Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  To the poor little rich girl, Richards was suspect at first but proved himself, at least in her eyes, as one who wasn’t opportunistic. “Sure, I feared Marty was only interested in me because I was rich,” she once said. “I’d be stupid not to think about it. As it turned out, he was interested in me despite the fact that I was rich.”

  No one in the Johnson-Ryan axis believed a word she, or he, was saying when it came to her fortune.

  Says Quentin Ryan, “I never completely trusted him. She and Marty were spending gobs of money, just unbelievable amounts of money, and I was like, ‘Mom, you can’t buy your friends. These people are destroying you,’ and Marty had his bodyguard drag me to the other room and slap me around. My mother made roughly three and a half million dollars a year after taxes from her trust and they were spending on the average between nine and thirteen million dollars a year. When Marty married her, he won the Powerball.”

  On the first day of June 1988, two years before Mary Lea died, five of six of her progeny who were furious with the mad money spending of their mother and Richards—and mostly fearful that there wouldn’t be any millions left in her Johnson & Johnson trust fund coffers for them—took their whining to the press.

  “Johnson Heirs Battle over Trust Fund,” ran the headline across the Page Six gossip column of the New York Post. The lead said: “Johnson & Johnson heiress Mary Lea Richards has been spending an $80 million trust fund faster than most people can go through a box of Band-Aids. And if she keeps on at her present rate, her children by William Ryan—Quentin, Alice, Hillary, Roderick and Seward—claim they won’t have enough to buy that box.”

  The trust in question had been established in 1944 by her father, J. Seward Johnson Sr. From the trust Mary Lea was getting the income, some three million dollars a year, and upon her death, her children understood that they would get what was left, which they estimated to be about sixty million dollars. But if the Ryan gang were to be believed, she had spent almost eighteen million dollars just between 1983 and 1988, with “no rhyme or reason,” Quentin Ryan, then thirty, told the Post.

  He claimed that his mother spent more than three million dollars for just the furnishings in her River House apartment. His brother Hillary chimed in that his mother and Richards had spent one hundred thousand dollars in just one twenty-four-hour period entertaining dignitaries while on a trip to China. On a cruise aboard the QE2, they blew a half-million dollars.

  “I’m convinced that Marty Richards is doing everything he can to make sure he gets it all,” declared Hillary Ryan, who claimed that Richards’s “dry-cleaning bill is larger than my annual income.”

  Moreover, he charged that Richards had put up a wall between Mary Lea and her children.

  “He has painted us in a bad light. He’s shut us out of her life. He has an insatiable appetite for money.”

  Five of the children—not including Eric, who was his mother’s favorite, her principal heir among the siblings, and who was in her will to the tune of seventeen million dollars, give or take—had recently lost a case before the New Jersey Supreme Court to prevent Mary Lea’s trustees from giving her whatever she asked for, thus allowing her to spend like a drunken sailor with Richards happily assisting. Hillary declared that his mother was “easily swayed by the people she’s surrounded herself with, and it’s a pretty cutthroat cast of characters.”

  Around the time the gossip item appeared, Mary Lea’s health was beginning to seriously fail. She had liver cancer, and her doctors determined that she required liver transplant surgery. “She had shingles. She had diabetes. Her skin had a distinct yellow caste. Her eyes had a yellow cast. She was in bad shape,” Eric recalls. “This was a whole period with a lot of drama and desperation over her health issues and drama over legal issues, and how the trustees would react to the publicity that was being stirred up by my siblings.”

  In late April 1990, Mary Lea was admitted to Presbyterian University Hospital in Pittsburgh, where she underwent the transplant surgery. Two weeks later, on May 3, seventeen days before her sixty-fourth birthday, she died.

  After her passing, fierce battles erupted in and out of court involving her children; her third husband, Marty Richards; and her first husband, Bill Ryan.

  Even in death, Mary Lea’s Johnson & Johnson money was what everyone cared about. Two trusts, both of them established by her father, Seward Sr.—one in 1944, the other in 1961—had become the objects of fierce combat.

  The 1944 trust, all of it in Johnson & Johnson stock, was litigated in the early 1990s, and resulted in Richards getting about forty-four million dollars, almost half of the ninety million dollars that Mary Lea had in her estate. The remainder was eventually divided among her children, but not equally.

  Mary Lea’s will provided for Richards to receive the bulk of her estate and for Eric to receive about seventeen million dollars, and his siblings were to get just one million dollars each. Moreover, there was a clause that stated if any of them, except for Eric, contested her last will and testament “they would lose what they were otherwise given at the point of my mother’s death,” says Eric. “I was the only one who was immunized from that clause.”

  In order to make the division of money a bit better for his siblings, Eric, who had a law degree, says he acted as a sort of big brother/Robin Hood and entered “into a negotiation with Marty on the one hand, and with my siblings’ attorneys on the other hand, where I got Marty to move about twelve million dollars from his side of the pile into my siblings’ side of the pile and, at the same time, I moved about two million dollars, or three million dollars from my inheritance, so I enriched each of my siblings’ take from my mom’s will from about one million dollars to about three million, five hundred thousand dollars, and the question of there being a will contest disappeared.”

  However, the battle over Seward Sr.’s 1961 trust was a classic.

  “Ultimately, everything boiled down once again to Mary Lea Johnson’s money,” observes Richard Collier, the Princeton attorney who represented two of her children, Roderick and Alice, in the litigation.

  The case dragged on for a mind-boggling twelve years, involved a number of high-powered lawyers—one of them being Ken Starr, who had written the “Starr Report” charging that President Clinton had lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky—thousands of pages of testimony and documents, and all of it was focused on trying to determine the definition of just a single word.

  “It’s extraordinary,” says Collier, “that we spent a dozen years on the word ‘spouse.’ You wouldn’t think that you would need a six-day trial and more than a decade of litigation up and down the New Jersey Supreme Court twice to determine what the word ‘spouse’ means—but that’s what happened.”

  In early 1997, Mary Lea’s children and others filed a lawsuit in New Jersey to keep her spouses (by then her widowers)—Marty Richards and Bill Ryan—from benefiting. And there began the strange legal argument over the meaning of the word “spouse.”

  “The only position that concerned me and the court,” says Collier, was “should Marty be, or not be, eligible for distribution from that trust. There was a lot of money in that trust, so it was worth a lot of people’s efforts to determine that issue.”

  On April 3, 2008, the New Jersey Supreme Court, in a five-to-two ruling, decided that seventy-six-year-old Richards was still considered a spouse even though Mary Lea had died some eighteen years earlier, and that he could share in the huge trust fund along with other family members, among them great-grandchildren. The court left it to the estate’s trustees how much he would receive from the trust, valued around $350 million. While he won the role of spouse, he was not considered a distributee by the trustees and received no financial reward, according to Eric Ryan. Some of the other beneficiaries began getting anywhere from seven hundred thousand dollars to $1.5 million annually, which was to stop in 2014, and continue with the next generation of the Johnson dynasty.

  Richards, who wore two wedding rings, his a
nd his late wife’s, naturally was overjoyed, telling a reporter for The New York Times, “I’ve always wanted to be part of the family. It hurt me terribly when they said I was not a spouse. What do you mean I’m not a spouse? I wanted to be treated respectfully as Mr. [Seward] Johnson had suggested I be treated.”

  After battling liver cancer and undergoing surgery in 2011, Richards celebrated his eightieth birthday, on January 17, 2012, in grand style at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. Looking slim and tanned, his hair white with a bald spot in the middle, he gaily posed for photos with the likes of close Johnson family friends Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, she who had starred in Richards’s film adaptation of Chicago.

  “Marty always liked to keep it in the Johnson dynasty,” a close friend says. “He saw himself as a Johnson through and through, and would until his dying day.”

  That day came ten months later, on November 26, 2012, some twenty-two years after the death of Mary Lea. Richards was buried next to her in Locust Valley Cemetery in Long Island, not far from where he and the heiress had once constantly partied on her Band-Aid– and Baby Oil–financed Southampton estate.

  They were not alone in death, though, as they rarely had ever been alone in life.

  Curiously, their burial site was a private grove also occupied by the graves of at least five close friends and theatrical associates, among them a one-time hairdresser who helped produce two Producer Circle plays in the early seventies and again in the early eighties—a “strikingly handsome” homosexual who had photographs done of himself in studios “to make him look like an Adonis,” a Johnson family member says. He had died of AIDS a couple of years after Mary Lea’s passing.

  Another buried there was Mary Lea’s longtime protector in life and then in death, the celebrity bodyguard to the stars, Tony Maffatone, an ex-cop from Paterson, New Jersey, whom she had hired back in the mid-1970s when she claimed her then-husband had put out a murder contract on her. Maffatone, who died in 2000 at age fifty-seven in a scuba diving accident, had also done security work for Dolly Parton, and for Sylvester Stallone, whom he taught fighting and weapons use for the film Rambo: First Blood Part II.”

  While chums of Mary Lea and Marty were buried in the cemetery grove, no provision had ever been made for the burial there of Mary Lea’s five sons and one daughter from the first of her three marriages, who had survived their mother.

  “When my mother married Marty, there was sort of a gradual displacement with my mother’s relationship to her kids,” says first-born, Eric Ryan, who had had a “combative history” with Richards over the years. “I think this [the burial place] was kind of a metaphor for all of that, and it’s curious from a psychological point of view, and from a family dynamic point of view.

  “In a lot of ways Marty was the child my mother always wished she had, and she really enjoyed making him happy in material ways by giving him carte blanche with interior decorators or tailors. Marty’s closets were like something out of The Great Gatsby—row upon row of two-thousand-dollar suits. At their social events I would meet people who would introduce themselves as, ‘Oh, I dress Marty.’ They were people from Upper East Side boutiques.”

  Regarding the burial grove—which is surrounded by bright rhododendrons, with shiny brass plaques marking the graves of Mary Lea, Richards, and their friends, and a stone bench inscribed with an eloquent quote from Romeo and Juliet—Ryan sees it all as very appropriate, and observes: “If life’s a party, why couldn’t death be a party.”

  One of the several viewings for Richards, Ryan says, “had the feeling of a cocktail party without the booze.” A rabbi gave a brief prayer and then friends like Chita Rivera shared remembrances. She called him a “genius of the theater.”

  While Richards had become a millionaire many times over during his curious marriage to the Johnson heiress, had been bequeathed millions more in inheritance after she died, and presumably made millions more as a successful partner with her in their theatrical business, people close to him at the end of his life believed he had gone through most, if not all of it, living the good life. As Michael Riedel, a longtime friend and theater critic for the New York Post, noted in an appreciation column, “He had millions and burned through millions.”

  That fact was underscored by Maryanne Dittman, an associate of Mary Lea and Marty’s, who had run into Eric Ryan when she attended his funeral. She told him, “They did not want to pay for the death announcement in The New York Times because they were trying to be conservative. She told me that they preplanned and prepaid for the funeral and that they had been able to save a great deal of money that way, so there was definitely a sense of trying to carefully manage what funds he had.”

  It was thought that, at best, Richard’s estate might be worth $10 million.

  But Ryan didn’t think he or his siblings, or their children, would be beneficiaries of any of it.

  “I would be totally shocked,” he says. “I would cash the check, don’t get me wrong. But it would be a total shock.”

  PART VII

  ACQUIRING IDENTITY

  41

  Almost four decades before Woody Johnson spent $635 million of his vast Johnson & Johnson trust fund fortune to buy the New York Jets football team, he and his aggressive young business partner and idea man, Michael Richard Spielvogel, tried to snap up the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

  At the time, 1976, Spielvogel, a skinny, wired, good-looking Jewish macher from Long Island, didn’t even know what a down was, but Woody did, even though he wasn’t a rabid football fan. The last time the Band-Aid heir had tossed the pigskin was back in prep school when he was mostly warming the bench.

  Woody had high hopes that owning a National Football League team would give him his own identity, one that had nothing to do with his family’s eponymous health-care business. Spielvogel, whose job it was to teach Woody about business, look for new venture opportunities, and broker deals for him—they were both just twenty-eight years old—had heard that the new Buccaneers franchise was going up on the block, and was open for bidders. He called the NFL and started the ball rolling.

  “I had the authority from Bob [he never called him Woody] to make a deal and I made an offer of fourteen million dollars to be in the name of Robert Wood Johnson IV,” Spielvogel says many years later. “Trying to get the Bucs was just one of those crazy things we did. We were just kids buying land and building condominiums.”

  As it turned out, Woody lost his bid for the team, which became part of the American Football Conference West. Ownership went to a more established high roller, Hugh Franklin Culverhouse, a hugely wealthy attorney and real estate mogul from Jacksonville, who paid four million dollars more than the team of Woody and Spielvogel had offered.

  “It was all politics,” Spielvogel asserts. “We played off Robert’s name, the Johnson and Johnson name, figuring we’d have a real good shot. We were just kids and the National Football League was dealing with more sophisticated people. When it fell apart it was like, okay, so what, no big deal, what’s next?”

  Woody would have to wait until the new millennium to have his dream of owning a professional football team come true—and finally earn his own identity at the age of fifty-three—when he bought the Jets many seasons after superstar quarterback Joe “Broadway Joe” Namath was gone from the team. Woody then got the chance to feel some of the pain of what it was like to own another often mediocre team—“the same old Jets,” was the long-heard refrain from the fans. The Jets hadn’t won the big game since Super Bowl III, when Richard Nixon was in his first presidential term, and Woody was recovering from his broken back.

  Still, Woody had never forgotten his first shot at becoming an elite NFL owner. When a sports reporter asked him in 2010 whether he had ever shown interest in another team in the past, he named the Bucs, but ignored, or twisted, some important facts:

  “When I was about thirty, they had put a bid out for Tampa Bay … I’d just sold a cable company down there. So I looked at t
hat for a while. And that involved building a team, building a stadium, moving to Tampa, all those things. That’s a bit much for me. Plus, living in Tampa is not living in New York.”

  What he failed to mention was that the cable company he sold had actually been his brother Keith’s, inherited by Woody after Keith’s drug overdose; that he had seriously been actively looking forward to building a team and everything that went with it; that living in Tampa was never an issue because he was already residing in Fort Lauderdale, just a twenty-minute private plane flight away; and that while Tampa wasn’t New York, he didn’t move there from Florida until the early 1980s. Most important, he hedged on the fact that he had definitely made a very serious bid with very serious money and had been shut out.

  And ignored altogether in Woody’s curriculum vitae was Michael Spielvogel’s important role. He had become a nonperson in Woody’s scenario.

  In 2011, twenty-nine-year-old Jaime Johnson, one of Woody’s two pretty, blond heiress daughters—his firstborn, Casey, had died a year earlier—told a New York Times fashion reporter that it was her billionaire father who had inspired her to do something positive with her life. She had begun dabbling in the photography world, shooting subjects like her father’s Jets’ 2012 cheerleader calendar.

  “My dad worked every day since graduating college,” stated Jaime with sincerity. “He told me, ‘I put on a suit and tie every day because I wanted to stay in the game.’”

  But that’s not how Spielvogel remembers Jaime’s father the very first time they met at the Fort Lauderdale home of a friend, the heir to a fortune in IBM stock, one Sunday afternoon in 1973.

  “We were watching a Miami Dolphins game on television and the doorbell rang and I go to the front door and there’s this guy with long blond, scraggly hair down to his shoulders, wearing sandals, and his zipper was pulled down and I could see his underpants through his Bermuda shorts,” Spielvogel vividly recalls. “He was disheveled. I thought, who is this beach bum?”