Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  At the time the book was written, Casey was a student at the prestigious Marymount School, a Catholic day school for girls and part of the Sacred Heart of Mary system. Later she attended the Dwight School, whose acronym was “Dumb White Kids Getting High Together,” and whose classmates and chums for the rest of her life would be the hard-partying “celebutante” sisters Paris and Nicky Hilton of the Hilton Hotel dynasty.

  In the book, the Johnsons noted that after Casey was diagnosed “anger” had set in for them. “We kept asking ourselves: Why is this happening to Casey? Why is this happening to us?” They said, “This anger, in turn, may provoke guilt … it’s irrational to be angry at your child, but somehow you can’t help it … We went through enough of that same guilt ourselves.”

  Casey’s diabetes had put enormous pressures on a marriage that already was shaky at times. Woody and Sale acknowledged, “There’s no question that Casey’s diabetes has affected our family in a very profound way … the daily stress of worrying about our daughter’s health … affected each of us—and the way we relate to one another … [marriage partners] have to work doubly hard to keep themselves and their relationship strong … we have grappled with all of these issues.”

  In the back of Managing Your Child’s Diabetes there was a note to readers stating that Woody and Sale were available for “keynotes and seminars,” but that never happened, according to Tony Colao, who handled the publishing house’s speaker’s bureau. “Publicity was not even a consideration—that they would go out and do speaking,” he recalls. “I couldn’t see Woody Johnson getting on planes to go around and do groups of two hundred. He was pretty private.”

  But Casey’s diabetes had given Woody an issue to dig into, and he became the poster boy for diabetes research and funding. “He went around the country and would meet people and say, ‘I want you to donate twenty-five thousand dollars to diabetes research, and I’ll match it,’” says Saltzman.

  On his own, Woody wrote a check for $10 million as part of a $100 million-diabetes campaign, and he cofounded the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Still later, in a lobbying effort, he convinced the U.S. Congress to approve a guaranteed fund for diabetes research.

  However, despite all of that money and research and effort by her father, Casey, who had everything money could buy, subsequently ignored all the rules about her disease. “She thought she was invincible,” observes a friend. “Casey had always done whatever she wanted to do. She wound up in the hospital a few times, but the diabetes never killed her and I guess she thought she could do whatever she wanted to do—until the diabetes and her lifestyle did kill her.”

  The former Johnson staff person who had worked for the family on and off for almost a decade and was an eyewitness to the family drama and dynamics had developed a bond of sorts with Woody and was aware of how distressed he was about Casey’s illness. “He’d gone through a lot of hell his whole life dealing with the death of family members, and he was still feeling anguish over that when Casey was diagnosed. His comment to me toward all of that tragedy was, ‘All my trust fund wealth aside, I’d give it all back if it meant getting all those family members back.’”

  48

  At virtually the same time that Casey Johnson’s diabetes struck the family like a lightning bolt out of the blue, her father, Woody, was slammed with another tragic situation involving someone else he dearly loved. His lifelong friend Guy Vicino, who had been living a promiscuous gay life, had contracted what in the mid-1980s was called “the gay plague.”

  He had AIDS.

  Woody, haunted by the onslaught with Casey, was determined to use every means at his disposal to help keep Guy alive, and if he couldn’t, to make his last days as comfortable and peaceful as possible. He owed him much.

  With his sense of style, Guy early on had become Woody’s de-facto GQ-like advisor, and Woody, who usually sported shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops when he could get away with it, required expert sartorial advice. “When Guy and Woody would get together, it was Guy who would say, ‘Wear this, don’t wear that, it’s the same thing you wore last night,’ and Woody would do it,” notes John Vicino.

  Guy was comfortable being gay, but coming out was very difficult for him, and at one point he had contemplated committing suicide. But his emergence from the closet in the mid-1970s was met with shrugs all around by the people who were most important to him, including his closest friend, Woody.

  His brother Neil says, “Guy was a bit flamboyant, but he didn’t speak with a lisp. He played sports, he rode horses, and, if anybody went in that direction [accusing him of being queer], they were going to be in dangerous territory. Guy was very quick, and very smart, and could tear you apart with his tongue.”

  Woody had always gotten a kick out of Guy, looked up to him and thought he was smart and funny and sophisticated, and used to recount stories about him to others. Looking back, Neil didn’t believe that Woody and Guy ever had anything more than a close friendship. “Knowing Guy and being close to Woody, and Woody being who Woody was—a macho, party kind of guy—Guy never would have said anything to Woody, or done anything to Woody, or made a pass at Woody, because Woody always struck me as the kind of person who probably might have ended the friendship. But Woody was very accepting when Guy came out.”

  In 1984, thirty-seven-year-old Guy suddenly looked like he was at death’s door. A physician who specialized in infectious diseases and who was a friend of John Vicino’s had noticed the extreme change in Guy and warned John to keep an eye on his brother. “I went over one day and Guy was terribly emaciated and I was shocked at how sick he was,” recalls John of that horrific time. “I said, ‘We’re going to the hospital.’”

  Guy was diagnosed at Broward General with PCP—pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, an early sign of AIDS, a disease that was still something of a medical mystery back then. “The doctors were still telling him he may or may not have AIDS,” says John. “I slept on the floor in his hospital room for three nights because the nurses were afraid to come in. They had to wear a gown and a mask and I remember Guy saying that nobody had come in to help him go to the bathroom. They were all too afraid.”

  Guy Vicino was among the early victims in the worldwide gay community to be struck down. That same year screen idol Rock Hudson, the most famous AIDS victim at the time, was diagnosed and secretly treated in Paris, but it was too late—he died a year later in October 1985. Guy Vicino would live several more years.

  While Hudson had hidden his disease from his closest friends and lovers until the news media found out and he was outed, Guy felt Woody should be among the first to know that he had been infected. “We telephoned Woody and my brother told him he had it,” says John. “Guy said, ‘I’m sorry, Woody, I’m really sorry,’ but Woody said, ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ The next day, I heard a knock on Guy’s hospital room door and there’s Woody. Guy looked at me like—we want to be alone—and Woody stayed there while Guy went through the first crisis period.”

  The first time John Vicino met Sale Johnson was when she came to Florida to visit Guy and strongly suggested that he be placed in a protective “medical bubble” like David Vetter, the so-called “boy in the bubble” at the Texas Medical Center, who lived inside sterile plastic bubbles to avoid infection because of a fatal immune disease. “She said, ‘We want to put you in a bubble. We’ll find a clinic until they find a cure for this disease.’ But Guy said, ‘I don’t want to be that guy. I can’t do that.’”

  Guy had heard that Rock Hudson had received experimental treatments in Paris, and he thought of going to France.

  That’s when Woody came to the rescue.

  “He said he would check to find the best treatment program,” says John Vicino. “Nothing happened for about a month. I remember my mother said, ‘Woody’s not going to come through,’ but Guy told her, ‘No, you’re wrong. Woody’s going to come through,’ and he did.”

  Because of
Woody and his Johnson & Johnson family influence, Guy got into an exclusive AIDS program at the University of Miami where he was treated with an expensive experimental new drug called AZT, which was then believed to slow the disease. Because Guy had gone through a family inheritance, Woody also picked up all the huge medical bills, and arranged for AIDS expert Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and his assistants to become involved in Guy’s case.

  Despite the experimental treatments, Guy was slowly dying. Several times he nearly died when he again developed PCP and the tumors known as Kaposi’s sarcoma.

  In the last months of his life, Guy opened up to his brother Neil about some of his sexual adventures. He told him he had a lover in New York from whom he had contracted the disease, and who had left him. From what he gleaned, Neil always suspected that the carrier was blond, tanned, mustachioed Gaetan Dugas, an Air Canada flight attendant, who died in 1984. Dugas had been labeled AIDS “Patient Zero” because he had been linked by medical investigators to the U.S.’s first reported cases.

  If Neil Vicino’s suspicions were correct, it meant that Woody Johnson’s lifelong friend was one of some twenty-five hundred sex partners that the thirty-one-year-old Dugas claimed he had before he died of AIDS-related kidney failure.

  In Guy’s last year of life, he and Neil, who had been appointed the executor of his brother’s estate, made a pilgrimage from Fort Lauderdale back to their hometown of Princeton. “We went to the Jersey shore and had a photo taken of me and Guy sitting in front of the house that we rented that was next to the Johnsons’ beach house.” The Johnson and Vicino boys had spent many summers there playing together.

  In the late winter of 1988, all of the very special medical care Guy Vicino had been receiving at Woody Johnson’s behest had finally failed, time had run out, and he knew that he was about to die.

  “As Guy got sicker, he made me promise two things.” John Vicino has never forgotten, his voice filled with emotion decades later. “He said, ‘I know Woody will try to come down from New York, and I don’t want him in the room to see how I look. I don’t want him to remember me like this.’”

  On Friday, March 11, Guy, who was dying at home, called John, who was living in a small condo apartment, and told him he was signing over his home to him, and when he was gone he wanted his brother to move in.

  “I said, ‘No, Guy, we’ll do that on Monday.’ And then on Sunday his temperature spiked and he went into the hospital.

  “The last thing he said to me was, ‘Don’t let Woody in here.’ Woody called and he was on the phone with Guy, who was in and out of consciousness and bleeding out of every orifice. Woody was talking to him and Guy was trying to answer him back, but he was having problems forming words,” says John, who was at his brother’s bedside at North Ridge Medical Center in Oakland Park, Florida.

  “I got on the phone and Sale was a wreck. She said, ‘There’s got to be something we can do. We’ll bring him up here to New York.’ Woody called again and said, ‘I’m coming down,’ and I said to him, ‘Don’t come tonight. Guy’s going to get some rest.’ All of it was a lie. I told Woody we’d call him on Monday.

  “Guy then got on the phone and the last thing I heard him say was, ‘I love you, too, Woody.’”

  Guy Vicino died on Tuesday, March 15, 1988. He was forty-one years old. Funeral services were held the following Friday at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale. The Johnson family—Woody, Betty, Libet, and Christopher—flew down in their private jet. Woody took charge and gave an upbeat and loving eulogy about the Johnson and Vicino boys’ innocent childhood in Princeton, and how all of them had been so close, and had had such good times.

  “Woody was so dedicated to Guy, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was the biggest single private contributor to AIDS research in this country,” declares Neil Vicino. “I could never help but believe that that was because of my brother and Woody’s closeness. I’ve always felt that Guy left somewhat of a legacy through Woody.”

  49

  Ten-year-old girls fantasized about fashion with their Ken and Barbie dolls, but when Casey Johnson was that age she did real dress-up with her first, but not her last, Chanel bag; a year later at eleven, she donned a pair of snakeskin pumps, and even though she didn’t have a driver’s license, she was given the keys to her own car at sixteen. At eighteen, she got breast implants.

  “I got whatever I wanted,” she once boasted.

  “Woody overindulged Casey and her sisters,” a family member asserts. “That was Woody’s way—just give them anything they wanted. He was raised with the idea that money can do everything, and that’s what worked for him.”

  Because of all the money, Casey had had an odd childhood. By the time she had reached her early teens, she had never actually been inside a grocery store. Servants did all the shopping for the Johnson table. A relative once took Casey to a supermarket—the first time she’d ever been in one—and she wandered around like an alien creature with wide-eyed amazement, looking at all the products on the shelves.

  “The store was holding a cooking class for young children that day,” recalls her escort. “Casey sat at the counter with about ten other kids and the two instructors gave them recipes and ingredients and told them what to do. Casey was in absolute shock, but she went through the process. ‘Oh, I love this. It’s so much fun,’ she said, and then gleefully told me, ‘I’m going to give all of these recipes to our cook.’ I said, ‘Casey, let’s take a recipe and select the food here in the store for dinner,’ and she was elated. She never had an experience like that with her parents. She was starved for attention.”

  The same person once took her to a blue-collar discount store much like Walmart to see how she would react, since she had never been in such a place, either, and to let her see how the other half lived and shopped.

  “I said, ‘Casey, there are stores like this for people who can’t afford Bergdorf Goodman, or Saks Fifth Avenue,’ and I gave her fifty dollars and told her to walk around and buy something. She came back to me later with the same fifty-dollar bill and said, ‘It’s all so ugh!’ She did not live in the real world.”

  When Casey received a present neither she nor her mother rarely sent a thank-you card. When someone asked Sale about it, her response was, “Oh, Casey gets so much stuff, she doesn’t have time to write thank-you notes.” One giver of gifts to Casey maintains, “She didn’t have to do anything to conform to the social values of other people because of the way she was taught—or not taught—at home.”

  Sale, in her position as a Johnson wife and New York socialite, received lots of gifts, too, but had earned a reputation among some in her circle as one who re-gifted. She even had a room said to have been brimming with stuff that she had received and then sent on to others, sometimes with the original tags and cards intact.

  “Sale wasn’t penurious and not tight, but she was very careful with her money,” asserts her longtime confidante Dr. Ed Saltzman. “You would get gifts from her that she had received three years before. I received lots of stuff—a book, or a shirt, or a sweater—that was three years old. But she also once sent me a new computer.”

  Another person, less diplomatic, says of Sale, “How about miserly? How about cheap? Sale was the queen of recycled gifts. We’d turn around and throw them in the trash, or give them to Goodwill. Some of them still even had cards on them that were addressed to Sale from so-and-so.”

  Added a relative: “She’ll go over telephone bills line by line, but she doesn’t think anything about spending one hundred thousand dollars to rent a summer house. She’s complicated.”

  * * *

  Getting her high school diploma had been quite an achievement for Casey Johnson because she hated school, wouldn’t study, refused to complete assignments, and thumbed her nose at all authority.

  As a relative says, “Casey rebelled completely. She was really angry at her family because she had diabetes and blamed them. Her attitude was—‘I’ll show you!’”

  Tho
se close to Woody and Sale, knowing Casey’s lack of interest in academia and general failure as a student, were astonished when they heard that she had actually been admitted to Brown University, the prestigious Ivy League school with tough admission standards.

  “I called the house and I wanted to know how the kids were doing and I spoke to the maid and she told me Casey was going to Brown, and was in Providence arranging for a room,” recalls Dr. Ed Saltzman, who intimately knew all about Casey’s severe health, academic, and behavioral problems. “I said, ‘Brown! What do you mean she’s going to Brown? She can’t be going to Brown.’ I was so dumbfounded I figured the maid didn’t know, so I asked, ‘You mean Brown University, the one in Rhode Island? The Brown?’ And she said yes. I didn’t get it. There was no way that kid could get into Brown.

  “So I called Sale a couple of days later and I said, ‘Sale, Casey’s at Brown?’ And she said, ‘Well, Woody’s on the board,’ or something like that. I realized very quickly that obviously that’s how she got into Brown—because of Woody’s influence.”

  As it happened, one such connection that the family had was Brown University president Vartan Gregorian, the former president of the New York Public Library, who later served as president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Woody and Gregorian also served together as board members of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.

  Casey had been admitted to Brown as “a provisional, part-time, non-matriculating student—a provision made for her because of Woody’s connections at the university,” claims a person with knowledge of the situation. “Woody would never say, ‘I got her in,’ because he was always proud of her having gone there—even transiently.”