While Sale Johnson acknowledges their friendship with Gregorian, she doesn’t think there was any blatant influence used, any sort of quid pro quo to get Casey admitted. “I don’t think that money was donated. Woody didn’t have a new swimming pool built, or put in a new science building. But Casey wasn’t a good student. She said she didn’t want to stay there because they wouldn’t let her bring her dog. That was her excuse publicly, and even to us. But she knew she couldn’t cut it there. If I were Brown, I wouldn’t have accepted her as a student.”
Unlike Casey, her sisters Jaime and Daisy did graduate from Brown. “They got in on their own merit,” says a relative. “Academically, they were much better than Casey. Jaime had good grades and scores, and Daisy was a nationally ranked equestrian, so both of them had other qualifications. But it didn’t hurt that they were children of Woody Johnson.”
* * *
One of Casey’s earliest crushes was on a distant cousin, cute Cameron Morrell Douglas, the son of Michael and Diandra Douglas, the actor’s first wife. Diandra was also Casey Johnson’s godmother, and Casey had a relatively close relationship with her, especially when Casey was on the outs with her own parents, which was often.
Cameron was the grandson of Kirk Douglas and his first wife, Diana Dill, the sister of Ruth Dill Johnson, the first wife of Casey’s great-uncle, J. Seward Johnson Sr. Diana, a onetime actress, had dedicated her 1999 memoir to Cameron. Her son, Michael Douglas, and his second wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, had also bought the Dill family’s aristocratic Ariel Sands hotel, a forty-seven-room cottage colony in Bermuda. The bonds were, indeed, tight between the Johnsons and the Douglases.
Nine months Casey’s senior, Cameron was equally as wild and misbehaved. The two had first met in late adolescence when Michael and Diandra were frequent houseguests at Woody and Sale’s farm in New Jersey, and the two couples had jet-setted around together to places like the Douglases’ home in Majorca.
“Casey had a terrible crush on Cameron and that boy was bad news,” states a relative. “I know for a fact he was not a good influence on her. He had a very troubled childhood and he began using drugs and he probably acquainted Casey with some of that stuff.”
Sale, who was aware of her daughter’s close relationship with the young junkie, acknowledges, “It’s certainly possible” that he turned Casey on to drugs. “Casey was enamored of Cameron.” And she says she knew about his drug use and that he had been in rehab “multiple times.” She says that part of Casey’s “thought process” was that “Cameron shouldn’t be doing things, and she would try to talk him out of it, but then part of her would be mesmerized because Cameron was a club person and she liked him a lot.
“Casey said to me that she did coke on occasion, or she smoked pot because it made her feel good, and she felt she was in pain so much of the time—mental pain, and drugs was the one thing that made her happy. But she wasn’t a drug addict.”
In April 2010, high school dropout, disk jockey, and heroin addict Cameron Douglas was sentenced to five years in federal prison after he was arrested in the summer of 2009 for dealing the drug crystal meth—at eighty dollars a gram—out of a room in the trendy Gansevoort Hotel in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. He pleaded guilty to charges of drug trafficking.
Like Casey, who always blamed her problems on her parents, Douglas did the same. His lawyers asserted that his “serious heroin addiction” was “not due to any acts of his own but by dint of birth and a difficult upbringing” in a home with a rich, powerful father. He was driven to drugs, they contended, because of “dysfunctional upbringing.” At a hearing, a psychiatrist testified on Cameron’s behalf, stating that his problems, “car accidents, motorcycle accidents”—it sounded much like a description of Keith and Billy Johnson—“… had a lot to do with who his parents are.”
Michael Douglas had handwritten a five-page letter to the judge pleading for lenience for his son, and noting that Cameron was among other Douglas relatives who had battled addictions. Douglas’s half brother, forty-six-year-old sometime actor and aspiring standup comedian Eric—Kirk’s son from another marriage—had died of a drug overdose in a New York apartment in 2004. And Michael Douglas himself had once admitted to, and had been treated for, “sex addiction.” His wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who starred in Marty Richards’s Chicago, was hospitalized and treated for bipolar II disorder a year after her stepson, Cameron, was sentenced to prison.
The Johnsons and the Douglases had much in common.
The sentencing judge in Cameron’s case told the court that the time he had already spent in the minimum security federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, was the longest he had been off of drugs since the age of thirteen, which was when Casey and Cameron had their initial flirtation.
A few days before Christmas 2011, Cameron was sentenced to an additional four and a half years behind bars—including eleven months of solitary confinement for violating prison rules—after he was caught again with drugs. A few days later his mother, Diandra, complained to the New York Post that what the judge had done was cruel and harsh, and she declared: “Cameron is fighting an addiction which is a disease that runs in the family,” and she added, clearly thinking of her late goddaughter, Casey, “Would you put a diabetic in solitary confinement?”
PART VIII
FAMILY MATTERS
50
The end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium was a time of major change for Woody Johnson, his wife, Sale, and their firstborn, the increasingly troubled Casey.
Long hidden in the shadows, Woody had spent half of the 1980s and most of the ’90s involved in forming and running the very privately held Johnson Company, which was established after he and his family moved from Florida to New York.
The key role of the firm, headquartered in Rockefeller Center, initially was to confidentially manage his Johnson & Johnson fortune—the untold hundreds of millions from his trust funds, from his inheritances, from his immense block of Johnson & Johnson stock, and from enormous profits made from outside investment ventures—plus looking after the wealth of some other members of the dynasty, and acting as a philanthropy.
He had a small, capable crew of accountants, lawyers, and advisors—some of whom had been with him since his late twenties when he was building those condominiums in South Florida with his first partner, Michael Spielvogel. His team included Neil Burmeister, who became president of the Johnson Company—he was with Woody for some three decades before he retired—and was the seer who had advised Keith Johnson to invest in a lucrative early cable TV franchise in Florida, which Woody inherited after Keith’s overdose, and made a bundle when he sold it.
Along with Burmeister, Woody brought with him from Florida accountant Joel Latman, who became the company’s treasurer. Also on board was his trusted longtime administrative assistant, Mary Anne Adams.
Woody, who was brought up to be suspicious of people who might want to take advantage of him and his fortune, thoroughly trusted his small group. Observes Sale Johnson Rashad, “Woody had such quality people around him, people who never took advantage of him in any way.” She says if she suspected anyone, “I’d be the first person to say to Woody, ‘Hey, they are users.’”
Though they would be divorced, Sale years later has great respect for Woody’s accomplishments, since he could have just lived large as a playboy. “When he was at the University of Arizona with all those beautiful coeds, it took him seven years to graduate because he was in the hospital during some of that time. But he wasn’t in any hurry to leave because he was a party animal,” she says. “He was out-of-control wild in many ways. But he’s done a pretty amazing job in life. He didn’t have to do a damn thing. He could have been a total ne’er-do-well, sailing around on a boat and smoking pot, and he didn’t.”
Woody and his fortune were not in the public eye until the late 1990s when he surfaced as a bidder for the New York Jets. In 1999, he established a business entity called New York Jets LLC, with
his mother, Betty, sister Libet, and brother Christopher as minority shareholders.
Chasing the Jets ownership instantly put him in the media spotlight, as he vied for the team against another billionaire who didn’t mind all the attention, Charles F. Dolan, the Cablevision and Home Box Office founder, and owner of Madison Square Garden.
With the relatively unknown Johnson heir in the race for the team as the sales deadline neared, The Times observed days before Christmas 1999: “If public renown were a prerequisite to owning a sports team, Robert Wood Johnson IV would be excluded.”
Though his marriage to Sale was slowly crumbling, they were still together during the bidding process. “We were sitting on the beach using my cell phone because his had run out of juice and he was making his final offer,” recalls Sale. “And he said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to bid, it’s already so high.’ So my suggestion was, bid as high as you feel you can afford and if you get it, you get it, and if you don’t, you move on.”
The Band-Aid heir upped his bid by ten million dollars as if he was dropping a quarter in a vending machine slot after quickly conferring with his attorney, Ira Akselrad, who later asserted, “There was a lot of deliberation about what was appropriate.”
In early January 2000, Woody, at fifty-two, was the victor. The estate of the previous Jets owner—the oilman and New Jersey native Leon Hess, who had died in May 1999 after owning the team for fifteen years—took his check for a whopping $635 million. Early bets were that the team would sell for about $500 million in the deal being brokered by Goldman Sachs, and some analysts even felt the usually losing Jets were only worth $250 million at best.
As it turned out, Woody’s final and winning number was the most ever paid at the time for a professional New York sports team, and the payout was considered “remarkable for a team with a downtrodden history, and which finished with a 1–15 record as recently as 1996,” observed The Times, which also noted that Woody paid for the Jets “with his personal wealth.”
George Vecsey, in a Sports of The Times piece headlined, “Playing Billionaire Roulette,” compared the low-key Woody to the media and sports mogul, Dolan.
He observed:
Normally, we lumpen proles are not inclined to root for any billionaire with an IV after his name, since it implies continuity and power, big bucks begetting big bucks. But in the struggle for control of the Jets, good old Woody came off as a man of the people, an outsider, a lone wolf, with no looming Vaderian [Star Wars, Darth Vader] menace. Woody does not own other sports teams [like Dolan]. Woody does not control what is piped into our television sets [like Dolan]. Woody does not raise our cable rates [like Dolan]. He just sells bandages [erroneous]. Good old Woody … In the meantime, let’s have some fanfare for the common man [tongue in cheek], good old Woody.
For Woody, owning a team in the Big Apple, the biggest sports market in the United States at the time, meant major prestige. He was happy to pay a high price but with it came the loss of his cherished privacy. Stories about him began appearing more frequently in the press, and they often dredged up Johnson dynasty scandals, from the past to the present. When his eldest, Casey, became a tabloid figure in the late 2000s because of her debauched Hollywood lifestyle, it was embarrassing gossip column fodder.
As it turned out, Woody had made a good bet on the Jets; within a decade the team would be worth twice what he had paid, although by the end of the 2011 and 2012 seasons they were still considered “the same old” losing Jets with lots of personal and professional issues, as dysfunctional in many ways as the Johnson dynasty itself through the generations.
Dr. Ed Saltzman, Woody and Sale’s longtime friend and confidant, says he “never imagined” Woody ever becoming a professional sports mogul because he didn’t think he was that savvy as a businessman, but that soon changed. “I asked him why he bought the Jets and not a professional baseball team that plays 162 games in a season, and he told me that the finances in baseball were terrible. He said, ‘The union runs baseball. At least there’s a salary cap in the NFL. There’s no salary cap in baseball. In football if you don’t play, your contract’s gone.’”
Within days of Woody’s purchase, the Jets’ prized coach, Bill Parcells, who Woody desperately hoped to keep, quit, as did his designated successor, Bill Belichick, who would later go on to coach the Jets’ biggest rival, the New England Patriots, and embarrass Woody’s team, it seemed, game after game, season after season.
In their last face-off in the 2011 season, for instance, the Patriots buried the Jets by a score of 37–16. Leaving the field, the furious Jets coach Rex Ryan was confronted by a fan who shouted, “Belichick is better than you.”
The loudmouth Ryan responded, “Shut the fuck up!”
Ryan apologized for his outburst the next day, but the National Football League fined him seventy-five thousand dollars, one of the heftiest ever levied on a head coach, but it was not Ryan’s first: In 2010, during Super Bowl week in Miami, he was fined fifty thousand dollars by his own team, a decision sanctioned by Woody, for flipping the bird to a fan, an act that was photographed by someone’s cell phone camera and posted online, eventually going viral.
Despite it all, the Johnson scion finally had his own identity as an owner in the NFL, something he had craved since the mid-1970s when, in his twenties, he lost in his serious bid for the new Tampa Bay Buccaneers expansion franchise.
Woody would later be described as “the fat checkbook behind the New York Jets.”
* * *
While Sale Johnson thought Woody’s acquisition of a professional football team was sexy and she loved the celebrity wow factor, she was shocked by his next life-changing proposition.
He wanted a divorce, the latest in a long history of marital splits in the Johnson dynasty.
The timing made it seem as if he was trading in his spouse for tight ends and fullbacks.
But Sale, who had been with the new owner of the Jets for some three decades, and was the mother of his three daughters, was going to want a lot in exchange for giving him his freedom.
“Sale was stunned when he told her it was over,” observes Dr. Ed Saltzman. “Early in the marriage he needed Sale to bring his life under control. Later, I think she depended on him more than he depended on her. I never saw a lot of touchy-feely with them. When the marriage was in trouble I flew up to New York to talk to them both, to counsel them in some way so that they handled the children properly.”
A relative who watched the marriage disintegrate maintains: “For a long time they were not friendly. They were seldom together, and they each had their own lives. I never walked into a room and saw them sitting and talking—never. I never saw anything that one would expect in an intimate, loving relationship. Finally, Woody said to her, ‘I just don’t want to live this way anymore. I’m very unhappy.’ Sale was just floored.”
Looking back a decade after their split, Sale has a different take. She says, “It’s just not true” that she was taken by surprise. In fact, she asserts, “I brought up divorce first, then we talked about it, and then I thought, no, we should discuss this further, maybe try to get some counseling. But we really were living parallel lives. I was off with Daisy with the horses. I was back and forth with Casey [and her problems]. But Woody and I never raised our voices, never cursed. That’s why it was such a surprise that we were actually getting a divorce. Long before people knew, we had already made that decision.”
Sale had kept a game face. In the early fall of 2000, a few months after Woody bought the Jets and was beginning divorce settlement talks, his soon-to-be ex-wife threw a theme party at their 834 Fifth Avenue palace for Michael Douglas and five other captains of Hollywood and the celebrities who loved them—Barbara Walters; Catherine Zeta-Jones; Universal Studios president Ron Meyer; chairman Scott Greenstein of USA Films; and another equestrian like Sale who was tragically injured during a horse event, Christopher Reeve. What the guests all had in common was that they were born on the same
day, the twenty-fifth, in the month of September, but in different years. Sale used the occasion as the kickoff for a Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation fundraiser.
Neither the guests, nor The Times, which mentioned the party in its “Public Lives” gossip column, had any idea that the Johnsons’ marriage was going south in front of their eyes.
But their very quiet split didn’t come as any big surprise to those who knew them well. It was as if they already had an open marriage of sorts. Aside from their separate interests, there were whispers about lovers on both sides. Someone claimed to have seen Sale kissing a man on the beach in Southhampton, or letting another male friend of hers drive one of Woody’s exotic cars. She heard he was seeing other women. But nothing ever was proven, at least publicly.
* * *
While Sale was off riding her prized horses, Woody was off on macho motorcycle jaunts with a small circle of wealthy pals.
The biker events had started in the early 1990s with other masters of the universe who got together, among them the gay media baron Jann Wenner, whose empire included Rolling Stone and Mens’ Journal. Like Woody’s marriage, which was getting increasingly rocky, Wenner’s had actually fallen apart in 1995 when he left his wife, Jane, for a former Calvin Klein male model. (After a sixteen-year separation, they went for a divorce in 2011.)
While Woody had experienced tragedy years before when his brother Billy was killed on a motorcycle, he still got a thrill out of the speed and danger on a Harley. When he was offered the opportunity to ride with Wenner and his coterie, he jumped on board. And it was quite a jaunt—from the Tavern on the Green in Manhattan’s Central Park, cross-country to San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Page 36