But Bob Frey actually had qualms about Woody. His fortune notwithstanding, Bob didn’t think the Band-Aid heir was strong, or bright, or accomplished enough for Nancy, and felt that his daughter needed someone more interesting in her life.
Still, everything seemed to be going according to plan wedding-wise when suddenly Woody’s attorney and trustee, Seymour Klein, demanded that Sale sign a prenuptial agreement. That should not have come as a surprise, though it did. Over the years members of the Johnson family had had too many experiences with gold diggers—female and male—so the prenup had become part and parcel of entry into the Band-Aid dynasty.
“Bob was disgusted that she had to sign the prenup,” recalls Steve Tobin, a client, friend, and confidant. “He felt that this was a young marriage, that they were going to have kids, and that they were going to spend their lives together. Bob was the father of the bride, and he was just very unhappy about it.”
Sale acknowledges that her father was upset, “but we didn’t go to a lawyer. My father and I just looked at it and said, fine, whatever. We never really paid any attention to it until years later when Woody and I went to get a divorce.”
In June 1978, twenty-nine-year-old Nancy Sale Frey became the wife of thirty-one-year-old Robert Wood Johnson IV in a very private wedding ceremony on the grounds of the Princeton estate where he grew up.
Neither the couple’s engagement nor their ceremony was publicized, as one would have expected, in the society wedding pages of The New York Times, and the Frey’s hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Betty Johnson had demanded absolute secrecy, and years later Sale curiously claims, “I wasn’t anybody that was interested in being in the society pages having an announcement that I was getting married. I didn’t want the world to know.”
Bob Frey gave away his daughter, who wore her maternal grandmother Riette Sale Frey’s wedding dress. Sale’s mother, Melisse, kissed and hugged the groom. One Frey relative who had received an invitation from Sale, but who was ordered by her father to stay away, was his only sister, Mary Frey Hickman. At the time, her husband, David Hickman—one of her three husbands—though academically very bright, was an obese oddball who held menial jobs such as delivering packages, and was from a poor farm family.
“Because my brother didn’t think that socially speaking it would be a good thing for the Johnson family to discover what an ordinary-type guy I was married to, he called me and told me not to attend. Bob wanted to make sure that I didn’t embarrass him and his daughter in front of the Johnsons.”
Some years later, when Sale and Woody had three daughters, and Mary Hickman had two girls and two sons, she would regularly send holiday greeting cards to their uncle and aunt, to Woody and Sale, and to their cousins, Casey, Jaime, and Daisy Johnson. But she never received an acknowledgment, not a card, not a call, not a thank you.
“My brother Bob was very blunt about it,” she states. “He told me, ‘Don’t bother. Nancy won’t answer, and Woody doesn’t care,’ so I quit sending.”
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During much of their courtship, Woody Johnson and Nancy Sale Frey had been living in the condominium penthouse apartment in Fort Lauderdale that he had bought during his volatile business partnership with Michael Spielvogel—the unit where he had been sued for reportedly ignoring paying the condo fees. But now that they were married, and planning to start a family, he bought his parents’ nearby Bay Colony estate from his mother, and they settled in.
Just before Christmas 1978, six months after their wedding, Sale became pregnant, a time that was an emotional mix of both joy and trepidation for her, according to Dr. Ed Saltzman. “When she was pregnant, she was seeing a psychiatrist in Miami, and it had to do with becoming a mother for the first time, and whether Woody could be a good father,” he says. “She researched everything. She didn’t leave any stone unturned.”
On September 24, 1979, at Hollywood Memorial Hospital, in Hollywood, Florida, Sale gave birth to a girl with a wisp of brownish-blond hair who they named Sale Trotter Case Johnson, and nicknamed Casey. Her first name, Sale, was in honor of her Jewish paternal grandmother, and Trotter was said to be for a long-lost Johnson forebear, or related to the baby’s mother’s interest in horses; Sale was on the verge of becoming a champion equestrian with priceless breeds in her stable.
Saltzman, Casey’s pediatrician, was in the delivery room with the obstetrician who brought her into the world during a normal delivery with a slap on her pink and plump bottom, eliciting her first, but far from her last, loud cry for attention.
Years later, looking back, it seemed ironic that Casey, who had been born in a town named after the Hollywood of movie stars, would die four months after her thirtieth birthday in the real Hollywood, where she hoped to become a star—as a sad, diabetic, emotionally disturbed tabloid train wreck who had been living a very public, scandalous life.
But that’s not how her life began.
“Casey was an adorable, sweet, cuddly baby, and she was adorable and sweet as a child,” says the octogenarian Saltzman. “But when she got into her teens, when she was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, she’d tell me, ‘I bought a so-and-so pocketbook for five thousand dollars,’ and in every color, and so she then was not so sweet. She was just a lost child.”
Woody had always hoped for a son to carry on the Johnson dynasty name, but he would father two more daughters with Sale—Jaime and Daisy. He would have to wait almost a quarter century until after their divorce to finally have two sons with a much younger woman. She would become his second wife when he was in his late fifties and one of their sons would be his namesake.
Still, Woody loved Casey as much as Sale coddled her, with the help of as many as three nannies, one for each of her daughters as they came along, plus maids, drivers, housekeepers, and personal chefs who also acted as child-keepers when needed. Sale’s wish to never be a homemaker had come true.
Among the help were Milly, Casey’s half-Jamaican, half-Chinese nanny who was with the family for a quarter century before her death, and Jamaican Marita, who mostly looked after Jaime and Daisy, and was still working for the family in 2012. Another woman, Mozelle, had worked cleaning house and running errands for Sale after she left college and “morphed into full time at Bay Colony,” Sale says.
Milly and Marita wielded Dr. Spock–like authority. “They had their own notions to a greater or lesser extent, on how child-rearing was supposed to work, and whether a parenting idea from Sale or Woody was good, or bad, and how closely they would respond to it,” observes a family confidant.
Saltzman says that despite all of the help, “Sale was very attentive to her kids. She may have had nannies, but she was always around, and I got plenty of phone calls from her about the health of her kids. She’d call me at 3 A.M. and I’d be at their door.”
When Casey turned three in 1982—the same year her sister Jaime was born—Sale began planning for her firstborn’s future education. At the same time, Woody had decided it was time for them to leave Florida and set up his business operations and develop a social circle in New York City.
He and Sale had started house-hunting on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and she began looking into fashionable private schools. Attending one had always been a dream of hers. She had gone to public school in St. Louis, but was envious of girls she knew who had attended the exclusive John Burroughs School in the suburb of Ladue. But her father hadn’t seen a need to spend the money to send her there.
Sale had applied to one of Manhattan’s best schools for Casey and she asked Saltzman to write a letter of recommendation explaining what a wonderful child she was and what a prominent and respected family she came from. As it turned out, Saltzman’s sister was the school’s psychologist. “Sale and Woody couldn’t believe that she was going to make the decision. Casey got in, but they eventually had to change schools because she wasn’t much of a student.” It wasn’t the first or last time that she would be in and out of an elite New York private school—because of d
isciplinary issues, or lack of interest in her studies, or unsatisfactory grades, or health problems, or a combination of all these.
Despite the fact that Woody was heir to an immense family fortune, his own family’s branch of the Johnson & Johnson dynasty was never an integral part of New York’s upper echelon of society, and knew few people, if anyone, in the social register. So when Woody and Sale decided to make the big move to the Big Apple they needed someone with taste, style, and entree to lead the way. They chose Guy Vicino, who “was a real social butterfly and very connected to the high social life in New York City,” notes his brother Neil. “Guy opened the right doors.”
Guy’s brother John maintains that Woody needed someone like Guy in his life to show him how to dress, what to wear, where to go. “Woody wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, but where the genius of Woody comes in is that he knew his limitations, and he made sure he surrounded himself with people like Guy who could help him. Guy knew the right society people, and he knew all the right properties.”
The right property for Woody and Sale was a bargain-priced three-million-dollar, five-bedroom, six-thousand-square-foot duplex with servants’ quarters that needed renovation, said to have once been owned by a sheik, at 834 Fifth Avenue, one of the most prestigious cooperative apartment buildings in Manhattan. It once was described as “the most pedigreed building on the snobbiest street in the country’s most real-estate-obsessed city.”
Woody had joined a gold standard of other heirs and heiresses to great corporate American fortunes who had resided there—Standard Oil, Woolworth, Hearst, Rockefeller, and Ford were among those represented, and now Johnson & Johnson. “Their apartment wasn’t just an apartment, it was a palatial mansion,” says an awestruck relative who visited often. “It was just magnificent. The furnishings cost a fortune alone, and the rooms were splendorous.”
The pièce de résistance for arriving guests was the grand staircase leading to the second level from the immense foyer with its elaborate console holding an enormous vase whose fresh-cut flowers were changed daily. The staircase reminded visitors of the sumptuously curved one in the opening scene of Bonfire of the Vanities, a movie that was marketed as a “story of greed, lust, and vanity.”
But the Johnsons’ place was the real deal, not some set designer’s fantasy.
To some observers, the Johnson palace, steps from the Central Park Zoo, was, well, something like a zoo itself in terms of pets and their messes.
“When they renovated the apartment,” a relative says, “they even had a stainless steel shower/toilet for their five dogs because the dogs wouldn’t always be taken outside to crap, so they’d crap in this room and the floor would flush it away. If you went into the kitchen, you’d throw up because the dogs peed on little pieces of paper. Sale had Schnauzer puppies who walked around in diapers in the apartment.”
On one family vacation, Woody had rented a yacht and the Johnsons’ canines did their duty not on paper, not above on the deck, but below on the beautiful rugs in the living quarters. It cost him a pretty penny to have the mess cleaned up. Like her mother, Casey loved dogs, considered them “my babies,” but they would make incredible and costly messes, including even in her twelve-thousand-dollar Hermès Birkin bag, where she carried a teacup pooch everywhere. She was in her midtwenties and staying in a luxurious suite at the famed Plaza Athenee in Manhattan, when her Chihuahua, Tukus, had the runs, and defecated everywhere. Woody was forced to foot the clean-up bill, as much as twenty thousand dollars, a mere bag of shells for a man with his kind of money. It was still an embarrassment, a messy one.
Besides their palace on Fifth Avenue, the Johnsons also bought a spectacular spread for weekend relaxation and entertainment in the chic countryside of Bedminster Township, New Jersey, whose other notable residents included Forbes magazine CEO Steve Forbes and automobile mogul John DeLorean.
The property, called simply “The Farm,” had an octagon-shaped home, a swimming pool with pool house, a helicopter pad, a golf course, and stables. Sale had installed stainless steel sinks for her growing collection of Arabian horses, and the necessary paddocks for riding. At the entrance to Woody’s wonderland were lifelike bronze sculptures of each of the Johnson children at play, done by J. Seward Johnson Jr. using a photograph of the girls as a model from which to work since he and Woody and Sale weren’t close and he rarely got to see the kids in person.
Having sold the Bay Colony home, the Johnsons bought another mansion in South Florida, in the exclusive Palm Beach Polo & Country Club, in Wellington—Florida’s equestrian country where Sale became a well-known horsewoman. The Johnsons often flew down in their private plane on winter weekends.
To outsiders looking in, Woody and Sale appeared to be a golden couple living life to the fullest in a royal manner, but within the first five years there already was trouble in the marriage: Woody was finding Sale difficult to live with, or at least that’s what his controlling mother, Betty, had confided to a relative.
“Betty heard Woody complain about Sale and she called me up about five years after they were married and said, ‘I need to talk to you about Woody. He’s very unhappy,’ and she asked me what she should do about it,” recalls the relative. “Her words, and I’ve never forgot them, were, ‘What is it that makes Sale think she can run everyone’s life, and do it totally without grace? She controls my son and he can’t take it anymore.’ I said, ‘Well, I guess she’s just a bossy person.’ And that was the end of it.
“I didn’t want to get involved in a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law catfight.”
* * *
By the time Casey turned eight, she already was quite a handful—bratty, demanding, and obnoxious.
As her mother would later describe her behavior, she “was acting up a lot at the dinner table, often to the point where we’d have to ask her to leave the table and go to her room, because we didn’t think it was fair that she was rude and disruptive to the rest of the family.”
During the Easter-Passover school break in 1988, the Johnsons vacationed at their home in Florida. It turned into a horrible getaway because all three of the girls came down with chicken pox. Sale hustled them off to be looked at by Dr. Ed Saltzman, the pediatrician, who ran them through a battery of routine tests—urine, blood, the usual—and prescribed nothing; they were as healthy as any children could be with chicken pox.
Back in New York, the girls needed another physical for a school requirement. Again, they passed with flying colors—except for Casey; there was some question about her urine. She was called back for a second test, just to make sure there was no mistake. There wasn’t. At first her mother thought it might have been some sort of bladder infection. Others educated in medicine, like her brothers, thought it was some sort of kidney infection. The other possibility was diabetes. It was then that Sale remembered how thirsty Casey had been, and how often she ran to the bathroom to urinate.
Casey’s New York pediatrician said it was urgent that she be examined more thoroughly.
Woody and Sale took Casey to Mt. Sinai Hospital, which had a highly respected diabetes center staffed by endocrinologists, headed by Dr. Fredda Ginsberg-Fellner, who made the formal diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes, and became Casey’s personal doctor. For Casey and her family, it became a life-changer, requiring daily insulin injections, a carefully monitored diet, and other health regimens. Her lifetime with this disease would be marked by difficult physical and emotional consequences.
Before Casey even left the hospital, Woody and Sale began practicing injecting each other with saline, and giving one another blood tests, so they could deal with it when they got her home. Sale later recalled, “It took me a couple of days just to get the nerve up to prick my own finger … waiting for the courage to stick myself.”
Jaime, too, would become the victim of a serious health issue. As a teenager, she was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease lupus, which, in her case, was considered genetic; a sister of Woody’s mother, Mary Wold Strong,
a mother of five like Betty, had died from it. But no one in either the Johnson or Frey family was known to have had diabetes.
“Sale was very on top of Casey’s condition,” says Saltzman. “But Woody would call me and say, ‘Tell me what to do. I have to get rid of her diabetes. I have to correct it. Whatever it takes to make the diabetes end, I’ll do it, whatever money.’ He couldn’t grasp the concept that it had nothing to do with his wherewithal, his money.”
When Casey was diagnosed, doctors and nurses were brought in to instruct everyone on signs to look for, and what to do in case something happened to Casey, and how to administer insulin if they needed to in an emergency, according to a Johnson staff member at the time. “Everybody was informed because if Casey’s sugar level was off, she could black out and go into a coma, and that did happen to her on occasions. We had to know what to do and not just stand there and panic.”
The summer after Casey was diagnosed the Johnsons had gone to Africa for a vacation. One afternoon while her parents were out with friends, Casey had gone off on her own and fallen ill, arriving back at their lodging in near diabetic shock. Marita, the nanny, had to track down Sale and Woody using a walkie-talkie so she could be given emergency instructions on what to do.
When Casey was thirteen, Woody and Sale got together with a writer-researcher of how-to books and women’s magazine articles, Susan Kleinman, and produced a 224-page volume entitled Managing Your Child’s Diabetes, published in 1992 by a small, later defunct New York house, MasterMedia Limited. The forward was attributed to one of America’s best-known celebrity diabetics, Mary Tyler Moore, diagnosed in 1964. “In these pages,” she stated, “a fourteen-year-old and her parents share their experiences with diabetes and their conviction that a cure for the disease will be found … The Johnsons’ optimism is not just inspiring, it’s contagious.”
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 34