little money, and of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.
He had gone to Taft High School with another neighborhood kid, Stanley Kubrick, who years later as a famous director was quoted as saying, “When I heard we would be working together on The Shining, I called him in Scotland and started singing ‘Hail Taft High.’ [He said] ‘Who the fuck is this?’ and hung up.”
Richards’s parents had once sent him to the Marie Moses School of Dance and Singing because, at nine, he had a wonderful little voice, and it was there h
e became friends with some other future showbiz types such as Rita Moreno and Donna Reed. When he was about to enter adolescence he got a part as a newsboy in a Broadway show called Mexican Hayride. In his late teens, he sang in clubs.
In the mid-1950s, when Mary Lea Johnson Ryan was giving birth to her fifth, her future third husband’s name appeared in a show-business item in the Daily News about “young baritone Mart Richards, a teen-aged sensation. This Bronx-born buddy of Sal Mineo [who was gay and murdered years later in West Hollywood], first became popular when he did commercials for a candy bar.”
In the early 1950s, he had a brief marriage that ended when he concluded he liked boys more than girls, but never told his parents. “It was the fifties, you didn’t talk about those things then. My mother would have jumped out the window, she would have thought she did something terribly wrong,” he acknowledged in a New York magazine profile. “I never walked around in a tutu. The only difference was I liked guys.”
The fact that he was gay and they mostly slept in separate beds didn’t faze Mary Lea, because she was overjoyed that she finally had a marriage partner who, she felt, really cared for her, and who loved show business as much as she did.
Like the gay Charles Merrill with Evangeline Brewster Johnson, Richards would claim that he and Mary Lea “had a totally normal sexual relationship,” and that she made him feel “handsome and virile.”
The only real issue, supposedly, was that she had millions, and he had nothing.
Mary Lea often voiced the Johnson dynasty mantra: “You never know if people are being nice to you because of the money or because they really respect you as a person,” she once told a journalist. “But you have to trust somebody, and while you rule out the ones who are obviously opportunistic, you take everybody at face value until they disappoint you.”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 28