After his inspection, Tobin thought Runaway Bay was a disaster waiting to happen, too, sales-wise.
“It really was a building that was not well conceived in terms of marketability,” he says in 2010. “Their problem was there really weren’t a lot of water views—the water was far off. It was a B-player in terms of an investment. The other problem was that the building needed to be sold in a rough real estate market. My business was thriving because there were people like Woody and Spielvogel in trouble.”
When construction of Runaway Bay—named after a location in Jamaica—was started “it was a good market,” maintains Spielvogel. “But it takes two to three years to complete. You have to have a good crystal ball.”
Along with the complex, Tobin didn’t think much of Spielvogel, who was generating bad reviews from everyone except Woody—that was still to come. “He was a nightmare, so I didn’t think Woody always surrounded himself with the smartest people,” observes Tobin. “He was a pushy kind of New York Jewish guy who did not reflect what you’d expect of a partner of a Johnson and Johnson heir. He was not the ambassador to St. James Court. He probably felt he caught a fat hog in the ass with Woody and that’s pretty much what he had done. He was a real putz.”
Not knowing the two well, Tobin was under the impression that the fast-talking Spielvogel had glommed on to the seemingly mild-mannered Woody, when it was really the other way around. What Tobin also didn’t understand was that Woody was living vicariously through Spielvogel’s bravado and his bluster just as he would decades later through Rex Ryan’s Ralph Kramden bombast and braggadocio.
It took Tobin a while before he actually learned who Woody really was because he kept such a low profile, with Spielvogel out front.
“I never put together the Johnson part of his name with Johnson and Johnson. I eventually learned at some point after he became our client that he was an heir, and I thought, ‘Holy shit!’ For a kid who’s been carried in a trust fund situation like him to have any kind of entrepreneurial fire in the belly was unique to me.”
But Tobin quickly noted that Woody left mostly everything in Spielvogel’s hands, acting more like a playboy than a businessman who had a lot of serious money riding on their Runaway Bay project. “Woody would take off into the wild blue yonder. He was never going to be the guy who was the day-to-day, do-the-job guy. He was going to have people doing all the work for him.”
After Tobin had toured Runaway Bay and had met with the principals and had decided to take on the project, he called a staff meeting to brief his people about the job and what needed to be done.
Instantly, one of his most aggressive employees jumped up and volunteered to oversee the whole deal. Her name was Nancy Sale Frey, “a tiger woman” in her midtwenties “who got things done” and who had recently been promoted as one of Tobin’s several young thirty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year vice presidents.
Tobin had hired Sailee, as she called herself, a year or so earlier when she was job-hunting after she had been laid off by her previous employer, Leadership Housing, said to have been her first job after she graduated from the University of Miami in 1971, where she had majored in education and psychology and played lots of tennis.
Job-hunting, she walked unannounced into the office of Herb’s brother, Steve Tobin, who was then the sales manager for a project called Aventura, billed as Miami’s version of Beverly Hills. While Steve Tobin didn’t have any openings, he was impressed enough with her style, aggressiveness, ambition, and the experience she had in her previous job to recommend her to Herb, whose firm he, too, soon joined and where he worked closely with Nancy Sale Frey.
“She was very driven to be successful,” says Herb Tobin, looking back, “and she achieved a very high level of financial success as a result of the events that took place in my company, meaning she met Woody Johnson, and she immediately pushed herself onto that project. I always thought she was very opportunistic and smart. She knew how to get what she wanted, and she got it. She said, ‘I would like to work on that account.’
“She found a way to find out who Woody was,” continues Tobin. “She saw an opportunity, she knew how to read situations, she saw vulnerability, and moved in and filled a void. I saw her interest. She pushed herself into that job. She hooked on to Woody, and the relationship grew legs. Somebody had to go hold hands with the client, and she did it—literally.”
Many years later Nancy Sale Frey Johnson Rashad claims that it was Spielvogel who got her involved in the project because of how sexy she looked, and that she didn’t jump in on it on her own, and had no agenda. “He saw me go into Herb’s office and I was wearing a long chamois skirt with a slit up the front and I had long blond hair, and high platform shoes, and he told Herb that they wanted me to be the account person. I had no idea, really, who Woody Johnson was.”
If anyone could get Runaway Bay up and running in terms of marketing and advertising, it was Sale Frey, a jock from a prominent Jewish St. Louis family who did her job as aggressively as she attacked opponents on the tennis courts at college. Sale’s job was to shepherd Woody and Spielvogel’s account, coordinating everything to make sure it would all happen, which she did, and Woody was duly impressed with her professionally and personally.
Tobin, however, was somewhat surprised that Woody had fallen for her, at least the physical aspect.
“She was not a knockout,” in Tobin’s eyes. “She put herself together, and she always dressed nicely, but she was kind of tomboyish. Today one might think she was a lesbian, but she liked guys. She was in her twenties and I was in my thirties, but I never thought of her as very attractive. She appealed to Woody because she had that look that he had been programmed to like. I thought he was a better-looking man than Sailee was a woman.”
Beauty, however, is in the eye of the beholder, and Spielvogel takes credit for being the first to say, “Robert, I’d like you to meet Sailee, she’ll be working with us—and that changed the whole course of his life.” Spielvogel thought she was a knockout, and was attracted to her. But he knew he didn’t stand a chance against his wealthy partner. “She made Christie Brinkley and Farrah Fawcett look like they were ugly. Anybody who thought differently had to be blind assholes.”
Besides questioning Sale’s physical attributes, or lack thereof, Tobin couldn’t figure out Woody’s appeal, either, other than his immense trust fund.
“I don’t know how any woman could have gone for him back then. He was awkward socially, and was not a very aggressive kind of guy. He was so laid-back you’d almost have to stick a mirror under his nose to see if he was breathing.”
Initially, Sale thought he was somewhat nerdy, but cute. “He definitely was not stylin’,” she says looking back many years later, long after they were divorced. “He wore a cashmere blazer missing a button with the right-hand pocket ripped and the lining showed. When we first moved to New York he wore the same outfit until he eventually started having his suits made in London.” What initially attracted her to him, she maintains, was that he seemed “responsible and stable and he had a goofy kind of humor that I thought was really funny.”
His wealth, she claims, “didn’t really register.”
Tobin saw Woody as troubled, and “was really out there without a compass. He had no one to tell him what to do, or to give him direction. He had no experience. All he had was a bunch of money.”
Sale stepped in and became Woody’s “PalmPilot”—a determined young woman who could help him organize his life at a time when he was floundering around professionally and personally.
“Woody had a lot of shit going on in his life,” says Tobin. “Sale was anal, organized. She could help Woody get his act together. He found her to be a comfort zone. And she had met a guy who was rich and who could offer her a ticket to ride. When she got with Woody, she shot right to the top and never looked back.”
* * *
As Woody became more confident in the business world—“he absorbed like a sponge what I was teaching
him,” asserts Spielvogel—their partnership went from warm to cold seemingly overnight. Woody began bringing in new people who were loyal to him, such as the accountant Joel Latman—“another Jewish guy [who had done work for the Johnson family],” notes Spielvogel.
Woody also began taking advice from a new set of lawyers who, like others, didn’t take to Spielvogel and wanted him out of the picture.
“They had a lot of meetings among themselves,” he recalls. “They could sense it was time to get rid of me, that Bob didn’t need to give twenty-five percent of all future business dealings to me. I believe they were telling him, you got your education in business, you don’t need to pay for it the rest of your life.”
Spielvogel suddenly was being treated more like an employee and a gofer than a twenty-five percent non-voting partner. After Woody’s brother Billy died, for instance, Spielvogel was ordered to go to Hollywood to see what kind of assets and business he had. Spievogel refused, contending it had nothing to do with their deal and Woodric Enterprises.
When the insurance company that had the policy on Keith Johnson balked about paying, Spielvogel, who was experienced in the insurance business, told Woody the company was acting within its rights. Woody felt he was siding with the enemy, and being disloyal to the Johnson family. “They were really bitterly mad at me. They felt I was interfering in something that I wasn’t supposed to interfere in. They made it seem I was against the family.”
Spielvogel, who had a hand in running things at the partnership’s Holiday Inn, was soon replaced by an efficiency expert, which resulted in an angry confrontation. When Spielvogel refused to leave the hotel one afternoon, the police were called, he was handcuffed, and escorted off the premises. “I was just there in the hotel. I owned twenty-five percent of the fucking place. They said I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was a detriment. We were bucking heads.”
Without Spielvogel as a player, new partnerships were formed. One of them, headquartered in Pompano Beach, Florida, was incorporated as Pompano Systems, which was believed to have encompassed Woody’s inherited cable TV business, and listed Woody as the director and president; Neil J. Burmeister, the late Keith Johnson’s financial advisor, as secretary; and Joel Latman, who handled accounting. Like Latman, Burmeister remained as a principal in Woody’s future investment and business enterprises under the umbrella of the Johnson Company, which he formed after he left Florida in the 1980s and moved to New York.
Woody had reportedly invested five hundred thousand dollars of his own money in the cable franchise. When it was sold for some ten million dollars, he was said to have walked away with an enormous but unknown profit.
Spielvogel was seeing a different Woody Johnson than the seemingly naïve guy who had come to his office virtually hat in hand several years earlier asking him to teach him “bidness” in return for a very nice slice of the pie.
“He became standoffish, icy, aloof.”
Spielvogel filed a lawsuit, but says that in their final settlement he never saw one red cent of the percentage Woody had promised him and that was part of their formal partnership agreement. In the end, when the dust had settled, he agreed to fifty-five thousand dollars; one of the partnership’s business cars, a Chevrolet Impala station wagon; and some office furniture.
In all, the partnership spent a total of eleven million dollars on investments, and Spielvogel claims Woody “made millions more” from those deals.
“I decided to settle because I had a house and a mortgage and suddenly I had no income. It all stopped. I was struggling really badly and at that point you’ll take anything to pay your bills. I became a twenty-five percent nobody. But I don’t blame Bob. I hold no grudges toward him.”
After the partnership ended badly, Spielvogel had his ups and downs in business. But he and Woody would share one mutual tragedy. Like Woody, who lost his daughter, Casey, to drugs in 2010, Spielvogel’s daughter, Debra, was murdered in 1998, and Spielvogel fell apart. Also like Woody, he had a second marriage with a younger woman and they had a child.
A year after Woody purchased the New York Jets in 2000, having long ago put his first business partner out of mind, Spielvogel got into some very serious trouble. In the late 1990s, he had gone back to school and earned a law degree, and had become a business consultant and an advisor to an African-American physician, Dr. James Scott Pendergraft, who owned five late-term abortion clinics in Florida.
Christian conservative anti-abortion elements in Marion County, who wanted to keep a Pendergraft clinic from opening there, came up with a list of allegations. In a complex case that pro-choice advocates have asserted was a way of using the judicial system to harass abortion providers, the black doctor was convicted of extortion, conspiracy, and mail fraud, as was his Jewish consultant Spielvogel, who also was accused of lying to the FBI, filing a false statement, and conspiracy.
The jury consisted of eight elderly women and four men, all but one of them white, and the two key government witnesses were members of a local Baptist church whose membership were pro-life advocates. Woody’s former business partner didn’t stand a chance, and served eight months behind bars before he was released after all but two of the charges against him were dropped on appeal, and he was hoping for a pardon on the remaining ones involving the FBI.
Spielvogel had had quite a tumultuous roller-coaster life since that day that Woody had come to see him. Looking back, he feels that the Band-Aid heir “got exactly what he bargained for—and more—from our partnership. He made millions of dollars, he learned how to spell ‘bidness,’ and he got a wife out of it.”
As for Sale, he jokingly wonders, always the hustler: “Since I introduced them, maybe she should give me a commission for the megamillions she won meeting and marrying and divorcing Bob Johnson.”
44
When Nancy Sale Frey was a freshman at the University of Miami she aggressively elected herself captain of the then-lowly women’s tennis team, soon had a short-lived, tumultuous relationship with South African Patrick Cramer, one of the star players on the men’s championship tennis team, and was named “Princess Sailee” in the Miss Ibis competition for the university’s 1968 Ibis yearbook. Despite what others may have felt about her looks, she always had confidence that she was gorgeous.
She was one of five girls chosen from a group of about two dozen who had applied for the Miss Ibis pageant out of the entire school. The yearbook carried Alice in Wonderland–like photos of her. One had her looking pensive with a blue ribbon in her long, bleached blond hair, a string of pearls around her neck, gloss on her lips, and wearing a demure white top with a black design. The other had her posed against an exotic Banyon tree, offering the camera a Pepsodent smile, and wearing a black top, tight slacks imprinted with a black and white design, flat sandals, and with her blond tresses flowing down over each of her breasts. Her right leg was bent seductively, her sandaled foot against the tree trunk, her right hand resting suggestively on her thigh.
The panel of “celebrity” judges who had chosen her and the other four included a Miami Dolphins placekicker; a local radio disk jockey; a Miami Herald beauty editor; the vice mayor of Coral Gables, where the campus was located; and Sammy Spear, who was the leader of Jackie Gleason’s TV show orchestra.
While the Ibis yearbook portrayed the event as important, it really wasn’t. “It was open to anyone and everyone,” recalls one of the other princesses, pretty, blond Irene Bangstrup, who had been the school’s 1967 homecoming queen. “There weren’t hundreds of women vying to be a princess, believe me. It was a one-shot deal.”
But Sale Frey’s selection may have gone to her head because later in life, after she became Mrs. Woody Johnson and a New York socialite, she often showed up in published reports described as a model, or former model.
For her tenth reunion in 1977 at University City High School in St. Louis, she submitted a written blurb about herself. In text worthy of a Playboy magazine centerfold, she informed her classmates that she was “pr
esently a model and enjoys traveling, diving, and snow skiing,” but gave no details about her claimed modeling. Around that time she had been working at the Tobin company where she first met Woody, but the Tobin brothers, who didn’t think she was very attractive, say they were unaware of any modeling by their vice president. For her thirtieth high school reunion in 1997, writing in the third person, the Manhattan socialite and mother of three daughters stated that her background included “modeling internationally.”
When her high school classmates read her responses their jaws dropped. “I was really surprised and wondered, where’s this modeling stuff coming from,” says Suzi Matlof, who remembers Nancy Frey as “skinny as skinny can be, like a rail actually, just straight down with no curves, and she was just okay looking. We never heard about her doing any modeling. She never did that in high school, and usually we would all hear something like that.”
But the references to her signifying a big-time modeling career somewhere in the distant past continued.
In an October 2011 New York Times profile of her two surviving daughters, Jaime and Daisy, headlined, “Trying to Outrun Wealth and Fame,” that image was still perpetuated when, once again, she was described in the second paragraph as “a former model,” which may have left Vogue catwalk images in readers’ minds.
It was nothing on that order.
Nancy Sale Frey Johnson Rashad concedes that her career was minimal at best, and happened just after college. “We’re not talking Christy Turlington here,” she admits in 2012. “We’re not talking New York, high-fashion runway. We’re talking about a runway in a Florida department store, and the designer would be brought in to do shows.”
She says she also was cast as an extra in a South Florida TV commercial for Chevrolet, but she wasn’t the spokesmodel. “The car went through a gas station and I was wearing cut-off jeans and a top and I had long blond hair and I think I roller skated through,” she recalls. She also appeared for a time on a billboard on Interstate 95 in the Sunshine State for Costa Rican tourism. “But we’re talking forty years ago.”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 31