Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

When the Atlanta-headquartered family chemical company for which Bob Frey was working was sold in the early 1970s, he went into the stockbroker-training program in his early fifties at A. G. Edwards & Sons, in St. Louis, and quickly rose to the position of senior vice president of investment management. He made millions of dollars for his clients because of his obsessive stock research. Even more, he became an expert in designing portfolios that permitted his clients to shelter their money to avoid paying high taxes.

  “Bob Frey was a guy who oftentimes had money in the things he was telling you to buy,” emphasizes Tobin, “and that’s what made him unusual—he had skin in the game. Every time you talked to him, he was trying to sell you something. You couldn’t say, ‘Well, I’ll think about it.’ He’d hound you.”

  Tobin and his entire family had become Bob Frey’s clients based on a recommendation from his daughter. Even Rabbi Jeffrey Stiffman, of Congregation Shaare Emeth, of which Frey was president, put his money with him to invest. “He studied voraciously, and was dedicated to his clients,” said the clergyman, who would give a eulogy at a memorial service for Frey, who died in early August 2010 at the age of ninety-two. “He was one of the most driven people I’ve ever known.”

  However, one very important person in his life who didn’t give him his business was surely the wealthiest of his clients—his future son-in-law, Woody Johnson, and that, along with some other issues he had with his daughter’s first husband, would provoke resentment on Frey’s part for years.

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  Melisse Frey had wanted Nancy to go to a better college than the hard-partying University of Miami, but she was out-voted because her daughter was able to convince her doting father into allowing her to go there because she could play tennis as much as she wanted. He rarely said no to his little girl.

  No one dreamed that while she was living in the Sunshine State she would meet and marry one of the wealthiest eligible bachelors in America.

  Before Nancy Sale Frey arrived to begin her freshman year in September 1967, her mother called close Frey family friend Dr. Ed Saltzman, a prominent pediatrician in South Florida’s Gold Coast—also a client of Bob Frey’s—and asked him to keep a watch on her daughter “in case she had any problems, sort of be a big brother to her,” he says.

  “When Nancy got here she was a very simple little girl, an unassuming Missouri hayseed, but in her own inner self she was very strong and that soon became quite apparent,” Saltzman observes. “With me, she was very sweet and soft and clingy at times, but she had a very tough personality. She was aloof and driven like her father. She got a dollar and ten cents’ value out of a dollar. She could be an unlikable person.”

  Nevertheless, Saltzman, at least two decades her senior, would become a close confidant of Nancy’s, which is the name he knew her by until after she married Woody. One day she told him, ‘I’m now Sale, so call me Sale.’” He also played the role of a sometime surrogate father to Woody. And he was the pediatrician who cared for their first child, Casey. Through the years he would hear from Sale and even Woody about their own marital relationship issues, from their courtship in the mid-1970s, to which he was an eyewitness, to their breakup and divorce in the early 2000s. When he could, he offered fatherly advice and sage counsel.

  Not long after Nancy arrived in Miami, she called Saltzman with a medical problem. Even though she seemed to play tennis around the clock, she had found herself walking with a slight limp, and suffered serious leg pains. Her friends on the men’s tennis team at the University of Miami had noticed her gait and assumed one of her legs was shorter than the other, or that she was slightly pigeon-toed. But it was a bit more serious. However, the orthopedists who examined her could find nothing wrong, told her it was all in her head, and advised her to see a psychiatrist.

  “I said to her, ‘You’re not crazy,’ and I recommended a specialist I knew for her to see,” says Saltzman. “The doctor called me, believed her symptoms, and asked for my okay to do exploratory surgery because this was in the days before the CAT scan. He found a neroma, a nerve tumor that was benign, and removed it, and she was then okay. After that Nancy thought I was magical. She thought I invented the anatomy book.”

  Besides seeking medical opinions, she brought by a few young men she was dating to get her favorite doctor’s opinion and approval on whether they were acceptable, thus making Dr. Saltzman kind of a Dr. Drew on her love life.

  One of her serious boyfriends was the son of a department store executive, whom she fell for a few weeks into her sophomore year. He was so good-looking, she says, “that he couldn’t pass a plate window without checking his profile. We’d go to a party and people would look at him. It wasn’t good for my confidence, and I had [bleached] blond hair down to my waist, and wore short skirts the length of tennis skirts, and platform shoes that made me six feet tall.”

  Despite the narcissistic competition for attention, they dated steadily through college. After they graduated, her boyfriend became a contractor with associates who Sale says had shady ties. The two lived together in a one-bedroom condo in a complex that he and his partners had built and in which Bob Frey had made an investment. With the profit he bought his daughter one of the units. At the same time Sale had enrolled at the Allstate Construction College, which advertised in the classified sections of South Florida newspapers, offering courses leading to state-mandated contractor licenses. Like her boyfriend, she wanted to be a builder and cash in on the Sunshine State’s construction boom.

  While her relationship with her boyfriend had started going downhill—he could be violent, she claims—she had bonded with one of his business partners, “who was like my protector.”

  The grandfatherly-looking partner, according to Sale, was “mob-related, and had been in San Quentin and Leavenworth for many years over a period of time, but he was the world’s nicest guy. He hadn’t killed anybody. He was like an extortionist kind of person.” Another associate in the company, she says, was a Sicilian who “loved to play up that role—not like the I-am-going-to-kill-you role, just the Sicilian role.”

  Her boyfriend wanted to marry Sale, but one night “he picked up my steel construction manual, which weighed about ten pounds, and threw it so hard while he was screaming at me that it stuck in the drywall in my apartment. So that night I decided, okay, that’s it, we’re breaking up.”

  But her friendship with the elderly partner continued, even after he was sent up again and was an inmate at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. “I visited him constantly,” she says. “I’d drive up in my little Mercedes convertible with my schnauzer and spend the night with my aunt and uncle, and I would go see him even when his kids wouldn’t visit him. I showed up one time in a very fitted blue jean jumpsuit and a cowboy hat and boots,” she vividly recalls, “and he wrote me a letter saying, ‘Well, you were a big hit. You give all the guys kind of a thrill every time you come.’” She sent him photos of herself with which he festooned his cell. Years later she observes, “I did a lot of stuff as a young person I can’t believe I did. I had this confidence that I could do pretty much whatever I wanted.”

  The next VIP in her life was far more white bread, and far wealthier. Saltzman immediately liked Woody and found him both “mensch-like but at the same time very furtive and secretive. He needed me because I added a certain maturity to his life. He had business advisors, but he needed guidance in personal areas. He had no idea of social structure at all. He wasn’t sophisticated. What did he ever see in life? He saw nothing. His mother, I gather, was cold and involved with her life. She ran the dynasty and felt everybody was after her money, and she taught Woody that everybody was out to get his money. So he was always very careful.”

  One evening Woody and Sale were having a potluck dinner at Eddie and Joni Saltzman’s home. Around eight o’clock, the telephone rang. It was the mother of one of the pediatrician’s patients, a famous mother—1971’s Miss America, Phyllis George, who was then part of the cast of the popular CBS Sports progra
m The NFL Today. One of her two children was sick and she wanted Dr. Saltzman to come over and see what the problem was.

  “So I went over and played doctor and I got home about ten o’clock and I was surprised to see that Woody’s car was still there. They had waited because, like teenagers, they wanted to know everything there was to know about Phyllis George—what was she like? Was she really as pretty in person? What was the house like? That kind of stuff. I was stunned, and it said something about their interests in celebrity.”

  Some years later, when they were married and were living the high life in New York, the Johnson dynasty couple would finally become part of their own fawning celebrity and society set. But in Florida before their marriage, and during the early years of it, Woody and Sale had few friends. Woody, who was introverted, mostly palled around with Michael Spielvogel, until he was axed, and hung out with his longtime friend from childhood, the gay boutique owner and interior decorator Guy Vicino.

  He also stayed in close touch with his one trusted bosom buddy and fraternity brother at the University of Arizona, Gary Johnson, with whom, back in their hard-partying college days, they were known as the Dupree Brothers. Gary had married Woody’s ex-college girlfriend, Diane Vonderahe, who had been with “BJ,” as she called him, the inebriated night when he broke his back and was left nearly paralyzed, while on the way to a party in Phoenix at Gary Johnson’s parents’ home. Woody was subsequently the best man at Gary and Diane’s wedding, and had gone on a treacherous white-water rafting trip on the Colorado River with them right after his back had sufficiently healed, risking further injury if an accident had happened. Gary and Diane, who had a daughter, had gotten divorced after eight years of marriage just around the time Woody and Sale were a serious item, and the couples, although living on different coasts, tried to get together as often as possible.

  “The first time I met Sale was when Gary and I went down to BJ’s place in Florida,” Vonderahe says years later. “We went to Super Bowls together, and we went on a cruise with them to the Caribbean. That’s when I told Sale that I kind of knew they were going to get married because I could tell she was just a very in-charge person, and BJ was really fascinated with her in the sense that she really took control of things, and he definitely needed someone like that because he never really changed from when I knew him in college.” Sale, she says, was never a favorite of Gary’s, and he told that to Woody because “she was not an easy person to like.”

  (Woody remained lifelong friends with Gary Johnson, a one-time Phoenix corporate meetings planner, whose claim to fame was as the creator of Topless Golf, featured on the cover of Playboy’s March 2001 issue, a year after Woody had bought the Jets and was divorcing Sale. Inside was a titillating layout of buxom girls—dubbed the “All American Topless Golf Team”—who were photographed in living color exposing their ample breasts and fondling phallic woods and irons on a golf course. Woody’s pal was quoted as saying, “[W]hy not hire beautiful women to be your golfing buddies…? Better yet, why not hire topless beautiful women?”)

  While Woody had Gary Johnson as a chum, Sale had no close girlfriends to speak of, Saltzman had observed, and thought it was strange. He later came to realize that “women didn’t like her because of her toughness,” which had manifested itself at times on the golf course. “The other women hated her because she was not friendly. She wouldn’t make small talk, or be social. She just wanted to win, and she did.”

  Saltzman wasn’t the only Jewish fatherly-type who Woody had bonded with during that time. Another was Irving Shepard, who also was a good friend of Sale’s parents and a client of her father’s, and who lived in South Florida. Some three decades Woody’s senior, Shepard was a charming, well-to-do businessman who in his younger days had been an airplane company’s chief test pilot, and as he aged he was a tanned, happy-go-lucky chap originally from St. Louis who was living large under the Florida sun when Sale introduced him to Woody, and Shepard introduced “the goyish millionaire” to a delicacy Woody never knew existed.

  “We had been playing golf and afterwards Woody was hungry so I took him to a Jewish deli—he’d never been in one before—and he ordered paté of all things. The old Jewish waiter didn’t know what he was talking about, so I said, ‘Give him chopped liver.’ He thought it tasted great and he said, ‘Why have you people been hiding this all this time?’ He thought the Jewish people were hiding good food like chopped liver from the gentiles.”

  At the time, Woody was a member of the very exclusive Coral Ridge Country Club, in Fort Lauderdale, whose golfers over the years included President Dwight D. Eisenhower, golf Hall of Fame’s Julius Boros, “Buffalo” Bob Smith of TV’s Howdy Doody program, along with such VIP guests as Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, and the Jets superstar Joe Namath. Also members were Woody’s mother, her brother, Dr. Keith Wold and his wife, Elaine, the Johnson & Johnson heiress who was one of J. Seward Johnson Sr.’s daughters.

  Shepard had played with Woody at Coral Ridge a number of times, had become enamored of the club’s luxe, “and after a while I said to Woody that maybe I should join. He looked at me kind of surprised and said, ‘Irving, you wouldn’t like it.’ Now I’d been around long enough, and I’d been Jewish long enough, to know what that meant—restricted. It turned out that of the several hundred members there were probably two or three Jews, so the club could say they had Jewish members.

  “I never did join.”

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  Dr. Ed Saltzman, who was frequently in Woody and Sale’s company when they lived in Fort Lauderdale, saw that she wore the pants in their relationship. “She’s the one who would say, ‘Woody, we can’t do this, or Woody, we can’t do that, or Woody, it doesn’t make sense, or Woody, we don’t want to do that, or Woody, I don’t care what they tell you, I’m not going to do that with you, and you’re not going to do it!’”

  In Sale’s own words, written in her 1997 high school reunion update, she stated that she and Woody had dated for a very long “five years” before they were married. She didn’t give the reasons for their lengthy courtship, but they mainly had to do with alleged problems Woody was having.

  “Woody had habits that weren’t necessarily approved by society,” asserts Saltzman, who firmly believed that the Johnson heir had an addictive personality. “I know he did a lot of partying, and Sale put a stop to all of that. She was in total control. She just was so strong. She used to say to me, ‘Either Woody stops, or I’m gone!’ And he stopped the drinking—and I’m talking about heavy drinking—and he became a solid citizen because of her. Sale had a lot to do with Woody growing up.”

  But Sale, looking back almost four decades later, didn’t believe she forced Woody to do anything. “He turned himself around. I just said to him, ‘I don’t see myself spending a lifetime with somebody who drinks, or who smokes.’ But I was not saying he had to do this, or do that. He just went cold turkey.”

  At one point during their courtship, Sale broke it off for a number of months, and dated two others, including an award-winning advertising art director connected to the Tobin company who tragically died from cancer during their relationship. “Whether her breakup with Woody had to do with his substance abuse or not, whether she just wanted his personality to be different, she just wanted to cool it,” says a close family member. “Maybe she was afraid of committing to him and she wanted to test the waters.”

  Fearing he might lose her, Woody made a trip to St. Louis in his private plane to try to convince her father to get her to marry him.

  Just as Woody would hire shrewd, tough business advisers and lawyers to do his bidding, just as he would have an aggressive, boastful coach like Rex Ryan for his Jets, he needed a woman with an iron fist in a not so velvet glove, and Nancy Sale Frey fit the profile.

  By mid-1977, Sale felt Woody was sufficiently under her control, and in control, to finally accept his proposal of marriage.

  Besides being able to organize Woody’s life and help get his act together, she b
elieves that he wanted to marry her because “he was looking for a woman who was similar to his mother,” observes Sale, who felt she met the profile. “Betty Johnson was from the Midwest and was a very solid person, and I was from the Midwest and I was a very solid person.”

  As preparations for the wedding were under way, there were embarrassing goings-on facing both the Johnsons and the Freys. The New York City murder-for-hire plot involving Mary Lea Johnson Ryan D’Arc was still in the tabloid headlines, as well as her sexual exploits, and in St. Louis, Sale’s father out of the blue was separating from her mother and, after some three decades of marriage, they were heading for an unpleasant divorce. The once beautiful Melisse Frey had lost her looks in her fifties due to a serious hyperactive thyroid condition that made her eyes bulge and caused her to lose her figure, which only got worse because of mistreatment of her condition. Later, in her sixties, she began to show the early signs of Alzheimer’s, the same disease that had claimed her mother relatively early in life and Melisse’s sister, Helen.

  Bob Frey met a younger and more glamorous woman, Dolores Plattner Wool, called Dodie, a Jewish divorcee with two children, who became the second Mrs. Robert Frey in 1981.

  “Bob and Melisse just kind of grew apart, and he just sort of fell out of love with her,” says a Frey family confidant. “Melisse was blindsided and didn’t understand why he would leave her. When Bob got together with Dodie, Melisse harassed them with phone calls, called her a whore. It was terrible.”

  Sale came to despise her father’s new wife, irrationally so, say those who knew both, which caused tension and fights between Bob and his daughter for years. “We never considered her part of our family,” Sale says after her father’s death. “This lady was very Jewish and very controlling.”

  Because of those dark clouds, Woody and Sale waited a bit longer before tying the knot.

  While Melisse was devastated about the breakup of her own marriage, she was overjoyed with their daughter’s impending nuptials “because it was going to be a different life for Nancy with stables of horses and homes all over the world and servants and huge money,” recalls close family friend Francis Brownstein. “I saw them in Florida when they were engaged and Nancy was beaming with happiness and joy because she had snagged this guy.” The St. Louis Jewish Light columnist Lois Caplan Miller had learned about the engagement from Melisse and Bob, “and what I heard was, ‘My Nancy’s going to marry the richest man in the world!’”