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If anyone’s face could have graced the cover of a glamour magazine because of her natural beauty, it was actually Nancy Sale Frey’s mother, Mary Melisse Nemeth Frey, Woody Johnson’s future mother-in-law.
Dr. Ed Saltzman, a longtime friend of the Frey family, “an older big brother” to, and confidant of, Woody and Nancy’s before, during, and after their marriage—and the pediatrician of their firstborn daughter, Casey—swears Melisse resembled the stunning Academy Award–winning actress Olivia de Havilland.
“Melisse was absolutely beautiful—I mean beautiful.”
With her strawberry-blond hair, blue-green eyes, ivory skin, perfect features, and shapely figure, she was a knockout and, according to a close relative, that caused issues between mother and daughter. “Nancy’s problem was that she got sick of everybody telling her how gorgeous her mother was. Nancy was perceived as an ugly duckling compared to her mother. She had a very handsome, accomplished older brother and an adorable younger brother and she was the homely child in between. When she was young she would not identify with anything feminine. She only wanted to do athletic things—ride horses, play tennis. She wanted to be a boy.”
Years later Sale acknowledges that the domestic life was never her thing, and by marrying into the Johnson dynasty she always had servants at her beck and call. “I didn’t want to be a homemaker like my mother. I didn’t want to go grocery shopping, or cook. I wanted to be in business, do sports, and Woody never said anything.”
Woody’s future mother-in-law—who would use her middle name, Melisse, which had a classier ring to it than Mary, just as her daughter used her middle name, Sale—was a first-generation American of blue-collar immigrant Hungarian stock on her father’s side and Czech on her mother’s side.
Melisse’s parents, James and Mary Nemeth, raised chickens in the backyard of the modest multifamily home where they once had lived on the main street that ran through the western New Jersey town of Phillipsburg, across the Delaware River from Pennsylvania.
P’Burg, as it was known, was where a number of college and professional football players had grown up, such as Jim Ringo, a Hall of Fame center who played in the 1950s and ’60s for the Green Bay Packers and the Philadelphia Eagles. The town also blossomed some beauties. Along with the Nemeths’ daughter, Melisse, who the local boys all chased, P’Burg was hometown to a buxom blond bombshell named Vera Jayne Palmer—better known later as the actress and Playboy centerfold Jayne Mansfield.
While the Nemeths always lived no more than an hour from the Princeton estate where their granddaughter Sale’s first husband, Woody, was raised, they were always a social and economic world away, and were rarely included in the Johnson’s elite circle.
Melisse’s father, born April 14, 1890, had arrived in the United States in 1908, and had registered as an alien in 1917, and through his life James Nemeth had held a series of manual labor jobs; he worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania; he had been an ironworker for the American Horse Shoe Company; he was a teamster and drove a truck; and during World War II, he was employed at the Picatinny Arsenal in North Jersey that turned out bombs and artillery shells.
His wife, Mary Hlavcsek, whom he married when she was nineteen and he was twenty-six, had been born on Christmas Eve in 1896 in Czechoslovakia. She came to the United States in 1913, five years after her husband. Her first child had died in the great flu epidemic of 1918.
The Nemeths had little or no formal schooling, but learned to speak, read, and write rudimentary English; she better than he. They were members of the Jehovah’s Witness sect.
James and Mary were the future maternal great-grandparents of the wealthy Johnson & Johnson heiresses and socialites—Woody and Sale’s progeny—Casey, Jaime, and Daisy Johnson.
As a family member notes, “James was a very self-sufficient immigrant, a hard-working, simple kind of guy who was handy around the house and even resoled his children’s shoes,” while his great-granddaughter, Casey, was known to buy dozens of thousand-dollar-a-pair Manolo Bhlaniks in one fell swoop, and usually wore each pair just once.
Many Hungarian immigrants like the Nemeths had settled in New Jersey, and the Johnson & Johnson company had close ties to the Magyar community, and hired many of them to work in the New Brunswick plant; at one point a third of that city’s population had Hungarian blood, and 66 percent of Johnson & Johnson’s employees had Hungarian roots.
“The Johnsons liked the Hungarians. They were hard-working and honest … Before long, the company came to be known as the ‘Hungarian University,’” according to Lawrence Foster. Woody’s grandfather, Robert Wood Johnson Jr., the General, once boasted that he had “many close friends among the Hungarian people,” who invited him to family events such as weddings and christenings. One disgruntled Hungarian employee, however, wasn’t so friendly; he tried to extort thousands of dollars from the company, with the threat of blowing up Johnson & Johnson’s headquarters. He was arrested before any damage was done.
Melisse, born in 1922, was Mary Nemeth’s middle child. A sister, Helen, was two years older, and a brother, Louis, four years younger, died in his late twenties. Helen Nemeth married a veterinarian, Harry Alexander Roney, who served as the chief veterinarian for the New Jersey Civil Defense and Disaster Control Division for two decades beginning right after World War II, and Helen had worked as a bookkeeper for the New Jersey Herald. They had a son, Alexander, a teacher, who was one of Sale’s cousins.
But it was Helen’s sister, the gorgeous, body-beautiful Melisse, who at twenty-three hit the jackpot with her marriage.
In the summer of 1945, when President Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that forced the surrender of the Japanese, Melisse, a high school graduate, was working as a beautician at the Richard Hudnut Beauty Salon on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
The salon catered to society women, and one of Melisse’s duties, with her glowing, radiant skin, was to demonstrate and promote Hudnut’s product line called the DuBarry Beauty Ritual Kit, which sold for one dollar and fifty cents and included DuBarry Cleansing Cream, Skin Freshener, and Foundation Lotion for, as the DuBarry advertising declared, “an alluring dawn-to-dusk protective film. Even while you sleep, there’s a special rich cream to pamper your pores! Follow your DuBarry Beauty Ritual faithfully, daily. Be the Beauty that makes men ask, ‘Who Is She?’”
One of the men who approached Melisse Nemeth as she strolled down Fifth Avenue one afternoon during her lunch break that end-of-the-war summer in 1945 and asked who she was, was a tall, handsome navy lieutenant in uniform on his final leave.
His name was Robert David Frey, and he and Melisse had come from two different worlds. He was the son of a prominent Jewish attorney and former circuit judge in St. Louis, Abraham B. Frey, and the former Riette Sale. Nancy Frey would use her paternal grandmother’s maiden name throughout her adult life, and it was the name that she would bestow upon her and Woody’s firstborn, Sale Trotter Case Johnson, known as Casey. Abe Frey was president of the reform Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis, and Riette Sale Frey was active in the city’s Jewish community; she was a leader in the Shaare Emeth Sisterhood, was a member of the Jewish Hospital Auxiliary, and a member of the National Council of Jewish Women.
“My brother Bob, who was still in the navy, but just getting out, and my brother Richard, and their friend Sy Aronson were in New York and saw Melisse walking down the street, and Robert thought she was really attractive, and he stopped to chat with her,” recounts Mary Frey Hickman decades later. “Melisse, who was still using the name Mary at the time, and who was a cosmetologist, thought he was very attractive, too, and she ended up with Robert, and she married him.”
If things had turned out differently two years earlier, Bob Frey might not have made it home in one piece, or at all.
The headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dated December 30, 1943, read: “St. Louisan Rides Atop Tank Under Fire to Help Save Bombed Ship.” Frey, then a twenty-
six-year-old ensign and an assistant gunnery officer, had taken the borrowed army tank through a “shower of shrapnel,” according to the report, “to reach his damaged ship moored to a jetty in Palermo harbor” after German bombers blew up stores of ammunition.
He was serving aboard the destroyer Mayrant, and his bunkmate was a naval lieutenant by the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., the wartime president’s twenty-nine-year-old son, who was in command during the fierce attack. Frey was honored with the Legion of Merit, one of the first junior officers in the navy to have been so decorated during the war.
With the war finally over, all those lucky boys like Bob Frey who came home in one piece were getting married to all those pretty girls who had kept the homefront fires glowing as Rosie the Riveters in defense plants or, in Mary Melisse Nemeth’s case, had kept the faces of Manhattan’s Upper East Side matrons glowing beautifully, or tried to, with DuBarry’s Beauty Ritual.
Three days after Thanksgiving 1945, their engagement was announced in The New York Times, with a photo of the striking “Miss Mary Melisse Nemeth,” and details about the couple, including the fact that Lieutenant Frey was an alumnus of the University of Illinois and the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, class of 1940.
Eleven days later, on December 8, the knockout gentile beautician from a poor immigrant family in New Jersey and the handsome Jewish naval officer from a prominent family in St. Louis tied the knot at Manhattan’s Commodore Hotel in a ceremony presided over by New York Municipal Court Judge Abraham Goodman. Melisse’s sister, Helen, was the maid of honor, and Bob’s brother Richard was best man.
Just a month earlier, one of their other brothers—there were four in all—Army First Lieutenant William Howard Frey, had married the first of his three wives, Brena Feldman, the heiress daughter of one of the owners of the Atlanta-headquartered Puritan Chemical Company, whom he met while he was stationed in the south. Bill Frey would rise to president and bring Bob and his brothers into the company.
When Melisse married Bob Frey and moved up in the world, her family in rural New Jersey felt “a little animosity” toward her, according to a family member. “They felt abandoned, and Melisse’s sister, Helen, ended up taking care of their parents. But Melisse couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of Dodge, and Bob Frey was her ticket out of that small town, provincial life.”
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Bob Frey took his bride home to the Gateway to the West city where Mary Melisse Nemeth Frey was welcomed warmly by some close friends of the Frey family, and scorned by others mainly because she wasn’t Jewish and had come from poor roots.
“Bob came home with this total shiksa, but the darndest thing was she had more Jewish soul than he ever did,” asserts family friend Lois Caplan Miller. “If there ever was a trophy bride, it was Melisse. She was blond and beautiful and had a great shape, and a big smile, and big boobs, and we became friends. I think everybody loved her because she was warm and outgoing and gracious.”
Not everybody.
Others felt Bob Frey had gone off the deep end by marrying her, and rejecting his Jewish, upscale roots.
“Here he was from an aristocratic family, highly educated, highly thought of in the community, very big in the society of giving and philanthropy, and he was bringing home this unknown girl of a different religion who had kind of a low-class background, but was gorgeous, and everyone was shocked,” observes a Frey family confidant.
Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion about her.
A year after Bob and Melisse got hitched, she gave birth to the first of their three children, a son whom she named James Louis, the boy’s middle name in honor of her brother who had died early. Her second, born in 1949, was Nancy Sale, who was given her middle name by Bob in honor of his mother. Melisse’s third and last was named Alan and given the middle name Benjamin in homage to Judge Frey.
Nancy’s brothers—Woody Johnson’s future brothers-in-law—were thought by everyone in the Frey’s circle to be handsome, brilliant, and successful.
Jimmy, as he was called, got his medical degree at Duke University and became a neurologist with a specialty in vascular neurology. He would become affiliated with the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix where Woody had been treated after his near-crippling back injury.
Alan B. Frey was a Princeton University Postdoctoral Fellow in molecular biology, and became an associate professor in the department of cell biology at the New York University Langone Medical Center, and lived with his family in Woody’s hometown of Princeton, and for a time in Highland Park, where the General years earlier had been the young mayor.
Of the three Frey siblings, though, it was Nancy who would become a boldface name, a New York socialite, and very wealthy beyond anyone’s imagination when she became a Johnson dynasty wife.
Bob Frey bought a comfortable late-1920s Tudor-style home with four bedrooms, three baths, and a one-car detached garage that was furnished with some of his mother’s hand-me-down antique furniture. The Frey home was at 517 Midvale Avenue in the pleasant University Hills section of University City, a tree-lined neighborhood in St. Louis populated with doctors, dentists, and academics who taught at nearby Washington University.
Despite the Frey family wealth and position in the St. Louis Jewish community—the earlier generation of Frey brothers, including Nancy’s father, were delivered to school in a chauffeured limousine and grew up in an eighteen-room mansion on St. Louis’s posh Lindell Boulevard—Bob Frey was rather conservative in his own lifestyle. “Bob and Melisse were not living the high life,” observes family friend Lois Caplan Miller, who was a columnist for the St. Louis Jewish Light. “They lived a kind of ordinary middle-class life.”
Woody Johnson’s future brother-in-law virtually disappeared for five days a week, returning only on weekends, as the workaholic sales manager who was successfully hawking sanitary maintenance chemicals for the Puritan Company, in Atlanta, of which his brother William had become president.
Unlike his father and grandfather, both highly respected attorneys and judges, Bob was strictly business-minded, a born hustler with a Harvard MBA in economics and a degree in business administration. At Puritan, he went to work in sales, and when the company opened an office in St. Louis he vigorously ran the sales branch, traveling up and down the East Coast.
With Bob constantly traveling, Melisse was left to run things at home, responsible for the early upbringing of her three children.
Possibly overcompensating for the meager surroundings in which she had grown up, Melisse became the epitome of a zealous Stepford housewife. Not only was she gorgeous like the robotic wives in the film, she also was a meticulous Stepford housekeeper who obsessively set the breakfast table perfectly the night before, and even made sure the front lawn was green year-round by having it spray-painted in the winter.
Melisse also embraced her husband’s Judaism with a vengeance, converted, and became very active in the Frey family’s temple, Shaare Emeth, and at one point was head of the Sisterhood, and celebrated every Jewish holiday. But her daughter, Sale, who converted to Episcopalian before she married Woody, recalls that her mother “listened to church music when my father was away.”
As a doting and driven mom, Melisse became the leader of Nancy’s Girl Scout troop, ran it with a firm hand—and woe to any of the girls who got out of hand. One of the projects she asked the troop to perform was to make cushions, Martha Stewart–like, for when they sat on dirt around the campfire. One of the scouts, whose parents had run summer camps, had questioned the project, asking, “Why don’t we just sit on the ground?” Melisse went ballistic, took it as an affront to her authority, and called the girl’s parents and told them, “Debby’s not right for the Girl Scouts. She talks back too much.”
At the same time, Melisse had little control over her own daughter, who was rebelling against her, and generally against authority, in typical teenage fashion.
While still in high school, she had worked part time at a popular yo
ung woman’s clothing store called the Honeybee in nearby Clayton, Missouri, that was considered the place to shop for preppy apparel such as Villager and Lady Bug things, which was Nancy’s style—crewneck sweaters, oxford shirts, kilts, Peter Pan collars, short plaid skirts, kneesocks.
A close Frey relative claims that Nancy’s father discovered that his daughter had “sticky fingers” when she worked there.
“Bob came home one day and he walked into Nancy’s room and happened to open her closet and there were just piles and piles of these gorgeous things, just piled up, and he asked her where it all came from because she didn’t have the money to buy it, and he and her mother didn’t give her the money to buy it,” claims the Frey relative. “Bob told me she didn’t pay for the things, that she took them. When he asked her about it, Nancy thought what she had done was cute, that she was able to sneak things out of the store.”
Years later, in 2012, Nancy Sale Frey Johnson Rashad adamantly denies ever shoplifting, and declares, “I spent every penny I ever earned there, and all of my allowance of fifteen dollars a month or whatever it was, so I could buy things, and I got a thirty percent discount, and I don’t think my father ever went into my closet.”
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If Nancy Sale Frey didn’t exactly inherit her mother’s dazzling looks, she most definitely was her father’s daughter in every way. Her aunt, Mary Frey Hickman, for one, says, “Robert was certainly bright, and he was opportunistic. Nancy learned at her daddy’s knee.”
After seeing her in action working with Woody Johnson, Herb Tobin says he knew immediately whom she took after. “She looked like her father and she acted like her father. Sailee and Bob were similar—they both had the attitude of ‘go get ’em!’”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 32