Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  As they sat in front of the television watching the game, Woody made conversation by asking Spielvogel what he was up to, and learned that the guy was involved in building apartment houses in South Florida, had a successful insurance business back in Long Island, and was driving a flashy Cadillac Eldorado convertible. In other words, Spielvogel came across as a successful, fast-talking, likeable hustler who was “making a lot of money” at a young age, and who had done it all on his own.

  “I got the impression that was kind of impressive to him,” says Spielvogel. “I had made it the hard way on my own. I hadn’t inherited a dime. Those guys had stock certificates. I didn’t have family money.”

  The meeting was “kind of a non-event” for Spielvogel, who, after his brief Florida visit, had returned to his base of operations in Port Jefferson, New York, having no idea who the bedraggled fellow was with whom he had chatted, and couldn’t have cared less.

  Several weeks later Spielvogel, who claimed to be the youngest agent at Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, was sitting in his office, in a small, one-story professional office building he had built and leased back to Guardian, when his secretary, a high school intern, told him there was a call from a Mr. Johnson. Spielvogel didn’t know a Johnson and had to refresh his memory. Woody said he was now in New Jersey, in Princeton, and wanted to come up and meet with him.

  “I gave him a Jewish invitation,” recalls Spielvogel. “Come anytime.”

  Ninety minutes later Woody was on the phone again.

  “I’m here,” he says. “I’m at the airport.”

  This time he was zipped up and wearing a suit and tie, but his sandy-blond hair, in the fashion of the time, was still scraggly and down to his shoulders.

  “He started the conversation and said, ‘My dad told me that I have to learn business from somebody who made their own money without inheriting it, and preferably he should be a Jew. That’s why I’m here.”

  It was a pitch that Spielvogel, who was one of the Chosen People, has never forgotten. He tried to keep himself from laughing, or throwing the guy out.

  Woody went on to say that he and his mother had “checked out” Spielvogel and learned that he was legitimate, had fit his late father’s criteria—a Jew with no family fortune—and was “the kind of guy that could teach him ‘bidness,’ and that’s how he said business, he called it ‘bidness,’” says Spielvogel, still getting a laugh at Woody’s pronunciation years later, but believing he was just trying to “sound cool.”

  Woody then told him that he had millions of dollars at his disposal, that he wanted to invest some of it, and that he was willing, if Spielvogel agreed, to have him as his business partner.

  Woody then made quite an offer that Spielvogel eventually could not refuse.

  He told him, “I’ll give you ten percent of the first deal we do just to feel each other out, and twenty-five percent of everything thereafter.”

  Woody said, “I’ll be responsible for the finances and the money and you be responsible to teach me ‘bidness’ and what to do and how to do it.”

  Processing what he was hearing, Spielvogel says he was flattered, still didn’t really know to whom he was talking, but his gut feeling was it all sounded off-the-wall, unreal, and “very, very naïve.” Who, he thought, makes an offer like that on the spot? “It was bizarre, but he was unsophisticated in business,” recounts Spielvogel. “He had no street smarts. He didn’t know how to do anything in business, or even in life, but he tried to look and sound important.”

  Spielvogel told Woody, “I’ll get back to you,” and offered to drive him back to the nearby Long Island airport for his return flight to Princeton. That’s when he started to become a believer.

  “On the tarmac was an impressive private plane. I waited with my mouth open while he took off.”

  Spielvogel returned to his office, called their mutual friend in Fort Lauderdale—“a rich playboy”—to check out his shaggy-haired visitor and to get the scoop. “I said, ‘Who is this guy, Bob Johnson?’ and he told me he was the heir to Johnson and Johnson, and he said, ‘Michael, can I get in on this partnership, too?’”

  The two met again in Florida and afterward Spielvogel was convinced that Woody “could deliver whatever we needed financially.” At the time, Woody had access to as much as fifty million dollars (in mid-1970 dollars), which was quite a handsome sum, and he was due to get his next trust fund check when he turned thirty several years later.

  Things moved quickly after that meeting.

  Woody arranged for a partnership agreement to be drawn up by a Fort Lauderdale attorney, Alex A. Dow, a friend of the Johnson family, and their company, Woodric Enterprises—for the “Wood” in Robert Wood Johnson IV, and the “Ric” in Spielvogel’s middle name, Richard—was incorporated. Beyond the generous percentage deal Woody had promised, Spielvogel also was given a salary of seven hundred dollars a week, and, he says, the title of executive vice president of Woodric. They rented an office suite with seventeen hundred square feet on the seventeenth floor of the fairly new Landmark Bank Building, then the tallest building in Fort Lauderdale, and outfitted it with custom-made office furniture purchased in Miami.

  They were on their way.

  They bonded fairly quickly. Woody’s pet name for his new business partner was “Michael-ito,” but Spielvogel called him Bob, or Robert. At the time, he recalls, only family members and very close friends used the nickname “Woody.”

  Until he found a place of his own, Spielvogel was permitted by Woody to stay in the guesthouse at the Johnson family’s Bay Colony estate in Fort Lauderdale, Woody’s mother’s house, but only when she wasn’t there.

  “Bob was actually scared of his mother, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. But he didn’t defy her. If she said something, that was it.”

  Years later, the very private owner of the Jets spoke briefly about his mother to a reporter, saying in part, “She’s pretty hard-core. She doesn’t complain about anything. Her advice to me always was, ‘When you’re cold, put a jacket on. Stop complaining. When you’re hot, take it off.’ She’s a pragmatic person. She’s kind of like I am. She’s on the side of fiscal responsibility. You’ve got to pay your bills.”

  Early in the partnership, Woody “had left tons of money in the bank and went away,” says Spielvogel. “He said, ‘Don’t spend it all at once.’ Robert was flying around the country for two or three weeks at a time, and enjoying himself. I bought into that. My job was to do the job, and Robert’s job was to be Robert.”

  Spielvogel would later come to believe that Woody wasn’t in business with him to actually make money.

  “I don’t think money motivated him. Woody was in partnership with me to learn business and play the game, and be able to grow up and be able to look sophisticated. He already had a fortune.”

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  The Woodric partnership’s first acquisition was five hundred acres of raw land in Melbourne, Florida, for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, purchased with the idea of developing it, or selling off lots. A bigger deal was a one-hundred room Sheraton Inn in Boca Raton that had gone into foreclosure and that they got for a bargain price of three million and one dollars in an auction. The twelve-acre property included a helicopter, a small golf course, shops, and other amenities. It was soon converted into a Holiday Inn. “It was,” says Michael Spielvogel looking back, “quite a property.”

  The moneyman and lead partner, Woody Johnson, liked the deal Spielvogel had made—it was his biggest in terms of investment—but he wanted no part of the helicopter. “He didn’t want his name attached to it,” says Spielvogel. “He didn’t want the liability in case something happened, and someone would come after his money.

  “Woody would think more about the consequences of how the family would think, and he was overprotective of who he was, almost to the point of not letting it be known that he was the one behind the development. He was afraid people would steal from him, or hurt him, paranoid that peo
ple were going to take advantage of him.”

  By holing up in Florida, by having Spielvogel as his front man, and remaining virtually anonymous under the Woodric corporate umbrella, Woody was insulating himself emotionally and professionally as best he could from his brothers’ shenanigans, from the family scandals up north, even from any repercussions from his mother’s divorce.

  However, Woody couldn’t keep his name or reputation completely pristine during the midseventies when he and Spielvogel were hustling business in South Florida. There were a couple of lawsuits involving fraudulent or misleading sales activity, and another involving Woody’s personal failure to pay his own condominium association dues for a four-thousand-square-foot penthouse he had bought in the newly-built Corinthian on the Intracoastal in Fort Lauderdale. He was held in contempt of court.

  After Woody became nationally known as owner of the New York Jets, The New York Times made mention of the two cases in a 2004 profile of the football mogul headlined: “Behind the Jets, a Private Man Pushes His Dreams,” which described him back in the midseventies as an “unorthodox” risk-taker who “could be tough.” He declined to be interviewed when the paper contacted him.

  * * *

  Despite all of the hustling, it wasn’t all business for the young Woodric Enterprises partners.

  The two spent many nights haunting South Florida’s clubs and bars—favorites were a place called Brothers Three where major groups like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons had gotten their start, and a babe-magnet spot called Bachelors—looking for women, and doing well.

  “Bob and I were pigs. We were whoremasters,” maintains Spielvogel. “There wasn’t a day that we didn’t have women at the house. Bob could get any woman he wanted. If you drove around in a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible, and a rust-color Porsche Carrera that was his pride and joy, and lived in a multimillion-dollar house in Bay Colony, and had a guesthouse, and you were who you were—a Johnson heir—well, once the girls knew that they were putty in Woody’s hands.”

  There was one young woman in Woody Johnson’s life in the early to mid-1970s who didn’t fit in any way, shape, or form in the bimbo, pickup, or one-night stand category.

  Her name was Bonnie Tiburzi.

  “They were in a hot and heavy relationship,” says Spielvogel. “She was very pretty and a great catch, but Bob was also seeing other women.”

  Like Woody’s great-aunt, the eccentric Evangeline Brewster Johnson, who had been an early-twentieth-century aviatrix, Tiburzi had a love of flying. And when she was twenty-four, she broke into the aviation all-men’s club by becoming America’s first woman commercial pilot for a major airline, American.

  Tiburzi became famous at the time. Her promotion during the pro-feminist era of the midseventies became a major media story with cheeky newspaper headlines like: “She Flies by the Seat of Her Panties,” and “American Beauty Is Rose in the Cockpit.”

  After an almost quarter-century career of piloting, Tiburzi retired in 1998.

  Along the way, she had had one bad marriage, to another pilot, and then a good one—to Bruce Faulkner Caputo, who had been a one-term Republican U.S. Congressman from Yonkers, a New York City commuter district, and later a U.S. Senate candidate. But his political career crashed and burned when it became public that he had made inaccurate claims about his Vietnam War service.

  In her 1984 memoir, TAKEOFF! Tiburzi reminisced about her career, and also chronicled her romance with Woody, who she identified as “Bob,” because, as she emphasizes years later, “I didn’t want to use the name Woody. Everyone would know who he really was. I wanted to protect his privacy.”

  Among a number of references to him in the book, she stated (with the help of a professional writer):

  Bob was an attractive, unassuming, thoughtful guy who was trying hard to establish his own identity and career … He was ingenious, he had the resources and he needed to go places … Yet he could not completely understand that what I wanted was right for a woman. I’m not sure I even cared … I was obsessed with airplanes … Bob was his usual steadfast self, encouraging me to do what I felt I should and yet not wildly enthusiastic about my goals.

  Reminiscing about Woody and Spielvogel in 2010, she says: “Woody was just an all-around great guy who had a beach boy look and was playful and fun. I always thought of Michael as being more serious than Woody. He was a let’s-get-the-job-done business-type person who didn’t laugh or joke like Woody. I saw him as a finger-snapping, gum-chewing guy, though I never actually saw him snap his fingers, or chew gum, but that was kind of his persona. Michael was very pivotal to Woody, getting him into business because Woody had ambition to do something different other than Johnson and Johnson.”

  Before she dated Woody, she had become a “buddy” of his brother Keith; they had been introduced by Guy Vicino, who was running one of his chic fashion boutiques in Fort Lauderdale. “I adored Keith but he was a bit bizarre and had an affected way, but with a lot of flair.”

  Keith knew class and style and recognized it when he saw it, and he saw it in Bonnie, who was then teaching flying at an airport in Pompano Beach. “I had a Cartier watch and I remember Keith pointing it out and saying, ‘Oh, a flight instructor with a Cartier watch! Hmm. How fancy.’ Most of my flight instructor friends, or my students, didn’t know a Cartier from a Timex, but Keith certainly knew the difference.”

  Bonnie knew Guy was gay—“he was very flamboyant, I mean you just knew it, and he didn’t hide it”—and she suspected Keith was, too, from his mannerisms and style. “He certainly had those airs,” she says. But she was unaware, though, of his drug problem, she claims, and was “shocked”—shocked—when she learned he had overdosed and, as she understood, “they found a needle in his arm.”

  She had also heard “through one of the lawyers” that when Keith died he had left “an astronomical amount of money. It was just amazing—it was seventy million dollars.”

  She never got to know Woody and Keith’s other ill-fated brother, Billy.

  On one occasion, playing Cupid, Keith asked her if she wouldn’t mind if he brought his big brother Woody along for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. “Woody showed up, and he was so cute, and the next day he called and asked me whether I was dating his brother, and I said no, and he said, ‘Oh, then can I ask you out?’ and I said yes. I adored Woody, and thought he was wonderful, a good all-around guy, just kind of uncomplicated. We pretty much dated for two or three years.”

  Bonnie was a tomboy growing up and a jock of sorts when she and Woody were seeing each other. They played tennis, went boating, and she learned to scuba dive in the Johnson’s Bay Colony swimming pool. It was while they were in bathing suits that she first saw the glaring scar on his back. “It was huge—huge. He told me he had broken his back when he stepped off a ledge, or a rock, when he was in college, and he told me just because I had said, ‘Oh, gosh what happened to you?” (Years later, she ran into him as he was walking toward his office in Rockefeller Center and she recognized him from behind because of his gait. “He sort of lists a little bit to one side. It was a permanent injury.”)

  Woody, she says, wasn’t much of a romantic, never gave her gifts, or wrote her love letters, or brought her flowers. Because of his very private nature, he never opened up about the death of his father, which loomed large with him, his troubled brothers’ escapades, or any of the other embarrassments and scandals of the Johnson dynasty. “We just had fun.”

  Bonnie had no expectations about a future with Woody, either, because her sole goal in life was to become a commercial airline pilot.

  “I never thought, ‘Oh, goody, if I marry this guy I’m going to have lots of money. I never thought, I’m sorry I didn’t [marry him] because from the time I met him I was really so focused on flying, for good or for bad that was my direction, and I think Woody was trying to be on his own and do something with his life. Marriage was not in the cards.”

  Once she won her wings at American Airli
nes, they lost touch.

  “I hope he was fond of me,” she says decades later, “because I was certainly very fond of him.”

  One of the last times she was with him, he showed her a magazine, and in it was a photograph of Woody, Spielvogel, and an attractive young woman named Nancy Sale Frey.

  “Everybody was wearing black T-shirts and wearing construction hats, and it had to do with one of their developments,” Bonnie recalls. “He could have been dating her at the very same time he was dating me. He was a cute guy and I’m sure sparks probably flew.”

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  When the construction of Woody Johnson and Michael Spielvogel’s massive high-rise Runaway Bay condominium project in downtown Fort Lauderdale was completed, they required experts to help with the marketing, advertising, and sales of the apartment units.

  Herbert A. Tobin & Associates, with an in-house staff of about twenty-five, was in the business of handling such projects “from womb to tomb,” as its founder, Herbie Tobin, liked to boast. The firm had good genes.

  Tobin’s father, Ben, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, was a shrewd entrepreneur who, along with his partners, Alfred R. Glancy and Roger L. Stevens, the founding chairman of New York’s Lincoln Center, acquired controlling interest in the Empire State Building in 1951, and had projects all over the country.

  Spielvogel says he personally checked out the Tobin company before he brought Woody in for a meeting because “one of my functions was to insulate Robert from business deals.”

  To see what he was dealing with, Tobin toured Runaway Bay but wasn’t impressed. As a funny promotional gimmick in the mid-1970s, Tobin’s parent company, Ryerson & Haynes, had commissioned the comedian Henny Youngman to do his shtick on a record album entitled, Take My Project, Please, a play on Youngman’s signature line, “Take my wife, please.” The album cover showed Youngman fiddling while a row of high-rise buildings burned behind him.